What did the secret police do in Tsarist Russia? Creation of the secret police

History knows many totalitarian regimes that relied entirely on the forces of the secret police when it came to intelligence activities, terror against dissenting citizens and mass executions...

This article presents ten of the most brutal secret police forces that have ever existed in the world. Some of them are probably well known to you, while others you will hear about for the first time.

1. Ministry of State Security of the GDR

The Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic (or Stasi) is the counterintelligence and intelligence agency of the German Democratic Republic. It was created in February 1950, similar to the Soviet NKGB, with which, by the way, they worked closely during the Cold War.

According to rough estimates, for every 160 residents of East Germany there was one informant working for the GDR Ministry of State Security. Stasi informers were everywhere: in schools, hospitals, industrial plants, and even among “friendly” neighbors.

Until the early 1970s, agents of the GDR Ministry of State Security practiced only arrests and torture, after which they began to resort to provocations, slander, psychological pressure, threatening phone calls, searches and other methods of dealing with dissident citizens. Many Stasi victims subsequently ended up in mental hospitals or committed suicide.

The GDR Ministry of State Security was disbanded in 1989.

2. Central Department for Combating Banditry

The Central Anti-Banditry Department (CDB) is a secret police and intelligence service created in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s to actively combat the rising wave of crime and looting that was sweeping the country after a series of riots and widespread chaos.

The Central Anti-Gang Squad employed people who were ruthless towards criminals and suspects. They carried out reprisals without trial or investigation, regardless of whether the person was guilty or not.

Most crimes committed by the secret police themselves remained unpunished. One of the methods of torture they practiced during interrogations of suspects was called “Le Café”: they beat a person with batons until he lost his pulse, and then forced him to travel long distances in this state.

3. Bureau for Combating Communist Activities

The Bureau for Combating Communist Activities (BCCA) was created by Mariano Faget, a man who had previously had experience in finding and prosecuting communists, fascists and Nazis in Cuba.

BBKD enjoyed the support of the US Central Intelligence Agency. The peak of his activity came in the 1950s (after the emergence of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary organization “26 July Movement”).

The Bureau for Combating Communist Activities was disbanded in 1959.

4. "Tonton Macoutes"

The Haitian Guard "Tonton Macoutes" (National Security Volunteers - Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale) was created by dictator François Duvalier in 1959. Its members were particularly cruel, which is why the people of Haiti considered them not people, but mythological creatures like ghouls who kidnapped and ate bad children for breakfast.

National security volunteers reported only to the president of the country. They were tasked with stopping any attempts by the dissatisfied to overthrow the Duvalier regime. The Tonton Macoutes are responsible for thousands of rapes, tortures, kidnappings and executions of innocent people. They burned their victims alive, stoned them to death, and then put their bodies on public display so that no one would ever again have the desire to go against the dictatorial regime. During the reign of Francois Duvalier and his son, more than 60 thousand people were killed.

5. SAVAK

SAVAK - Iranian Ministry of State Security during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1957-1979). It worked closely with the CIA and dealt with dissidents (mainly communists and Shiites) quickly and mercilessly.

SAVAK members resorted to methods of torture such as electric shocks, pulling out teeth, tearing off nails, pouring boiling water and sulfuric acid, keeping them in solitary confinement for a long period of time, sleep deprivation, burning with fire and hot iron, and so on.

Iran's Ministry of State Security was disbanded after the revolution ended in 1979. Instead, a new secret police was created - SAVAMA, whose members were even more cruel than their predecessors.

6. Department of State Security

One of the largest and most brutal secret police forces of the Cold War was the Romanian Department of State Security (or Securitate), founded in 1948 with the assistance of the Soviet Union.

Members of the Securitate were given the goal of tracking and spying on Romanian citizens who showed dissent, arresting them, torturing them and executing them. About half a million informants worked for the Department of State Security. Even one word spoken in the wrong place and with the wrong intonation could result in severe punishment. In such conditions it was almost impossible to resist the regime.

