Secret police in the context of "Gestapo"

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army soldiers, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II, despite the fact that the 20,000 who collaborated with the Axis powers were half the 40,000 who served in the Soviet Red Army. Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile. After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence.

The Romanian revolution (Romanian: Revoluția română) was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December 1989 as a part of the revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several countries around the world, primarily within the Eastern Bloc. The Romanian revolution started in the city of Timișoara and soon spread throughout the country, ultimately culminating in the drumhead trial and execution of longtime Romanian Communist Party (PCR) General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and the end of 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. It was also the last removal of a Marxist–Leninist government in a Warsaw Pact country during the events of 1989, and the only one that violently overthrew a country's leadership and executed its leader; according to estimates, over one thousand people died and thousands more were injured.

Following World War II, Romania found itself inside the Soviet sphere of influence, with Communist rule officially declared in 1947. In April 1964, when Romania published a general policy paper worked out under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's instructions, the country was well on its way of carefully breaking away from Soviet control. Nicolae Ceaușescu became the country's leader the following year. Under his rule, Romania experienced a brief waning of internal repression that led to a positive image both at home and in the West. However, repression again intensified by the 1970s. Amid tensions in the late 1980s, early protests occurred in the city of Timișoara in mid-December on the part of the Hungarian minority in response to an attempt by the government to evict Hungarian Reformed Church pastor László Tőkés. In response, Romanians sought the deposition of Ceaușescu and a change in government in light of similar recent events in neighbouring nations. The country's ubiquitous secret police force, the Securitate, which was both one of the largest in the Eastern Bloc and for decades had been the main suppressor of popular dissent, frequently and violently quashing political disagreement, ultimately proved incapable of stopping the looming, and then highly fatal and successful revolt.

A police state is a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little to no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are not exclusive to simply one-party states or dominant-party states, as they can also arise in a democracy or multi-party system.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

The Great Purge or Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор, romanized: Bol'shoy terror), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год, Tridtsat' sed'moy god) and the Yezhovshchina (ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə], lit. 'period of Yezhov'), was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (especially those aligned with the Bolshevik party). The term "great purge" was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror, whose title alluded to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. In 1936, the NKVD under Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries (known collectively as wreckers) began affecting civilian life.

The Crypteia, also referred to as Krypteia or Krupteia (Greek: κρυπτεία krupteía from κρυπτός kruptós, "hidden, secret"; members were κρύπται kryptai), was an ancient Spartan state institution. The kryptai either principally sought out and killed helots across Laconia and Messenia as part of a policy of terrorising and intimidating the enslaved population, or they principally did a form of military training, or they principally endured hardships as an initiation ordeal, or the Crypteia served a combination of all these purposes, possibly varying over time. The Krypteia was an element of the Spartan state's child-rearing system for upper-class males.

Modern historians often translate "Krypteia" as "secret police" or "secret service", but its precise structure is debated.

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (29 March [O.S. 17 March] 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the NKVD from 1938 to 1946, during the country's involvement in the Second World War.

An ethnic Georgian, Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. His ascent marked the end of the Stalinist Great Purge carried out by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or Gulag camps. In 1940, Beria began a new purge of the Red Army. After Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was appointed to the State Defense Committee, overseeing security.

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Russian: Народный комиссариат внутренних дел, romanized: Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del, IPA: [nɐˈrodnɨj kəmʲɪsərʲɪˈat ˈvnutrʲɪnʲɪɣ dʲel]), abbreviated as NKVD (Russian: НКВД; listen), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946.

First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR, the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as a commissariat of the Soviet Union in 1934. During the Great Purge in 1936–1938, on Stalin's orders, the NKVD conducted mass arrests, imprisonment, torture, and executions of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. The agency sent millions to the Gulag system of forced labor camps and, during World War II, carried out the mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians, and millions of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus, to remote areas of the country, resulting in millions of deaths. Hundreds of thousands of NKVD personnel served in Internal Troops divisions in defensive battles alongside the Red Army, as well as in "blocking formations," preventing retreat. The agency was responsible for foreign assassinations, including that of Leon Trotsky.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who was the dictator of Italy during the Fascist era from the March on Rome in 1922 until his overthrow in 1943. He founded the National Fascist Party (PNF) and served as Prime Minister of Italy from 1922, later adopting the title Duce ("leader") of Italian fascism. Mussolini first organized the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919, which evolved into the PNF that established a totalitarian regime. As the founder of fascism, Mussolini was a key inspiration and contributor to the rise of similar movements across Europe during the interwar period.

Mussolini was originally a socialist politician and journalist at the Avanti! newspaper. In 1912, he became a member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), but was expelled for advocating military intervention in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded a newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, and served in the Royal Italian Army until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. He eventually denounced the PSI, his views pivoting to focus on Italian nationalism, and founded the fascist movement which opposed egalitarianism and class conflict, instead advocating "revolutionary nationalism" transcending class lines. In October 1922, following the March on Rome, he was appointed prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III. After removing opposition through his secret police and outlawing labour strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated power through laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years, he established dictatorial authority by legal and illegal means and aspired to create a totalitarian state. In 1929, he signed the Lateran Treaty to establish Vatican City.

Rokuhara Tandai (六波羅探題) was the post of the chiefs of the Kamakura shogunate in imperial capital Kyoto whose agency, the Rokuhara (六波羅), kept responsibility for security in Kinai and judicial affairs on western Japan, and negotiated with the imperial court. Despite keeping security, the Rokuhara were also a sort of secret police and widely feared.

Rokuhara Tandai was set up after the Jōkyū Incident in 1221. The two chiefs were called Kitakata (北方) and Minamikata (南方), respectively. Kitakata was higher-ranking than Minamikata. Like shikken and rensho, both posts were monopolized by the powerful Hōjō clan. The agency was destroyed with the fall of Kamakura shogunate in 1333.