# Stasi The **Stasi** (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry for State Security) was East Germany's secret police and intelligence service from February 8, 1950 until its dissolution on January 13, 1990. Its motto was "Shield and Sword of the Party." ## Scale At its peak the Stasi had 91,015 full-time employees. By 1995 researchers had identified 174,000 informants; estimates that count occasional informants run from 500,000 to 2 million. Its longest-serving chief was Erich Mielke (1957–1989). ## The end and the files On January 15, 1990 citizens occupied Stasi headquarters to stop the destruction of files. The files were opened from 1992, and the records agency was folded into the German Federal Archives in June 2021. ## Putin's Stasi card In December 2018 *Bild* reported — and a Stasi Records Agency spokeswoman commented on — the discovery in the agency's archive of a Stasi identity card issued in 1985 to Vladimir Putin, then a KGB officer stationed in Dresden (CNN gives the posting as 1985–1990; Wikipedia, citing the BBC, 1985–1989). Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the KGB and Stasi were "partner intelligence agencies." ## RWKB angle The Stasi is the institutional backdrop of Putin's formative intelligence years — and the canonical model of total informant surveillance against which modern [[Surveillance State]] debates are measured. ## See Also - [[KGB]] - [[Surveillance State]]