ENFORCEMENT OF THE REGISTRATION REGIME

Background

Moscow police enforce the system for the registration of all residents and visitors vigorously and in a manner characteristic of a state of emergency. According to a report provided by the Moscow City Passport Directorate, during the first five months of 1997 law enforcement officers conducted 1,400,536 passport checks to determine compliance with registration requirements. During the same period police found 737,561 people in violation of Resolution 637-RM. Roughly half, 413, 958, were from the CIS. They acknowledged collecting fines of more than 3.5 billion rubles, or $608,000. In 1996 the UVIR deported beyond the Russian Federation 3,080 individuals "illegally on the territory of the city of Moscow" -although it is unclear if such individuals were legally on the territory of the Russian Federation57- 1.7 times more than in 1995.

At least six separate city law enforcement branches carry out passport checks, including neighborhood inspectors, officers of the Automobile Inspectorate (GAI),58 Criminal Investigation units, and the Municipal Police. They do so by entering private homes (often with threat of force), by flagging down and searching automobiles, and by stopping people on the streets, in the subways and on other public transportation. Special operations under suchnames as Operation Regime, Operation Law and Order, and Operation Signal lead the city's fight against, "violators of the registration regime. . . with the goal of stabilizing circumstances in the city and preventing crime by out-of-towners and the homeless."59

Police enforce the registration regime on the basis of four sets of regulations additional to those outlined above. Significant among them is Presidential Decree 1025, adopted in July 1997 to fight crime in Moscow and Moscow Region.60 The decree enables the city and regional governments to prolong the involuntary detention of "vagrants and beggars" in "social rehabilitation centers" for up to thirty days, and empowers the police forcibly to "remove" the homeless from Moscow. Under an August 27, 1996 mayoral decree implementing Decree 1025, Moscow police renewed the practice, established in 1993, of detaining the homeless and shipping them out of Moscow on trains.61 In the first five months of 1997, police "deported" 16,456 homeless people from the city; in 5,740 of these cases it had a warrant from a procurator to do so.62 About 2,200 of the "deported" homeless were sent to unspecified "treatment centers." According to some reports, Luzhkov plans to initiate legislation in the Russian parliament that would criminalize habitual vagrancy.63

"Clean-ups" of Moscow

This vigorous enforcement of registration rules peaks at times of public holidays and crisis. This dates to the Soviet period, when, for example, in preparation for the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, the government sent thousands of people out of town. In the most notorious and recent example of what officials call "street cleaning" in Moscow, in October and November 1993 (during the state of emergency brought on by the armed struggle between the Kremlin and the parliament), city authorities detained some 14,000 individuals and deported about 9,000 others-most of them dark-skinned people who allegedly had failed to register with the police-citing the need to fight criminality. After a rash of bombings in the capital last summer, and the issuing of the decrees on the homeless noted above, police reportedly "deported" from Moscow (but not necessarily from Russia) 4,800 individuals.

The "clean-up" of Moscow for the 850th anniversary falls well within this pattern. In addition to cracking down on "illegal" refugees and migrants, the city's "cleansing" effort also attempted to remove prostitutes and thehomeless.64 It is interesting to note that since prostitution is not a crime in Russia, when police detain prostitutes they do so on grounds among others, of violations of registration rules.

Police apparently increased their active sweeps of the homeless at the same time. Avgust Kol'tsov, Deputy Director of the Yaroslavl' Home for Social Rehabilitation, noted an "invasion" of homeless people into the city that began in May, which he attributed to the impending 850th celebrations. According to Kol'tsov, when Moscow police detained this "contingent" and asked where they were from, they answered, perhaps untruthfully, that they were from Yaroslavl (or other cities close to Moscow), as "they planned to return to the capital after the festivities ended.65 The homeless were put on trains to their supposed places of origin.