Members of the Securitate were directly involved in the suppression of the dissident movement in the late 1960s on behalf of the totalitarian ruler Nicolae Ceausescu.

The Department of State Security was disbanded and reorganized by the Romanian Parliament in 1991.

7. Santebal

The Cambodian secret police, the Santebal, were created during the reign of the Khmer Rouge; Over time, it essentially turned into a fighter squad.

Santebal members are responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people who ended up in prison camps, of which there were about 150 in Cambodia. The most notorious of these was Tuol Sleng, where approximately 20,000 prisoners were held between 1976 and 1978, of whom only seven survived. Over the course of 11 years, members of Santebal killed more than two million Cambodians to please the Khmer Rouge regime.

8. People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR

The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD) played an important role in the creation of the Gulag camps, which during the entire existence of the organization were visited by about ten million people.

The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR ceased to exist after the death of Joseph Stalin (1953), to whom they were subordinate.

9. Gestapo

The Gestapo, Hitler's secret state police, created in 1933, terrorized Nazi Germany for thirteen years, serving as the main instrument in the suppression of dissent, as well as the mass extermination of the Jewish population - the Holocaust.

During World War II, the Gestapo was headed by Heinrich Himmler. Under his leadership, the organization transformed from simply a secret police into an intelligence service and body dedicated to finding and prosecuting enemies of the Nazis both among German citizens and those living in the occupied territories.

The Gestapo, along with the SS, played a major role in the adoption of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which meant the mass extermination of Jews in Europe.

After Germany's defeat in World War II, the Gestapo was recognized as a criminal organization, and many of its members were executed as war criminals.

10. Central Intelligence Agency

The CIA is an agency of the US Federal Government, created on September 18, 1947, which initially does not seem such a terrible organization, because in fact it collects data, but in fact, the CIA is behind most of the bloodiest intelligence agencies in the world. The United States has already admitted that in addition to collecting data, the CIA is engaged in torture and has its own secret prisons, and not only on its territory. It is also worth recalling that the United States created Al Qaeda, which then returned the favor to them.

CIA involved:

Towards the overthrow of the legitimate government in Guatemala in 1954 (Operation PBSUCCESS)
- to arm the Afghan Mujahideen in the period from 1979 to 1989 (Operation Cyclone)
- an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro (the failed Bay of Pigs operation)

This is still a small part of what this Agency is involved in, but in essence, it is through the hands of the CIA that the modern world order is governed. It’s just that it’s often done by someone else’s hands.

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Today we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: the dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938 and the dictatorship of Bolshevism after 1930. These forms of domination are essentially different from any kind of dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and although they were the result of the continuous development of party dictatorships, their essentially totalitarian qualities are new and cannot be derived from one-party systems. The purpose of one-party systems is not only to seize the levers of government, but also to fill all government institutions with party members, to achieve a complete merger of state and party, so that after seizing power, the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for the government . This system is “total” only in a negative sense, namely that the ruling party will not tolerate any other parties, any opposition and no freedom of political opinion. When a party dictatorship comes to power, it leaves the original distribution of power between the state and the party intact; the government and the army have the same power as before, and the “revolution” consists only in the fact that all government posts are now occupied by party members. In all these cases, the party's power is based on a monopoly guaranteed by the state, and the party no longer has its own center of power. The revolution initiated by totalitarian movements after they have seized power is much more radical in nature. From the outset, they consciously seek to assert the essential differences between state and movement and to prevent the government from absorbing the movement's "revolutionary" institutions. The problem of seizing the state machine without merging with it is solved by the fact that only minor party members are allowed to occupy high positions in the state hierarchy. All real power is vested only in the institutions of the movement, external to the state and military apparatus. All decisions are made precisely within the movement, which remains the center of action in the country where all decisions are made; the official civil services are often not even informed of what is happening, and party members who harbor ambitions of obtaining ministerial portfolios always pay for their “bourgeois” desires by losing their influence over the movement and the confidence of its leaders. Totalitarian power uses the state as an external facade, supposed to represent the country in a non-totalitarian world.

