They support the war in Ukraine.
They welcome the government’s repression of the voices of resistance.
They glorify “traditional values” and vigorously oppose immigration, the LGBT community, and abortion rights.
When the police need help, they are always at hand.
“Russian Community” (Ruskaja Obščina) is the largest ultra-right organization in the country.
And it continues to grow.
The new surge of racially motivated attacks and hard-line nationalist activities did not go unnoticed by the authorities; and, again, they did very little to stop them.
The BBC in Russian analyzes how today’s nationalists differ from the far-right movements of the recent past – and why they were not suppressed by the state this time.
‘An unusual kind of help‘
Marina (39), from the western Siberian oil town of Nizhnevartovsk, heard about the Russian community from a friend.
“They told me that they help people and that they have connections in the police,” Marina told the BBC.
She had problems with her ex-boyfriend Maksim, who pursued her after the breakup – he ransacked her apartment and shot at the windows with an air rifle.
She reported him to the local police, but the latter ignored her complaints.
In the end, in December last year, she decided to turn to “members of the community” for help.
Marina easily found the channel of the local cell on Telegram, which answered her quickly.
Five men – “young guys, about thirty years old” – drove to her house to talk to Marina live.
She told them how she met Maksim.
They quickly started a love affair and he moved into her apartment, where she lived with the children from her previous marriage.
However, she says that Maksim quickly began to change – he forbade Marina to talk to her friends or use social networks, and began to beat her.
“He slapped me, kicked me and threw objects at me.”
A few months after the beginning of the relationship, Marina realized that she was pregnant.
She had an abortion in secret.
“I realized I had no other choice,” she said.
When they eventually broke up, his reaction was anger.
On the day she was supposed to collect things, Marina says she found all the electrical cables in the apartment cut, the balcony windows broken, the door broken, the washing machine door blown off and a deep hammer print in the plasma TV.
That was obviously not enough for him.
Maksim returned several more times and started shooting at the windows from the street.
“The guys from the Russian community listened to me with patience and compassion. They said they would try to do something, if only to talk to him. Practically, they seemed ready to help somehow.”
A few days later, Marina saw a new video on the Russian Community channel.
It was titled “Payback for murder”.
An unknown “community member”, without mentioning her name, spoke about Marina’s story and how she asked them for help.
“The ‘Russian community’ will not help this girl.
“She had an abortion. Our “Russian Community” is against infanticide. She is against abortion,” he said in the video.
“We believe that no matter what kind of person he is, regardless of the circumstances, it should never lead to the killing of your child out of anger at your ex,” he said.
The marina was pushed out of the channel and blocked, she said.
“For the ‘Russian community’, abortion was a far greater sin than anything my ex did.
“According to them, everything was my fault. They offer an unusual kind of help,” she said.
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‘The unity of the Russian people‘
The “Russian community” first appeared at the end of 2020.
According to their website, the group’s goal is to “unite the Russian people and provide every kind of help to each other.”
We spoke on the phone with one of the coordinators of the Russian Community, Pavel Omelnitsky, who heads their operations in the city of Yaroslavl, not far from Moscow.
“We have Armenian and Tajik diaspora there. They also live in close-knit groups, but no one is specifically protesting against the Tajik diaspora. It’s the same with the ‘Russian community,'” he claimed.
Some regional branches explicitly claim that all representatives of the nations that make up Russia are welcome in the organization, if they consider themselves “Russians”.
In others, for example, in the city of Uljanovsk, they state that membership is only for “Slovenes”.
Asked why ethnic origin is an important unifying factor in both cases, Omelnicki did not like the question: “It smells like Russophobia to me,” he said.
The “Russian Community” has several founders: Yevgeny Chesnokov, for example, former coordinator of the anti-abortion organization “For Life”; former government official from Omsk Andrey Tkachuk; and Andrey Afanasyev, who works for the conservative TV channel “Savior”.
