Министерство внутренних дел Российской Федерации: история и современность

Russian Federation agency

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD; Министерство внутренних дел [МВД], Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del) is the interior ministry of Russia. The MVD is responsible for law enforcement in Russia through its agencies the Police of Russia, Migration Affairs, Drugs Control, Traffic Safety, the Centre for Combating Extremism, and the Investigative Department. The MVD is headquartered in Zhitnaya Street 16 in Yakimanka, Moscow. Vladimir Kolokoltsev has been the Minister of Internal Affairs since 2012.

The first interior ministry (MVD) in Russia was created by Tsar Alexander I on 28 March 1802. The MVD was one of the most powerful governmental bodies of the Empire, responsible for the police forces and Internal Guards, and the supervision of gubernial administrations. Its initial responsibilities also included prisons, firefighting, state enterprises, the state postal system, state property, construction, roads, medicine, clergy, natural resources, and nobility; most of them were transferred to other ministries and government bodies by the mid 19th century.

As the central government began to further partition the countryside, the ispravniks (chiefs of police) were distributed among the sections. Serving under them in their principal localities were commissaries (stanovoi pristav). Ispravniki and pristav alike were armed with broad and obscurely defined powers which, combined with the fact that they were for the most part illiterate and wholly ignorant of the law, formed crushing forces of oppression. Towards the end of the reign of Alexander II, the government, in order to preserve order in the country districts, also created a special class of mounted rural policemen (uryadniks, from uriad, order), who, in a time without habeas corpus, were armed with power to arrest all suspects on the spot. Two long time units of the Imperial MVD and NKVD, the Russian Firefighting Service and the Federal Prisons Service, transferred to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations in 2001 and to the Russian Ministry of Justice in 2006, respectively. The last reorganization abolished Main Directorates inherited from the NKVD in favour of Departments. In 2012, career police officer Vladimir Kolokoltsev became the Minister of Internal Affairs in Russia. On 5 April 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian Internal Troops, OMON (the Special Purpose Mobility Unit), and SOBR (SWAT) forces to form the basis of the newly created National Guard of Russia, and these close to 200,000 public order, special police, and internal troop forces previously under the command of the MVD were reassigned to the Security Council of Russia.

In 2006, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Six years later, the former head of surveillance at Moscow’s main Internal Affairs Directorate was found guilty of organizing her murder by tracking her movements and giving a gun to the killer. Some material from that leak was published in 2014, about half of it was not, and WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the files two years later, at a time when Julian Assange was focused on exposing Democratic Party documents passed to WikiLeaks by Kremlin hackers.

The founder and editor of the independent news site Koza. Press, known professionally as Irina Slavina, was harassed by law enforcement for years. On October 2, 2020, she committed suicide by self immolation outside a regional Ministry of Internal Affairs building, writing on Facebook, “For my death, please blame the Russian Federation.” Supporters of Navalny said he was being silenced for criticizing President Vladimir Putin's government. In 2020 Navalny was poisoned in Russia with the Soviet era nerve agent Novichok. Telecommunications service providers are required to grant the Ministry of Internal Affairs 24 hour remote access to their client databases, including telephone and electronic communication and records, enabling the Ministry to track private communications and internet activity without the users' knowledge. The law permits authorities to monitor telephone calls in real time.