In connection with the creation of the OGPU, on 28 March 1924, the USSR Central Executive Committee adopted the “Statute of the Rights of the OGPU Regarding Administrative Banishment, Exile, and Imprisonment in Concentration Camps.” Adopting resolutions on these measures became a responsibility of the OGPU Special Conference which consisted of three members of the OGPU Board ( Kollegia ) under the obligatory supervision of the procurator's office.

The OGPU Special Conference had the power to process cases of counterrevolutionary crimes, espionage, smuggling, counterfeit and hard currency manipulation, and banditry, as well as cases of parasitism, drug and liquor dealing, den-keeping, black stock exchange, speculation, and other especially dangerous criminal offences.

In the late 1920s, the OGPU Special Conference reviewed cases that were compiled by the “troikas,” created by OGPU instructions from 1929 and 1931. The troikas included chiefs of operational directorates—OGPU departments and the OGPU permanent representative mission in the Moscow Military District—and processed cases submitted by the central apparatus and occasionally by the local organs.

With the formation of the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, or the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) on 10 July 1934, the OGPU was liquidated, and its operational units were incorporated in the Chief Directorate of State Security within the new People's Commissariat. The Special Conference persisted within the USSR NKVD structure and operated under the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Its powers were curtailed, and it now had only the right to pass sentences of concentration camp imprisonment, exile, and banishment of up to five years or deportation from the USSR with regard to individuals “recognized as socially dangerous.” The Special Conference under the people's commissar of internal affairs consisted of his deputies, the USSR NKVD plenipotentiary for the RSFSR, the head of the Chief Directorate of the Worker-Peasant Militia, and the people's commissar of internal affairs of the union republic where a particular case originated. The participation of the USSR Procurator or his deputy at the sessions of the Special Conference was obligatory.

The “troikas” and “dvoikas” were eliminated in November 1938, but the Special Conference remained as an extrajudicial organ without any changes in its functions. It persisted within the USSR MGB (Ministry of State Security) and MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and was abolished by a decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on 1 September 1953.