The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD; Russian: Министерство внутренних дел [МВД], Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del) is the interior ministry of Russia.
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.[citation needed]
Police
As the central government began to further partition the countryside, the ispravniks (chiefs of police) were distributed among the sections.[1] 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.[2] 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.[2] These uryadniks rapidly became the terror of the countryside. Finally, in the towns of the rural countryside, every house was provided with a "guard dog" of sorts, in the form of a porter (dvornik), who was charged with the duty of reporting the presence of any suspicious characters or anything of interest to the police.[2]
Secret Police
In addition there was also the secret police, in direct subordination to the ministry of the interior, of which the principal function was the discovery, prevention, and extirpation of political sedition. Its most famous development was the so-called Third Section (of the imperial chancery) instituted by Emperor Nicholas I in 1826. This was entirely independent of the ordinary police, but was associated with the previously existing Special Corps of Gendarmes, whose chief was placed at its head. Its object had originally been to keep the emperor in close touch with all the branches of the administration and to bring to his notice any abuses and irregularities, and for this purpose its chief was in constant personal contact with the sovereign.[2]
Following the growth of the revolutionary movement and the assassination of EmperiorAlexander II, the Department of State Police inherited the secret police functions of the dismissed Third Section and transferred the most capable Gendarmes to the Okhrana. In 1896 the powers of the minister were extended at the expense of those of the under-secretary, who remained only at the head of the corps of gendarmes; but by a law of 24 September 1904 this was reversed, and the under-secretary was again placed at the head of all the police with the title of under-secretary for the administration of the police.[2]
Having won the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks disbanded the tsarist police forces and formed an all-proletarianWorkers' and Peasants' Militsiya under the NKVD of the Russian SFSR. After the establishment of the USSR, there was no Soviet (federal) NKVD until 1934.[citation needed] In March 1946, all of the People's Commissariats (NK) were redesignated as Ministries (M). The NKVD was renamed the MVD of the USSR, along with its former subordinate, the NKGB which became the MGB of the USSR. The NKVDs of Union Republics also became Ministries of Internal Affairs subordinate to MVD of the USSR.[citation needed]
Secret police became a part of MVD after Lavrenty Beria merged the MGB into the MVD in March 1953. Within a year Beria's downfall caused the MVD to be split up again; after that, the MVD retained its "internal security" (police) functions, while the new KGB took on "state security" (secret police) functions.[citation needed]
In his efforts to fight bureaucracy and maintain 'Leninist principles', Nikita Khrushchev, as the Premier of the Soviet Union, called for the dismissal of the All-Union MVD. The Ministry ceased to exist in January 1960, and its functions were transferred to the respective Republican Ministries. The MVD of the Russian SFSR was renamed the Ministry for Securing the Public Order in 1962.[citation needed]Leonid Brezhnev again recreated the All-Union Ministry for Securing the Public Order in July 1966, and later assigned Nikolai Shchelokov as Minister; the RSFSR Ministry was disbanded for the second time, the first being at the creation of the NKVD of the Soviet Union. The MVD regained its original title in 1968.[citation needed] Another role of the reformed MVD was to combat economic crimes, that is, to suppress private business which was largely prohibited by socialist law. This fight was never successful, due to the pervasive nature of the black market.[citation needed]
By the mid-1980s, the image of the people's militsiya was largely compromised by the corruption and disorderly behaviour of both enlisted and officer staff (the most shocking case was the robbery and murder of a KGB operative [ru] by a group of militsiya officers stationed in the Moscow Metro in 1980).[citation needed]
In 2006, investigative journalistAnna Politkovskaya was murdered.[7] 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.[7]
In December 2019, Distributed Denial of Secrets listed a leak from Russia's Ministry of the Interior, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine, at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there.[8] 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.[9][10][11][12]
The founder and editor of the independent news site Koza.Press, known professionally as Irina Slavina, was harassed by law enforcement for years.[13] 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.”[13]
In September 2023, Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs decided to have an appeal by imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny challenging his 19-year prison sentence on extremism charges held by a court behind closed doors, and the appeal was dismissed.[14] Supporters of Navalny said he was being silenced for criticizing President Vladimir Putin's government.[14] In 2020 Navalny was poisoned in Russia with the Soviet-era nerve agentNovichok.[14]
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.[13][7] The law permits authorities to monitor telephone calls in real time.[7]
^From Catherine II's time to that of Alexander II, these chiefs of police were put in power by the ruling nobility. This was changed after the Emancipation reform of 1861.
Ronald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police, Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet. Political Security Operations, 1565–1970
Dominic Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume II: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, Cambridge University Press (2006), ISBN978-0-521-81529-1.
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