Attacks on Law Enforcement From Within Its Own Ranks Suggest the System Is Crumbling, and the Only Question Is How, not If, to Reform It
Andrei Makarov’s announcement has caused a commotion. Back in the day he was a reactionary lawyer who brilliantly defended members of the State Committee on the State of Emergency, and then became a progressive politician of Boris Yeltsin’s stature. He is now an honorable member of the United Russia party. Mister Makarov said that there is no way to reform Russia’s Interior Ministry – it can only be disbanded and created anew. He even proposed a scheme for this dismissal: to put everyone on a contract and then hire only half back into staff. The best half. Which will then align itself into a neat single file of honest cops.
But just as it happened with Major Alexei Dymovsky, this radical and unexpected suggestion once again drowned in a plume of personal associations. “We know what Makarov is made of,” some exclaimed. “Sure, it’s clear that Dymovsky is no angel to say the least.” “He’s an angel, an angel!” others rebutted. In any case, what difference does it make? We are not the Final Judges or the political inquisition. There is no need to test the integrity of one’s design to be able to discuss ideas that have had such wide resonance. For this, a few simple things will suffice. Firstly, the speaker must not be a patented clown, the son of a lawyer or the daughter of street democracy – in regard to these, the idea is simple: go on, keep ranting, amuse the public. It’s not like we’re going to take you seriously. Secondly, the speaker must not be an agent provocateur who can masterfully redirect the discussion, create a thermal wave that will attract the rockets and shells and tangle up the topic. And he also mustn’t be an outright lunatic, of which there are plenty.
Some observers vacillated a bit when deciding whether the second point was true of Makarov and Dymovsky. But these vacillations were not strong enough to make them refuse to discuss the issue of whether this country has a police force.
We know from personal experience that there are honest, worthy and even amicable people among Russia’s police officers – as a rule, the further they are from the management’s trough and the closer they are to the people. District officers can certainly overlook some disorder and illegal apartment rentals and charge a dime for it, but on the whole they still look like law enforcement officers. Even if they are commonplace. These can be worked with, taught to kick their bad habits and given raises in return. But the closer one gets to the center of some decision making, even of the simplest kind, the worse things become. The plethora of murders, psychoses and fits of police brutality that have taken place in the past year and a half (a symptom of the system’s imminent demise) are a mere scratch on the surface of the larger, decomposing System, which some normal people can’t stand up to—they either play by its rules, move over to the sidelines, or go insane.
Speaking of the System. No matter what mister Dymovsky is like (I’ll repeat, we don’t know) and no matter what footprints his numerous followers from the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor’s Office have left, the most important thing is this: these are all staff officers, and not liberal intelligentsia. For them, the System is still alive and unshakable; their epaulets are like earrings for a married woman in a traditional cult, a sign of eternal loyalty. If you can’t fit in with the System, if you can’t exist within it, then leave. But there is no need to go against the flow, to make private things public. When one after another, the officers start breaking this unspoken rule and viciously attacking the System instead of simply getting out, it means that the System is staggering. It means there is no more electric circuit along the barbed wire. It means that existing within its borders is a formality that does not necessarily need to be followed.
The common folk can sense that mister policeman is no defender, and that miss prosecutor does not threaten wrong doers with the harsh law, but with an unaffordable deal. The mister and miss themselves lose their own faith in the power of their system. And inevitably, a politician appears who quickly turns all the attention on himself. He is the first to say what everyone’s been quietly feeling out loud. Actually, when there is opposition that is capable of truly participating in the struggle for power, the right to make the first loud statement is theirs. When there is no such opposition (it doesn’t matter why right now), the nomenclature is the first to make noise. Its nerve endings are made in such a way that it can foresee a threat—not to the country or society, but to its lovely self. And it immediately crosses over to the other side, while not really going anywhere. At least for a while. And then, depends on how it goes.
In a similar manner, at the beginning of our perestroika of the Big System, Telman Kharenovich Gdlyan suddenly appeared. He was no angel either, to say the least; we all know what a Soviet crime investigator was. Although back then, many hollered: “Angel! Angel!” It’s just that he was the first to sense that the System was collapsing. Thus, it is possible and important to go against it. Straight through. I am not saying that we are at the beginning of perestroika—any association is lame, and this one limps on both feet. I am saying that we are at the beginning of a general depreciation of large systems. From power stations that have not been thought through, to law enforcement and the courts, which used the example of poor Sergey Magnitsky to demonstrate that in Russia there is a death penalty for hostages of economic crime. And while there is still a small possibility of avoiding perestroika in all of its beauty, we should try to fine-tune the country.
If we have to pay for it by giving up the present “unreformable” Interior Ministry, than that’s a small price to pay. How exactly? The way Makarov has suggested? Should we follow the scheme that Dmitry Kozak proposed in the early 2000s—to create a separate municipal police force that could replace the federal militia when X-hour arrives? Should we follow the model that was used in the Ukraine with the road patrol? These are all secondary questions. The most important thing is to agree on a simple statement: we chose evolution. Not revolution. Not a revolt. Because once gangrene has started, it is better to live with no fingers than not to live at all.