The core of power in the country - the super-efficient and super-competent secret police services - is located above the state and behind the façade of ostentatious power, in a labyrinth of many institutions with similar functions, at the basis of all power movements and in the chaos of inefficiency. Reliance on the police as the only authority and, accordingly, neglect of the seemingly much larger arsenal of power of the army, characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, can be explained in part by the totalitarian desire for world domination and the conscious disregard of the differences between foreign and native countries, between foreign and foreign countries. own internal affairs. Military forces, trained to fight a foreign aggressor, have always been a dubious instrument in civil war; even under conditions of totalitarianism, it is difficult for them to look at their own people through the eyes of a foreign conqueror. More important in this regard, however, is their dubious value even during war. Because a totalitarian ruler bases his policies on the premise of his ultimate world domination, he treats the victims of his aggression as if they were rebels guilty of treason, and therefore chooses to rule the occupied territories through police rather than military force.

Even before coming to power, the movement has secret police and spy services with an extensive network in different countries. Their agents are subsequently given more money and powers than regular military intelligence services, and are often the secret heads of embassies and consulates. Their main task is to create fifth columns, to direct the activities of branches of the movement, to influence the internal politics of the countries concerned and, in general, to prepare for the moment when a totalitarian ruler - after the overthrow of a government or a military victory - can openly make himself at home in a foreign country. In other words, secret police affiliates in other countries are the transmission belts that constantly turn the ostentatious foreign policy of a totalitarian state into a potentially internal affair of the totalitarian movement. However, these functions performed by the secret police in order to prepare the implementation of the totalitarian utopia of world domination are secondary in comparison with those that must be performed for the current implementation of the totalitarian fiction on the territory of one country. This dominant role of the secret police in the internal politics of totalitarian countries has naturally contributed greatly to the common misconception of totalitarianism. Every despotism relies heavily on the secret services and fears its own people more than the people of other countries. However, this analogy between totalitarianism and despotism only applies to the early stages of totalitarian rule, when political opposition still exists. In this respect, as in several others, totalitarianism capitalizes on the misconceptions that exist in non-totalitarian countries and consciously maintains them, no matter how unflattering they may be. In a speech to Reichswehr personnel in 1937, Himmler acknowledged himself as a mere tyrant when he attributed the continued expansion of police forces to the likely existence of a “fourth theater of action within Germany in the event of war.” Likewise, Stalin, at almost the same time, almost convinced the old Bolshevik guard (whose recognition he needed) of the existence of a military threat to the Soviet Union and, therefore, of the possibility of such an emergency that would require maintaining the unity of the country, even at the cost of despotism. The most amazing thing is that both statements were made after the destruction of all political opposition, that the secret services were expanding, when in reality there were no longer any opponents to spy on. While the war was going on, Himmler did not need to use, and did not use, SS troops in Germany itself, except to operate concentration camps and to supervise foreign labor; The bulk of the SS troops were sent to the Eastern Front, where they were used for "special purposes" - usually to carry out mass murder - and to pursue policies that were often opposed to those of both the military and civilian Nazi hierarchy. Like the Soviet Union's secret police, SS units usually emerged after military forces had pacified conquered territory and dealt with open political opposition.

In the early stages of the establishment of a totalitarian regime, however, the secret police and elite party formations still played the role that similar structures had played in other forms of dictatorship and well-known terrorist regimes of the past; and the extreme cruelty of their methods finds no parallel only in the history of modern Western countries. The first stage of searching for secret enemies and persecuting former opponents is usually combined with the process of organizing the entire population into facade organizations and retraining old party members in the direction of voluntary espionage, so that the dubious sympathy of newly organized sympathizers is not a matter of concern for specially trained police cadres. It is at this stage that the neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy, who can explore “dangerous thoughts” than the officially assigned police agents. The end of the first stage comes with the elimination of open and secret opposition in any organized form; in Germany this happened around 1935, and in Soviet Russia around 1930.

