The Russian Obshchina and ISIS: Two Empires, One Playbook

That comparison is accurate, but it is also parochial. It locates the Obshchina inside a strictly Russian historical lineage. There is another comparison, less flattering to Moscow and more useful for the Western reader, which places it inside a contemporary global pattern: the Islamic State.

The objection writes itself. ISIS built a caliphate; the Obshchina patrols shopping malls. ISIS beheaded hostages on camera; the Obshchina beats up market vendors. ISIS drew foreign fighters from forty countries; the Obshchina operates within Russia's borders. All true. And yet the deeper one looks, the more the two organizations resemble each other - not in their current capabilities, but in their structural DNA, in the relationship to the state that birthed them, and in the imperial nostalgia they dress up as religious revival.

The Frankenstein problem

Every secret service that builds a religious militia eventually discovers the same law: the monster it has spawned stops obeying its creator. The Iraqi insurgency that became ISIS was not the product of pure Islamist zeal. It was assembled from the wreckage of Saddam Hussein's army, dismissed en masse by Paul Bremer's de-Baathification order of 2003, and seasoned with the cadres of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Saudi and Qatari money flowed in. Turkish intelligence looked the other way at the border. American policy toward Syria, deliberately or by inertia, allowed the Sunni opposition to mutate into something far more dangerous than what Washington had imagined arming. By the time the caliphate was declared from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul in June 2014, none of its original sponsors controlled it anymore. The asset had acquired its own agency.

The architecture of the Russian Obshchina is a miniature of that same logic. According to Meduza's investigation of June 2025, sources inside the FSB say the project was conceived for two purposes: to quietly absorb a portion of the operational budget, and to bait Russian nationalists into criminal acts so they could be paraded as "super-terrorists" and locked up. A classic provocation scheme, of the kind the Russian security state has run for over a century. Then the curators discovered that they had built something else. By 2024 the Obshchina had over 400,000 subscribers on its main Telegram channel, regional cells in every major Russian city, an institutional patron in Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin, an oligarchic sponsor in Konstantin Malofeev, and a working partnership with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Kremlin had set out to manufacture a controllable hate group. It produced a movement.

The fissures are already showing. In 2024 several regional cells - in Sakhalin, Kaliningrad, Krasnodar Krai, Tyumen - broke off and reconstituted themselves as the "Russian Druzhina," now operating under Malofeev's direct patronage. The market is already being divided. One handler, one set of sectarians; another handler, another set. ISIS went through exactly this process in 2013, when it formally split from al-Qaeda over jurisdiction in Syria and then turned its weapons on its former parent. The Obshchina is not yet at that stage. It will be.

The empire in religious clothing

The most consequential parallel is the one Western analysts tend to miss when they look at the Obshchina and see only a "Russian nationalist movement." It is not a nationalist movement. It is an imperial project wearing religious dress, and in this it is functionally identical to ISIS.

The caliphate that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed in 2014 was not, despite its self-presentation, a return to a pure or original Islam. It was the dream of restoring an imperial form - the Sunni caliphate as a continental polity - wrapped in theological language. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 left a hundred-year wound across the Muslim world, and the caliphate-as-project has haunted Sunni political imagination ever since. ISIS offered the most extreme answer to that wound: not a state, but an empire; not a nation, but a confessional dominion.

Russia's wound is older and structurally identical. The Third Rome doctrine - Moscow as the heir to Byzantium, the last true Orthodox empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - has shaped Muscovite political theology for over five hundred years. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was, in this framework, the latest in a sequence of imperial humiliations, and Putin's project since 2000 has been the attempted reconstruction of that lost empire under a new sacred banner. Malofeev's Tsargrad, the media-ideological complex that incubated the Obshchina's founders, is named after Tsargrad - the medieval Rus' name for Constantinople. The signal could not be more explicit. This is not "Russian nationalism." This is the project of an Orthodox Third Rome.

