Cycle of Violence

Sergei Nazarov’s murder inside Kazan’s Dalny police station was neither the first nor the last such incident. Nazarov, detained on suspicion of a minor offense, was beaten and raped with a champagne bottle. He died in the hospital. Yet Nazarov’s case has suddenly generated a public outcry, as it has become clear that Russia’s repressive security services system is incurable, despite last year’s reform, which renamed the militsia “politsia” and made officers pass qualification tests.

The public outrage at the Nazarov case opened a floodgate, and complaints poured in from other victims of violence or theft who had previously feared speaking out. Within two weeks, prosecutors in Kazan alone were dealing with over 60 new cases.

Russia’s police forces have long been plagued by a quota-based system,* in which the main criterion of success was closing cases, irrespective of the facts. In places like Dalny, rather than undertake an investigation, officers often randomly singled out the “perpetrator” from a crowd, then pressured him to confess.

Recently, a hair-raising article in Russian Reporter magazine [bit.ly/dalny] chronicled abuse and killings in the station that went unpunished because the court invariably sided with the police. Those with the guts to claim they were victims of violence were usually accused of being insane, of having inflicted damage on themselves by banging their head against the wall or the floor.

Since 2009, at least 24 unarmed individuals in Russia have died at the hands of police while in custody or while simply on the street, as victims of officers’ road rage, slon.ru claimed. This number does not include deaths registered by police stations as suicides or “sudden heart complications.”

Protests in Kazan and beyond – claiming that no one is safe from the very officers paid to protect them – led Tatarstan lawyers and rights activists to propose that their region become a living experiment in police reform. They argued for abolishing the “palki” system, instituting direct election of local policemen, and hiring law school graduates to head police departments, among other changes.

Although the scandal led to the sacking of Tatarstan’s regional police chief, the man in charge of all Russian police, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, is having none of it. In fact, he is looking everywhere but in the mirror for the root of the problem.

“If there is a bad seed in the field, you just get rid of it, without plowing the entire field,” Nurgaliyev said, rejecting sweeping reforms. Instead, he asked Russia’s cultural figures to teach police officers to “find beauty” in their everyday lives.

Without batting an eye, Nurgaliyev added that he will be happy to continue serving as interior minister in the new government to be selected by Putin, to be inaugurated in May.

For his part, Tatarstan Governor Rustam Minni­khanov sees current problems as having originated in the pre-Putin era: “In the 1990s, when we fought organized crime, employees of the Interior Ministry began feeling a lack of restraint,” he said at a regional government meeting.

Vedomosti, meanwhile, summarized the public mood in an editorial: “The tune ‘the type of army/police one has depends on the type of country one has’ is repeated over and over by many officials, including Putin – those same officials who carry responsibility for the state of the army, the police, and the country. And as long as they keep singing that tune, nothing will change. It will be Kazan everywhere.”

* Nicknamed the palki (“sticks”) system, for the hashmarks a officer makes each time he detains a suspect.