Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 17 – Last December, Russian security officers carried out coordinated raids against activists of the numerically small indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation, a reflection of Moscow’s continuing crackdown on non-Russians but an event that highlights a new development especially worrisome to the Kremlin.
“The timing was deliberate,” Anastasia Anisimova says, because “by starting at exactly the same moment, investigators ensured that he activists could not warn one another or coordinate a response” (correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/international-en/2026/08/17/terrorizing-the-indigenous-russian-repression-against-its-own-nations/ summarized at indigenous-russia.com/archives/49684).
While Moscow has worked hard to discredit and destroy organizations both inside the Russian Federation and abroad that keep non-Russian groups in touch with one another, it has not been able to eliminate the contacts that activists from these groups have either within Russia or abroad.
Indeed, as this report makes clear, activists have remained able to maintain ties with one another both directly and via their colleagues who have been forced into emigration to the point that Moscow has had to take this into consideration when it launches new moves against the non-Russians.
That Moscow now has to do that gives the non-Russians who are able to maintain such ties greater influence than their individual numbers or even collective size within the population might suggest and likely means that the Russian force structures will increase their efforts to break these links lest they limit the Kremlin’s freedom of action in the future.
It also means that these links deserve to be followed ever more closely and actively supported by those who study these peoples because they have become a force multiplier for these nationalities, a form of cooperation that the popular fronts of the Baltic countries pioneered at the end of Soviet times and that the Circassians and Ukraine are pushing now.
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