El Nacional (via 14ymedio), Miguel Henrique Otero, Madrid, 19 January 2024 — There is a model of power – the Police State – that has its starting point at the time of the creation of the political police in communist Russia, ordered by Lenin in 1917. With Stalin’s coming to power in 1922 and until his death in 1953 – more than three decades – the entity of the political police grew to become the very core of power.
The idea that prevailed during Tsarism, that the police – the famous Okrhana – was a mere instrument in the hands of the tsar or his ministers, was discarded and replaced by the communists with another concept: police power. And what is the nature of police power? It thinks, plans, makes decisions and executes operations on the thesis that every person is, by definition, suspicious. Specifically, suspected of being a political enemy, an enemy of the Regime, and therefore a person who must be watched, threatened, coerced. A person turned into a file. A person who, as an enemy, can be arrested, prosecuted, tortured, disappeared or openly murdered. Without having committed any crime. Without a reason to explain or justify it.
It is with Stalin that the political police acquires omnipresent power, total and unlimited, structurally unpunished, governed by criteria of arbitrariness, unilaterally, disproportionate use of force, secrecy and opacity. It is with Stalin that the political police merges with the State, which acquires the proportions of a police state, one of terror. It is with Stalin that the political police, merged with the Party and the State, reached stages of delirium when they were ordered to fulfill quotas of detainees, who were prosecuted and executed. Death quotas became goals and generated competition between the different police units, and they hunted anyone with the aim of reaching and exceeding the goals, in order to receive flattery and awards from the chief murderer.
It is with Stalin that the political police acquires omnipresent power, total and unlimited
That State, with the variants and nuances that have taken place in more than seven decades, is the state of terror with which Russia now governs, under the mandate of the war criminal Vladimir Putin. And it is that
