A Fifth Column With an Axe: Who Really Pays for Russia's "Russian Community"

The Union of the Russian People, created in 1905 by the Department of Police and bankrolled out of the Interior Ministry to save a monarchy already coming apart at the seams, lasted exactly twelve years. It ended with its leaders shot by the very revolutionaries its fighting squads had been meant to crush in the streets. At the time we left one block sketched only in outline and promised to fill it in separately: where the money comes from. Now there is something to fill it in with. An investigation by BBC Eye and the BBC Russian Service, together with an analysis by Ilya Shumanov of Arktida, has produced what no one had before: the financial records, and the names of the donors.

The legend of the people's kopeck

The "Russian Community" talks about money readily and touchingly. Almost every week a video appears on its Telegram channel and YouTube: no oligarchs fund us, we live on your donations, Russian, help your fellow Russian, send money to the card. Their site says as much - the movement runs exclusively on the people's contributions, thousands of ordinary citizens give, and on that money it maintains a staff, expands its network, and perfects that "unique mobile mutual-aid app." Remember the app. We will come back to it.

Private donations do exist. They simply do not make up the bulk of the budget. And the budget, once you look at the accounting - tangled, unstructured, nothing like the tidy filings any normal nonprofit submits to the Justice Ministry - is in fact quite legible. In 2024 something on the order of thirty million rubles passed through the Community; in 2025, around sixty. Can you raise sums like that at a hundred or five hundred rubles a head from the whole nationalist scene? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Because there are major donors the Community's leaders never mention. And that is where it gets interesting.

The faces of the project, and their family business

First, the men in the shop window. The founders of the "Russian Community" are Andrei Tkachuk, a former deputy speaker of the Omsk city council; Andrei Afanasyev, a journalist at the Spas television channel; and Yevgeny Chesnokov, a public activist. They are frequently filed under Konstantin Malofeyev's people, and that is a half-truth: Tkachuk and Afanasyev did work inside the structures of the "Orthodox oligarch," Tkachuk drew a salary there right up to the start of the full-scale invasion, and Afanasyev also turned up at Tsargrad. But the Community itself is not a continuation of Malofeyev's project. Malofeyev has his own regional web of nationalist cells, which he keeps feeding, and it has a concept: monarchism, the double-headed eagle. The "Russian Community" has no monarchism. It is a different construction, and it grew up more as a counterweight to Malofeyev's ventures than as their extension.

These founding fathers are not oligarchs or major businessmen. A former deputy head of a Siberian city council, a presenter on an Orthodox channel, an activist for banning abortion. Not the kind of people who can finance a movement running into the tens of millions. They are a facade. They take a salary off the project rather than putting money into it. And here is the living illustration: the donations the Community collects on YouTube and through the app go not to an organizational account, as they should for any public association, but to Tkachuk's personal card, the details of which he publishes on his own Telegram.

Tkachuk is, in fact, a telling figure. An editor of TV programs at the Eurasia channel, then regional media, then Sibneft, then the Omsk mayor's office and the Omsk regional government, then a seat on the city council for United Russia with the title of deputy speaker, then Dolgoprudny, where he had earlier worked the elections for United Russia as a political technologist. A spin doctor who holds himself well on camera, speaks well, knows how to build networks and work an information agenda. The ideal candidate for the formal leadership of a street movement. Not an ideologue, not a prophet - a manager.

A family business has naturally been built up around the project as well. The official merchandise runs under the brand "Russkaya Lavka," registered to Tkachuk's brother-in-law Mikhail Varfolomeyev, who in his time also worked in Tkachuk's structures. Profiting off the Russians, too, is the wife of co-founder Chesnokov: Tatyana Chesnokova owns the online store "Lyubomir," where you can buy a "Ya Russkiy" T-shirt, a "Nebo Slavyan" sweatshirt or, if you prefer, an axe. The axe is its own genre. When a movement that stages raids and puts people face-down on the floor is selling axes as souvenirs, there is not much left to add.

An agent, a sugar king, and a garbage baron

Now to those behind the facade. To the people you will never see in any video about the people's kopeck.

The first donor is the foundation of the political analyst Sergei Mikheyev, the same one who never leaves Russian television screens and who once served as an adviser to Aksyonov in Crimea. His charitable foundation transferred money to the Community at the outset. The foundation collects funds from various pro-Kremlin structures, including oligarchs from the oil-and-gas sector, and passes them along. But the more interesting point is elsewhere. Mikheyev is not merely a loyal talking head. Thanks to an investigation by the Dossier Center, it is known that Mikheyev operates as a recruited agent, run by specific handlers: FSB reserve colonel Valery Maksimov and GRU officer Valery Chernyshov (Dossier). They helped him formulate the narratives he then broadcast, and through him they ran pro-Russian opposition figures in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. And the foundation of this man stands at the origin of the "Russian Community's" funding, while Mikheyev himself appears at its public events as an informal patron. Mikheyev called the BBC's documents forgeries and denies the transfers. The entries, meanwhile, exist both in his foundation and in the Community. The sums are not in the millions, but they exist, and denying them is foolish.

The second donor is far larger, and until now had never surfaced in the financing of near-government structures at all. He is Igor Khudokormov, a shadow billionaire known as Russia's sugar king. The owner of the Prodimeks agroholding, the country's largest sugar producer: fourteen plants, roughly nine hundred thousand hectares of land under the group's control across eight regions, and a fortune that Forbes valued at 1.9 billion dollars in 2026. Together with his brother he is one of Russia's key latifundists, and the land bank only keeps growing. A former military man, a graduate of the Leningrad Railway Military School, who began in the nineties with barter: Ukrainian sugar in exchange for Russian fuel oil. The Prodimeks holding is stocked with former officers, most likely his fellow servicemen. And there is an old story there as well: a deputy interior minister's son, Denis Zubov, worked as a top manager, and Khudokormov bought the senior security official a stake in an offshore that later surfaced in the Panama Papers. In other words, this is a man who was already working closely with the siloviki by the mid-2000s.

