‘The bureau’s niche project’ Meduza reveals how the FSB gave rise to wartime Russia’s most notorious far-right group
The far-right nationalist group Russkaya Obshchina (“Russian Community”) had been around for four years already when it rose to prominence in 2024. Around the same time, activists and human rights groups began documenting an increase in anti-migrant sentiment across Russia, linked in part to the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in Moscow. In May 2025, Russkaya Obshchina found itself in the media spotlight for a variety of reasons, ranging from reports of open cooperation with regional police and news of violent attacks by the group’s members, including one that proved deadly. As it turns out, Russkaya Obshchina isn’t just linked to Russian law enforcement. One of the organization’s members admitted to journalists last year that they sometimes carry out assignments for the FSB. Now, Meduza special correspondents Andrey Pertsev and Lilia Yapparova can reveal how Russian intelligence, federal officials, and regional authorities all cooperate with the country’s most notorious far-right group.
In late May, investigators in Russia’s Vladimir region opened a criminal case against three Russkaya Obshchina members on charges of assaulting an 18-year-old resident in the town of Kovrov. The trio allegedly dragged the victim to the forest, where they tied him up, beat him for several hours, and threatened him with murder and rape. Earlier that month, Russkaya Obshchina members stormed an apartment in Vsevolozhsk (a town outside of St. Petersburg), leading to a skirmish and a fire that killed a 37-year-old Armenian national. A woman who escaped the blaze by jumping out of a window was also severely injured. Local investigators subsequently opened a criminal case but classified the Russkaya Obshchina members only as witnesses.
Incidents like these haven’t stopped police in several Russian regions from cooperating with Russkaya Obshchina quite openly. On June 11, for example, traffic police in the Sverdlovsk region announced that “volunteers” from the group would be joining them on raids. “[They] will provide assistance in preventing serious traffic violations and hold explanatory conversations [with drivers] in more than 20 of the region’s cities,” they wrote on social media.
Shortly beforehand, Russkaya Obshchina members carried out a “joint raid” with police in the city of Yekaterinburg. Members of the organization have also participated in police raids in the Moscow region.
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By all appearances, cooperation between the police and Russkaya Obshchina is entirely organic. According to a lieutenant governor overseeing domestic policy in one of Russia’s regions and an employee of a presidential plenipotentiary envoy, regional officials haven’t received any direct instructions from the Kremlin on working with the far-right group. In most regions, neither officials nor the security forces dare to interact openly with Russkaya Obshchina. But heads of local law enforcement agencies and even some governors, such as the Moscow region’s Andrey Vorobyov and the Leningrad region’s Alexander Drozhdenko, may still be encouraging its members on their own initiative, the presidential envoy’s staffer told Meduza.
“This is one of the variations on the ‘patriotic theme,’” he said, referring to the Kremlin’s ideological initiatives. “Although Drozdenko got unlucky,” the staffer added, in a nod to the deadly apartment fire in Vsevolozhsk.
“No one is going to bolster us civilian [officials and political operators] with such tough guys. This is the security forces’ project, not ours. But we have Obshchina members [in the regions] and they regularly receive information about those who ‘screw up.’ And it clearly comes to them from sources in law enforcement,” the lieutenant governor explained.
‘A project of the bureau’
In the lieutenant governor’s opinion, Russkaya Obshchina’s activities benefit both federal and regional security forces when “interethnic conflicts” arise. “Migrants, the Caucasus, there’s always some tension around this topic. It’s often inconvenient for the security forces to get involved in such a story — they need to open a criminal case, [there are] lawyers, scandals. And here, some tough guys come along and say: ‘You’re wrong. We don’t behave like that. Apologize.’ And that’s the end of it,” he explained.
Members of Russkaya Obshchina often force their victims to make public apologies. In Ryazan, for example, they made a local man record an apology video after he allegedly “insulted a Russian girl.” In a similar incident in Chita, they forced an apology out of a “migrant taxi driver.” The presidential envoy’s staffer considers Russkaya Obshchina’s actions “borderline extremism” and its anti-migrant rhetoric “harmful” — so much so that he fears migrant workers “will leave and there will be no one to work.”
But he also thinks that since Russkaya Obshchina is operating publicly, it must be “under the hood of the bureau” — in other words, under FSB protection. “In such an organization, two out of ten people are informers and two out of one hundred are [the FSB’s] direct employees,” the staffer maintained.
