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Who Is Watching Russia’s Peoples?
The system monitoring interethnic conflicts — and the lavish lifestyles of those running it
Last week, several Telegram channels reported that documents potentially relevant to a criminal case had been seized from the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN). Law enforcement officers also reportedly questioned the agency’s deputy head, Arina Yamkova; the head of its Administrative Department, Evgeny Polezhaev; and Ivan Vlasov, head of the Department for Event Implementation and Information Support within FADN’s Administrative Department. The reports have yet to be officially confirmed or denied. What is known is that in January 2026, Sergei Razzhivin, head of FADN’s Directorate for the North Caucasus, Crimea, and Sevastopol, was detained at his Moscow apartment. Investigators believe that the directorate rented premises from an acquaintance of his at an inflated price.
The interest in FADN may also be linked to an asset value to Russia’s security and law enforcement agencies: its system for monitoring interethnic and interfaith relations. The system tracks online content, news coverage, and social media posts, and FADN has proposed expanding it to messaging apps. It can pass information to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and prosecutors, enabling them to take repressive measures.
Arctida and Important Stories investigate how the institution under FADN’s authority that operates the monitoring system works, how it has tracked developments in Russia’s Arctic regions, and what is known about the connections of its director, Anna Polezhaeva, who has a taste for conspicuous luxury.
“A Security Service for Ethnic Policy”
The Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs (FADN) is responsible for implementing Russia’s state ethnic policy and its program for the adaptation and integration of foreign nationals. It also distributes subsidies for “spiritual and educational projects” and initiatives aimed at “strengthening the unity of the Russian nation” and promoting “the ethnocultural development of Russia’s peoples.” In 2025, FADN allocated 2.5 billion rubles for these purposes. According to a report by Russia’s Accounts Chamber, the agency spent 4.1 billion rubles in total that year, half of which went to the nonprofit organizations Assembly of the Peoples of Russia and All-Russian Cossack Society.
Pro-government experts responding to reports of law enforcement interest in FADN argue that the agency “must evolve from an agency that organizes celebrations into a strategic institution — essentially a security service working on ethnic policy and countering extremism.”
FADN already has some of the infrastructure needed to play that role. Back in 2017, then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved regulations governing the State Information System for Monitoring Interethnic and Interfaith Relations and Early Warning of Conflict Situations. Since 2017, the government has allocated approximately 500 million rubles to its development and technical support.
FADN oversees the system, which federal and regional authorities can access. It monitors social media posts and other publicly available online content in real time across all of Russia’s regions, including occupied Ukrainian territories. Analysts at FADN’s situation center use the system to provide information to security and law enforcement agencies for further action.
According to FADN’s reports on the implementation of state ethnic policy in 2024 and 2025, the system’s findings led to the initiation of 170 criminal cases and 25 administrative cases. In 2024 alone, it identified more than 35,000 “negative information incidents.”
What content does the interethnic relations monitoring system track?
The findings would be forwarded to the same security and law enforcement agencies, which would have between 30 minutes and four hours to respond.
“A system like this is technically feasible, and there is a predictable demand for it in authoritarian countries whose governments want to control every shift in the information environment. Building a solution like this takes about 36 months, provided the team is fully engaged and administrative resources are used to speed up integration. Costs are difficult to estimate for a government contract, but for a large enterprise, development and additional model training would cost 10–15 million euros,” said software developer Pavel Liber, a former senior director at EPAM and head of the disint.ai platform.
Development of FADN’s monitoring system was completed in 2020. Alexander Tereshkin, a Ministry of Defense officer and head of FADN’s Directorate for Analysis, Forecasting, and Work with Foreign Citizens, oversaw the project.
That same year, FADN established the House of the Peoples of Russia, a federal state budgetary institution, which housed the situation center responsible for operating the monitoring system. According to data obtained by Arctida, the House of the Peoples of Russia had 86 employees in 2025, including 39 situation center staff members.
Before 2021, the Arctic regions had not been connected to FADN’s monitoring system because of insufficient budget funding. Monitoring nevertheless continued through cooperation with local authorities. FADN’s 2019 reporting notes, for example, contain three briefing notes on the dissolution of the Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North, one concerning the detention of a Yakut shaman, and three on incidents involving migrants in the Republic of Sakha.
By 2024, 88 of Russia’s federal subjects were connected to the automated monitoring system. FADN’s annual reports on the implementation of state ethnic policy for 2024 and 2025 classify discussions about “issues concerning the development of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples” as “negative discussions.”
But FADN does more than monitor “negative discussions.” Its reports also describe efforts to counter what it calls “Finno-Ugric separatism.” FADN reports that “the implementation of a Finno-Ugric project under the auspices of foreign states was wound down” and established the All-Russian Forum of Finno-Ugric Peoples as an alternative to the World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples.
The House of the Peoples of Russia also oversees four branches in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions. According to FADN’s 2025 report, analysis of aggregated data from these four regions identified 871 “destructive information incidents,” 42 of which “required a response.”
FADN appointed Anna Polezhaeva, formerly head of the agency’s protocol service, as director of the House of the Peoples of Russia. Mikhail Mishin, an employee of the FSB’s 10th Directorate, took charge of the situation center. Evgeny Prokoptsov (Krugov), a major in Russian military intelligence (GRU), became head of FADN’s Department for the Protection of State Secrets. Meanwhile, Stanislav Bedkin, a colonel from the FSB’s Second Service and deputy to FADN head Igor Barinov, began overseeing the institution and accompanying its director at public events.
