When the Russian World Comes Home
Last September, a new conservative movement made itself highly visible in Russia. Thousands of its white-shirted volunteers acted as guards for a mass religious procession through central Moscow led by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. Later last year, its members were seen marching through a Moscow suburb dressed in black and singing a Soviet children’s song. Known as Russkaya obshchina, or Russian Community (RO), the group has engaged in anti-migrant vigilantism and enjoyed public support from parts of the Russian security apparatus. Just this week in Berezovsky, a city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals, members of RO posed as FSB officers while abducting six people, a Yekaterinburg news outlet reported. According to the victims, RO activists blocked their cars and emerged wearing masks and shouting “FSB at work!” They forced several people into another vehicle, drove them to a forest, and beat them. RO offers a different account, claiming its members had intervened to protect a veteran of the war in Ukraine from a “multiethnic gang of extortionists.”
RO has consistently publicized its joint raids with the police at construction sites and retail markets, places where migrant workers and members of ethnic minorities have traditionally been employed. In one video, police officers accompanied by RO activists arrive at a construction site in Surgut, an oil-producing city in Western Siberia, and round up the migrant workers there. The workers are then escorted away in single file, each with his hands on the shoulders of the person in front of him. They are lined up facing the side of a bus and searched.
RO activists now appear in schools giving talks on the concept of the Russian World, conservative values, and the “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s official euphemism for its war against Ukraine.
The Russian Orthodox Church has also backed the group. The relationship was first publicly acknowledged in April 2025, when Archbishop Savva Tutunov, a prominent cleric known for his nationalist views, gave a presentation on the group at a session of the Supreme Church Council, chaired by Patriarch Kirill. In August 2025, the Moscow Patriarchate instructed local dioceses to establish contact with RO and provide the organization with “spiritual guidance.”Much of this is not new. It is the latest chapter in the presidential administration’s long-running attempts to tame far-right nationalism and prevent it from developing beyond the Kremlin’s control. The difference this time is the scale, according to Alexander Verkhovsky, a veteran researcher of far-right movements in Russia and head of the SOVA Center. “Of course, hundreds of thousands of viewers on their Telegram channels do not represent the whole country. But the very fact that this organization exists, is well known, and is widely discussed is changing perceptions of what is considered normal in our society,” Verkhovsky says.
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The movement was founded in 2020 by Andrei Tkachuk, a minor figure in Omsk regional politics; Yevgeny Chesnokov, a leader in Russia’s anti-abortion movement; and Andrei Afanasyev, a presenter on Spas TV, which is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church. Initially rooted in COVID-era conspiracy theories, the organization gained a higher profile following the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent militarization of Russian society. The group spread to more than 150 cities across Russia and, as early as 2023, began claiming credit for assisting police raids targeting undocumented migrants.Today, RO has grown into what the BBC describes as Russia’s largest far-right activist group. Its publicly articulated ideology remains relatively thin, consisting largely of patriotic and nationalist rhetoric, hostility toward immigration, opposition to abortion, and support for the Russian Orthodox Church. Its main Telegram channel has more than 600,000 subscribers. RBC, a Moscow-based media outlet, identified 426 groups associated with Russian Community on VKontakte (VK), Russia’s largest homegrown social network. Most are local communities organized around individual towns, districts, and cities. The movement’s main VK group is approaching one million subscribers. Taken together, its VK groups have more than two million subscribers.
Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee and a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin, has emerged as one of the organization’s most important protectors, repeatedly intervening in local cases involving RO activists. Representatives of the movement have denied that Bastrykin has personal ties to RO while acknowledging the support he has provided.The organization’s principal financial backers appear to be closely connected to the state. A recent BBC investigation identified agricultural billionaire Igor Khudokormov and pro-Kremlin political commentator Sergei Mikheev as leading financiers of RO. Khudokormov has ties to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev, the son of former FSB director and Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, while Mikheev has been reported to have connections to the security services.
