ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was responsible for the maintenance of order in the Soviet Union. Its mandate, grounded in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, was to control crime, isolate political opposition, and combat economic activity outside the state sector. The MVD's internal security troops assumed an active, and controversial, role during perestroika. Seeing that the conscripts of the internal security troops were unable to control ethnic conflict and unrest during perestroika, the leadership of the MVD created a new elite branch of the ministry, known as the Special Purpose Security Detachments, or OMON. Until the Gorbachev era, the MVD remained an extremely powerful, and seemingly unshakeable, institution of state control despite occasional changes in its name and in the scope of its activities. At the end of the Gorbachev era, three million employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs performed law enforcement, corrections, and public safety functions in the USSR.