The House of the Peoples, Diamonds, and Modest Charity
“Thank God for what you have, and thank Him for what you don’t have, too,” Anna Polezhaeva, director of the House of the Peoples of Russia, which operates the monitoring system, advises on her VKontakte page. According to its official website, the institution she runs is dedicated to “preserving civic peace, mutual understanding, and harmony among all the peoples of the Russian Federation, and creating favorable conditions for harmonizing interethnic relations.”
Polezhaeva built her career in Moscow after moving there from Yekaterinburg. In 2020, she acquired an apartment on the 26th floor of Neva Towers in Moscow City, worth at least 50 million rubles, along with a sizable collection of luxury jewelry, predominantly diamond pieces, valued at more than 200,000 euros, and premium Mercedes-Benz and Porsche Cayenne vehicles. Yet according to information obtained by Arctida, her monthly salary at the House of the Peoples of Russia in 2025 was 325,000 rubles.
Polezhaeva is a member of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations and the Arctic Council’s Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG). She regularly attends events involving the Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the North. She oversees the international project “Children of the Arctic,” which evaluates preschool and school education practices for Indigenous children. She also participates in presenting and defending reports before the United Nations on children’s rights and Indigenous Peoples’ rights.
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Polezhaeva may owe her career to two men: FADN head Igor Barinov, a former State Duma deputy and retired FSB colonel, and Evgeny Polezhaev, head of FADN’s Administrative Department.
By the time she graduated from the Faculty of International Relations at Ural Federal University, named after Boris Yeltsin, Anna was married to Evgeny Polezhaev. At the time, he headed the Department for Work with Municipalities at the Sverdlovsk Region Ministry for the Management of State Property.
Anna’s father, Andrei Bolikov, worked at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court. After graduating, Anna herself became a chief specialist in the International Relations Division of the International Cooperation Department at the Sverdlovsk Region Ministry of International and Foreign Economic Relations. By then, the couple and their parents knew former FSB colonel Igor Barinov well. Evgeny’s father, Vladislav Polezhaev, and Barinov were both members of the Sverdlovsk Association of Special Forces Veterans. At the time, Barinov was a State Duma deputy and deputy chair of its Defense Committee. He also headed United Russia’s interregional coordinating council for Sverdlovsk and Kurgan regions, with responsibilities that included overseeing political work in the area.
After FADN was established in 2015 and Barinov became its head, he immediately recruited both Polezhaevs. Evgeny Polezhaev became head of the agency’s Administrative Department. Anna Polezhaeva, then 25, took charge of its Protocol and International Relations Department. The couple divorced in 2019, and in 2022 Anna was appointed director of the House of the Peoples of Russia, an institution subordinate to FADN.
The House of the Peoples organizes events and campaigns intended to demonstrate support for children, veterans, and members of various ethnic communities. But the assistance featured on the institution’s VKontakte page contrasts sharply with the luxury its director displays.
For example, in a New Year’s greeting ahead of the Year of the Horse, Polezhaeva urges Russians to “bring even your boldest ideas to life for the good of the Motherland…” while displaying a large gold Panthère de Cartier ring worth 13,500 euros. In another photograph, she appears dressed as the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, wearing Bvlgari earrings priced at USD 38,000. In this photograph, she wears a bracelet by the Italian brand Roberto Bravo featuring moving diamonds. A comparable piece is listed on the company’s website for approximately 21,000 dollars. Polezhaeva’s collection also includes a Swiss Franck Muller Double Mystery watch. Diamond-encrusted versions with crocodile-leather straps in various colors are listed by a watch retailer for 90,000 euros. When Anna created her VKontakte page in April 2020, her profile photograph showed her wearing a Swiss Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watch worth 27,000 euros. And in 2023, colleagues posted a congratulatory message with her photograph on the House of the Peoples’ official account. In it, Polezhaeva wears a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace valued at 10,900 euros.
The value of this jewelry contrasts starkly with the scale of some of the House of the Peoples of Russia’s humanitarian aid efforts.
For example, in April 2026, the institution sent a truckload of drinking water to people affected by flooding in Dagestan. The price of Polezhaeva’s watch is also almost equivalent to the amount allocated in 2024 to cover travel for talented children attending events outside the Republic of Sakha under the “Children of the Arctic” project she oversees. In 2023, Polezhaeva took part in a Victory Day campaign honoring veterans. A photograph shows a veteran receiving a standard food parcel and a patriotic book, which Polezhaeva displays while wearing a Cartier Love bracelet worth 7,500 euros.
How the Polezhaevs are connected to former State Duma deputy Sergey Vainstein
Why Have the Security Services Taken an Interest in FADN?
The agency’s poor performance may provide the official rationale for law enforcement scrutiny and the resulting media attention. The unofficial reason, however, could be a struggle among security agencies to redistribute spheres of influence, according to Ilia Shumanov, Arctida’s co-founder and managing partner at TriTrace Investigations.
“Having former FSB officers in [FADN’s] leadership provided a degree of protection. But there is also a leadership transition underway within the FSB, and in the current circumstances the protection network that took shape under Barinov will no longer be able to operate as before. The agency controls a valuable tool for monitoring ethnic issues, which remain sensitive in Russia,” Shumanov said. He emphasized that public tolerance is declining amid high levels of violence.
“On one side, we see the ‘Russian Community,’ which has been given license to use violence, and pro-government groups that seek to speak on behalf of Indigenous Peoples. On the other, we see growing ethnic self-awareness in a number of communities, particularly among young people who risk being drafted into the war. And FADN has a tool that can be used for surveillance, to expand the security services’ powers, and to increase their influence,” Shumanov said. He believes one possible outcome is the transfer of the monitoring system to the FSB’s Second Service.
