Putin Furthers Civil Society Facade as Tool of Control

Putin Furthers Civil Society Facade as Tool of Control

Executive Summary:

• The Kremlin is continuing its crackdown on independent civil society and takeover of organizations that once acted independently of the Kremlin through arrests and false narratives.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has replaced genuine civil society with state-managed institutions, including the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, which simulates pluralism while filtering dissent, managing ethnic tensions, and allowing for controlled participation under authoritarian oversight.
• Cossack organizations function as state-aligned instruments of coercion and reward within ethnic governance, while youth movements such as the Movement of the First socialize younger generations into disciplined patriotism and loyalty to the regime.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has created a government-run civil society system as a substitute for authentic civil society. One of the main such organs is the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. The government founded the council in November 2004, replacing the Presidential Commission on Human Rights that first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin established in 1993. In the years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the council performed some genuinely independent work, such as issuing a statement criticizing the Federation Council’s approval for Putin to deploy troops to Ukraine in 2014 (Kommersant, October 28, 2019). Authentic non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—such as Moscow’s SOVA center, which monitors hate crimes in Russia—used to report to the council. Putin removed the council’s director, Alexander Verkhovsky, by decree in November 2022, as the government closed or co-opted independent Russian organizations in the wave of civil society repression following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine (SOVA Center, November 18, 2022). Other opposition figures, including Ekaterina Schulman, were removed from the council after the Kremlin designated them as foreign agents. The Kremlin has since accused Schulman of creating a “terrorist” organization, called the Anti-War Committee of Russia, and indicted her in absentia in January (Kommersant, January 23). Those left on the council now include supine figures like Sergey Karaganov and Alexander Brod. Karaganov has opined on the possibility of winning a nuclear war, and Brod recently decried the “systematic character” of “discrimination” against Russians and co-ethnics abroad, claiming it is a means for Western countries to exert “pressure upon Russia” (Vesti.ru, December 18, 2025; RIA Novosti, February 10).

The Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN), created by the government in 2015, is another government-controlled organization with a thin veneer of autonomy. Putin tasked the agency with “strengthening the unity of the multinational Russian Federation” and “preventing attempts to incite conflicts based on racial, national, or religious hatred” (Novaya Gazeta, November 28, 2023). In the decree founding FADN, provision 2B explicitly says that its function is to work with “national-cultural autonomous groups, Cossack societies, and other institutes of civil society” (Laboratoriya Istorii Diaspor i Migratsiy, March 31, 2015). The agency seeks to prevent Russia’s uneven treatment of its ethnic minorities from sowing division. FADN’s leader, Igor Barinov, reported to a Duma committee that 2025 saw a growth in the number of “negative news stories connected to polyethnic and polyreligious relations.” He continued, “As in the prior year, half of these were connected to ‘foreign moderators.’” Barinov further reported that the greatest number of negative news stories were seen in the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and central Russia. The top three news themes were “the narrative of decolonizing Russia,” “migration processes,” and “protest activity using ethnic and national themes” (Kommersant, February 11). FADN helps sustain inauthentic institutions for ethnic minorities, ensuring the government can identify and appear to neutralize their grievances.

Russian Cossack groups are government-contrived civil society organizations that channel anger about the center’s treatment of ethnic minorities. These NGOs provide a gendarmerie for the regime to repress other minorities. The proposal to name 2026 the year of national unity supposedly came from Ataman of the All-Russian Cossack Society Vitaly Kuznetsov, whom Putin appointed. Regime-controlled reporting suggested the Cossacks were particularly well-suited to this purpose because “for centuries, Cossack life, service, and all aspects of service have been shaped by a constant dialogue of cultures, languages, and faiths” (see EDM, June 26, 2024, November 13, 2025; RIA Novosti, February 10). Membership in government-controlled Cossack organizations helps individuals obtain presidential grants for the development of civil society and secure access to prestigious Cossack schools for their children (Rossiyskoe Kazachestvo, February 5).

Other stage-managed NGOs are specifically aimed at the young. The Nashi, which the government created in 2005 in response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, is one infamous example. The government founded the Yunarmiia youth movement in 2015 to foster a patriotic upbringing with an “understanding of civic solidarity,” physical preparation, “moral-ethical” training, and “social activeness” (Dzen.ru, November 22, 2023). In 2022, the Kremlin combined Yunarmiia and the Russian Union of Schoolchildren into the Movement of the First. The bill founding this organization was read in the Duma in May 2022 on the “100-year anniversary of the [Soviet] pioneers.” The federal budget directly finances this organization, which received 19 million rubles ($220,000) in 2023. It accepts anyone between the ages of 6 and 18 and has the main values of “life and dignity,” “justice and good,” “the unity of the Russian nations,” and “serving the fatherland” (Kommersant, November 20, 2023). The young have typically been the most revolutionary part of any nation, so the regime’s interest in channeling their energies is unsurprising.

Russia’s proliferation of government-organized civil society institutions offers a window into how the Kremlin approaches societal security. Putin’s takeover of civil society and education is a characteristic of fascism (see EDM, February 23). As the West discusses Russia’s hybrid war and information battles, the concept of societal security is being debated in Russia (see EDM, February 9). The timing of Russia’s turn to corporatist entities after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine is consistent with the notion that Putin saw color revolutions as a U.S.-backed plot to undermine his regime.