Police brutality in Marxist-Leninist states

[gorillafuck]

Is there any information on police brutality in Cuba, and also the former eastern bloc?

[Manic Impressive]

Will any of it be from a reliable source?

[Widerstand]

Will any source be considered reliable by those who disagree?

[gorillafuck]

Well I don't know, I'm asking.

[Woland]

Truncheons were forbidden in Stalinist USSR. Police/NKVD hardly ever carried guns.

[Tommy4ever]

Truncheons were forbidden in Stalinist USSR. Police/NKVD hardly ever carried guns.

How did they go about killing people then? They surely didn't use their bare fists? That seems so ... inefficient.

[Patchd]

How did they go about killing people then? They surely didn't use their bare fists? That seems so ... inefficient.
Unless Chuck Norris was in their ranks.

[Unclebananahead]

Curiously, there are very few, if none, known trials of former deformed M-L state officials for brutality. There was one case that Parenti wrote about, in which a police official in Romania IIRC, was charged with brutality for the use of tear gas and water cannons on protesters. Also, there was no massive outpouring of people incarcerated in 'gulags,' emerging after the 1991 overthrow of the USSR.

[gorillafuck]

Curiously, there are very few, if none, known trials of former deformed M-L state officials for brutality.Trials by whom?

[ComradeOm]

Is there any information on police brutality in Cuba, and also the former eastern bloc?I can give you figures for the Soviet Union. What period are you interested in?

[Widerstand]

Curiously, there are very few, if none, known trials of former deformed M-L state officials for brutality. There was one case that Parenti wrote about, in which a police official in Romania IIRC, was charged with brutality for the use of tear gas and water cannons on protesters. Also, there was no massive outpouring of people incarcerated in 'gulags,' emerging after the 1991 overthrow of the USSR.

There are very few trials of police officials for brutality in Germany, and far less convictions. Does that mean that police brutality doesn't exist in Germany?

[Sixiang]

How did they go about killing people then? They surely didn't use their bare fists? That seems so ... inefficient.

Maybe they didn't need to kill people all the time...

[Unclebananahead]

There are very few trials of police officials for brutality in Germany, and far less convictions. Does that mean that police brutality doesn't exist in Germany?

I'm referring to the 'post-Communist' regimes prosecuting officials in the former regimes

Edit: Which I tend to assume they would have done eagerly, had the opportunity presented itself

[gorillafuck]

I can give you figures for the Soviet Union. What period are you interested in?
Khruschev period primarily. I'd accept info from any period, though.

[scarletghoul]

Maybe they didn't need to kill people all the time...
dont be ridiculous theyre communists all they do is kill people for their own oppressive and twisted ideology

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The police in Cuba aren't brutal, from what I could tell. Everyone I spoke to was very friendly with the police; at first I mistook this for corruption (as obviously, in the UK, you just don't go and be all chummy with the police), but it seems as though there is a genuine link between the police and the workers in Cuba.

I realise that this isn't statistical information, sorry.

[Sixiang]

dont be ridiculous theyre communists all they do is kill people for their own oppressive and twisted ideology

Oh right. How could I have been so silly. :p

[Robocommie]

Will any source be considered reliable by those who disagree?

The historian's age old dilemna...

[Die Rote Fahne]

ITT:

Cuba and the USSR were communist.

[gorillafuck]

ITT:

Cuba and the USSR were communist.
ITT?:confused:

[Broletariat]

ITT?:confused:
In This Topic/Thread

Bro

[ComradeOm]

Khruschev period primarily. I'd accept info from any period, though.Unfortunately I don't have figures for the first few years of Khrushchev's reign. Its pretty much uniformly accepted however that repressive measures decreased considerably as the Soviet economy shifted away from the coercive Stalinist model (a trend that is apparent in the last years of the Stalin period). As an example, by the time of Stalin's death there were still 600,000 persons in Soviet camps or prisons; by late 1954 this would fall to 474, 950 and would continue to shrink.

Below is a rough table that I've cribbed together from Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century. The first set of figures are derived from Kurashvili 1996 and account for the number of people sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes 1921-53. Those unfortunate to fall into this position would be either given the death penalty, sent to camps/prison/colonies or exiled. It does not include deaths during deportations or other extra-judicial measures. The second set (1959-74) accounts for prosecutions for anti-soviet activity (treason, antisov agitprop, etc) as defined by the criminal code and come from Pikhoia 1998. These are hard to see but they read as:

1959-62: 5,413
1963-66: 3,251
1967-70: 2,456
1971-74: 2,423


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/GreaterDCU/Misc/anti-Soviet.gif
One interesting reason for the fall of the repression figures in the 1960s and beyond is the increasing use of profilaktika (preventative measures) by the state security services. That is, a potential offender who had fallen under police surveillance would be called in for something like a 'friendly chat', be given a warning beating, or simply have their career discretely destroyed. I recall Ilič (Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev) calling this 'extra-judicial repression'. This is not accounted for in the above figures


dont be ridiculous theyre communists all they do is kill people for their own oppressive and twisted ideologyIs this a strawman I see before me?

[Toppler]

Well, under CSSR, the use of beatings by the police was well known, and tolerated by the public, as more than 90 percents of crimes were solved, and the crime rate quadrapled after the revolution, with ever higher increase in murders etc. so while these methods are definitely not humane are something to look up to, it did work better than the current police (with less than 50 percent of crimes getting solved), which is not really more humane as while they don't beat you up usually, they can hold you in a cell without food or water for up to 20 hours, so...