The scandal with crimes in the Russian police is being worked out in the public space in the traditional way – by transferring it to the moral plane. On Tuesday, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev proposed introducing a course in philanthropy in police universities, “because we work with people.” Yesterday, this topic was developed by participants in the round table “Spirituality. Morality. Law” at the Moscow University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Nurgaliev asked cultural figures to help teach police officers "to see the beauty in the everyday, to be a sensitive person," and psychologists to give recommendations on "normalizing the climate in teams, conditions for relaxation and switching attention to positive emotions." According to the minister, it will take a lot of time to raise a new generation of police, "this should happen gradually, and not by breaking. Metaphorically speaking, if a weed suddenly appears among healthy ears of corn, it is simply removed by the roots, but the entire field is not plowed."

Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Kirill stated there that the police work in a morally unfavorable environment, "where there is decay, where there is spiritual gangrene," they are not supermen and they need the support of all public institutions, especially religious ones. According to the patriarch, no reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs system will be effective unless the moral state of the entire society is changed.

We have heard these theses many times - that the police (formerly the militia) is a cross-section of a dysfunctional society and that it is impossible to reform it by mass replacement of employees. Vladimir Putin spoke about this, and Rashid Nurgaliyev repeated this phrase in different ways before the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And the then Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov stated back in 2003 that restoring order and reviving the state is possible only through raising spirituality.

What is wrong with society? After all, it seems that the same Patriarch Kirill told President Medvedev last November that in the 20 post-Soviet years the people had managed to revive amazing spiritual treasures, and that church-state relations had developed greatly in recent times, and that they were based on joint care for people. And the Patriarch told Prime Minister Putin in February of this year that in the 2000s, “by a miracle of God, with the active participation of the country’s leadership, we managed to emerge from a terrible, systemic crisis that was destroying the very foundations of people’s life.”

True, threats in the moral sphere remain. But, probably, both the Orthodox Church and other religious confessions could take on their share of responsibility, because for the last 20 years, at least the main ones have been working completely freely, and even with significant support from the state. If we talk about Orthodoxy, according to social surveys, up to 75% of Russian citizens consider themselves Orthodox. And if the police are a cross-section of society, it turns out that 75% of police officers are Orthodox.

Translating the problem into a moral plane is a universal tool. No one in history has ever succeeded in creating a moral society; it is beyond the competence of the police, the prosecutor's office, and even the church. If we reason in Christian categories, the world lies in evil and we can educate a society from which we can recruit the ideal police until the Second Coming (and after that, the police will no longer be needed).

But citizens must have some hope in this life. This hope, oddly enough, is for the political-administrative way of solving the problem. If we forget about morality for a moment, it turns out that the police have (or should have) a system of strict personnel selection; that the vertical organization and the strict principle of subordination to orders limit subordinates in independent actions and shift a significant part of the responsibility to superiors. In such a system, corruption and crime cannot exist only at the grassroots level. Reforming such a structure cannot be entrusted to it itself. The Georgian experience of police reform shows that it is quite possible to carry out a mass replacement of employees, completely disregarding the moral state of society - and the system will become effective, and the moral level of employees will rise.

From the editor: Until the second coming