Which dictatorship had the most effective security apparatus?

Which dictatorship had the most effective security apparatus?

  • USSR

    Votes: 10 18.2%
  • Nazi Germany

    Votes: 2 3.6%
  • Hussein's Iraq

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • North Korea

    Votes: 7 12.7%
  • East Germany

    Votes: 34 61.8%
  • Imperial Japan

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mao's China

    Votes: 1 1.8%
  • Other

    Votes: 1 1.8%

  • Total voters
    55

Wendigo

Banned
Which dictatorship in the past century had the most effective/successful security apparatus?

Which secret police was the most brutal/murderous in its role?

By security apparatus I mean organizations like the Gestapo, Kempeitai, NKVD/KGB, Stasi, DINA etc.
 
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"Most effective" and "most brutal" are different questions.

The Stasi were probably the most comprehensive secret police in history, at least in terms of their ability to monitor the population. The issue is that spying and keeping detailed records on virtually everyone doesn't actually equate to organising wholesale NKVD-style purges.
 

Wendigo

Banned
"Most effective" and "most brutal" are different questions.

The Stasi were probably the most comprehensive secret police in history, at least in terms of their ability to monitor the population. The issue is that spying and keeping detailed records on virtually everyone doesn't actually equate to organising wholesale NKVD-style purges.

I know they're two different questions. I didn't feel like creating an entire new thread for the question of brutality so I just put two questions in this one.
 
Depends on what you mean by effective, as in the ability crack down or loyalty to the state without any kind of corruption. I would give it the Soviets only because they have a long tradition of personel based secret police organizations.
 
The obvious choice would be Best Korea, however I think a lot of the security comes from propaganda and indoctrination, and less from the security itself.

As such, I voted East Germany. Germany was exposed to the outside world, the indoctrination wasn't complete and it had to use repression to keep going. I can't remember the exact number but it had a stupid number of spies and it worked for 40 years
 
East German "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" aka STASI

It was most effective security apparatus
like wiretapping the ENTIRE telephone system of DGR
Inspecting the Entire posting that came from West Germany.

It's Main Directorate for Reconnaissance pull operations off like Bond Movie
They were Best informed about West Germany and NATO activity, they had even spies in USA like Pentagon or Capitol Hill.

They had 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) informants recruited under Opposition by Force, either they enter STASI prison and die there or betray there Love once.
For every 6 east germans were one IMs, in contrast the Gestapo and SS had only one informant vor every 2000 germans.
The Madness went even so far that from ALL opponents a "Smell sample" were collected, so they could use bloodhounds to track them down.
Also on order of Politburo the STASI even stole valuable Artwork from Private homes, churches and museums to sell then on black market to get needed foreign currencies !

"Zersetzung"
This STASI at it darkest, the psychological and psychical destruction of opponents.
So-called "operational procedures" to 10,000 individuals are estimated to have become victims wer of 5,000 of whom sustained irreversible damage.
they start slowly to destroy the lives of there victims, by manipulation by induce personal crises in victims and drive them insane
and if that not worked killing them and let looking that like a suicide

There a good Movies who portray the Work of STASI

The Lives of Others

For Eyes Only (Streng geheim)
(based on true story how Statis got the DECO II, MC 96 and MID files and brought then to DGR)
 
Saudi Arabia, apparently their is friggin awesome and so little know which doubles its awesomeness.

What amazes me about the STASI is that they got all the phones and all the mail and had 1 in 6 East Germans informing for them, its that they kept it a secret. Surely there would have been over a million people in the know; agent handlers, wiretap shift supervisors even payroll clerks would have had an idea of the size and depth of operations and deduce the vast scope and yet it didn't collapse under this weight.
 
Saudi Arabia, apparently their is friggin awesome and so little know which doubles its awesomeness.

What amazes me about the STASI is that they got all the phones and all the mail and had 1 in 6 East Germans informing for them, its that they kept it a secret. Surely there would have been over a million people in the know; agent handlers, wiretap shift supervisors even payroll clerks would have had an idea of the size and depth of operations and deduce the vast scope and yet it didn't collapse under this weight.
I would think a lot of people realised it. I would also think a lot of the people who realised and talked about it mysteriously disappeared afterwards.
 
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