Policing post-Stalin society: The militsiia and public order under Khrushchev

With its resources cut and its staff purged the militsiia of the mid-1950s was one of the main institutional victims of Khrushchev's destalinization. In a parallel development, the mass amnesty of 1953 and the general lifting of Stalinist constraints led to a steep rise in recorded levels of public order offenses. Arguably the most politically significant of these were the spontaneous outbreaks of mass violence which, in an ironic twist, targeted the militsiia as the most immediate and accessible symbol of the state against which angry crowds could vent their spleen. The article suggests that the events at Novocherkassk of June 1962 and the background of widespread dissatisfaction with economic policies against which they were played out compelled the Soviet leadership to develop a new post-Stalinist conception of "public order," one in which the militsiia would play the preeminent frontline role.