The Black Hundreds of 1905 said the same thing in different words: "For Faith, Tsar, Fatherland." The Obshchina says it now in the dialect of the 2020s. ISIS said it in Arabic. The formula is shared. In each case, the religion is not the goal; it is the legitimating apparatus for an empire that has no other language left.

This is why the Obshchina's relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church matters more than its Telegram subscriber count. ISIS could not have functioned without the sectarian theological infrastructure of certain Saudi-funded mosques and clerical networks. The Obshchina cannot function without the parallel infrastructure of the Moscow Patriarchate, which gives it doctrinal cover, real estate, recruitment channels, and the moral vocabulary of a sacred mission. The blockade of a school in Koisug in search of "subhumans" is not improvisation by the Obshchina. It is the application of a centuries-old theological template, in which anyone unbaptized is automatically constituted as a "stranger" and an enemy. The Russian Church has reproduced this myth for centuries, and it is still alive.

The dehumanization formula

ISIS's catalog of designated enemies - Yazidis, Shia, Christians, secular Sunnis, anyone deemed apostate - was generated by a particular theological move: the declaration of takfir, the excommunication of fellow believers as unbelievers, which licenses violence against them. The Obshchina operates with the same move, transposed into Orthodox vocabulary. The Azeri trader, the Tajik laborer, the Ingush family, the Chechen, the Jew commemorating Stalin's victims at Sandarmokh - each is constituted as an inorodets, as someone whose presence on "Russian soil" is theologically illegitimate.

The episode in Koisug in April 2024 deserves to be read precisely. Six Obshchina members surrounded a village school "looking for subhumans" because a child had argued with a Russian-language teacher. The word nelyudi - non-humans - is the functional equivalent of the Arabic kuffar in ISIS rhetoric. At Sandarmokh in August 2025, the Obshchina disrupted the reading of names of victims of the Great Terror, drowning out the ceremony with "Katyusha" and hanging up placards on the trees with the names of foreign citizens who had died fighting on Ukraine's side against Russia. The gesture was theological, not political. It declared that certain dead are not to be mourned, that certain victims are not victims, that the priestly authority over memory and grief belongs to the imperial church alone - and that Sandarmokh is not a place of memory for those Stalin executed but a platform for equating "enemies of Russia," Soviet and present-day. ISIS dynamiting the shrines of Sufi saints in Mosul, the Obshchina drowning out names at Sandarmokh - same gesture, different uniforms.

The Russians as a caliphate

It is worth stopping here to spell out the main point, because the Western reader habitually thinks of Russians as an ethnos - and misses what makes the Obshchina truly dangerous.

The Russians do not exist as an ethnos. What the imperial vocabulary calls "the Russian people" is a composite construction of Finno-Ugric tribes (Merya, Muroma, Meshchera, Ves, Mordva, Mari), Turkic components (Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash blood absorbed into the Muscovite population over centuries), and a Slavic layer that arrived later and constituted a minority. Anthropologically, genetically, linguistically, the "Russian" is a product of the Muscovite assimilation machine, not an ancient nationality. What holds this construction together is neither blood nor language but exactly two mechanisms: Orthodoxy in its Muscovite-imperial inflection, and loyalty to the Tsar as defender of the faith.

This is the caliphal model. The classical caliphate had no ethnic boundary either: Arab, Persian, Berber, Turk, Indian - all became members of the umma through Islam and submission to the caliph as defender of the faith. Ethnicity was secondary, confession and loyalty were primary. The Russian Empire was built on the same scheme: a Tatar prince who converted to Orthodoxy became a Russian nobleman; a Chechen who swore allegiance to the Tsar and was baptized became a Russian officer; a Buryat lama who recognized the supremacy of imperial power remained a Buddhist but entered the imperial vertical on conditions of loyalty. The boundary was not ethnic but confessional-imperial.

