From New Lines Magazine
Emboldened by an ultraconservative state agenda and the war in Ukraine, radical nationalists are cautiously welcomed by the government
In a suburban park in St. Petersburg on a sunny late-spring day, singers in traditional Russian costume perform for families as pop music blares in the background. Men in black are patrolling the scene, watching from the edges. Some are armed with pistols. Others wear bulletproof vests and patches bearing the Russian imperial flag or Orthodox icons.
Most sport logos on their caps and T-shirts of the medieval Prince Alexander Nevsky. The logo is a black silhouette on a white background — a symbol of patriotism and Orthodox faith, and the official emblem of Russia’s largest far-right movement, called Russkaya Obshchina (RO), meaning “Russian community.”
“I want law and order in our country,” says one of the men in his 30s, disguised by dark sunglasses and a black cap, who asks to remain anonymous. “A lot of men went to war, so Russkaya Obshchina was created to maintain order here. We are helping the police,” he tells New Lines. Coordinating the group is Sergey Ognerubov, commander of the local district’s volunteer patrol — a civilian force which, under a 2014 law, allows regular citizens to assist the police in maintaining public order, although with limited authority.
Ognerubov’s first encounter with members of RO took place about a year ago, after elderly women in his area called him, concerned about the masked men patrolling their neighborhood.
He went to investigate.
“They were good guys from different professions,” he recalls. “But they’re not lawyers. … I told them, we live in a rule-of-law state. If you want to do this, you need to respect the law.”
Since then, Ognerubov has started integrating RO members into the district volunteer patrol, asking them to submit official applications and complete a probationary period.
More than three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country’s far-right landscape is evolving, as the state increasingly seeks to co-opt and control such activism, with RO serving as a prime example of the strategy. The group promotes “traditional values,” supports the war and carries out law enforcement activities — sometimes alongside police, sometimes independently — effectively creating a parallel policing structure with unofficial state backing. Critics warn that empowering a far-right group in this role risks inflaming ethnic tensions in a multiethnic, multireligious country like Russia and could ultimately destabilize the very state RO purports to defend.
Founded in 2020 by anti-abortion activist Evgeny Chesnokov, former Omsk City Council Deputy Speaker Andrey Tkachuk and TV journalist Andrey Afanasyev, RO claims its goal is “uniting Russian people” (“yedinenie russkikh lyudey”) based on “the principle of mutual support.” Crucially, it uses the word “russky,” meaning ethnic Russians, as opposed to “rossiysky,” which refers to all citizens of Russia of any ethnicity and is the word used in the country’s full name, the Russian Federation.
They sport patches with Prince Nevsky because of his role in defending early Russian lands against foreign attacks, mostly Swedish and Teutonic invasions, in the 13th century.
The network has over 140 chapters in cities across Russia and a large social media presence, with more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, over 650,000 Telegram followers and hundreds of thousands more on VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook.
The group is closely aligned with the state’s promotion of Russian conventional beliefs, customs and culture, as well as Orthodox Christianity, while also disseminating anti-abortion and anti-migration propaganda.
Its channels regularly publish video reports of raids conducted together with police, aimed at uncovering illegal migrants across the country, especially from Central Asia, who make up a large part of Russia’s low-wage workforce.
Giovanni Pigni is an Italian journalist based in Russia, where he covers the country and the conflict in Ukraine.
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