The secret services are rightly called a state within a state, and this is true not only under despotism, nor under constitutional or semi-constitutional governments. The very fact of possessing classified information gives these services a decisive advantage over all other civilian institutions and poses an open threat to members of the government. The totalitarian police, on the contrary, are completely subject to the will of the leader, who alone decides who the next potential enemy will be and who, as Stalin did, can also designate secret police cadres to be destroyed. Since police officers are no longer allowed to use the method of entrapment, they are deprived of the only means of asserting their own necessity independent of government and become completely dependent on higher authorities to maintain their jobs. Like the army in a non-totalitarian state, the police in totalitarian countries only carry out the existing political line and lose all the prerogatives that they had under despotic bureaucracies. The job of the totalitarian police is not to solve crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. Her main political characteristic is that she alone enjoys the confidence of the highest authorities and knows what political line will be pursued.

Under totalitarianism, as under other regimes, the secret police have a monopoly on certain vital information. However, the kind of knowledge that only the police can have has undergone an important change: the police are no longer interested in what goes on in the minds of future victims (most of the time, police officers are indifferent to who those victims will be), and the police have become entrusted with the highest state secrets . This automatically means a huge increase in prestige and improvement in position, even if it entails a certain loss of real power. The secret services no longer know anything that the leader does not know better; speaking in terms of power, they have descended to the level of the performer. From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the transformation of a suspect into an objective enemy is the replacement of a suspected offense with a possible crime, characteristic of totalitarianism. A possible crime is no more subjective than an objective enemy. While a suspect is arrested because he is considered capable of committing a crime that more or less matches his personality (or his suspected personality), the totalitarian version of the possible crime is based on a logical anticipation of the objective development of events. The Moscow trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the military leaders of the Red Army are classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. The following logical considerations can be discerned behind the fantastic trumped-up charges: events in the Soviet Union could lead to a crisis, a crisis could lead to the overthrow of Stalin's dictatorship, this could weaken the country's military power and perhaps lead to a situation in which the new government would have to sign a truce or even make an alliance with Hitler. The consequence of this was Stalin's repeated statements that there was a conspiracy to overthrow the government and enter into a secret conspiracy with Hitler. Against these “objective”, although completely incredible, possibilities stood only “subjective” factors, such as the reliability of the accused, their fatigue, their inability to understand what was happening, their firm belief that without Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred to fascism, i.e. a series of small real details that naturally lack the consistency of a fictional, logical, possible crime. Thus the central premise of totalitarianism, that everything is possible, leads, when all the limitations inherent in the facts themselves are progressively removed, to the absurd and terrible conclusion that any crime that the ruler can imagine must be punished, regardless of whether it has been completed or not. Of course, a possible crime, like an objective enemy, does not fall within the competence of the police, who can neither solve it, nor invent it, nor provoke it. Here again the secret services depend on the political authorities. Their independent position as a state within a state is a thing of the past.

In only one respect is the totalitarian secret police still very similar to the secret services of non-totalitarian countries. The secret police traditionally, i.e. Since the time of Fouché, it has profited from its victims and increased the state-approved budget from unjust sources, simply by acting as a partner in activities that it supposedly should eradicate, such as gambling and prostitution. These illegal methods of replenishing their own budget, ranging from friendly bribery to open extortion, played a huge role in freeing the secret services from the authorities and in strengthening their position as a state within a state. It is curious that the replenishment of the secret service's pockets at the expense of victims turned out to be more durable than all the changes. In Soviet Russia, the NKVD depended almost entirely financially on the exploitation of slave labor, which really did not seem to provide any other benefit or serve any other purpose than to finance a huge secret apparatus.

