Training of police personnel in Ukraine in 1930–1941

Abstract

The processes related to training for Internal Affairs Agencies in Ukraine during 1930–1941 have been studied; the basic forms of such training, its some achievements and shortcomings have been analyzed.

It has been noted that the experience of police activities and research of legal principles of the functioning of personnel training for the police provide a great scope of material not only for scientific generalizations, but also to determine the areas for improving the organization and activities of modern law enforcement agencies. The stated issue is not enough studied. The scholars in Ukraine, as a rule, have studied general tendencies in the development of the police in the specified period, and the problem of training police personnel remained unstudied.

It has been established that the main tendency in personnel policy for the police was to maintain a professional core of these agencies and to increase the number of employees with special education. This resulted to the permanent search for the best terms of training of police profession in schools and courses. Ongoing restructuring of educational establishments, orientations and priorities in education and the pursuit for the number of those enrolled, not for the quality of education, violated stability in the professional training of the police personnel. As a result, the system of police education in pre-war decade, being in the constant movement and reconstruction, remained qualitatively unchanged. The discipline was strengthened, paramilitary elements were implemented into internal rules of police units, but the system of police education kept the old benchmarks in the organization of vocational training, unlike the civilian education system, where in the second half of 1930s there was a reform of all steps and levels of training; and secondary and higher educational institutions were re-orientated to improving the quality of the educational process, increase in education terms and the elimination of class barriers.