Is the stage of criminal case initiation necessary in the Russian criminal procedure?

On the one hand, since the adoption of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation the Russian legislator has repeatedly adjusted the rules, regulatory reasons, grounds and procedures for the criminal case initiation contained in Section VII. However, the proposed amendments and additions can be found inconsistent and sometimes deprived of elementary logic, which results from the lack of a consolidated government concept concerning a most important stage of the criminal procedure that often largely determines whether it is possible to achieve the tasks set forth by the state. This can be explained by the fact that certain Russian agencies having a direct relation to law enforcement realize their narrow professional interests through the legislative bodies. First of all, it is the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service, the Prosecutor's Office, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. The legislator periodically "condones" the departmental or other "priorities", for example, restricting (or expanding) the power of the prosecutor to oversee the bodies of preliminary investigation at the initial stage of the criminal process, significantly reducing (or increasing) the terms of the investigative or other actions permitted for the inspection of crime reports, reducing (extending) the terms of the so-called pre-investigation. On the other hand, the scientists do not have any consolidated concept concerning the system of norms to regulate the verification of crime reports either. It is interesting to note that their opinion often directly depends on their "affiliation". For instance, if the lawyers belong to the prosecutor's office, they support the expansion of the prosecutor's supervisory powers at the stage of a criminal case initiation, while their colleagues from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation justify the need to minimize these prerogatives. It seems that the objective assessments of how feasible the stage under discussion is in the system of the Russian criminal procedure should be based on the analysis of its practical results. Moreover, such an analysis should be carried out from the "su-pradepartmental", or more precisely - from the governmental positions, bearing in mind the tasks to be addressed through the means of the above-mentioned stage. It is the comparison of the tasks set forth for the stage of criminal case initiation and the means provided for in the RF Code of Criminal Procedure (in comparison with their counterparts from the next stage of preliminary investigation) that allows defining the practical need for the stage under discussion, and, if necessary, for the further improvement of its functioning.

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