Although RO has grown rapidly and enjoys high-profile protection, continued patronage remains contingent on staying in the Kremlin’s good graces. Moscow still has to reconcile its increasingly assertive Russian nationalism with its official commitment to Russia as a multiethnic and multireligious state. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are officially recognized as the country’s “traditional religions,” and Putin has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to religious and ethnic equality. An openly anti-Muslim and anti-multicultural organization such as RO sits uneasily within this system.
The movement’s hostility toward Russia’s Muslim minorities, notably Chechens, and its opposition to the construction of mosques have already provoked figures within Chechnya’s leadership, whose loyalty the Kremlin has strong reasons to preserve. Should tensions rise in the North Caucasus, Moscow could find RO’s activities increasingly inconvenient: Moscow would try to keep Muslim powerbrokers on its side. More broadly, RO’s position remains dependent on its patrons. If its protectors and financiers within or close to the state apparatus lose influence, the organization could quickly find itself in peril.
Similar organizations that enjoyed state patronage have risen rapidly and disappeared just as quickly, when their political usefulness declined or their patrons fell out of favor. RO may be different. Its extensive regional network, large online following, ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, and support from influential figures in the state apparatus give it resources that some of its predecessors lacked. The end of the war could provide an important test. Russian officials are already concerned about the difficulty of reintegrating large numbers of returning soldiers and the potential for crime and social instability among demobilized veterans. RO could conceivably become one of the organizations through which some veterans are incorporated into civilian political and social life. Whether veterans would join such a movement, compete with it, or form organizations of their own is very much an open question.
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RO’s rise comes amid broader Kremlin efforts to promote patriotism, conservative values and greater social mobilization around the state. Sergei Kiriyenko, the powerful first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration responsible for much of the Kremlin’s domestic political strategy, has overseen efforts to formulate a more coherent ideological framework for the regime. At the same time, the state has invested heavily in organizations such as the Movement of the First, a government-sponsored national youth movement that in some respects recalls Soviet mass youth organizations.It is tempting to see these developments, together with the rise of RO, as elements of a unified Kremlin strategy to rebuild the ideological and organizational infrastructure once afforded by Soviet institutions. The history of state-supported groups that have risen and fallen offers little support for this view. RO probably represents something more familiar, an attempt to cultivate and channel a particular social constituency, while keeping it dependent on patrons inside the state.
What has endured is less an institutional form than an idea, Russkiy mir, or the Russian World. Its evolution is telling. The idea emerged in the 1990s from overlapping discussions among Russian intellectuals, political strategists and the Orthodox Church about the millions of Russian speakers who found themselves outside Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The church increasingly conceived of the Russian World as a transnational Orthodox community united by language, culture, and religion, and saw it partly as a means of countering the secularization of post-Soviet societies. Political thinkers developed parallel versions of the idea. Pyotr Shchedrovitsky, an influential Russian political strategist and intellectual, argued that networks connecting Russian-speaking communities across the former Soviet Union could preserve Russia’s cultural and political influence after the collapse of the USSR.The Russian state gradually incorporated these ideas into its own soft-power strategy. In 2007, Vladimir Putin established the Russkiy Mir Foundation to promote Russian language and culture abroad and strengthen connections with Russian-speaking communities. At this stage, Russkiy mir was primarily presented as a cultural and linguistic project rather than a justification for the use of force. Only later, particularly after Russia’s interventions in Ukraine beginning in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, did the concept become intertwined with territorial claims, military intervention, and finally with full-scale war.What happens to the idea of the Russian World will depend in large part on what happens to Russia’s political regime and how the war ends. It may remain a justification for irredentism, imperial expansion and war. Or it may eventually return to something closer to a loosely bound cultural and linguistic community: a Russian-speaking sphere not unlike the Francophonie or the Spanish-speaking world. Organizations such as RO are fleeting. The consequential question about RO is whether Russians will choose to preserve the idea of a cultural and linguistic space extending beyond the state boundaries and, if so, what political and geopolitical meaning they will invest in it.