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Abstract
This article deals with the evolution of policing in late‐ and post‐Soviet Russia. It begins by showing that distinct auspices and providers of policing were to be found in the late‐Soviet context, even if, from an institutional point of view, they almost always belonged to party‐state agencies. Such a context emphasizes a process of informal multilateralization of policing prior to the Soviet break‐up. The article then goes on to show what has changed with glasnost and perestroika, exploring new demands for policing, new auspices and new providers. It argues that the market‐oriented approach of policing finds blatant limits in such a context. Finally, the article attempts to assess the Russian state's recent willingness to take control of private protection companies, centralize criminal investigation departments and delegate public security missions to the municipalities. These trends are likely to give rise to opposing interpretations.
Notes
Gilles Favarel‐Garrigues is CNRS research fellow at CERI‐Sciences Po, Paris. E‐mail: favarel@ceri‐sciences‐po.org. Anne Le Huérou is research fellow associate at CADIS (EHESS/CNRS), Paris. E‐mail: anne.le‐[email protected]. Correspondence to: Gilles Favarel‐Garrigues, CERI, 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris; Anne Le Huérou, CADIS, 54 bvd Raspail, 75006 Paris.
See, e.g., the outline of the last penal code in Soviet Russia, the first and second chapter of which were devoted to “offences against the state” and “offences against socialist property”.
Reviving earlier attempts in the 1920s, Nikita Khrushchev created the Dobrovol'nye narodnye druzhiny in 1959. These were auxiliary citizen police units formed of volunteers (druzhinniki) in both residential communities and working collectives. In exchange for additional days off, these volunteers patrolled the neighbourhoods at night in search of tramps, drunks or any kind of “khuligany” (the Soviet term for petty offenders).
We can add to the druzhiny their counterparts in the field of social and prevention work with young deviant people. Public inspectors and other bodies were volunteer citizens who, in many cases, played the role of social workers.
In the same way, being a druzhinnik was a way of gaining access to otherwise unauthorized resources or goods (for companies brigades) or simply to some privileges (e.g., not being stopped by traffic police to show your license is known to be the main motivation to be member of traffic volunteer squads).
As it is well known, crime in the Soviet ideology was seen as a result of class struggle in capitalist societies. Therefore crime was to be eradicated in the Soviet Union. This propagandistic vision of crime explains why official information on crime is so scarce. Yet, at the same time, it was permanently refuted by other sources of knowledge for Soviet people, such as satirical cartoons in newspapers, popular jokes, songs or movies.
A kind of local neighbourhood watch in a more formal way, the public security council is a volunteer body created under the auspice of local self‐management committees acting jointly with local police agents and dealing with petty offences, neighbour disputes, alcoholism‐related problems and the like.
This material is based upon research conducted by Anne Le Huérou for IHESI, Paris, in 2001–2002: “Vers l'invention d'une co‐production de la sécurité: Evolutions institutionnelles et mode de cooperation des acteurs locaux, étatiques et non étatiques de la sécurité locale dans l'Europe post‐communiste”. Field work was undertaken mainly in Omsk and St Petersburg in cooperation with Dr Y. Gilinskii and Y. Kostyukovskii of the Centre of Deviance of the Institute of Sociology in St Petersburg (Russian Academy of Sciences) and with the expert office Gepitsentr in Omsk.
Human rights organizations have extensively reported these violations, especially during the “foreigner” campaign during the summer of 2002. Authorized by Governor Tkachev, it was conducted by Cossack paramilitary groups who were to search and expel illegal migrants (see, e.g., United Nations Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2002; Glasser, 2002).
Interviews and personal observation, Omsk, November 2001. This positive image was reflected in the results of a marketing survey conducted for the UVVO in the city of Omsk.
In the neo‐institutional studies, “private enforcers tend to appear as abstractions and are seen as sharing the same set of attributed behavioural assumptions as economic subjects [as if they were] merely passive providers of a commodity the selling of which wholly depends on the level of demand and available choices. … While plausible theoretically, such assumptions tend to underestimate the actual capacity of force‐wielding organizations to determine choices available to economic subjects” (Volkov, 2002: 19–20).
Various state police officers and private securities managers with whom we met had different opinions on that point.
In addition to the staff allocated to each region by the federal budget, regional authorities can hire additional personnel paid from their own budgets (Interviews with experts, Omsk, November 2001).
The propiska, or internal residence permit system, that existed throughout the Soviet era as a means of control of the circulation of citizens and internal immigration is supposed to have disappeared in today's Russia. However, it still exists in the major cities, especially Moscow, and registration rules have become a very sensitive issue since the 1999 apartment house bombings and the beginning of the second war in Chechnya.
In 1996, a presidential decree authorized (as an experiment) a few cities to set up their own police agencies, with their own staff. It was considered a failure and the experiment closed in 2001 (Interview with V. Smirnov, deputy head of public security department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Moscow, 15 November 2001; see also Kruessman, 1999).
We do not ignore the fact that these standards are not shared by all Western countries, as some states are reluctant to give too much autonomy to the cities in this field.