Secret police

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.[source?]

Historical secret police agencies

Secret police agencyNationExisted fromState leader
Cheka / OGPU / NKVD / KGB U.S.S.R.1917–1946Vladimir Lenin / Joseph Stalin
GestapoThird Reich1933–1945Adolf Hitler
StasiEast Germany (DDR)1950–1990Walter Ulbricht / Erich Honecker (1971–89)
OVRAItaly1927–1943Benito Mussolini
DINA / CNIChile1973–1990Augusto Pinochet
State Security DepartmentNorth Korea1948–present Kim dynasty (North Korea)

References

  1. ↑ 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.
  2. ↑ 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
  3. ↑ Though still in existance, the set-up is clearly based on the Soviet model.