If the stories of arrested NKVD agents can be trusted, the Russian secret police came dangerously close to realizing this ideal of totalitarian rule. The police have a secret file for every resident of a huge country, which lists in detail the numerous relationships that connect people, from casual acquaintances to real friendships and family relationships; after all, it is only in order to find out their relationships with other people that defendants whose “crimes” are somehow “objectively” established before their arrest are subjected to such biased interrogations. Finally, with regard to memory, so dangerous for a totalitarian ruler, foreign observers note: “If it is true that elephants never forget, then the Russians seem to us completely different from elephants... The psychology of the Soviet Russian seems to make unconsciousness a real possibility.”

Today, as in 1991, there is much talk - about teachers who rig elections, about judges who defend teachers who rig elections, about politicians who appoint judges who protect, etc. But today, as in 1991, there is not a word about Lubyanka. Such amazing political hesychasm!

Meanwhile, today Lubyanka is much more powerful than in 1991, much more experienced and richer. This, by the way, largely explains the “protest movement.” It is not against “falsifiers”; it is certainly not for the “middle class”. This is primarily the grumbling of the economic and military elite, which is fed up with the insolence of the Lubyanka elite.

Of course, as in 1991, any attempts to talk about Lubyanochka cause displeased hissing. Like, what kind of paranoia is that! What pettiness - some kind of eavesdropping, hacked blogs... Fi! Let's talk about the main thing! But who said that this is not the main thing?!

There were secret political police in all countries of the socialist bloc (for residents of Russia it is worth mentioning: outside this bloc it did not exist; comparing the Lubyanka with the FBI is a KGB lie). The secret political police existed in different countries in different ways, but in all countries, after liberation from Russia’s “tutelage,” they dealt with those who worked in the authorities or for the authorities for a long time and painfully. The only country that does not have this problem is Russia itself. The building of the secret political police was and is - more precisely, dozens of buildings in Moscow and thousands throughout Russia.

There were and are employees of the secret political police - there are thousands in Moscow, tens of thousands throughout Russia, and maybe even a zero should be added.

And then - shut up. In Germany, millions of informers have been identified. In other countries there were fewer, because there was a lack of conscientiousness in reporting. However, we are talking about thousands of people. Names have been named, some have been fired, some have resigned, some are unclear.

And only in Russia - nothing! No way! None of the journalists, politicians, scientists, writers knocked, wrote denunciations, implemented the assigned tasks or completed the assignments. One bishop admitted during perestroika that he was recruited by Lubyanka, but then he was derecognized. A couple of people who were definitely known to be “alas, yes” proudly reported that they were engaged in disinformation and re-education of Lubyanka.

There are many known security officers in the ranks of the highest nomenklatura - starting with the Leader of the Nation. But below - starting, for example, with school directors and those equivalent to them - there is not a single one. The firefighters didn't knock, the teachers didn't knock, the athletes didn't knock. And they don't knock! Lubyanka stands still, money is spent on agents, denunciations are received - but no one writes. Denunciations spontaneously generate like... like... In general, if something spontaneously generates, then denunciations. Newspapers and magazines, film directors and actors, politicians and military men do and say things that are extremely consistent with the interests and policies of the Extraordinary Struggle Commission, but the Extraordinary Commission has nothing to do with it. If Gogol wrote “The Inspector General” now, the Governor would declare: “She knocked on herself.”

This is still half luck, but the most fortunate thing is that everyone fought against Lubyanka. The main dissident, as we know, was Andropov, followed by Gorbachev. All members, workers and farm laborers of the CPSU Central Committee dissented, overcoming the stupidity of the dissidents, who, on the contrary, contributed to the strengthening of despotism. Workers and peasants - of course, they are the bearers of reason and freedom. There were no Soviets; they were invented by anti-Soviet people out of drunkenness. Recently it became clear that there was no “education”, there were no superficially educated cowardly philistines with diplomas who did not want to be educated further, but there were sweet, wonderful, freedom-loving Iteerites who reprinted samizdat, listened to “Svoboda”, in general - brought perestroika as close as they could . In Germany, the IteR members knocked, but here, no one!

