History
Kaitsepolitseiamet was first established on April 12, 1920. From 1925 to 1940 the institution was known as Poliitiline politsei (abbreviated PolPol). The PolPol fought against subversive activities of political extremists, espionage, desertion, smuggling and terrorism. The most discussed targets were the Estonian communists whose party had been declared an illegal organisation following the failed December coup, forcing them to operate clandestinely and through various legal fronts, usually as workers' organisations. Communists were supported by the Soviet Union, who had publicly accepted the principles not recognizing the parliamentary order, seeing terrorism as a legitimate activity. Similarly, the PolPol surveyed pro-Nazi oriented Baltic Germans and extreme monarchists of the White Russian emigres.
When the Soviet Union annexed Estonia on June 17, 1940 the PolPol was one of the first institutions which was practically in corpore repressed - almost all of its employees were deported in course of June deportations; before the end of the World War II more than 90% of the PolPol employees and their families were killed.
Read more about this topic: Estonian Security Police
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)