Venezuela Wants To Impose A Soviet-Style Police State — But Can It Pull It Off?

-OpEd-

BUENOS AIRES — The modern police state may not have begun with the Communist takeover of Russia in 1918, but the Bolsheviks and their ruthless leader, Vladimir Lenin, made it work like nobody ever had before.

When Joseph Stalin succeeded him as strongman in the 1920s, imposing a reign of terror that would last to his death in 1953, the secret police practically engulfed the Soviet state. There had been a secret police under the czars, the Okhrana, but this was always a tool in the hands of the imperial state and the minister in charge.

The Bolsheviks however turned the state itself into a giant, pervasive policeman. Its planning and actions were driven on the assumption that every citizen was a suspect. What were Soviet citizens suspected of? Of being critics, “fascists” (often without knowing it) and enemies of Communism — and thus, they needed to be watched, cowed and coerced wherever necessary.

Every person was a walking police file waiting to be detained, charged, “disappeared” or murdered in broad daylight. No crime need have been committed.

The powers of the secret police became boundless under Stalin, as raison d’état turned to delirium. The state was now police and criminal in one. Even the oppressors lived in fear. Police chiefs had quotas to fill and targets to meet, which meant nabbing people, often by chance, at home or on the street, on illusory charges.

After World War II, the same model was imposed with greater or lesser intensity in the communist states of Eastern Europe, and later in Cuba.

A similar polity has reemerged in Russia today under President Vladimir Putin, and in countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela, which like Cuba, will not hide their admiration for Communism. In the three cases, the police state is also militarized, as shown in the repeated occasions when police and soldiers are seen acting together against civilians.

Same boss, same orders

The various security, police, intelligence and military agencies in these states collaborate and share tasks, procedures and information. They are after all working for the same boss and have the same objective: to keep the regime in place, first and foremost through terror.

People must perceive the system as arbitrary, perverse, and sadistic.

Terror is carried out by acts of violence essentially, but also through its communication. You must already fear the terrible things that could happen in time. People must perceive the system as arbitrary, perverse, and sadistic, knowing there is no recourse against its wrath.

Today, Venezuela is arguably not governed so much as under occupation, by police, soldiers, militiamen and internal spies. The last category, in their scope, will remind one of the Stasi in communist East Germany and its vast surveillance operations.

Yardsticks of terror

But how effective has the country’s 20-year socialist regime been in establishing a communist-style terror state? Are all state powers merged and united in a single ideological entity? Do civilians feel its presence in ordinary activities, on an everyday basis? Do they act and speak freely? Can they access information, freely circulate across cities or stop and observe an incident without courting trouble?

Or put more specifically: Can the state prevent people from walking onto a beach to watch and record an oil spill or similar incidents? Can they gather in protest, and meet with and speak to opposition politicians like María Corina Machado or Freddy Superlano?

These are yardsticks for the terror state: the level of fear and impotence among ordinary folk, and the impossibility of exercising basic, constitutional rights.

Do Venezuelans fear being hauled off (which the regime prefers to do between two and four in the morning), beaten and subjected to a litany of absurd and sinister procedures for exercising basic rights?

It is difficult to gauge precisely the level of terror under President Nicolás Maduro, but the general elections due this year — if they are not hijacked or cancelled — will give Venezuelans a big clue on whether or not they are living in a “Putin state.”

*Otero is an exiled journalist and former editor of El Nacional, a Caracas newspaper.