More than half a million people are subscribed to the main channel of the Russian ZOV Telegram group.
In addition to the obvious meaning, the word “zov” could also refer to Z, O and V, the identification letters with which the military vehicles that occupied Ukraine were painted.
The channel claims to have almost 150 regional branches across the country.
The group’s Telegram channel in Moscow has more than 30.000 subscribers.
Omelnitsky took over the branch of the Russian community in Yaroslavl last year.
He is 37 years old, the father of several children, and calls himself a deeply religious man.
He studied at the Moscow Theological Academy in Sergiy Posad, but took a break from the seminary in 2022, started collecting aid for Russian soldiers in Ukraine and took it to the front.
Two of his brothers fought there, one as a regular conscript and the other as a volunteer.
Even as a seminary student, says Omelincki, he began to worry about the growing divisions among the people in Russia – and began to think about “how to revive unity” and how to encourage young people to go to church.
“At the same time, I realized that a lot of people don’t even know our Russian culture or our Russian tradition,” says Omenicki, explaining the decision to join the Russian community.
As soon as he was accepted into the movement, Omelnitsky began delivering aid to Russian soldiers on behalf of the organization.
Other branches of the movement also participate in the purchase and delivery of food, clothing and military equipment, such as rifle sights.
In May, “members of the community” delivered drone jammers and rifles, along with night vision equipment, to the front line near Kharkiv.
Immigrants and (false) crime statistics
The uproar surrounding the building of the mosque on the “Holy Lake” near Moscow in the spring of last year brought the Russian community into the spotlight of the wider public.
Members of the movement joined other Orthodox activists at the protest, carrying a banner reading: “We will not allow our places to be desecrated by a mosque.”
Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill spoke often about the brotherhood of Christians and Muslims in Russia – and the Russian community also emphasizes that message.
According to them, their opposition to the mosque was reflected in the fact that it was not built for local Muslims (whom they claim have enough places to pray), but for immigrants from Central Asia, whom they accuse of “Islamizing Russia”.
Pavel Omelnicki went to great lengths to explain that he has nothing against immigrants: “I have friendly relations with many of them and they are wonderful people,” he told the BBC.
“What I do not tolerate is crime and lawlessness. The nationality of the criminal is not important. Recently, more and more criminals are simply migrants. It’s a simple fact.”
Omelnicki is wrong: the crime rate among migrants is roughly in line with their number among the total population.
This year, what’s more, according to the statistics of the Ministry of the Interior, that trend was declining.
The spokesperson of the Ministry recently confirmed that the number of immigrants who commit crimes decreased by 3,1 percent.
The crime rate among foreign nationals fell by 5 percent during the first seven months of 2024, almost twice as much for serious crimes, and by more than 20 percent for drug trafficking.
The rekindling of anti-migrant rhetoric is one of the trends noted by Vera Aperovič, an analyst at the Owl Center, a body that monitors extremist activities in Russia.
“By the mid-2010s, law enforcement had suppressed virtually all far-right movements and this kind of discourse gradually faded into the background,” she says.
“Recently, however, the xenophobic anti-immigrant debate has revived – and the ‘Russian community’ has made a significant contribution to making it very vocal in today’s Russia.”
“Our Russian boys”
Across their social media channels, branches of the Russian community regularly broadcast news about their activities – and the stories are often characterized by a xenophobic subtext “often giving everything an ethno-xenophobic context where it doesn’t exist at all,” says Alperovitch.
“Whatever the issue is—domestic activities, crime, or whatever—it’s of interest to nationalists, and the Russian community is quite successful at that.”
News about “ethnic gangs” terrorizing local populations across Russia regularly appears on the main Russian Community channel.
Most of the posts deal with migrants from Central Asia, but the Community also writes about people from the Russian republics of the North Caucasus.
Subscribers receive regular news about “gangs of migrant teenagers who extort money from school children”, “gangs of illegal migrant taxi drivers” and “ethnic gangs of hooligans”, “Muslim gangs” or any other “gangs” to which members of the community add derogatory names.
