By Anne Le Huérou

In April 2009, a police officer, D. Yevsyukov opened fire at people in a Moscow supermarket, killing two and wounding several others. In March 2012, a young man died in custody after being raped with a champagne bottle in a police station of the city of Kazan. Soon after, the police reform, passed in March 2011, was considered as a “failure” by the newly appointed Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev. Those two cases of police violence, far from being exceptional, are almost a part of the routine – though not always with such deadly endings - in many police precincts in Russia and comprise a growing amount of the convictions against Russia at the ECHR. These two particular episodes can serve as landmarks for what I would like to develop in this contribution, for the first played a starting point for building-up police violence and deviance issues as a public matter that further helped and pushed the State to undertake a reform, under the presidency of D Medvedev, and the second led to a kind of acknowledgement that the task was too huge, at the very moment when the coming back of V Putin as the President was sending down the issue from the political agenda. In between, very diverse, vivid and sometimes at first glance paradoxical mobilizations against police violence, corruption and misbehavior have spread all over the country. Would they be NGOs helping victims of police violence to seek justice through court, provocative performances from art-groups or people taking arms against the police, these mobilizations

Paris: University of Paris, 2016. 20p.