The always-brilliant Robert Coalson, reporting over at The Power Vertical:
President Dmitry Medvedev picked up a bunch of positive press on February 18 when, apparently in response to the massive numbers of police-abuse scandals that have emerged in recent months, appeared at an Interior Ministry conference and laid down the law. Even fellow Power Verticalist Brian Whitmore and myself were mildly impressed that Medvedev had summoned the power to dismiss two deputy interior ministers and some 13 other police generals. It is the common wisdom that the Interior Ministry is one of those areas of government that Vladimir Putin keeps strictly under his thumb, so it seemed a little odd to see Medvedev making a strike so close to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, a Putin protectorate.
Of course, the fact that Medvedev tapped Nurgaliyev to implement his as-yet-undetailed Interior Ministry reform is a pretty good clue that the changes are likely to be cosmetic. “Ogonyok” did a nice series of pieces on the ministry’s troubles and noted that “the majority of experts agree that for now the guiding tool in the matter of reforming police structures is not a systematic approach, but a “personal” one. That is, in good Soviet tradition, a reform initiative will just be used to settle political scores and/or provide the background music for a game of Kremlin musical chairs.