The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR (MVD; Russian: Министерство внутренних дел СССР (МВД), romanized: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del SSSR) was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1991. The MVD was established as the successor to the NKVD during the reform of the People's Commissariats into the Ministries of the Soviet Union in 1946 as part of a broader restructuring of the government. The MVD did not include agencies concerned with secret policing unlike the NKVD, with the function being assigned to the Ministry of State Security (MGB), which had been established during the Second World War. The MVD and MGB were briefly merged into a single ministry from March 1953 until the MGB was split off as the Committee for State Security (KGB) in March 1954.
This resulted in a system where one agency was responsible for domestic and foreign intelligence gathering, espionage, surveillance and secret police functions, and another responsible for the regular civilian police forces, fire departments and internal security troops. The MVD was headed by the Minister of Internal Affairs and responsible for many internal services in the Soviet Union such as the Militsiya, the national police force, the Internal Troops, which served as the USSR's national gendarmerie, the OMON riot control units, Traffic Safety, prisons, the Gulag system as well as the successive penal colonies, and the internal migration system. From 1966-1968, it was briefly known as the Ministry of Public Order Protection. The MVD was dissolved upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and succeeded by its branches in the post-Soviet states, the largest being the Russian MVD, which inherited its predecessor's functions, though its Internal Troops would later become their own independent service - the National Guard.
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