Translated material
The enemy of the "dissenters"
Metropolitan police appointed temporary head
The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Rashid Nurgaliev, yesterday appointed Police Major General Alexander Ivanov as acting head of the capital's Main Internal Affairs Directorate. The former head of the Moscow police, Vladimir Pronin, was dismissed by President Dmitry Medvedev a day earlier. The reason for this decision was the tragedy that occurred on Monday night in the south of Moscow, where one of Mr. Pronin’s subordinates - the head of the Tsaritsyno police department, Major Denis Evsyukov - shot nine people in a supermarket.The appointment of Mr. Ivanov as acting head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate is a purely technical issue. Before that, he held the position of first deputy head of the “head office” - the head of the criminal police service and, according to the staffing table, must fulfill the duties of the head in the absence of the “first person”. Whether he will be able to become a “full-fledged” chief of the Moscow police is still unclear.
On the one hand, it is known that Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is very jealous of appointments in the city’s “power bloc.” Suffice it to remember that before Mr. Pronin was appointed head of the Moscow City Internal Affairs Directorate in 2001, the department did not have a full-fledged leader for a year and a half.
At the end of 1999, when the former head of the Moscow City Internal Affairs Directorate, Nikolai Kulikov, was removed from his post, a serious conflict arose between the federal authorities and the mayor’s office over the candidacy of a new chief. Then Mayor Luzhkov for a long time did not give his consent to the appointment of Viktor Shvidkin, nominated by the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to this position, and until the summer of 2001 he headed the Moscow police with the same prefix “acting”. The conflict was settled only after the federal and city authorities agreed on a new candidate in the person of Mr. Pronin.
Now, however, the situation has changed somewhat. Due to amendments made to the Law “On the Police” in 2006, now in order to approve the head of the regional Main Internal Affairs Directorate, the federal authorities do not need approval of his candidacy, as before. However, an uncoordinated decision could obviously complicate relations between the Kremlin and the mayor's office.
Whether Mr. Ivanov will suit both sides or whether other candidates will be considered is still unknown. It is worth noting that Mr. Luzhkov was the only politician who expressed regret over the resignation of Vladimir Pronin, saying that he was “an effective boss and military general.” Based on this, we can assume that he will approach the candidacy of the new head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate with special care.
59-year-old Alexander Ivanov joined the internal affairs bodies in 1976. He started as a senior inspector of the criminal investigation department of the Babushkinsky District Department of Internal Affairs of Moscow. In 1977, he was appointed deputy head of criminal investigation of the 61st police department, and in 1981 - head of the criminal investigation department of the Babushkinsky district police department. In 1992, Alexander Ivanov was approved as the first deputy chief of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the North-East Administrative District of Moscow, and since 2001, just when the capital’s Main Internal Affairs Directorate was headed by Vladimir Pronin, he took the post of his first deputy - the head of the criminal police.
Recently, by the way, Mr. Ivanov was involved in a scandal involving the persecution of “dissenters.” In January 2009, it was reported that it was he who sent a letter to the leadership of the Higher School of Economics, which recommended that those students who were detained during one of the “dissent marches” be expelled from the university as “unreliable.” The general in that letter stated that “carrying out unauthorized mass actions is one of the types of extremist activity, has a high degree of public danger and requires adequate response measures from law enforcement agencies.” In this regard, he asked the university management to “consider the issue of eliminating the circumstances conducive to the commission of offenses and the advisability of further training of these persons.” The university management responded to this with an indignant refusal. The rector's press secretary, Olga Kolesnikova, said then that the university was not going to kick anyone out. “Another big question is how they were detained. We know how our internal organs work. It’s also good that our guys survived. It is known that one student simply stood at the Philharmonic and waited for her friend, Ms. Kolesnikova said. - We can expel students if they fail. And if they study well, why should we expel them?”