The absolute power of the three modern dictators consisted precisely in the ruthless, illegitimate authority of a substantial police force and special guards whose activities were controlled to the very end by the dictators themselves.
In Russia, just as in Germany, such a police force existed even before the violent change of affairs. Because prerevolutionary Russia was swarming with agents attempting to overthrow the tsarist regime, the political police — called the Okhrana — was large, even by Russian standards, as well as efficient. It monitored revolutionaries not only at home but also if they ventured abroad to more democratic countries. Most scholars agree that the tsar’s Okhrana was the largest and most efficient secret police force of its time (it employed around fifteen thousand agents). As a result of its activities, hundreds of opponents of the tsarist regime spent part of their lives in prison or Siberian exile. On average, seventeen opponents of the tsar perished on the scaffold every year. Among them was Alexandr Ilyich Ulyanov — who planned an assassination of the tsar — the older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who later assumed the name Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, therefore, had a personal reason to detest the Okhrana, but he also recognized its usefulness for safeguarding the state. The architects had to guard vigilantly the postrevolutionary regime and at the same time condemn the police methods it employed. According to the classics of Marxism, all repressive roles of the state would cease to exist after the Socialist revolution. In his extensive study, The State and Revolution, Lenin attempts to lay out, with many citations from Marx and Engels, his opinion of the repressive role of the state after the revolution.
According to him, the consummation of the proletarian revolution would be the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat. Marxists, claims Lenin, will recognize that it will be necessary for the proletariat to smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, they will shatter it to its very foundations, they will destroy it to the very roots, and they will replace it with a new one.
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The necessity of state terror was theoretically justified. And who better to effect long-term terror than a well-organized police force?
Later, after Lenin had seized power, he founded a political police force (first it was called Cheka — All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Over the course of three years, under the command of the Polish Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky, this revolutionary police organization, whose task was to liquidate political opponents and essentially everyone who somehow represented the previous regime, employed around a quarter of a million fanatics resolved to carry out the dictator’s will. The number of murdered exceeded ten thousand victims a month. At the same time, immediately after the revolution, the Cheka began organizing the first concentration camps. The Cheka was renamed and reorganized several times, but it continued to serve as a ruthless instrument of the dictatorship. During Stalin’s reign, the number of murdered grew along with the number of concentration camps. After World War II, according to the Soviet model and under the direct leadership of Soviet advisers, affiliated organizations were founded in all countries where Communists had taken power.
The Nazi dictatorship could avail itself of traditions established by the Bolsheviks and the Italian Fascists, and even the German tradition itself, which had its own semimilitary organizations and associations.
A few years before the Nazi takeover, Hitler had at his disposal a million-strong organization called the SA, led by the retired artillery captain Ernst Röhm. His fanatical disciple, Heinrich Himmler, commanded a much smaller, but more elite, body: the SS, which he planned to employ as the political police. From the beginning, the members of the SS carried out their orders with ruthless, blind obedience. They committed appalling crimes, from the torture of prisoners to inhuman medical experiments to mass murder in gas chambers.
One of the leading Nazis, Hermann Göring, had commanded an eighty-thousand-member corps of the Prussian police. He then established the gestapo, based on that model, one of the most efficient secret police forces in the world. In outright cruelty, it was not far behind the state police in the Soviet Union.
Because the Nazis were the only political party that commanded such large armed units with members willing to do anything, their coup took place incredibly smoothly and much more quickly than the Bolshevik coup (certainly the fact that it took place in the middle of peaceful Europe played a role). On the very first day of the takeover, the police arrested more than fifteen hundred Communist functionaries, who were on a previously drafted list; later they started arresting the functionaries of other political parties. Because there were so many of these and they couldn’t all be crammed into the existing prisons, on March 21, 1933—less than a month after the coup — Himmler established the first concentration camp not far from Dachau in an abandoned munitions factory. Originally it was intended only for five thousand people arrested for interrogation, but after a few years its population swelled to twelve thousand at a time.
The Nazis had been thoroughly prepared for the coup, so they easily seized absolute power in just a few weeks. Himmler’s SS units quickly penetrated the highest ranks of the secret police, which also assumed control over a growing number of concentration camps.
In terms of the number of victims, one cannot compare the terror of the first years of Nazi rule to the Bolshevik reign of terror. Nevertheless, the Nazi terror afflicted tens of thousands of German citizens and in the end culminated in the extermination of six million Jews.
During the brief period in Czechoslovakia between the end of the protectorate and the Communist coup in 1948, the Communist Party did not have its own (at least, not its own legal) armed contingent; however, a Communist named Václav Nosek headed the Ministry of the Interior.
Three days before the coup, members of the party quickly formed armed people’s militias. (This obviously illegal and unconstitutional action calls into question the claim by the Communist leaders that they achieved power legitimately.) Armed members of the Communist Party marching through Prague certainly influenced the quick transformation of a democratic society into a Soviet-style dictatorship.
The Communist journalist Rudolf Černý compiled President Antonín Novotný’s memoirs from a series of conversations. Here, the president and the highest representative of the Communist Party supposedly demonstrated unambiguously the necessity of police terror during the second half of the 1950s and most of the ’60s.
The new Communist government immediately removed from both the police and the army its real and probable opponents and replaced them with reliable members of the party. The changes primarily concerned State Security; the Soviet Union sent advisers who demanded the introduction of inquisitorial methods, which until then had been unthinkable, since the populace remembered all too well this practice by the gestapo. Some who survived questioning, and even some of the investigators, described how these interrogations were carried out. The accused were beaten, given electric shocks, deprived of water, and placed in unheated underground cells, and had their most sensitive parts burned. One of the most effective methods to break someone accused of an often nonexistent or absurd crime was to deprive him of rest.
Most of the important political prisoners were interrogated at the Ruzyně prison. The head of the interrogators there was Bohumil Doubek, who wrote about the methods employed: Therefore, it was determined that if there was supposed to be a certain result in the investigation, it [the interrogation] must be conducted at least fourteen to sixteen hours a day. The prisoner was allowed to rest from ten in the evening till six in the morning. If he arrives at his cell at midnight, he won’t fall asleep because he’s still agitated from the interrogation, and in the morning he must get up at six. Moreover, he can be woken at night by the guards. Because he has to stand during the interrogation, he is then physically and mentally exhausted, and it is not difficult for the interrogators to acquire the incriminating evidence because the accused is more acquiescent. The reality was even more drastic because the interrogated often had to walk the entire night in their cells; their feet would swell, and they often lost control over their own words owing to exhaustion.