Far-right activists from Russia’s largest nationalist movement, Russkaya Obshchina, donned black camouflage and patrolled multiple cities last month hunting for “ethnic criminals.” They raided dormitories, parks, and construction sites in search of migrants from Central Asia, nabbing six on November 24. On social media, the activists celebrated their “joint raid with law-enforcement officials,” posting a video of themselves leading migrants in chains on their way to deportation.
Russkaya Obshchina is working in concert with the Russian state to carry out a radical new campaign against immigrants. In August, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill allowing migrants to be expelled without a court decision. Three months later, he amended the criminal code, introducing draconian sentencing guidelines for “countering illegal migration.” Deportations have skyrocketed. According to the Russian state news agency TASS, the government deported more than 60,000 immigrants this year as of November 1—twice more than in the first nine months of 2023. On November 8, the Russian interior ministry announced its decision to deport an additional 20,000 people.
Perhaps more striking than the campaign itself is the well of ethnic hatred it seems to have tapped. In rallies this fall, thousands of far-right and ultranationalist activists marched through Russian cities in support of Putin’s policies. They have the blessing, too, of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church. In September, priests in flowing gowns led a crowd of 75,000 people on a religious procession in St. Petersburg, where members of Russkaya Obshchina chanted “Russians, forward! We are Russians, God is with us!” Some carried the black flag of the mercenary Wagner Group, notorious for its brutality in Ukraine and Africa. Last month, more than 2,000 members of the nationalist “Double-Headed Eagle” and Tsargrad movements marched in Nizhny Novgorod bearing Russian imperial flags. Their founder, the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, marched too.
In 2014, the United States sanctioned Malofeyev for sponsoring Russian separatist movements in Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions. He does not believe Ukraine has a right to exist; it belongs to the Russian empire he hopes to revive. In an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month, Malofeyev seemed to speak on Putin’s behalf when he denounced Donald Trump’s Ukraine-Russia peace offer—before negotiations had even started. “For the talks to be constructive,” he said, “we need to talk not about the future of Ukraine but the future of Europe and the world.”
How did radical nationalists so fully infiltrate Russia’s police and politics? Putin’s Kremlin has a long history of aiding far-right hate groups involved in violence against immigrants. In 2014, he effectively took over the nationalist agenda when he annexed Crimea and supported a militarized separatist movement in the Donbas. These maneuvers were meant to serve what Putin called the “Russian World”: anyone, he says, “who feels a spiritual connection with our Motherland, the bearers of Russian language, history, and culture.”
The full-scale invasion in 2022 accelerated the nationalist movement. “During the war in Ukraine, people we thought were marginalized became Russia’s mainstream figures,” Pavel Kanygin, a Russian investigative journalist, told me. “The nationalists’ clear-line ideology—the monarchy, reconstruction of the Russian empire, empowerment of the Church—resonates with the Russian security service and law-enforcement officers.”
Politicians too. Parliament members such as Mikhail Matveyev openly endorse Russkaya Obshchina. The spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, has posed for pictures with the group’s black flag in her hands. The pro-Kremlin newspaper Vzglyad describes the group as a “healthy power on the Russian nationalist field.” This political support has helped Russkaya Obshchina amass huge influence. On Telegram, the group has more than 600,000 followers. One of its posts shows a Russian fighter in Ukraine wearing a black sun on his uniform, a Nazi symbol. “We are giving our health away, our lives for the sake of our children, their future,” a soldier tells the camera. “Not for the sake of strangers who come to replace us in our cities.”
Another far-right group, the Russian Druzhina, dressed in balaclavas and armored vests and swept through the town of Mytishchi in August. Its masked leader reported that he and his vigilante gang worked “together with law-enforcement organs to identify persons illegally staying on the Russian territory.” Judging by how the group describes its mission, the round-up was meant to “revive the true Russian spirit.” The same month, an association called Northern Man reportedly detained more than 240 immigrants in a joint operation with police.
Northern Man became famous last year for organizing a mass street protest opposing the construction of a large mosque near Moscow. Days later, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, announced that the mosque would be moved to a much smaller site. “Russian authorities adjust policies under the nationalists’ pressure,” Alexander Verkhovsky, the founder of the SOVA Center, a Moscow-based group that monitors xenophobia and far-right movements, told me.
“Trump and his administration should understand that the Russian mainstream has shifted to the right,” Verkhovsky added. For Russia’s growing ultranationalist faction, he said, Trump’s “plan to let Kyiv stay independent would not be acceptable.”
Russia’s nationalist movement has taken off amid rising immigration. The country has long attracted immigrants from the Central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. These populations are largely non-Slavic and include many Muslims. Last year, Russia registered the arrivals of more than 8.5 million migrant workers, including more than a million from Tajikistan. One advocate for migrants’ rights told me that at least a million migrants in Russia are undocumented.
Hate toward these immigrants flooded Russia after a Moscow concert hall was attacked by terrorists associated with an Islamic State branch active in Central Asia. The massacre, which took place in March, killed at least 145 people and wounded more than 500. Police stopped and interrogated migrant workers from Central Asia in the metro and on the streets. Several months later, the Russian interior ministry announced that its “main task is to lighten up the Moscow region, so that it is not blackened by foreign citizens.” This terminology has become commonplace among Russian officials and police officers who associate criminality with non-Slavic-looking migrants.
Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the Civic Assistance Committee, a charitable organization in Moscow that provides legal support for migrants, told me that public transport has become particularly dangerous for those of Central Asian descent. But the attacks can happen anywhere. “Two Uzbek men recently appealed for our help after they were violently beaten by a group of young ultranationalists” at a store, she said. “One of our attorneys took the case, but it turned out that one of the nationalists had influential connections, so the two victims went to jail.”
Gannushkina is 82 and has been defending refugees, displaced people, and immigrants in Russia since 1990. In 2022, a human-rights group that she co-founded, Memorial, won the Nobel Peace Prize. She told me that she sees a connection between the rise in ethnic hatred and the broader campaign of repression that Putin has imposed on Russian society. People may be angry with the authorities, she notes, but they are not permitted to criticize them; the Kremlin has redirected their hatred toward migrants and non-Slavs.
Verkhovsky told me that state news agencies have made a point of using the word migrant more often this year. A study conducted by the Levada Center, a sociological research agency in Moscow, found that 68 percent of Russians say that their country must limit the influx of migrant labor. “The highest level of hostility is recorded towards Roma, people from the Central Asian republics of the former USSR and, in the last two years, towards Ukrainians,” the report said. Verkhovsky believes that the Kremlin is juicing this anxiety. “We have never seen Russians feeling so ‘concerned’” about migrants, he told me.
The onslaught against migrants that the Russian nationalist movement has unleashed, in concert with the police, has become so virulent that even some of Putin’s erstwhile defenders can’t stomach it. Despite being a member of Russia’s military alliance, the government of Tajikistan recently called for its citizens to stop visiting Russia amid the roundups. The leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, slammed the Kremlin for its campaign of “persecution based on nationality or religion,” which he called a “messy inquisition of citizens of foreign countries.”
Kadyrov is hardly a Kremlin critic. Back in 2010, he told me of Putin, “I love him very much, as a man can love a man.” But there comes a time when enough is enough.