In February of last year, six young people with masks and hammers broke into a school in Chelyabinsk.
They were soon arrested, and some of them turned out to be minors.
The Russian community published extensive reports on the incident and claimed that the boys had arrived at the school to protect the students from a “gang of Tajiks” who were allegedly terrorizing the school and the entire district.
It soon turned out that the detained teenagers were neo-Nazi sympathizers who posed for photos with the Nazi salute, wore Nazi symbols and posted pictures of themselves on the Internet.
It turned out that they had previously participated in several ethnically-oriented attacks and rioting.
The ultra-right organization Severnjak, which often gathers together with members of the Russian community at joint events, distanced itself from the teenagers who participated in the attack on the school.
The Russian community, by comparison, provided them with legal protection.
Some are still in pre-trial detention, and colleagues from the community say that they are “our Russian boys”.
‘Without the Russians, they will cut you down!‘
“You are nobody and nothing without us. Do you fly planes? Do you build helicopters? I am proud to be a member of the Russian nation, a powerful country that opposed the USA!”, a gray-haired high school teacher scolded a Yezidi student in a classroom in Bataysk, near Rostov, in southern Russia.
“You don’t even have your own language, you haven’t made your own country! Without the Russians, they will cut you down!”
The incident from April this year showed the readiness of the Russian community to participate in causing ethnic unrest.
The reaction of the fifteen-year-old student infuriated them: the child is nothing more than a “rude teenager who decided to bring the Russians to their knees”, while the teacher is a “respected educational worker”.
They gathered about a hundred supporters in the school, carrying the Russian flag and imperial insignia with the inscription: “We are Russians: God is with us”, as well as pictures of Jesus Christ.
At the protest, six members of the Russian community were detained, accused of disturbing the peace and held in custody for three days.
Their colleagues were furious and called on the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrikin, to deal with the case.
He reacted almost immediately, ordering an investigation into the incident.
Bastrikin is a popular figure among the Russian right.
He has repeatedly raised concerns about mass immigration and crime rates among migrants.
Nationalists perceive him as someone who supports their perception of the state.
“Members of the Russian community regularly call for Bastrikin’s help on various issues. And experience shows that their appeals get a quick response,” notes Vera Alperovič from Sova.
The BBC sent a written request to the Russian Investigative Committee and even a response to it.
Members of the Russian community are connected via a smartphone app that allows them to communicate with each other, or use the built-in “SOS” button to call for help.
At the beginning of this summer, it was still available in the Apple App Store.
It appears to have since been removed.
Members of the Community blame the Russian version of this article for this: “It turns out that we were not to the taste of the Americans,” said Andrej Tkachuk, the leader of the group in Omsk.
We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
In the meantime, you can still download the Russian Community app on Google Play.
Their policy requires user content to be moderated, a spokesperson told the BBC, “which also applies to content that promotes violence or incites hatred against individuals or groups based on any characteristics associated with systemic discrimination or marginalisation.”
“If we discover violations, we will take appropriate action.”
Members of the Russian community do not hide that they actively cooperate with law enforcement.
“We act strictly within the legal framework. I coordinate activities with the FSB and the Investigative Committee, and other law enforcement services,” says Pavel Omelnicki, without going into details.
In January, police officers conducted a massive anti-immigrant raid on a construction site in Yekaterinburg.
Local members of the Russian community participated in it and then posted video operations on social networks.
The video caused widespread outrage.
The Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the incursion as a “humiliating attack on dignity” – the three people in the video were Kyrgyz nationals.
Members of the Community follow similar raids, reporting on how many of them were punished, deported or sent to military recruitment commissions.
A mutually beneficial relationship with the law
The Russian community is not only interested in immigration.
In early March, activists of the organization in Orenburg joined the local law enforcement agency in raiding the Poza gay club.
