Police state in the context of "Stalinism"

The police are a constituted body of people empowered by a state with the aim of enforcing the law and protecting the public order as well as the public itself. This commonly includes ensuring the safety, health, and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers encompass arrest and the use of force legitimized by the state via the monopoly on violence. The term is most commonly associated with the police forces of a sovereign state that are authorized to exercise the police power of that state within a defined legal or territorial area of responsibility. Police forces are often defined as being separate from the military and other organizations involved in the defense of the state against foreign aggressors; however, gendarmerie are military units charged with civil policing. Police forces are usually public sector services, funded through taxes.

Law enforcement is only part of policing activity. Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but the predominant ones are concerned with the preservation of order. In some societies, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property. Police forces have become ubiquitous and a necessity in complex modern societies. However, their role can sometimes be controversial, as they may be involved to varying degrees in corruption, brutality, and the enforcement of authoritarian rule.

The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From August 1910 to September 1945, it included the Japanese archipelago, the Kurils, Karafuto, Korea, and Taiwan. The South Seas Mandate and concessions such as the Kwantung Leased Territory were de jure not internal parts of the empire but dependent territories. In the closing stages of World War II, with Japan defeated alongside the rest of the Axis powers, the formalized surrender was issued on September 2, 1945, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of the Allies, and the empire's territory subsequently shrunk to cover only the Japanese archipelago resembling modern Japan.

Under the slogans of "Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces" and "Promote Industry" which followed the Boshin War and the restoration of power to the emperor from the shogun, Japan underwent a period of large-scale industrialization and militarization, often regarded as the fastest modernization of any country to date. All of these aspects contributed to Japan's emergence as a great power following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. Economic and political turmoil in the 1920s, including the Great Depression, led to the rise of militarism, nationalism, statism and authoritarianism, during which Japan joined the Axis alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, conquering a large part of the Asia–Pacific; during this period, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) committed numerous atrocities and war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre. There has been a debate over defining the political system of Japan as a dictatorship, which has been disputed due by the absence of a dictator, and over calling it fascist. The other suggested terms were para-fascism, militarism, corporatism, totalitarianism, and police state.

The anti-Stalinist left encompasses various kinds of left-wing political movements that oppose Joseph Stalin, Stalinism, neo-Stalinism and the system of governance that Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953. This term also refers to those that opposed Joseph Stalin and his leadership from within the Communist movement, such as Leon Trotsky and the party's Left Opposition.

In recent years, the term may also refer to left and centre-left wing opposition to dictatorship, cult of personality, totalitarianism and police states, all being features commonly attributed to Marxist-Leninist regimes that took inspiration from Stalinism such as the regimes of Kim Il Sung, Enver Hoxha and others, including in the former Eastern Bloc. Some of the notable movements within the anti-Stalinist left have been Trotskyism and Titoism, anarchism and libertarian socialism, left communism and libertarian Marxism, the Right Opposition within the Communist movement, Eurocommunism, ultra-leftism, democratic socialism and social democracy.

Peter I (Russian: Пётр I Алексеевич, romanized: Pyotr I Alekseyevich, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪkˈsʲejɪvʲɪtɕ]; 9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672– 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725), better known as Peter the Great, was the Tsar of all Russia from 1682 and the first Emperor of Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. Peter, as an autocrat, organized a well ordered police state.

Much of Peter's reign was consumed by lengthy wars against the Ottoman and Swedish empires. His Azov campaigns were followed by the foundation of the Russian Navy; after his victory in the Great Northern War, Russia annexed a significant portion of the eastern Baltic coastline and was officially renamed from a tsardom to an empire. Peter led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on the radical Enlightenment.

The period in the history of Guatemala between the coups against Jorge Ubico in 1944 and Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 is known locally as the Revolution (Spanish: La Revolución). It has also been called the Ten Years of Spring, highlighting the peak years of representative democracy in Guatemala from 1944 until the end of the civil war in 1996. It saw the implementation of social, political, and especially agrarian reforms that were influential across Latin America.

From the late 19th century until 1944, Guatemala was governed by a series of authoritarian rulers who sought to strengthen the economy by supporting the export of coffee. Between 1898 and 1920, Manuel Estrada Cabrera granted significant concessions to the United Fruit Company, an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit, and dispossessed many indigenous people of their communal lands. Under Jorge Ubico, who ruled as a dictator between 1931 and 1944, this process was intensified, with the institution of harsh labor regulations and a police state.

A dystopia (lit. "bad place") is an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. It is an imagined place (possibly state) in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. Dystopia is widely seen as the opposite of utopia – a concept coined by Thomas More in 1516 to describe an ideal society. Both topias are common topics in fiction. Dystopia is also referred to as cacotopia or anti-utopia.

Dystopias are often characterized by fear or distress, tyrannical governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Themes typical of a dystopian society include: complete control over the people in a society through the use of propaganda and police state tactics, heavy censorship of information or denial of free thought, worship of an unattainable goal, the complete loss of individuality, and heavy enforcement of conformity. Despite certain overlaps, dystopian fiction is distinct from post-apocalyptic fiction, and an undesirable society is not necessarily dystopian. Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, or technology. Some authors use the term to refer to existing societies, many of which are, or have been, totalitarian states or societies in an advanced state of collapse. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, often present a criticism of a current trend, societal norm, or political system.