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?]

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

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)