Russian Empire (1802–1917) 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.
Police As the central government began to further partition the countryside, the
ispravniks (chiefs of police) were distributed among the sections. Serving under them in their principal localities were commissaries (). and 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. 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 (, from , order), who, in a time without
habeas corpus, were armed with power to arrest all suspects on the spot. Two long-time units of the Imperial MVD and
NKVD, the
Russian Firefighting Service and the
Federal Prisons Service, transferred to the
Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations in 2001 and to the
Russian Ministry of Justice in 2006, respectively. The last reorganization abolished Main Directorates inherited from the NKVD in favour of Departments. In 2012, career police officer
Vladimir Kolokoltsev became the Minister of Internal Affairs in Russia. On 5 April 2016, Russian President
Vladimir Putin ordered the
Russian Internal Troops,
OMON (the Special Purpose Mobility Unit), and
SOBR (SWAT) forces to form the basis of the newly created
National Guard of Russia, and these close to 200,000 public order, special police, and internal troop forces previously under the command of the MVD were reassigned to the
Security Council of Russia.
2005–19 In 2006,
investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. 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. 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.
2020–present The founder and editor of the independent news site Koza.Press, known professionally as
Irina Slavina, was harassed by law enforcement for years. 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.” Supporters of Navalny said he was being silenced for criticizing President Vladimir Putin's government. In 2020 Navalny was poisoned in Russia with the Soviet-era
nerve agent Novichok. 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. The law permits authorities to monitor telephone calls in real time. ==Ministers==