The extended reform of Russia’s law enforcement system will only take place once a new contract is made between officials and the state.

Oleg Khrabry

The tragedy in Beslan, which prompted the secret service to start looking for people to blame in other competing agencies, has put the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ top brass in an difficult situation. A tough reaction to failures on the part of operative divisions could lead to a mass exodus of agents. To leave everything the way it is would mean that the heads of the ministry could expect to keep their posts only until the next crisis comes.
The nervousness dominating the law enforcement agency has led to one mistake after another. In less than a month after the battle in Northern Ossetia, the Moscow Main Directorate of Internal Security (GUSB) has more than once come under serious, relentless fire.

Image is nothing

“There are people in the Ministry of Internal Affairs that understand perfectly well that the system isn’t working, but everything is set up so that those who are willing to reform the system are extraneous. The Ministry’s structure only allows ministers to be active and independent. Even the minister himself is bound by the signals he gets from on high,” believes Sergei Maximov, a professor at the Institute for Legal Studies in Transnational Corruption and Organized Crime and an instructor at the MIA University. Clearly, today the next shakeup of the most hierarchical agency in Russia will come in the context of administrative reforms, consisting mainly of yet another structural change in departments and their heads. After determining and approving their functions, the “reformed” divisions continue their previous existence. This has already happened more than once. “The president gives the same task to every new minister: increase efficiency. As a rule, all of the reforms of the Ministry have merely renamed departments. The goals, functions, and methods remained the same,” says police general major Vitaly Popov.
Last July, the Kozak Group proposed a bill entitled “On the Law Enforcement Agencies of the Russian Federation,” that stipulated a more profound reform of the police, dividing it into the federal police, federal investigation agencies, the national guard, and municipal police departments. This would have been a revolution of sorts for Russia’s law enforcement system. The fact that the prosecutor would have only been responsible for “overseeing that laws are obeyed” by itself would have completely transformed the political landscape. The Kremlin was not ready for such a radical step. At the same time, the ministry was still entrusted with working with the more difficult republic presidents, governors, and mayors. The newly formed Federal Investigations Service (FSR) did not have the requisite mobility to make political decisions and failure was inevitable.
Other arguments from Russian law enforcement agents in favor of a “wait-and-see” approach were even more convincing. The police themselves were in an increasingly separatist mood in the regions, staff reductions could not be permitted at a time of increasing terrorism and crime, and most importantly yet another shakeup would destroy the system once and for all, as agents would leave en masse. The argument that more meddling will lead to collapse is perhaps the most powerful in the conscious move to slow down reform from above.
The history of changes at the Ministry of Internal Affairs which resulted in the departure of around a million employees over the last 15 years shows that the biggest blow to the agency came when former KGB, then former FSB, agents were put in charge of the agency in order to clean up its act.
According to sources inside the Ministry, “when some FSB agents were transferred to key posts at the MIA, mostly to the Main Directorate for Internal Security (GUSB), they were simply blown away by the amount of money floating around. Major clean-up sweeps followed immediately.” The negative result of these highly publicized clean-up actions despite their virtues was a catastrophic decline in police authority and the eruption of interdepartmental conflicts. The MIA old guard proved to be a powerful corporate organization capable of surviving skirmishes with the FSB guys and even of sowing discord on their turf.
The next person after Gryzlov to be appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, Rashid Nurgaliev, decided to put an end to the mass clean-up operations. Somehow he managed to get control the situation for a time, and its image became his image. In the GUSB, a bureaucratic boycott nearly paralyzed the main operative divisions and according to sources, “we were tacitly ordered not to react to bribes less than $50,000 and in general to prevent problems from happening.” The main MIA reformers were sent into exile to the south of Russia. Minister Nurgaliev issued an internal order charging the GUSB with organizing operatives in the Northern Caucasus and practically handing over all responsibility for work among the Chechen resistance to the GUSB. However, the majority of GUSB agents had never done undercover work: this is usually the FSB’s job.
After the Beslan tragedy, investigations into operations at the North Ossetian MIA revealed that the agency had repeatedly issued Russian passports illegally, not only to NIS citizens, but to guerillas fighters and even Basaev’s close colleagues. Someone can become a police officer, like everywhere in the Caucasus, for a thousand bucks. Ending a criminal investigation costs slightly more. The local prosecutor’s office absolutely refuses to start criminal proceedings, as the relatives of local bigwigs are implicated. According to Expert sources inside the Ministry, “people in high places who can influence the political situation in the country and in the republics are not capable of making the political decisions to systematically eliminate corruption because it involves both their commercial and career interests.”

