Since the late 1980s, de-Sovietization of the political regime and liberalization of the economy have led to a restructuring of policing in Russia. The rapid and highly publicized development of violent crime, traditional illegal markets, and predatory economic crime in a context of economic crisis has prompted various security demands. Protection of private goods and property rights has become a service offered by various providers of policing: private protection companies, internal security departments in large firms, and state police agencies, which are also offered on a contractual basis by the latter.
The same holds true for maintaining public safety, which is ensured, to varying degrees depending on the local situation, by federal, regional, and municipal bodies, private sponsors, and communities of residents, which sometimes reactivate modes of social mobilization that had been in practice under the Soviet system.
Within this landscape, in the early 2000s, the Interior Ministry (MVD) managed a set of police agencies devoted to crime fighting, ensuring public safety, and maintaining public order and also the Interior Troops. This bureaucracy is still militarized and centralized, but public safety and, to a lesser extent, criminal investigation missions are often supported by regional political leaders and/or businessmen, which prevents such investigations from being uniformly implemented across the Russian state.
The missions and prerogatives of the MVD were considerably reduced during the 1990s. The fire brigade and penitentiary administration were placed under the authority of the Ministries of Emergency Situations and Justice, respectively. In fact, the country’s leaders preferred to create new law enforcement agencies, such as the tax police, active from 1993 to 2003, rather than assign the MVD new missions. Nevertheless, the Interior Troops had become increasingly powerful during the 1990s through their active participation in the first Chechen war, waged from 1994 to 1996 on Russian Federation soil. Despite a reduction in numbers undertaken in 1998 and their lesser role in the second Chechen conflict, they remain a military force that some sources have put at 220,000 soldiers strong (Bennett 2000, 13). In the early 2000s, plans were announced numerous times to transform them into a national guard, further reduce their numbers, and redefine their missions.
The organization of Russian police agencies has undergone countless administrative reforms. In the judicial police, priority was given to departments fighting organized crime, which gained progressively more autonomy during the 1990s. Their regional structure in fact did not match that of other Interior Ministry departments, precisely in order to prevent collusion between local organized crime groups, law enforcement officers, and political staff. Since the early 2000s, the departments responsible for fighting drug trafficking and economic and fiscal crime, a reincarnation of the former tax police, have also risen in power within the ministry.
These reforms have not significantly transformed the repressive practices inherited from the Soviet era, even though the police as an institution adopted new statutes in 1991 that placed the defense of persons over that of state interests. The goal of bringing the police closer to the citizens conflicted with the government’s need to resort to emergency measures to deal with criminal threats it believed might jeopardize the political and social order. In such a context, the police continue to exercise their activity according to a results-based rationale: Their superiors set goals and priorities and evaluate the local departments according to quantified activity indicators, related especially to incidents reported and crime solving rates, which they themselves are responsible for presenting. This bureaucratic mode of organizing police activity encourages police officers to fulfill and/or report the successful performance of their duties by all possible means, by falsifying activity indicators and selecting the easiest cases to handle.
Moreover, it allows them free time to utilize their position for their own interests. Given their very low income, police officers readily admit to seeking to improve their daily fare, on duty or off, by, for instance, taking on legal protection assignments or even accepting bribes. These activities can assume far more sophisticated criminal forms, such as when a group of officers specializes in selling stolen cars or racketeering.
The everyday visibility of these practices in departments such as the highway police causes distrust among the population. Sociological studies stress the extent to which the police force is a feared and dreaded institution. Police brutality, denounced by national and transnational nongovernmental organizations, is a mystery to no one. The reputation of the police is also related to the fact that many officers leave the force for private security firms, and this loss is compensated by a recruitment policy with lowered standards: All applicants are accepted as long as they have no police record and they have fulfilled their military obligations. Given the salaries offered, the possibilities of finding illicit sources of income are an incentive to become a police officer.
In such a context, control measures have taken the place of announced reforms. Since Vladimir Putin rose to the presidency in 2000, the policy conducted toward the Interior Ministry has been characterized by greater penetration of secret service agents (FSB, ex-KGB) in the administration. New control bodies have emerged, particularly within the federal districts created in 2001, to better coordinate the implementation of the fight against crime. This policy has led to staging spectacular dragnet operations conducted in the name of the fight against corruption, which have revealed to the general public the existence of violent criminal organizations within the MVD. All of these measures have prompted the renewal of regional ministerial cadres, but have not called into question the traditional modes of bureaucratic organization of police activity.
