The decision today to convict Alexei Kozlov on fraud charges and sentence him to 5 years in a labor camp, seemingly as retribution against his wife, the activist journalist Olga Romanova, raises a crucial issue in terms of Russian reform. I appreciate that I am unfashionable in being mildly optimistic about police reform in Russia and the prospect that — over years, not overnight — it might lead to the emergence of a force concerned less with protecting the interests of the state and the elite and more with upholding the law and providing security for all. However, that will be impossible or meaningless without a corresponding change in the nature and culture of the Russian court system. If the courts are corrupt and/or subject to undue political influence, then police reform will be largely irrelevant: the guilty can arrange for themselves to be released, even if arrested, through bribery and blat (influence, connections), while the innocent who fall foul of the state or the elite will still be at risk. As is, time and again the courts appear to be — as in Soviet times — nothing more than instruments of factional and elite interest, from denying environmentalists their rights to characterizing efforts to confront homophobia as ‘extremism.’
All posts in category Police Reform
Judicial reform: the necessary flip side of police reform
Posted by Mark Galeotti on March 15, 2012
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/judicial-reform-the-necessary-flip-side-of-police-reform/
Russia’s brutal police: why has reform not stopped the abuses?
Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil
It’s a year since the Law on the Police was introduced amidst a series of genuflections towards the need to improve the cops’ human rights record, close the legitimacy gap between police and the policed and generally do something about long-entrenched habits and practices of corruption, intimidation and brutality. Heavens, the police were even banned from truncheoning pregnant women; I’d have thought this shouldn’t have needed to be said, but given the choice, I’d rather it be proscribed than permitted.
So has the world changed? It may not seem so. We are still being horrified by a litany of abuses and tragedies, from the fatal beating and torture of Sergei Nazarov in Kazan on March 9, through journalists being attacked and beaten while covering anti-government protests. (Parenthetically, Russian prisons are also still rife with violence.) So, what’s going on?
Posted by Mark Galeotti on March 14, 2012
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/russias-brutal-police-why-has-reform-not-stopped-the-abuses/
Sukhodolsky’s ouster from the St Petersburg police: Nurgaliev’s revenge, brutal MVD politics and a suggestion of a breakdown in silovik etiquette
The outgoing Mikhail Sukhodolsky
On Friday 10 February, OMON riot police surrounded the St Petersburg police headquarters on Suvorovsky Prospekt and evicted Colonel General (Police) Mikhail Igorevich Sukhodolsky. Earlier that day, President Medvedev had signed a terse order relieving him of his duties as head of the St Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Main Internal Affairs Directorate (GUVD) on unspecified grounds. Sukhodolsky himself subsequently held a press conference in which he enumerated the successes of his force in the time since he was appointed last year. (Interestingly enough, there’s no mention on the force’s webpage.)
Why has Russia’s second most senior field police commander, a man specially moved into this position in June 2011 from the position of first deputy interior minister, been sacked just eight months later, and so publicly at that?
Posted by Mark Galeotti on February 13, 2012
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/sukhodolskys-ouster-from-the-st-petersburg-police-nurgalievs-revenge-brutal-mvd-politics-and-a-suggestion-of-a-breakdown-in-silovik-etiquette/
On Military Police in the Moscow News
In this week’s column for the Moscow News, ‘Tough job for Russia’s new military police‘, I return to the vexed issues of crime in the ranks (still monstrously high) and the prospects for the new voennaya politsiya, something I’ve already written on here, although at that point without the benefit of Main Military Prosecutor Fridinskii’s splendid recent soundbite that “the scope of military corruption is mindboggling; it seems people have lost shame and a sense of proportion.” Nonetheless, the point does need to be reiterated that no police force – especially one drawn from an already-all-too-often-corrupted service – can ‘fix’ the problem. That needs to be a cultural process, a transformation of the Russian military that includes effective and law-based policing, but also extends to respect for all ranks, transparency of expenditures and a culture that holds senior officers to account. I think it’s a great step forward – but I’ll really start to believe in the VP when I see a senior officer in handcuffs, or them raid one of the underground factories producing counterfeit that you can still find sited on remote military bases to enjoy their “extraterritoriality” from regular law enforcement.
Posted by Mark Galeotti on November 1, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/on-military-police-in-the-moscow-news/
Good news about Russian crime (even while recognizing how far there is to go)
Maybe I’m going soft in my old age, or maybe something really is changing – a little. My latest Moscow News column riffs off my blogpost on the conviction of Sergei Butorin – ‘Osya’ – on multiple murder counts to tease out some good news from Russia on the law enforcement front. Let’s be clear about this: there are still numerous and massive problems, not least of which is the endemic culture of corruption. Even the recent purge was often an excuse for further extortion, as venal senior officers gouged bribes out of their underlings in return for a clear report. But while holding in our minds that Russia is still plagues top to bottom with corruption, criminality and the abuse of power, let’s not refuse to acknowledge that there are some signs of progress…
Posted by Mark Galeotti on September 12, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/good-news-about-russian-crime-even-while-recognizing-how-far-there-is-to-go/
‘State Building in Putin’s Russia: policing and coercion after Communism’ by Brian Taylor (2011)
Another quick foreshadowing of a forthcoming review, this time in the Russian Review. Read the review for my full comments, but in brief, State Building in Putin’s Russia: policing and coercion after Communism is an excellent and deeply-researched book on the MVD and other institutions of internal control under Putin. Brian Taylor (Maxwell School, Syracuse University) very usefully conceptualizes the siloviki of the military and security interests as at once a cohort (a distinct social body with certain common traits and values), clans (competing factions) and corporate (bureaucratic and institutional) interests. However, the core of this book is devoted to assessing the overall contribution of the police and security institutions to the development of the Russian state, demonstrating that state capacity only improved to a very slightly, a process largely limited by an inattention to what he calls “state quality” – essentially, good governance and the satisfaction of society’s needs. Taylor doesn’t really dig into how far poor governance reflects a failure of Putin’s state-building project and how far it is because Putin wasn’t interested in this kind of thing but wanted to create a centralized hybrid state. What this first-class book proves, though, is that even if Putin thinks he got what he wanted from the siloviki, if his aim was lasting, effective and reliable state building, then he was wrong.
(In fairness, though, I’d in any case always be a sucker for a book that declares itself to be committed to “bringing the gun back in” to the comparative literature on states.)
Taylor, Brian D. State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xviii + 373 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76088-1.
Posted by Mark Galeotti on August 30, 2011
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/state-building-in-putins-russia-policing-and-coercion-after-communism-by-brian-taylor-2011/
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