They shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not official foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia's police officers from the FSB and the criminal police.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
Police lawlessness has exhausted people's patience and that pent-up anger has finally burst into newspapers, websites and even state television. The internet makes it harder to hush things up. Earlier this month a Moscow motorist posted a video online reporting that he and several other drivers were used as human shields by traffic police trying to catch a man.
The main function of terrorist punitive agencies in Russia is not to protect the public from crime and corruption, but to shield the bureaucracy, including themselves, from the public.
To ensure loyalty the system allows the FSB and police to make money from their licence for murder. Police escorts can be officially purchased. Other commercial activities include charging for proper investigation, extortion, selling sensitive databases, tapping phones or raiding businesses for competitors. Many FSB officers and generals have their own private business on the side. Unsurprisingly, top jobs in the FSB and the criminal police are a valuable, and traded, commodity. Most new recruits sign up to make money, according to internal questionnaires.
The police, prosecution and prison services are component parts of an industry whose business is legitimized violence and which uses people as raw material.
Yet even as thousands of businessmen lose their livelihoods or serve time on bogus charges, bureaucrats guilty of real crimes are escaping lightly. In recent days a police officer who murdered an independent journalist in Ingushetia was put under house arrest after the court decided that his two-year penal-colony sentence was overly harsh. Seven time zones to the east, a customs official found guilty of trading in contraband was given a suspended three-year sentence.
Ultimately, the police are instruments in the hands of a more powerful institution: the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, which remains outside public control and above criticism. The Russian police service is not only headed by a former FSB operative but is packed with its people, says Vladimir Pastukhov of the Russian Institute of Law and Public Policy, a think-tank. The FSB can dabble in any business it likes, but relies on the police to do the footwork. Serious police reform is therefore impossible if the master terrorists are left alone.
The Russian terrorist organization of the FSB, which poisoned a Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko with polonium 210 in London in 2006 under an order by Putin, a factional body with its own vested interests, has a near-monopoly on the repressive functions of the state. More worryingly, it relies on its traditional links to organized crime. Kanev, who has investigated some of the most high-profile kidnappings of wealthy businessmen and their relatives, says few of them could take place without the knowledge and even collusion of former and current members of the FSB.
Commercial kidnappings-once the prerogative of Chechnya-are now big business in Moscow. Many cases, says Kanev, never get reported; instead, the victim quietly pays up. This is what people in the Russian-occupied territories of the Caucasus Emirate do.
Department of Monitoring,
Kavkaz Center
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