Propaganda has a knack for turning even very serious things into caricatures. Whenever one tries to return such things to a serious discussion, there is always a danger of appearing to defend the indefensible. No one wishes to be thus misconstrued, hence, goodbye to objectivity, hello propaganda. My advantage, though, is not fearing to be misconstrued. My sole objective is to get serious about serious things, that is all. With this in mind, let us return to a previous conversation.
As I promised earlier, this entry will be taking a look at the powers of secret police in totalitarian societies, and their chances to come out on top in the struggle for state control. The rationale for it has been sparked by the following sentence, quoted in my earlier posting Totalitarianism In Western Tidbits Part II: “One of the dangers inherent in the totalitarian dictatorship is the possibility that the secret police might seize control of the party itself.”
Assuming that “control of the party” in this case means, or indirectly implies state power, let us dismiss the middleman now and talk directly about the actual power of secret police to take over a totalitarian state. But before we get there, it will be worth mentioning that in the history of all classic totalitarian dictatorships, no such effort has ever been successful, nor, to my knowledge, has even been tried. Previewing the rest of this entry, we can be assured of the same situation with the overall power takeover.--- No such luck!
Let us now get back to the assertion above.
As if totalitarian societies were just as prone to opportunistic power struggles as normal dictatorships, this assertion overlooks the fact that totalitarianism is all about solid stability, and that it employs the practices of severe repression, embodied in secret police, exactly for the reason of assuring the state of no alternative or even potential, stores of power to challenge the power of the state. In fact, any power struggle is against the nature of the totalitarian state, and the sole justification of a coup d’état would be the incompetence of the existing government, that is, its abject inadequacy in promoting the welfare of the state and in fulfilling its tasks. Thus, during the colossal political and social crisis in post-Soviet Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, the KGB alone was to remain the bulwark of stability and continuity, allowing the damaged nation to survive the crisis, and eventually supplying its leadership from its own ranks (Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov, and a great many others), not by means of a coup, but through an orderly transition of power.
But how about the strong possibility of power abuse by some opportunistic individuals in high positions of power? This theoretically-posed question can be sufficiently answered from the practical experience of the three classic totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, namely, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. (I am reluctant to include Mao’s China in the same consideration even though this applies to China as well, as there is a peculiar Asiatic dimension to Chinese totalitarianism, which, on principle, I do not wish to gloss over, should I engage in such wholesale generalizations, no matter how true they may turn out to be.)
Starting with Italy, we find the name of Arturo Bocchini (1880-1940) directly associated with the creation and functioning of fascist secret police. Bocchini was named chief of the regular Italian police, Polizia di Stado, in 1926. He was also a Senator in the Italian Parliament. In 1927 he organized OVRA, secret police proper. Efficiently run as a state bureaucracy by a dedicated bureaucrat without any ambitions of power, it was greatly assisted by state laws, but was a surprisingly mild instrument of oppression, demonstrating the characteristic absence of an institutional will to power. Only ten people were sentenced to death by Italian secret police up to the time of Bocchini’s death in 1940.
A much more sinister, cruel, and oppressive was the secret police of the Third Reich in Hitler’s Germany. I am sure that the name Gestapo is familiar to many people, but, ironically, Gestapo was only a small part of the secret police apparatus. At first, the secret police functions were performed by the SS (under Himmler’s headship since 1929), plus the SA, plus the SD. Here is an example of the structural diffusion of power, by means of which the German totalitarian State was solving the problem of too much power concentrated in one organization. In 1933 Gestapo proper was set up by Hermann Göring, merging with the SD, and then coming under Heinrich Himmler’s control. Himmler was of course a consummate bureaucrat and a fanatic of the regime without any ambitions of personal power. Even his last act of “personal independence” trying to negotiate with the British and the Americans behind Hitler’s back, was not an effort to save himself, but to save the regime, and in no way made any claim to a personal, “authoritarian” distinction.
And finally, in Soviet Russia, the problem of secret police power was first solved by the state’s reliance on foreigners (that is, ambitious men with no Russian roots, ergo no public following) such as the famous Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky and his Cheka successor Vyacheslav Menzhinsky also Polish, or the Latvians Ian Berzin and Martyn Latsis, to mention just a few. Another method of keeping the secret police under control was to expedite the cycle of rotation for its upper echelon, in order to prevent them from ‘entrenchment’ and from eventually being able to take advantage of their position. The quick demise of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, and, after Stalin’s death, the elimination of the all-powerful Beria, are enough to illustrate how the state dispensed its preventive medicine. Ironically, many thousands of secret policemen, especially those of them who seemed to enjoy their ghastly business, in other words a disproportionately huge number of them were tried, and either shot, or, for lesser offenses, dispatched to the Gulags, thus further swelling the numerical ranks of the victims of Stalin’s Terror. (For more on Russia’s KGB [I am using this specific name generically] see my Russia and History sections.)