Two billion dollars and a million hectares do not appear on their own; protection on that scale is required. And the protection is legible: Khudokormov's name is today linked to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev, the government's curator of the agricultural sector and the son of former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev. Where there is sugar, there are the Patrushevs. And Khudokormov's charitable foundation, called Rost, was transferring money to the "Russian Community" on a regular basis - not a one-off contribution, but monthly payments through 2025. It was precisely these transfers that formed the core of the funding. Not the people's kopeck. The money of a man from the Patrushev clan.

The third donor is the flourish that adorns any account of the Russian elite. Nikolai Nefedov, known in criminal circles as Nefed Nizhegorodsky. According to Shumanov, this man effectively controls the garbage market of the Moscow region - the whole of Moscow Oblast as a single domain. His name has surfaced in the scandals over carving up the waste market; Kommersant wrote about him; he was summoned as a witness in a criminal case; and the late head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, named him as one of the beneficiaries of the very landfills Shestun had tried to shut down. His close ties to the Moscow Oblast government and to Governor Vorobyov are a story of their own. And so, through structures connected to Nefedov's family, money also flowed into the "Russian Community." It went, in Shumanov's account, to that same app - the SOS button that summons a "Russian SOBR" of Community activists to rescue a frightened citizen from migrants. A criminal boss who has survived into 2026 controlling the garbage in the very heart of Russia is paying for the nationalists' panic button. It would be hard to invent a better tableau of Russian national unity.

A roof you can see from a distance

Money is money, but no organization like this survives on the street without a roof. Compare the headlines of a year ago, when the Community's raids sometimes brought even police searches in their wake, with today's, in which the same people literally stand guard over Patriarch Kirill at a religious procession. Someone clearly said: do not touch these ones, they are under our wing, and we are handing them part of the monopoly on violence. Who is that someone?

The "Russian Community's" raids are not freelancing. They are coordinated with the police, and that is no accident: a joint sweep of someone else's birthday party, with guests laid face-down on the floor alongside the police officers who came along, happens only by arrangement. A former Community activist told the BBC outright that such raids are coordinated by the FSB and the Investigative Committee. And Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin responds with remarkable speed to any appeal from the Community members - because the anti-migrant theme is good for self-promotion, it brings social support, and not only from the security bloc but from the Kremlin, which since the Crocus attack has been stamping out laws restricting migrants' rights one after another.

The FSB works more subtly. Beyond pinpoint contacts at the level of Moscow Oblast and regional directorates, the Chekists act as infrastructural conduits. In a whole series of regions the Community runs training centers where people are taught knife combat and other combat preparation, and the instructors are not infrequently serving FSB officers and special-forces troops. In photographs from such sessions the instructors' faces are hidden behind balaclavas or blurred, which in itself hints at who exactly was sent to train the "people's movement." Episodes like this have been recorded in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, among other places. And at the political level, the connection to the Community is displayed ever more willingly by individual deputy governors and even governors: in Vologda Oblast the head of the region makes no secret of standing shoulder to shoulder with these people.

What the state wants from it

Put it all together. A recruited FSB and GRU agent, a billionaire from the Patrushev clan, the criminal master of the Moscow region's garbage, and over all of it a security-services patronage, Bastrykin's favor, and trainers in balaclavas. These are not marginals driven into a corner. This is a structure the state has accepted and keeps close deliberately. The question is why.

Because once the war ends a large wave of men who have been through the front will return to Russia, and something will have to be done with them. They will have to be channeled somewhere, absorbed into something. The "Russian Community" suits this perfectly: centralized groups tied to a federal leadership and under constant monitoring. This is precisely the internal, punitive-police function we wrote about before - the young will not be sent back to the front; they are being saved for the postwar scenario, or for the scenario of "if something goes wrong."

And the siloviki have already rehearsed that scenario once. When Prigozhin's column marched on Moscow, there was no one on the streets to organize even token physical resistance, even a token blockade. There was no one. A pro-Kremlin street force scattered across fifty regions, with a cluster of cells around Moscow, would have come in very handy at such a moment. This is a proto-political construction, and the logic points to the next step: to fix its legitimacy, to turn it into a nationalist party. Which is exactly what Malofeyev has long had in mind - to build a system of political influence through a nationalist movement. The group already exists, you can touch it, its activity is visible on the street. All that remains is to formalize it.

The "Russian Community" is the only nationalist force in Russia since the early nineties that does not set itself against the authorities in any form. It serves the Kremlin completely. And even if the presidential administration is a little wary of it, and direct control from there is absent, the siloviki feel quite comfortable in the role of its managers. Not a bad investment, when you think about it. A fifth column with an axe, raised by the Office, paid for with sugar and garbage, blessed by the patriarch.

So for anyone who still believes in a sincere popular love of the state - not for money, but at the prompting of the Russian heart - the news is bad. The billionaires could not be left out. Perhaps these billionaires really do love the Russian state sincerely. But for some reason they are shy about saying so openly, and route their love through charitable foundations with opaque accounts. The Black Hundreds of 1905 also believed they were saving the empire. The empire's historical memory is short. History's is not.