10 Most-Feared Secret Police Forces In History

3. NKVD (Formerly The Cheka And Latterly The KGB) - USSR/Russia

The second entry from Russia, there could in theory have been four if the Cheka and the KGB were counted as separate organisations, but both were similar to - if not quite as merciless - as the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Formed in 1934 under Joseph Stalin's brutal leadership of the Soviet Union, the NKVD helped keep the population of the USSR under control - primarily through the gulags. These forced-labour camps accounted for the death of more than 10million prisoners - either through exhaustion, starvation or execution. Yet this was not the most frightening period of the NKVD's history - that was during the Great Purge, between 1936 and 1940, when an average of 1,000 people were executed every day. Some 750,000 people were killed, many of who were NKVD officers, while a total of 1.6million were detained in all. Genocide was commonplace under the NKVD when Stalin was in control, with between 5million and 7million Ukrainians murdered by forced starvation during Holodmor in 1933. The Katyn Forest massacre - when 22,000 Polish nationals were executed by the KGB in 1940 - proved a step too far for Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who disbanded the NKVD. However, his replacement secret police - the KGB - remained almost as feared, if not quite as bloodthirsty.