As I promised earlier, this entry will be taking a look at the powers of secret police in totalitarian societies, and their chances to come out on top in the struggle for state control. The rationale for it has been sparked by the following sentence, quoted in my earlier posting Totalitarianism In Western Tidbits Part II: “One of the dangers inherent in the totalitarian dictatorship is the possibility that the secret police might seize control of the party itself.”
Assuming that “control of the party” in this case means, or indirectly implies state power, let us dismiss the middleman now and talk directly about the actual power of secret police to take over a totalitarian state. But before we get there, it will be worth mentioning that in the history of all classic totalitarian dictatorships, no such effort has ever been successful, nor, to my knowledge, has even been tried. Previewing the rest of this entry, we can be assured of the same situation with the overall power takeover.--- No such luck!
Let us now get back to the assertion above.
As if totalitarian societies were just as prone to opportunistic power struggles as normal dictatorships, this assertion overlooks the fact that totalitarianism is all about solid stability, and that it employs the practices of severe repression, embodied in secret police, exactly for the reason of assuring the state of no alternative or even potential, stores of power to challenge the power of the state. In fact, any power struggle is against the nature of the totalitarian state, and the sole justification of a coup d’état would be the incompetence of the existing government, that is, its abject inadequacy in promoting the welfare of the state and in fulfilling its tasks. Thus, during the colossal political and social crisis in post-Soviet Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, the KGB alone was to remain the bulwark of stability and continuity, allowing the damaged nation to survive the crisis, and eventually supplying its leadership from its own ranks (Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov, and a great many others), not by means of a coup, but through an orderly transition of power.
But how about the strong possibility of power abuse by some opportunistic individuals in high positions of power? This theoretically-posed question can be sufficiently answered from the practical experience of the three classic totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, namely, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. (I am reluctant to include Mao’s China in the same consideration even though this applies to China as well, as there is a peculiar Asiatic dimension to Chinese totalitarianism, which, on principle, I do not wish to gloss over, should I engage in such wholesale generalizations, no matter how true they may turn out to be.)
Starting with Italy, we find the name of Arturo Bocchini (1880-1940) directly associated with the creation and functioning of fascist secret police. Bocchini was named chief of the regular Italian police, Polizia di Stado, in 1926. He was also a Senator in the Italian Parliament. In 1927 he organized OVRA, secret police proper. Efficiently run as a state bureaucracy by a dedicated bureaucrat without any ambitions of power, it was greatly assisted by state laws, but was a surprisingly mild instrument of oppression, demonstrating the characteristic absence of an institutional will to power. Only ten people were sentenced to death by Italian secret police up to the time of Bocchini’s death in 1940.
A much more sinister, cruel, and oppressive was the secret police of the Third Reich in Hitler’s Germany. I am sure that the name Gestapo is familiar to many people, but, ironically, Gestapo was only a small part of the secret police apparatus. At first, the secret police functions were performed by the SS (under Himmler’s headship since 1929), plus the SA, plus the SD. Here is an example of the structural diffusion of power, by means of which the German totalitarian State was solving the problem of too much power concentrated in one organization. In 1933 Gestapo proper was set up by Hermann Göring, merging with the SD, and then coming under Heinrich Himmler’s control. Himmler was of course a consummate bureaucrat and a fanatic of the regime without any ambitions of personal power. Even his last act of “personal independence” trying to negotiate with the British and the Americans behind Hitler’s back, was not an effort to save himself, but to save the regime, and in no way made any claim to a personal, “authoritarian” distinction.
And finally, in Soviet Russia, the problem of secret police power was first solved by the state’s reliance on foreigners (that is, ambitious men with no Russian roots, ergo no public following) such as the famous Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky and his Cheka successor Vyacheslav Menzhinsky also Polish, or the Latvians Ian Berzin and Martyn Latsis, to mention just a few. Another method of keeping the secret police under control was to expedite the cycle of rotation for its upper echelon, in order to prevent them from ‘entrenchment’ and from eventually being able to take advantage of their position. The quick demise of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, and, after Stalin’s death, the elimination of the all-powerful Beria, are enough to illustrate how the state dispensed its preventive medicine. Ironically, many thousands of secret policemen, especially those of them who seemed to enjoy their ghastly business, in other words a disproportionately huge number of them were tried, and either shot, or, for lesser offenses, dispatched to the Gulags, thus further swelling the numerical ranks of the victims of Stalin’s Terror. (For more on Russia’s KGB [I am using this specific name generically] see my Russia and History sections.)
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