The secret police elevated Stalin by favoring the conspiratory party sector

Evidence

The means by which Stalin changed the Russian one-party dictatorship into a totalitarian regime and the revolutionary Communist parties all over the world into totalitarian movements was the liquidation of factions, the abolition of inner-party democracy and the transformation of national Communist parties into Moscow-directed branches of the Comintern. … His chief support in the succession struggle after Lenin’s death came from the secret police98 which at that time had already become one of the most important and powerful sections of the party. … It was only natural that the Cheka’s sympathies should be with the representative of the conspiratory section, with the man who already looked upon it as a kind of secret society and therefore was likely to preserve and to expand its privileges. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 874

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism of police-state capture relevant to how surveillance/intelligence apparatus shapes later totalitarian politics.