Erica Marat, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries

During the Cold War, western scholars of the USSR generally devoted little attention to the Soviet police, including both the main public-order policing agency, the militsia, as well as other subdivisions of its parent organization, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. While a few scholars of the era, notably Louise Shelley, understood that the police served as the most important institutional defenders of social order and the regime’s first line of defence against domestic challenges, most obse...