This explains what otherwise looks like a paradox: why Kadyrov's Muslim Chechens, Buryat Buddhists, and Tatar Muslims fight for the "Russian world" against Ukraine. Not because they have "become Russian" - they were never Russian in any ethnic sense. But because they are inscribed into the imperial vertical on the same conditions on which their ancestors were inscribed two, three, five centuries ago: loyalty to the defender of the faith in exchange for a place in the hierarchy. And this is why the Russian Obshchina, in its recruitment potential, is closer to a caliphate than to a national movement. Today it is closed around an ethnic core, but this closure is not structural - it is tactical. Should the political frame shift, the Obshchina will be open to anyone willing to swear allegiance to imperial Orthodoxy and to the Kremlin as its defender. They will leave their ethnicity at the door.

The stage of the cycle and the wreckage of the state

So how alarmed should one be, in the spring of 2026?

The Obshchina is not yet ISIS. But it is recognizably the ISIS of around 2010, on the eve of detonation. After the rout administered by the Sunni Awakening, the organization had gone deep underground. It was regrouping its cadres in the prisons of Bucca and Abu Ghraib, waiting for the perfect crisis to make its final leap. That crisis arrived in 2011-2014 in the form of the Syrian civil war, the American withdrawal from Iraq, and the collapse of Maliki's army across the Sunni provinces. ISIS did not arise out of nothing - it arose on the wreckage of the Iraqi state, which the Americans had dismantled without a plan to rebuild. Sunnis stripped of army, party, civil service, and social status became the cadre and social reservoir for the caliphate. Saddam's former officers brought ISIS military professionalism. Disbanded Baathists brought administrative skills. And the unemployed Sunni youth provided the inflow of fighters. The Shiite government in Baghdad, blaming them for everything and treating them as second-class citizens, supplied the motivation. A ready organism assembled itself over ten years on the wreckage of a state that no longer existed.

Russia is moving toward the same scenario, and the Kremlin knows it. Defeat in Ukraine, economic collapse under sanctions and hydrocarbon prices, the Putin succession - any of these vectors, let alone their combination, will dismantle the state in its current form. And when that dismantling occurs, the Obshchina will be the ready-made structure that occupies the vacuum, exactly as ISIS occupied the vacuum in Anbar and Nineveh. It already has cadres with frontline and street-violence experience. It has a parallel financial infrastructure through Malofeev and Khudokormov. It has the moral mandate of the Moscow Patriarchate. It has its own PR apparatus through Tsargrad. It has direct channels into the security ministries through Bastrykin. When the central vertical begins to crumble, the Obshchina will not need to be built from scratch - it will simply cease to be an instrument and become a subject.

This is what the Kremlin actually wants: a fire brigade for the day of revolution, a disciplined muscular force that will hold the street. It is also what the Kremlin will not be able to control. The Russian security state, like the American security state in Iraq two decades ago, is building a religious militia as an instrument of governance and is convinced it can dispose of the instrument when the work is done.

Here it is worth spelling the Bush parallel out to its end, because it is the key. In 2003 Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, issued two orders - on the de-Baathification of the state apparatus and on the dissolution of the Iraqi army. Overnight, several hundred thousand people - officers, civil servants, engineers, teachers - were left without work, without status, without prospects, without the right to return to public service. These people did not disappear - they became the cadre reservoir first for the Sunni insurgency, then for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then for ISIS. The military spine of the 2014 caliphate was, in significant part, Saddam's former officers whom the United States had itself pushed underground.

The Bush administration claimed it was building a new Iraq. In practice it built a cadre nursery for a future strategic adversary - and spent the following twenty years fighting what it had itself assembled. Whether this was an accidental error is an open question. A permanent crisis region at the intersection of Iraq, Syria, and Iran proved too functional for a systemic hegemon to be written off as mere stupidity. The military-industrial complex received twenty years of contracts. Europe received a migration crisis that hollowed out its political subjectivity. Russia received the Syrian trap, in which it got bogged down before the Ukrainian campaign. Iran remained isolated. In this optic the jihadist caliphate looks not like the by-product of a failed occupation but like an instrument that performed its strategic tasks and was then disposed of.

