Police

Police (поліція, жандармерія, міліція; politsiia, zhandarmeriia, militsiia). A branch of the state responsible for keeping civil order and ensuring the security of citizens. Under totalitarian regimes the police, especially the branch responsible for state security, are able to violate civil rights with impunity because there is no rule of law.

The autocratic tsarist regime, ever fearful of political opposition, developed a complex police structure. In 1697 Peter I created a central prikaz (agency) and chancellery in Preobrazhenskoe, near Moscow, that served as a political police directorate. Its work was aided by a network of government agents known as fiskaly, who specialized in surveillance and informing. Peter I also instituted a higher security organization, the Chancellery for Secret Investigation. Those police organizations played a major role in rooting out ‘Mazepists’ after the defeat of Hetman Ivan Mazepa at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.

The police structure of the Russian Empire underwent several reorganizations. At the beginning of the 20th century there existed a Police Department and a Gendarmery Corps subordinated to the minister of internal affairs. At the gubernia level the highest representative of police authority was the governor; at the county level the highest authority was the ispravnik. From 1826 the gendarmes served as antiriot troops in the cities and as a posse in rural areas and were given wide-ranging political powers of summary arrest, trial, and exile of persons suspected of political offenses. In 1881 Sections for the Protection of Public Security and Order (known as the Okhrana) were created to serve as a secret police. The Okhrana had rights to enter without warrant, to deport persons to Siberia without trial, to carry out surveillance of anyone, and, in important cases, to impose the death penalty without trial. It actively persecuted the Ukrainian national movement.

In Western Ukraine under Austrian rule, police were subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In Galicia and Bukovyna the highest local police authority was the viceroy. In Lviv and Chernivtsi there existed police commissions, to which the commissions in smaller towns were subordinated. A gendarmery organized along military principles served as a security service. The gendarmery, especially in the Hungarian parts of Austria-Hungary, actively persecuted the Ukrainian national movement.

After the Revolution of 1917 the police, gendarmery, and Okhrana were abolished and replaced with a militia (militsiia). Police functions were performed by municipal and rural county militias under the Central Rada and the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic, and by the National Guard under the Hetman government. In 1917–18, units of Free Cossacks also patrolled villages and protected them from attacks by bands. In 1919 a battalion for the Protection of the Republican Order also performed policing duties, and in 1920 the Ukrainian National Republic organized a gendarmery in the territories it controlled.

In the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) the police was organized on the Austrian model. The main police force was the State Gendarmery Corps, whose structure underwent several reorganizations during 1918–19. In 1919 the corps had 23 units, staffed by 31 senior officers, 1,000 professional gendarmes, 400 trainees, and 3,000 militiamen. In July 1919, after the ZUNR forces and government were forced to retreat into central Ukraine, the corps was renamed the People’s Guard. Its eight units served as a state security service and as an auxiliary force of the Ukrainian Galician Army (see also Field gendarmery).

In interwar Western Ukraine under Polish rule, the state police was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was organized along the lines of the Austrian gendarmery. It persecuted most manifestations of Ukrainian national and cultural life. In interwar Transcarpathia under Czechoslovak rule, the police and gendarmery were also organized along Austrian lines. In Bukovyna under Romanian rule, the rural gendarmery had public security and criminal investigation functions. There was also a political police.

The German police apparatus in Ukraine under the Nazi occupation during the Second World War was complex and all-pervasive. It consisted of the Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei), the SS security police; the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the SS security and intelligence service, which controlled the notorious Einsatzgruppen; the Gestapo (state security police); and the Kripo (criminal police). Those police formations had sweeping powers and carried out mass repression. Schutzmannschaften—local militias and auxiliary police units under German supervision—were created in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; in Galicia they were called the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

In Soviet Ukraine the functions of the tsarist regular police were assumed by the so-called militia, established in Ukraine in February 1919 by the Council of People's Commissars. From 1931 it was controlled by the GPU, and later, by the NKVD, MGB, and MVD. The militia’s main tasks was criminal investigation and prevention, for which they had powers to demand identification, to enter buildings, and to arrest; the maintenance of public order; the enforcement of the internal passport system; licensing the possession of firearms, explosives, and photocopiers; and traffic control, including the administration, licensing, and inspection of motor vehicles. Militia departments consisted of uniformed police, criminal detectives, a passport section, a state automobile inspection unit, and a prosecuting section, which acted when investigation was not undertaken by the State Procurator’s Office or the KGB. The MVD also maintained its own infantry units, which were called upon to quell serious outbreaks of protest or disorder. In 1990 the strength of the MVD infantry in the USSR was increased from 36,000 to 350,000, the additions coming from among soldiers withdrawn from Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. A special transportation unit was subordinated to both the regular militia and the appropriate state transportation organization. The political administration within the militia was the major vehicle of Communist Party control. Narodni druzhyny, civilian volunteer detachments that patrolled communities, helped the militia maintain public order and combat drunkenness. During Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika period the militia was criticized for its history of human rights abuses and suppression of legitimate public protest, and calls were made for the disbanding of its political administration. In 1990 the USSR Supreme Soviet considered adopting a new law on the militia, which was to provide the first comprehensive legislative framework for the operation of the police.

Although according to the 1990 Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine the militia was to come under the control of the government of Ukraine, it and the MVD remained under the central control of Moscow until the demise of the USSR in late 1991. Following the 1991 Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence, Ukraine through inertia held onto the law enforcement institutions designed by the Soviets to protect the state from its citizens, rather than vice versa; it retained the Soviet-established militia and the transportation patrols of State Automobile Inspectorate (DAI). Only in 2015 as part of reforms following the Euromaidan Revolution, these systemically lawless and corrupt bodies were replaced by the National Police of Ukraine.

The Soviet KGB and its forerunners, the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, and MGB, were the state security police in the USSR and the main organizations of Soviet intelligence and espionage. They also commanded special troops for quelling domestic disturbances and guarding borders. The Soviet security or secret police was the primary instrument of totalitarian social control through mass terror from 1918 until the mid-1950s and of the persecution of internal opposition and the dissident movement in the post-Stalinist period. From 1930 it also ran the notorious network of Soviet GULAG concentration camps. In the late 1980s the KGB initiated a public relations campaign to try to distance itself from its sordid past and to convince the population that it was now a reformed organization operating within the law. However, with the rise of the democratic and national movement in the USSR during the perestroika period, calls for the abolition of the KGB were increasingly heard, and it was outlawed together with the Communist Party in 1991. In Ukraine it was not liquidated, but transformed into the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Monas, S. The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass 1961)
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Ivan Kozak, Bohdan Krawchenko

[This article was updated in 2025.]