Greed is all

The nepotism of the Caucasus has infected the entire southern Russian law enforcement system and presents a real threat to national security. Unfortunately, it is only the most recent example of the decay of a system that never had a real leader. Even without a leader, the MIA can be an incredibly unified organization. Former agents from the Main Directorate to Fight Organized Crime are particularly well-known for banding together much like the crime families they investigate. The “turncoat” police from Criminal Investigations were also astoundingly advanced in their esprit du corps. It turned out very difficult to fire bribe takers and bandits in uniform. They have learned to move through the system unnoticed, sitting out reforms and sweeps in ministry institutes and returning to their posts, sometimes with promotions, after laying low for a while.
A spin-off from the MIA, the Federal Service for Control of the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substance Trade is headed by Putin’s former deputy as FSB director, Viktor Cherkesov. This agency has become yet another captive of the Ministry’s confused personnel policies. This new super-agency includes many agents from the former Tax Police, half of which our MIA experts believe “should have been fired outright.” The first move these old agents made in the agency ended in scandal. Recently, Cherkesov was forced to publicly apologize for the actions of his subordinates, who began a criminal investigation of twenty veterinarians for using ketamine, an anesthetic prohibited in 1998. A panicked Ministry of Health quickly put the substance back on the list of approved anesthetics.
The practice of blindly trying to close as many criminal cases as possible is an old tradition at the MIA and continues to flourish. The criteria for evaluating police work only serve to paralyze initiative at the local level. As the director of one of Moscow’s OVD explained, “If I have great crime prevention, but no numbers, no solved cases, my bosses automatically interpret this as inefficient work. That means it’s time to fire me.”

A new contract

“In recent years, our lawyers have come to believe that there will soon be a confrontation between business and bureaucrats as a class. Business has no access to the bureaucracy, but bureaucrats are getting involved in business. One of the biggest blows to the purity of organizations like the FSB, which oversees clean-up sweeps at the MIA, comes from the fact that FSB agents are now investigating big oil companies and other commercial organizations,” believes Sergei Vitsin, Deputy Chair of the Presidential Council on Improving Justice, former police general, and one of the architects of judicial reform in Russia. The generation of police officers that should be the focus of long overdue recruiting reforms is trapped between the hammer and the anvil. As the prestige of the police profession declines, this generation will abandon the force, leaving only those who cling to their posts in order to make a buck.
Nonetheless, many experts of various backgrounds have called corruption at the MIA, despite its large dollar figures, minor. There are still ways to fight it forcefully, which does happen in practice from time to time. The problem lies elsewhere. Corruption is often in high places in the form of white-collar crime. “White-collar officials, without breaking a single law, take over business in an entire region or industry, without risking a thing. Russian legislation allows such officials to get their hands on other people’s assets without formally breaking the law. And there is no way to stop them by force,” believes Alexander Volkov, Senior Partner at the Minfin Group.
To begin long-term reform, we first need to acknowledge the extent of the catastrophe. The state is sick. This very fact should force Russia to acknowledge that many of the state’s current functions need to be handed over to society. The freed up funds could be used to give a raise to the remaining agents who will carry out the functions that the state must be responsible for. These are first and foremost law enforcement and public order. Society should sign a new contract with officials working in the new system. It should be radically different from the old one, which ran along the lines of “you work for the state but have to earn your own money.” This will not happen until there is an extensive division of powers, when the judicial branch finally ceases to be the handmaiden of the executive. “You can have as many police officers as you want, but all decisions regarding the law and personal liberties should be decided by judicial authorities. We have started to move in that direction. But money can open the gates of any fortress,” believes Sergei Vitsin. The current asymmetry arose from the state’s desire to control everything. The Russian authorities are playing with fire: they only trust an inefficient state apparatus that is rotten to the core and addicted to the cheap thrills of hard cash to implement the total control of society for society’s sake, but without society’s participation. In time, the public at large will associate the state with this corrupt army of bureaucrats. They will in fact become the state, and it will be impossible to live under them.

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