The Kremlin is building the Russian Obshchina in the same logic. Not by mistake. As a functional element of a managed-chaos strategy on post-imperial space. If the central vertical falls, the Obshchina is to serve as the instrument of holding the Muscovite core through religious-imperial terror. If the vertical holds, the Obshchina is the punitive apparatus for domestic protest. In both scenarios the Kremlin wins. The only losers are the Obshchina members themselves, who will be shot at the appointed hour - as Dubrovin and Vostorgov were shot in 1918, as Röhm was shot in 1934. This is the classical logic of a special operation with the disposal of executors planned in advance.

ISIS proved that the conviction of control is always wrong - but the conviction of disposal is a different matter. The instrument develops its own theology, its own economy, its own recruitment, its own succession of leaders, and eventually its own quarrel with the state that built it. Malofeev's split-off of the Russian Druzhina is the first crack. There will be others.

Western policymakers should adjust their categories accordingly. The Obshchina is not a hate group, not a vigilante organization, not a "Russian Proud Boys." It is a state-built religious militia of the same generic class as the early Islamic State, distinguished only by the confession it instrumentalizes and the empire it dreams of restoring. The Third Rome speaks Russian; the caliphate spoke Arabic. The formula of both is imperial.

Where the analogy stops

Honest comparison requires honest limits. The Obshchina has not yet seized territory. It does not yet operate beyond Russia's borders, though the establishment of a Mariupol cell in occupied Ukraine in October 2024 is a warning sign. It does not yet command its own armed wing in the military sense, although its members are increasingly armed in the criminal sense - the Kameshkovo attack with clubs, knuckledusters, and knives is exactly the toolkit of the early Iraqi insurgency before it acquired heavier weapons.

And here is the main correction to my own initial formulation. The Obshchina today is closed around an ethnic core - this is visible from the composition of its cells and its rhetoric. But this closure, as I said, is tactical, not structural. The caliphal model around which the Obshchina is built has no ethnic ceiling. When the moment comes - when the imperial vertical begins to crumble and the call goes out for "defenders of Orthodoxy" from across the territory of the former empire - the ethnic filter will be lifted as easily as it was imposed. And then its resemblance to ISIS, which recruited through the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Europe, will cease to be merely structural.

The historical short circuit

One more parallel is worth stating plainly. ISIS achieved its caliphate in 2014, ten years after its parent organization had been seeded by the wreckage of de-Baathification. It lost its territorial caliphate by 2019. Five years on top, ten years of build-up, and a long tail of insurgency afterward. The Black Hundreds existed for exactly twelve years between 1905 and 1917 before the empire they were built to save collapsed around them, and their leaders were shot by the revolutionaries they had spent a decade hunting.

The Russian Obshchina was founded in 2020. By the historical clock it shares with both its ancestors, the interesting decade has already begun.

Empires that build religious militias to save themselves do not survive the militias. The militias do not survive the empires either. This is the law that ISIS proved by 2019 and the Black Hundreds proved by 1918.

The Kremlin understands the law. It is not trying to evade it - it is trying to use it. The imperial class knows how to outlive its empires, if it manages to dispose of its own soldiers before the soldiers realize they have been deceived. The Russian elite has already passed through this cycle twice: in 1917 it leapt out of the wreckage of Tsarism as Bolsheviks, in 1991 as oligarchs. Both times it stepped over those who had died for the previous system. Now it is preparing the third exit. The Russian Obshchina is the expendable material for that exit. Not the Kremlin's mistake. Its insurance policy.

The question is no longer whether the empire will outlive its militia. The empire will outlive its militia - if it manages to clear the militia in time. The question is whether the Kremlin will manage the cleanup before it collapses itself.