President Medvedev’s Reform Of The Mvd: A Step Towards Democratic Policing In Russia? by Bohdan Harasymiw Professor Emeritus of Political Science University of Calgary
[email protected] ABSTRACT Brian D. Taylor’s groundbreaking study, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), demonstrates the critical importance of the development of democratic policing if Russia is to build the institutions and order which are essential in a democracy. It also shows that President Putin’s state-building policies, unfortunately, carried Russia in the opposite direction. In the final year of the term of office of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, a new effort was made to reform the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), responsible for the police, and its operations. The objective of the present paper is to assess whether this most recent reform effort was finally taking Russia away from the predatory and/or repressive models of policing into the democratic (protective) mould. Rule of law means nothing if a country’s police are themselves not bound by the rule of law. Using official Russian government sources (e.g., Rossiiskaia gazeta) as well as other newspaper and monographic accounts, including results of public opinion surveys, the paper assesses progress made in 2011 in the reform of Russian policing. History and bureaucratic inertia predict a pessimistic outcome to Medvedev’s policies. Russia’s situation is further complicated by universal trends, especially in Western democracies, where traditional patterns of policing, and police accountability, are coming increasingly into question, thus thoroughly muddling the whole notion of policing.