80 years ago, the first Soviet government approved the creation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, known by its acronym, the Cheka. The name suggests that it was to be only a temporary body.

But it became one of the principal pillars of the Soviet system. The Communist Party insisted that it had all the answers to life's problems, and thus could tolerate no dissenting views.

The main domestic role of the secret police became to seek out any views which did not fit the party line, and ensure that those holding them were dealt with. This reached its most horrific point in the 1930's, when the NKVD, as it was then called, was responsible for the death and incarceration in prison camps of millions of Soviet citizens for real or imaginary dissent.

It was a significant development in the march towards the collapse of the USSR and the socialist system, when, under Mikhail Gorbachov's reform policies, people stopped being afraid of the secret police, by then the KGB. But the secret police has also had an important foreign role, too, spying for the Soviet Union and Russia abroad.

But ironically its greatest piece of foreign intelligence was ignored. The secret police, in the person of Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy in Japan, learned the exact date and time of the German attack on the USSR in 1941.