Formation and development of the competence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian empire in the early XIX and early XX centuries: on the example of the executive police

The article deals with competence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1802 to 1917 years in particular in the field of "security police". The article is written on the basis of a wide range of sources: the legislation of the Russian Empire, as well as the analysis of the literature of pre-revolutionary, soviet and modern Russian researchers. The article analyzes the approaches of different authors to the evolution of the Ministry's competence. The urgency of the problem is determined by a number of aspects. One of the important components of the effective functioning of the law enforcement agency is the composition of its competence, its optimal correlation with the requirements of the time, which is determined by the level of development of the state, society and legal culture of the legislator, a specific historical situation. In the Russian Empire since the beginning of the XIX century the police belonged to one of the leading executive bodies -the Ministry of Internal Affairs within the framework of which the formation and development of its competence proceeded. The following tasks have been realized in the article: the genesis has been reconstructed, the main stages of development have been analyzed, the composition of the subjects of reference and powers has been studied, the causes that have caused their evolution have been determined. Based on the analysis, a set of research methods, a set of normative legal acts and assessments of previous researchers, the author came to a number of conclusions: the process of the genesis of the competence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had a long and complex content, in particular the "security police" has passed a number of stages due to a wide range of objective and subjective reasons, the change in the scope of their competence was multidirectional. Gradually, the subjects of reference and powers of the "security police" are differentiated from the mass of other Police Departments and are concentrated in its special units. However, this process remained incomplete until the end of the analyzed period, and the competence of the "security police" included not the items of reference and powers that are characteristic for it.