When police major Denis Yevsyukov walked into a Moscow supermarket last year and opened fire, killing two and wounding six, the resulting public outcry forced the Kremlin to order a dramatic overhaul of the Interior Ministry.
But chilling security videos of the attack also showed that the store's two private security guards were woefully unready or unwilling to halt the rampage, which only ended after a shootout with police.
The attack on April 27, 2009, was a turning point in the public's already unfavorable opinion of Russia's 1.4 million-member police force. President Dmitry Medvedev subsequently ordered his interior minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, to slash the force by 20 percent over the next two years and raise salaries for the rest.
Now the police have set their sights on private security guards, a veritable army of largely undertrained and underpaid men who comprise more than 1 percent of the country's work force.
The Interior Ministry is using Federal Law 272, a bill that it drafted and that went into full force in January, to bring the industry under their control.
Supporters say the legislation will help weed out unqualified guards and improve public safety. But critics of the bill — including virtually all private security firms — say it was designed to enrich corrupt police officials who will be responsible for overseeing its implementation.
The law requires private security guards to pass an exam conducted by a police commission, in effect forcing guards to pay bribes for good grades, critics say. New guards will have to pass the test before starting work, while those already employed must take the exam within a year.
But the changes have been even more dramatic for the schools that provide private security guards.
They must now buy expensive exam software and train at costly shooting facilities. The firms must also lease their weapons from the Interior Ministry, which has the right to suspend a security firm's operations for purported violations — without a court order.
Lawmakers who backed the bill were "surely lobbying the interests of the non-departmental guards," said Igor Yeremin, head of the Moscow-based association of private security firms Gruppa R.
He was referring to the Interior Ministry's own division that protects commercial enterprises, state agencies and private individuals.
A Private Army
If it seems like there's a middle-aged security guard at the door of nearly every business in Moscow, that's because there is.
About 718,000 people are employed in private security across Russia, said Dmitry Sarychev, an Interior Ministry official in charge of licensing security guards. About 20 percent of them are in Moscow.
By the number of vacancies on Joblist.ru, private guards are surpassed only by drivers, builders and mechanics as the most sought-after workers, said Ivan Tyutyundzhi, a spokesman for recruiting firm HeadHunter, which owns the web site.
That could begin to change, however, as companies face rising costs to hire new staff.
Moscow alone shed about 14,000 jobs in the sector in the first two months of the year, with the number of guards falling from 157,000 to 143,000, said Yevgeny Karabanov, head of NSB, an association of private security firms.
Over the same period, the number of facilities protected by private security firms in the capital edged up to about 45,500, from 43,800, as electronic surveillance systems replaced human guards, he said, citing police data.
The vast majority of private security firms — about 80 percent — are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees and yearly revenue of no more than 10 million rubles ($315,000), said Galina Astratova, head of Positive Strategy, a market analysis company.
Alexander Ivanchenko, executive director of the Russian Security Industry Association, estimated that the market was worth $4.5 billion to $5 billion per year.
But statistics suggest that companies' returns on security expenses might not be great.
According to Interior Ministry statistics, private security guards manage to fend off every 20th attack, at most, said Igor Goloshchapov, chairman of the board at the Coordination Center of Managers of Security and Detective Firms, a nationwide nongovernmental association.
Part of the problem is training, he said. Private guards also have little incentive to put their lives on the line for relatively modest paychecks.
Making the Grade
One of the worst ramifications of the new law is the massive increase in bribery required by the corruption-prone examination system, managers of private security firms said.
The mandatory training, the say, does nothing to improve guards' skills because police are willing to pass people who never take the test and flunk honest guards who try to pass without paying them off.
In Moscow, the official cost to take the exam varies from 4,000 to 6,000 rubles ($125 to $190), but the guards also have to drop 3,000 rubles to assure a passing grade, said Yury Pavlusenko, head of the private security firm G4S.
For another 1,000 rubles, or about $30, guards can get their diploma without even showing up.
Trainees give the cash to an intermediary firm, which then pays off the school, said the deputy head of a Moscow-based private security firm.
"Police officers at the licensing departments, who are in cahoots with the schools, fleece the guards," said Gennady Gudkov, a Duma deputy and representative for the council of private security firms at the Interior Ministry, an advisory body that the ministry consults about laws and other initiatives concerning private security firms.
"As a rule, they try to flunk a guard at the exam so that he pays extra money," he said.
Gudkov and his party, A Just Russia, abstained from voting for the law in the first reading but supported it in the second and third readings, after multiple amendments.
"But even these amendments didn't solve all the problems," he said. "I thought we could mend the situation by passing regulations, but in practice it turned out to be more complicated," he said.
Including training expenses, a Moscow guard can expect to pay from 11,000 to 22,000 rubles to pass the test, compared with an average monthly salary of 12,000 to 15,000 rubles, industry insiders said.
Karabanov, from NSB, said he thought that the costly training stemmed from the software schools use, which sells for 500,000 rubles (almost $16,000) per copy, he said.
One of the private security firm chiefs interviewed for this article said on condition of anonymity that "the ministry has recommended that schools buy this particular program, which makes me suppose that schools share the money with the ministry."
The software was commissioned by the Interior Ministry, but the state does not set the price for it, said Sarychev, the Interior Ministry official.
A guild of private security firms and the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Industry are preparing to ask the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to examine pricing of the software for possible competition violations, said Karabanov, who is also a senior official at the guild.
Private Firms Closed
The law has already had a dramatic impact on the firms themselves, forcing hundreds across Russia to close.
The legislation banned private security firms with registered capital of less than $3,500, and it also stripped internally hired security departments from guarding a company's premises.
Another clause in the bill effectively banned foreigners from creating private security firms by requiring that their home countries sign special agreements with Russia.
About 2,300 of the country's 29,000 security firms at the end of 2009 have since disappeared, Sarychev said.
Until January, there had been about 500 firms founded jointly by Russians and foreigners, including 370 in Moscow, he said. Some have since reregistered with only Russian owners.
The decision to bar foreign ownership was in part a protectionist measure, Sarychev said, citing an unpublished order given to the government in 2005 by then-President Vladimir Putin to protect Russian security firms from competitors and foreign intelligence services.
Foreign security firms were poised to dominate the Russian market, like they do in the Baltic states, which was deemed a threat to the national security, he said.
Security experts and executives took particular issue with the law's provision allowing the police to halt a company's activities without a court order. The move appears to rub against recent Kremlin anti-corruption drives, which have sought to lessen officials' stranglehold on private business through excessive licensing and inspections.
Letting police decide whether to freeze a firm's work can "lead to unjustified decisions" because the police no longer need to prove alleged violations, said Yury Starorussky of Alligator, a Moscow-based association of private security firms.
Sarychev defended the bill, saying it aimed at improving private guards' professional skills and preventing criminals from obtaining guns.
But he conceded that "the main idea of the law is to reinforce [state] control over the activities of private security guards."
Meanwhile, guards around Moscow expressed nothing but skepticism.
Standing among a bustle of mostly elderly shoppers, a grocery store guard in central Moscow called the exam "money levying," and said it was "useless" in terms of boosting people's professional qualifications.
"My friends who passed the exam told me that you could buy it, like the previous one," said the guard, who declined to give his name. They said that for 7,000 rubles, the police would pass someone who did not even show up to take the test.
He said he had not yet decided whether he would take the test.