Shortly after the break-in, Russia’s first criminal case of extremism related to LGBT people was opened – the owner of the club and several employees were arrested and charged with organizing an extremist group.
During the break-in, members of the Russian community wore symbols and badges of the organization, and published videos taken inside the club on social networks.
The faces of the arrested were not blurred.
They, however, did not publish recordings of their own behavior.
One clubgoer who witnessed the break-in claimed that a member of the Russian community “banished and started beating up the guests, and immediately went looking for security cameras so no one would find out.”
They sat down the club’s staff and started questioning him.
And if they didn’t like the answers, they would bang their heads on the glass table.
Such extreme nationalist groups are nothing new for Russia.
What is different now is the hitherto unprecedented level of cooperation with the official representatives of the law, according to Alperovič.
She says that it benefits both parties.
“The police benefit from this because the Russian community practically helps them in doing their own work. And the Community also benefits because it can put its own ideological platform into action, and that from the hands of members of the law.”
Bad time to be a revolutionary
During the 2010s, the ultra-right movement in Russia was practically dismantled.
Many of its key figures were sent to Russian penal colonies to serve long prison terms, including for racially motivated murders and assaults.
“Nationalist groups were traditionally anti-Semitic — potentially revolutionary. But over time, the authorities dealt with the revolutionaries, so it became obvious that such an agenda would not take these groups very far,” says Alperovič.
And that is why they have long been looking for some kind of “common language between themselves and the government”.
And common ground was found by identifying a common enemy: criminal immigrants, gays, the liberal opposition and, more recently, those who oppose the war in Ukraine.
They also singled out the homeless, drug addicts and other vulnerable members of society.
Crimes committed by members of ultra-right organizations have skyrocketed in the last two years.
In such an atmosphere, a group of activists launched the NVMP, the Nazi Video Surveillance Project, in September 2023.
The organizers of the project are volunteers and activists who wish to remain anonymous to protect their own safety.
Following ultra-right channels on Telegram, they say they counted 96 attacks in September (62 on people and 34 on property, mostly cars).
In March of this year, they recorded 123 attacks, and in April 112.
Most of those detained for those attacks were teenagers under the age of 18, dressed in many videos as Nazi skinheads from the Russian XNUMXs.
The value of supporting warmongers
The need to fuel enthusiasm for the fighting in Ukraine further motivated the far right, according to Sova Center director Alexander Verhovsky.
The authorities need the support of the people for the war, which means that any civil group that is loyal to the regime is of great value to it.
“It opened up a lot more space for groups like this – radical ones among them,” he says.
“Does this mean that the political regime wants to somehow incorporate radical nationalists? I wouldn’t say. It’s just important that they don’t disturb him.”
Administrators of the NVMP project agree that the need for pro-war support has enhanced the ability of far-right groups to convey their own messages – which includes more than just promoting the war.
“By the fall of 2022, ultra-right actors who invested in military propaganda became the owners of unlimited media resources and gradually returned to their usual agenda – fueling ethnic hatred. With these new resources, the far right was able to push its racist agenda into the media.”
A very different mission
Some of those behind this latest wave of far-right activism in Russia are still in the country.
Dmitry Demusin, who is 45 years old today, was one of the leaders of the so-called “Russian Marches” and the founder of the Slovenian Union, together with some other extreme nationalist groups.
He was detained and fined, and his various organizations were banned.
In 2017, Demushkin was eventually sentenced to 2,5 years behind bars.
No one from the Russian community contacted him.
“Why? Because they were formed by those who banned us,” he tells the BBC.
“They have only three principles: don’t wave; fight those who wave; and campaign for a Special Military Operation. That’s the whole point of their existence,” he says, using the official term for the war in Ukraine.
Demushkin commented on the claim of the Russian community that they are helping the undermanned police force:
“Well, great – let them support the repression of their own protest, if they ever try to hold one. But clearly they will never protest: their mission is clearly very different.”
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