Moscow Not Only Repressing Non-Russian Organizations but Also Helping Businesses to Capture and Subvert Them, Major New Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 9 – The Kremlin has so actively repressed organizations defending non-Russian minorities and especially the numerically smallest among them that the second avenue of its attack on these groups – support for businesses who seek to capture such groups to prevent them from getting the way of their development plans – has received little attention.

            That has now been rectified by a major report prepared jointly by three independent Internet portal teams – Arktika, Vyorstka and Horizontal Russia (arctida.io/ru/projects/oni-rabotayut-na-blago-verhushki, verstka.media/rassledovanie-kak-associaciya-korennyh-malochislennyh-narodov-stala-instrumentom-obogascheniya-i-lobbizma and semnasem.org/articles/2024/08/02/kukolnaya-naciya-vlasti-rossii-ispolzuyut-korennye-narody-dlya-prodvizheniya-svoih-interesov-v-oon-pochemu-tak-proizoshlo).

            This joint investigation shows that business capture of such organizations both helps business to block activism that would limit its activities in their homeland and reduces outside criticism in international forums of what is happening in the Russian Federation because businesses elsewhere often make similar efforts, although usually with less government support.  

            (For a detailed description of the ways in which the Russian government and businesses in the Russian Federation have worked together to take over and then geld a leading ethnic activist group in the Russian North, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/putin-regime-often-seeks-to-take-over.html.)