‘Russian Community’ Now a Country-Wide Vigilante Group Backed by Kremlin But Not Always by Local Law Enforcement

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – The Russian Community, which has been compared with the Black Hundreds of the last years of the tsarist period (jamestown.org/program/russian-community-extremists-becoming-the-black-hundreds-of-today/) is now a country-wide vigilante group backed by the Kremlin but not always by local Russian police and prosecutors.

            The Kremlin is happy with the group’s attacks on immigrants, non-Russians and all those the Putin regime doesn’t like, but local law enforcement, while happy to have the Russian Community as a subordinate ally, doesn’t want the group to gain too much power lest it threaten the regime’s monopoly of the use of force.

            The clearest example of this, one that has been playing out over the last year and that shows that the Kremlin and local law enforcement are not entirely on the same page when it comes to the Russian Community, is in St. Petersburg (zona.media/article/2025/05/30/kovrov and meduza.io/en/feature/2025/05/31/a-nationwide-vigilante-network).

            A year ago, Russian Community activists rallied alongside ethnic Russian taxi drivers against “gypsy cabdrivers” from the Caucasus. That led to a clash, and the police arrested a dozen RC members. But they were quickly released after Aleksandr Bastrykhin denounced their arrests and demanded that a case be opened against the police for detaining them.

            State prosecutors have dropped those charges twice, but the Kremlin’s chief law enforcement official has been insisting that it be reopened, a clear indication that the Russian Community and its activists have the support of the Kremlin even when they run afoul of local police who are simply trying to force the RC activists to limit the amount of violence they use.