In a short - a couple of weeks - moment, when the voices of those who demanded to close the Lubyanka and reveal its friends loudly began to sound, what a powerful chorus of mercy and reason sounded and continues to sound! Now it is assumed that there is nothing to discuss. There is no KGB, there is the FSB, the law prohibits Lubyanka this, the law prohibits Lubyanka that, the new generation of Soviet people does not even know what Lubyanka is...

It looks like an old movie, where a corpse was discovered in one office, they found out that none of the office employees committed murder, and rejoiced - until one secretary asks: “But someone did kill?” The corpse is here.

Isn't it so, Rus'... Everyone is clean, everyone is freedom-loving, everyone is Europeanized to the bones of the marrow, and the main thing is not to ask - whose urine is on the floor of our toilets? Whose-whose is a draw! And so is all of Russia.

Creation of the secret police

The new emperor, who was recklessly treated with such disdain, becomes one of the most formidable tsars in Russian history. Having finished his role as a guard, Nikolai made a sad conclusion. All the rulers who came before him did not know what was going on in their own capital.

The conspiracy and murder of his grandfather Peter III, the conspiracy and murder of his father - Paul I...

Many people took part in them, but the unfortunate autocrats learned about the trouble only in their last hour. For several years there was a conspiracy of the Decembrists. But the uprising was never prevented, and it could have been disastrous for the dynasty. The former secret police in Russia, in the words of Nikolai, “proved their insignificance.”

And Nikolai decides to create a new, most effective secret police. And all future Russian special services will emerge “from under the Nikolaev overcoat.”

The Tsar conceives an institution that should be able not only to detect a mature conspiracy, but also to signal its emergence, which should not only learn about the mood in society, but be able to conduct them. An institution capable of killing sedition in the bud. Punish not only for actions, but for thoughts.

Thus, the Third Department is created in the bowels of the Imperial Chancellery.

Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf was the same guards general who wrote a denunciation against the Decembrists to Emperor Alexander I, with some of whom the count was friends. This denunciation was discovered in the papers of the late Tsar - a denunciation left unheeded by him. The new emperor read it. And Nikolai appreciated the count’s work. Benckendorf was invited to participate in the creation of the Third Department. And soon the count - the new favorite of the new sovereign - is appointed head ("chief manager") of the Third Department.

The chief administrator, Count Benckendorff, reported and obeyed only the sovereign. Moreover, all ministries are controlled by the Third Department.

Petersburg did not immediately understand the comprehensive tasks of a very serious institution.

It was only known that, explaining the tasks of the mysterious Third Department, the sovereign handed Benckendorff a handkerchief and said: “Dry with this handkerchief the tears of the unjustly offended.”

The society applauded.

But the capital soon realized: before drying the tears from the eyes of the innocent, Count Benckendorff decided to cause abundant tears in the eyes of the guilty. And not only the guilty, but also those who could be guilty.

The staff of the Third Division itself was deceptively small - a few dozen people. But a whole army was assigned to him. The French word “gendarme” began to refer to the formidable forces of the Russian secret police... Under the Third Department, a Separate Corps of Gendarmes was created. And the head of the Third Department became the chief of these political police troops.

But this was just the tip of a powerful iceberg. The main force of the Third Section remained invisible. These were secret agents. They literally entangle the country - the guard, the army, the ministries. In the brilliant St. Petersburg salons, in the theater, at masquerade balls and even in high society brothels - the invisible ears of the Third Department. His agents are everywhere.

The highest nobility become informants. Some - for the sake of a career, others - having found themselves in a difficult situation: men who lost at cards, ladies who were carried away by dangerous adultery.

“Kind blue eyes,” a contemporary described Benckendorf.

The kind blue eyes of the secret police chief were now watching everything. The unprecedented happened: the sovereign allowed Benckendorff to reprimand the tsar’s beloved brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, for his dangerous puns. And the Grand Duke, who loved to joke, was in impotent rage.

Serving in the secret police was considered highly reprehensible in Russia. But Nikolai forced the best names to serve in the Third Division. And so that the blue uniform of the gendarmes would become honorable in society, he often put Count Benckendorff in his carriage during walks around the city. Every year, Nikolai “with German restraint and accuracy tightened the noose of the Third Section around the neck of Russia,” Herzen wrote. All literature was given under the wing of the secret police. The Tsar knew that rebellions in Europe began with sharp words.

