Russia’s Nationalities Agency Playing Disturbing Role in FSB Crackdown

Russia’s Nationalities Agency Playing Disturbing Role in FSB Crackdown

Executive Summary:

• Russia’s Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN), Moscow’s latest bureaucracy for coordinating policy on that country’s ethnic groups, seldom gets much attention and is often dismissed as a talk shop that issues reports other Russian institutions ignore.
• Behind that banal exterior, the FADN operates a monitoring system that keeps track of what is occurring across the country and feeds the results to the Federal Security Service (FSB). This Russian security agency carries out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown against opposition groups.
• The presence in the FADN leadership of numerous FSB officers strengthens this link and is something that makes the FADN less the nationalities policy agency it advertises itself to be than a branch office of Russia’s powerful security service.

Russia’s Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN), Moscow’s latest bureaucratic structure for elaborating policy on that country’s ethnic groups, seldom gets much attention. Many often dismiss it as a talk shop that issues reports and recommendations other Russian institutions routinely ignore. [1] Behind that bland bureaucratic facade, however, the FADN has set up and maintains a ramified monitoring system with centers in every federal subject that track what is going on that either violates Russian law or is likely to give rise to such violations, then feed the results of this operation to the Federal Security Service (FSB), which carries out Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown against opposition groups (Arctida, October 28). FADN leadership includes numerous former or even current FSB officers—from the agency’s director on down—which makes it less the nationalities policy agency it advertises itself to be and more a branch office of Russia’s powerful security service, which it in fact represents (Arctida, October 28).

Somewhat unexpectedly, recent months have highlighted the ties between the FADN and the FSB less through reports of cooperation between the two—something neither side has said much about at any point—than through FSB moves against FADN officials. The FSB has detained FADN officials in what appears to be an effort to use corruption charges to ensure that the FADN does not gain too much power from these ties or even yields what powers it has to the FSB (Kommersant, January 22; VKontakte/@tsargradtv; Sledstviye, October 22).

These FSB moves have prompted Arctida, an independent investigative group that the Russian government earlier this year listed as “an undesirable organization,” along with the Important Stories portal, to launch a close examination of the FADN–FSB relationship (Arctida, October 28). Last month, some pro-Kremlin commentators suggested that the FADN must continue to develop in that direction, “evolving from an agency that organizes celebrations into a strategic institution” that will serve “essentially as a security service working on ethnic policy and countering extremism” (Lenta Novostei Sankt-Peterburga, October 22). Arctida, for its part, however, suggests that these FSB moves may have another purpose and are intended as a move to take the monitoring function away from the FADN and fold it into the second directorate of the FSB, which monitors many of the same issues (Arctida, October 28). It is too soon to tell which of these predictions will prove true, but the investigation that Arctida and Important Stories have conducted shows just how much is at stake not only for FADN but also for Russia’s nearly 200 nations and nationalities that FADN has been monitoring for itself and for the FSB up to now. 

The FADN itself was created in 2015. Two years later, then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev authorized the creation under its aegis of a monitoring system to track developments in online content, news coverage, and social media, a process that, in the years since, the FADN has been given some 500 million rubles ($6.02 million) annually to carry out—more than ten percent of the agency’s budget. According to Arctida, the agency now wants to expand this effort to include the monitoring of messaging apps as well. Since its creation, regional and federal authorities, including the FSB, have regularly accessed the FADN monitoring system. The FADN’s annual reports for 2024 and 2025 say that this has led to the opening of 170 criminal cases and 25 administrative ones, with FADN providing information on what it called more than 35,000 “negative information incidents.” In October, the FADN leadership said it wanted to expand its monitoring to include even “hints” of developments that could generate “tension among ethnic or religious groups,” including content that on its face contained “no direct calls for hostility.” Such an expansion would make FADN monitoring far more comprehensive and would likely lead to more criminal and administrative cases in the future if this proposal is adopted.

The monitoring system now operates under the cover of the Houses of the Peoples of Russia, which operate in all federal subjects of the Russian Federation and in Russian-occupied districts of Ukraine. In the latter, FADN says it identified in recent months “871 destructive information incidents,” of which 42 required a response by law enforcement agencies, an indication that FADN is now actively involved in Putin’s effort to integrate occupied territories into a common Russian legal space. 

Since its creation, the FADN has been closely integrated with siloviki agencies through sharing the task of monitoring what the population is thinking and by selecting personnel. Since its creation in 2015, Igor Barinov, a former Duma deputy and retired FSB colonel, has led the FADN. Among those with intelligence agency links he has appointed are Anna Polezhayeva as director of the House of the Peoples of Russia; Mikhail Mishin, who worked in the FSB’s 10th directorate, as head of monitoring; Yevgeny Prokoptsov, a major from the Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff (GRU), as head of the department for the protection of state secrets; and Stanislav Bedkin, a colonel from the FSB’s second directorate, as deputy to Barinov. Until recently, these ties not only provided these individuals and the FADN as a whole with a certain bureaucratic protection but also opened the way for many of them to engage in corruption. Polezhayeva, the head of the monitoring network, has been especially notorious in that regard, Arctida says, wearing expensive jewelry and acquiring luxury apartments.

The FSB is using corruption charges against the FADN and its monitoring system to build FSB power, Ilya Shumanov, the co-founder of Arctida and managing partner of TriTrace Investigations, points out. This leaves that system in limbo and may set the stage for transferring monitoring from the FADN to the FSB. If so, that would likely reduce the FADN to an organizer of festivals and thus a target for dismantling, as other past Soviet and Russian efforts to create a nationalities ministry have. (On that history, see Natsional’niy Aktsent, March 31, 2025.) The FADN may survive and even keep its monitoring system, however, because Putin may not want a single agency to control all monitoring capability, lest that concentration of power challenge his own. As long as that consideration governs the Kremlin dictator’s actions, the FADN may retain its monitoring function, even as the FSB turns up the heat. That, in turn, means the FADN will remain a powerful player in how Moscow runs the rest of the country and seeks to counter challenges from the regions and republics, a player none of those involved or analyzing can afford to ignore.

Note:

[1] For background on Moscow’s long-standing problems in creating an institution to oversee nationality policies that is strong enough to matter but not so strong to threaten the powers of other Russian government agencies or the country’s top leadership, see Window on Eurasia, April 4, 2025; and for recent examples of FADN reporting and activities, see FAND, June 8; Natsional’niy Aktsent, August 19.