Secret police

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 agency	Nation	Existed from	State leader
Cheka / OGPU / NKVD / KGB ^[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)

References

↑ 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.

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[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.

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