Nicholas forbade writers not only to scold the government, but even to praise it. As he himself said: “I once and for all weaned them from interfering in my work.”

A merciless censorship statute was adopted. Anything that had a shadow of “double meaning” or could weaken the feeling of “devotion and voluntary obedience” to higher authority and laws was ruthlessly expelled from the press. Places crossed out by censorship were forbidden to be replaced with dots, so that the reader “would not fall into the temptation to think about the possible content of the prohibited passage.”

Responsibility for the printed word was forever introduced into the consciousness of Russian writers. Moreover, this responsibility was not before God, not before conscience, but before the emperor and the state. The author’s right to a personal opinion different from the sovereign’s was declared “savagery and a crime.”

And gradually Russian writers stopped imagining literature without censorship. The great sufferer of censorship, freedom lover Pushkin sincerely wrote:

...I don’t want to be seduced by a false thought

Censorship is blasphemed by the careless.

What is possible for London is too early for Moscow.

The last line has almost become a proverb... Famous writers worked as censors - the great poet Tyutchev, writers Aksakov, Senkovsky and others.

Benckendorff, who was not known for his love of literature, now had to read a lot. The sad, rumpled, tired face of an elderly Baltic German was bending over the manuscripts he hated. The tsar himself read the works of writers.

The Tsar and the head of the Third Section become supreme censors.

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Nazi Germany, like any other country, had its own special services involved in intelligence, counterintelligence, monitoring the level of trustworthiness of the population, and identifying subversive elements. Under the conditions of the dominance of fascist ideology, other, hitherto unusual, tasks were added to these tasks. Thus, it was necessary to find not only leaders and members of hostile parties and underground organizations, but also to search for hiding Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. State security issues were supervised by a special structure - the Gestapo. This unit required special personnel and specific methods.

The origins of the political investigation service

The name of the service came about by chance. The long German name “Geheime Staatspolizei” (“Secret State Police”) was shortened by postal workers for convenience. In the spring of 1933, shortly after the National Socialist Workers' Party came to power, Department 1A was created in Prussia on the initiative of Hermann Goering. The goals of the party body were to conduct secret work to combat political opponents, of whom there were many in the country at that time. The first boss was R. Diss. Heinrich Himmler at that time headed the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and had nothing to do with the future Gestapo. This did not prevent the Reichsführer SS from gradually concentrating the organs of political investigation in his hands. Goering’s role in Nazi law enforcement became more than modest a year later; he was more concerned with the issues of the German Air Force. He handed over the reins to Heydrich, the chief of the SD service. Over time, all the disparate units created in come under centralized control from Berlin.

Historical facts

Beginning in 1936, the German police and other services responsible for the internal security of the Reich became subordinate to Heinrich Himmler. The criminal and political departments form a single structure. The second department, which is headed by, is engaged in exposing the enemies of the regime, which now includes racially inferior citizens, homosexuals, asocial types and even the most ordinary lazy people who are subject to labor re-education. This structure remained until 1939, until, shortly after the start of the war, the decision was made to form the Gestapo as its fourth department. This unit was headed by the same Muller. The history of the organization ended in 1945. The troops of the victorious countries were looking for the chief of the German intelligence service, but they were never found. According to the official version, he died during the storming of Berlin by the Soviet Army.

Misconceptions about appearance

In both Soviet and foreign cinema, images of Gestapo fascists are often found. As a rule, they appear in the guise of bestial humanoid creatures, dressed in black uniforms with rolled up sleeves, or sophisticated sadists armed with surgical torture instruments. They address each other using the titles accepted in the SS. This is partly true. SS officers were sometimes (to strengthen) transferred to work in the Gestapo. Photos of Himmler and Müller in full dress could also indicate the appearance of ordinary employees, but in reality this was not entirely the case. The bulk of the Gestapo men were civilians; they dressed in civilian clothes, in ordinary suits, and preferred to behave as inconspicuously as possible. The service is still secret. Only on special occasions did SS officers wear a formal black or (more often) mouse-gray uniform. The Gestapo was not supplied with its own uniforms.

