Secret police
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The first page of Beria's notice (oversigned by Stalin and other high-ranking Politburo members), to kill approximately 25,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest and other places in the Soviet Union
A secret police force is an agency most often used in dictatorships. It is used to scare people living under a dictatorship into agreeing with the dictator's policies. Not all dictatorships, however, use a secret police force. Fidel Castro's Cuba and Mao Zedong's China were able to maintain a dictatorship without using secret police.
Historical secret police agencies
| Secret police agency | Nation | Existed from | State leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheka / OGPU / NKVD [1][2] | U.S.S.R. | 1917–1946 | Vladimir Lenin / Joseph Stalin |
| Gestapo | Third Reich | 1933–1945 | Adolf Hitler |
| Stasi | East Germany (DDR) | 1950–1990 | Walter Ulbricht / Erich Honecker (1971–89) |
| OVRA | Italy | 1927–1943 | Benito Mussolini |
| DINA / CNI | Chile | 1973–1990 | Augusto Pinochet |
| State Security Department | North Korea | 1948–present [3] | Kim dynasty (North Korea) |
Secret Police Media
A machine used by Stasi to re-glue envelopes after mail had been opened for examination.
Arrest of Rudolf Abel by the FBI
Notes
- ↑ The chronology of the Soviet secret police agencies is very complicated. Listed here are examples up to 1946. The series continues postwar as the MGB and KGB.
- ↑ Andrew, Christopher and Mitrokhin, Vasili 2000. The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB. N.Y. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00312-5, ISBN 978-0-465-00312-9
- ↑ Though still in existance, the set-up is clearly based on the Soviet model.