A source close to the Putin administration agrees that the nationalist group is a “project of the bureau” because no agency besides the FSB will work closely with Russkaya Obshchina. As he put it,
There are two possible sides to the issue [of migrants and national minorities]. The bright side is various events about the ‘friendship of peoples.’ And the dark side is that interethnic relations are often accompanied by showdowns, murders, and brawls. [The latter] is more the sphere of law enforcement agencies. Civilian [officials] can only intervene on direct orders, and there’s always little positive benefit — some people are still dissatisfied.
According to this source, the FSB sends Russkaya Obshchina information on “interethnic conflicts” and “keeps the most active [members] under its wing.” And in return, the FSB gets information about Russkaya Obshchina itself. “[It’s] the bureau’s standard practices,” he explained. “Members talk about what’s going on with them, what they want to do, their doubts, and what internal conflicts there are.”
Russkaya Obshchina members haven’t kept the group’s FSB ties secret. In June 2024, a member of its Yaroslavl cell named Pavel Omelnitsky told the BBC Russian service that he “coordinates activities” with both the FSB and the Investigative Committee. A Meduza source close to the FSB corroborated this information, maintaining that the police green-light Russkaya Obshchina raids and that the group carries out assignments from security officials.
Another source close to the FSB told Meduza that the intelligence service not only controls Russkaya Obshchina but actually oversaw its creation. According to this person, the far-right group was initially part of a standard corruption scheme by the FSB’s counter-terrorism division, the Second Service.
‘Under the cross’
According to Meduza’s source, the Second Service “raised” Russkaya Obshchina as an astroturf militant organization in a bid to get more funding allocated to the division. But “ripping off the budget” may not have been the scheme’s only goal: The group was also supposed to carry out a false-flag operation that would allow the division “to report that they’d arrested super terrorists,” the person close to the FSB claimed.
Over time, however, Russkaya Obshchina came “under the cross,” this source continued — meaning it came under the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Meduza was unable to confirm exactly when and how this happened. But judging by news reports, it may have been in the spring of 2023. At the time, Russkaya Obshchina members were involved in protests against the planned construction of a mosque near Lake Svyatoye, an Orthodox holy site in Moscow’s Kosino-Ukhtomsky district. (The construction project was ultimately abandoned.) In the years that followed, Russkaya Obshchina successfully lobbied for the demolition of a Muslim prayer house in Troitsk (a town in the Chelyabinsk region) and for the liquidation of a Muslim community group in Kotelniki (a town outside Moscow).
Meduza’s source close to the FSB said that Russkaya Obshchina members continue to maintain contact with the intelligence services. However, he believes that in allying itself with the ROC and its affiliates (like the Orthodox-fundamentalist movement Sorok Sorokov), the group has alienated itself (or, as he put it, “fucked up all normal possibilities”).
“Fighting organizations, which are entirely made up of pagans, have completely turned their backs on them,” he explained. “Being Orthodox is [now] a mandatory requirement for joining Russkaya Obshchina. At the same time, they’re still trying to expand in Muslim regions.” (Namely, the likes of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, ethnic republics that have significant Russian populations who do not profess Islam.)
According to Meduza’s source close to the Putin administration, Russkaya Obshchina is a “niche project” of the security forces aimed at attracting the most active nationalists who are “tired of sitting at home and want to act.” However, Kremlin officials don’t want to draw public attention to the organization, “at least for now.” “We don’t need men to start signing up for Obshchina en masse,” he explained.
Civil servants in the regions have raised concerns about the nationalist group’s activities, which sometimes lead to bad press and even murders. With the connivance of their patrons in the security forces, “Obshchina members may imagine themselves to be judges and start deciding for themselves who is right and who is wrong,” the lieutenant governor warned Meduza.
Meduza’s first source close to the FSB thinks that the authorities are allowing Russkaya Obshchina to “blow off steam” on a case-by-case basis, viewing the group as a “free people’s militia” that’s beneficial to them for the time being. He chalked up the assault in Kovrov and the deadly apartment storming in Vsevolozhsk to “local excesses,” placing the blame squarely on the Obshchina members involved.
At the same time, Meduza’s other source close to the FSB said that if members continue to carry out more of these “antics,” Russkaya Obshchina may not be long for this world. “They will most likely just be liquidated in about four months,” he said.
Reporting by Andrey Pertsev and Lilia Yapparova
Translation by Eilish Hart