Who fought the partisans in the occupied lands?

Another mistake often made by directors, or rather, their consultants, lies in the names of the services involved in the fight against the forces of popular resistance. It was easier to generically call them all the same: “Gestapo.” This word is known to the mass audience, in contrast to the Felgendarmerie, GUF and even SD (Sicherheitsdienst), which actually worked in the occupied territories of the USSR and other countries. In the so-called Transnistria, temporarily captured by Romania, the Siguranza acted (by the way, unlike the royal army, quite effectively). All German services that carried out punitive actions and fought against were subordinate to the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht or the SS leadership. They had nothing to do with the RSHA headquarters in Berlin.

Cinema, Gestapo and SS

From a historical perspective, films about the Gestapo are not entirely correct. Sometimes particularly experienced counterintelligence officers from Germany were actually sent to the areas of greatest activity of the resistance forces. But since the occupied territories were not part of the Reich (even special money was printed for them), the area of ​​operation of the secret state police was limited to the borders of Germany as of 1939. The ranks of the employees of this structure corresponded to the police system adopted by the Gestapo. The SS had its own “table of ranks”, different from the army one.

Working methods

As you know, if an ordinary person is beaten for a long time and painfully, he will confess. Another question is how valuable and truthful the information he gives will be. A confession obtained through torture may well be a self-incrimination, and from an operational point of view it is meaningless. The main task assigned to the state secret police was to neutralize the intelligence efforts of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States and all other countries hostile to the establishment in Germany in 1933. It is difficult to judge how successful the employees of this service were; many aspects of the invisible war are still a state secret. The practice of world experience in counterintelligence work shows, however, that truthful and valuable data can be obtained using different methods, the main one of which is the belief in the need for voluntary cooperation. The Gestapo also showed diversity in methods. Photos of torture chambers equipped with the most sophisticated devices for suppressing the will and exerting all types of influence on those under investigation (both physical and psychological) make up a significant portion of the materials of the Nuremberg trials, which recognized the majority of executive institutions as criminal (including the Gestapo).

Did women serve in the organization?

Each intelligence service is strong with its personnel. The higher his qualifications, the better his preparation, the more effective his activities. But no number of employees, no matter how well they know applied psychology and methods of underground work, will be enough to control the mood and trustworthiness of a population of tens of millions of people. Full-time employees are forced to recruit freelance informants, who supply them with the necessary information. Most of the male population of Nazi Germany fought on the fronts. The “informers” were mostly women; the Gestapo took advantage of their natural curiosity and ideas of patriotism inspired by Goebbels’s propaganda. Of course, there were also male freelancers, and recruitment methods did not always involve voluntary cooperation. But, as far as published documents allow us to judge, there were practically no women among the full-time Gestapo employees.

Routine office

So, in the end, we can conclude that the ominous image created by means of post-war art does not fully correspond to historical realities. German Nazi counterintelligence did not break into captured villages, burning their inhabitants, did not guard concentration camps, and did not spy on partisans in occupied cities from Kharkov to Paris. In fact, unremarkable men in gray raincoats or suits walked along German streets, made acquaintances, recruited informants, and sometimes used special cars with direction finders to determine the location of the transmitters of the residencies of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. They did not wear spectacular and ominous uniforms with skulls on the crowns of their caps, and, most likely, most of them did not have the charm of the actor Leonid Bronevoy, whose talent created the famous joke hero Müller throughout the Soviet Union. The Gestapo, like any other intelligence service, was a bureaucratic organization rustling with reports. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, the analysis of surviving card files and archives took a lot of time. It was well spent. These documents became evidence of the inhuman and criminal nature of both Hitler's Nazism and all of its government structures, including the Gestapo.