Organizational and Legal Transformations in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire in the Late 19th - Early 20th Centuries

The article scrutinises organizational and legal changes that took place in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. During that period, the Russian Government continued the course aimed at consistent reforms of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in general and the system of political investigation in particular. Special attention is paid to the process of redistribution of powers among chief executeves of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Also, attention is drawn to the implementation of the problem of determining the term for the regulatory acts expiration and, as a consequence, the loss of their legal force. The article concludes that the absence of a systematic and uniform approach to determining the limits of temporal scope of regulatory acts is one of the problems of the Russian legal system of the late 19th century. It is established that the main reason for the constant redistribution of functions between the Minister of Internal Affairs and his peers was a subjective approach of certain individuals who, in different periods, held the post of minister. Categories of feasibility and normative guidelines were gradually distorted, and individual personal interests came to fore, which certainly did not facilitate the improvement of the quality of the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.