The ‘Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation’ (Rossotrudnichestvo) has a rich history.
In 1925, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) was established in the USSR. Formally, it was a public organisation, but in reality it was a division of the OGPU, as any contacts with foreign countries fell within the OGPU’s remit.
VOKS’s objectives included ‘familiarising the public in the USSR with the cultural achievements of foreign countries and promoting the culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union abroad, as well as fostering the development and strengthening of friendship and mutual understanding between the peoples of the USSR and other countries’. In other words, it involved working with foreign influence networks. VOKS was responsible for organising Soviet exhibitions abroad and receiving foreign delegations. The first chairperson of VOKS (until 1929) was Olga Kameneva, the wife of Politburo member Lev Kamenev and the sister of Lev Trotsky.
In 1958, VOKS was reorganised into the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (SSOD). By the end of 1991, the Union of Soviet Societies of Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries (SSOD) brought together 98 societies and associations for friendship with the peoples of foreign countries and maintained contacts with thousands of different foreign organisations; it ran Houses of Soviet Science and Culture and Soviet cultural centres, Russian language courses and SSOD representative offices in 89 countries.
Furthermore, ‘the Friendship Societies brought together more than 25,000 different enterprises and institutions, scientific, cultural, educational and training establishments, etc. Over 50 million people were involved in the work of the SSOD. Republican branches of the SSOD operated in all the Union republics, organising tens of thousands of events each year dedicated to foreign countries, their history, science and art, as well as to anniversaries and commemorative dates, and to solidarity with the peoples of foreign countries. Around 2,000 events were held annually at the Moscow House of Friendship. The SSOD maintained contacts with 7,500 organisations, public figures and representatives of science and culture from 134 countries. There were 108 public associations and institutes of friendship with the USSR operating worldwide.”
This was a vast network of Soviet influence agencies, established during the Soviet era, which did not disappear after the collapse of the USSR but continued to be maintained and utilised.
In 1992, the SSOD was transformed into the Russian Association for International Cooperation (RAMSiR), headed by Valentina Tereshkova, whilst retaining its structure. The association was designated a non-governmental organisation, but in that same year, 1992, the Russian Agency for International Cooperation and Development (RAMSiR) was spun off from it, headed by Alexander Shokhin, Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, with Tereshkova becoming his deputy. This was now, formally speaking, a government body to which all of the SSOD’s assets in Russia and abroad had been transferred.
The Russian Association for International Cooperation (RAMS) continued to exist in parallel and still exists today, bringing together more than a hundred friendship societies with foreign states and other supposedly public organisations with sometimes rather strange names, such as the ‘Moscow Branch of the International Organisation “Strength in Friendship”’. It is safe to say that they all have KGB roots and that there are no genuine civil society organisations amongst them.
In 1994, the Russian Centre for International Scientific and Cultural Cooperation (Roszarubezhcentre), chaired by Tereshkova and, from 2004, by Eleonora Mitrofanova, succeeded the RAMSiR agency. This change in leadership clearly signalled a significant shift in the agency’s status and the assignment of new tasks to it. Whilst Tereshkova was a figurehead, Mitrofanova, a graduate of MGIMO, had previously held the post of First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; from 2009 to 2016, she served as the Russian Federation’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO; and since 2020, she has been Ambassador to Bulgaria. Under her leadership, in July 2021, 70 staff members of Russian diplomatic missions, implicated in links with the security services, were expelled from Bulgaria.
In 2008, Roszarubezhcentre became Rossotrudnichestvo, a body under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Rossotrudnichestvo is currently represented in 80 countries worldwide by 96 overseas missions. It reports directly to the President of the Russian Federation and falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rossotrudnichestvo thus bases its work on a network of overseas agents of influence established as far back as the Soviet era. The nature and scale of Rossotrudnichestvo’s activities are evident from its annual reports. As, for example, stated in Rossotrudnichestvo’s 2016 report:
‘The Agency pays particular attention to foreign nationals wishing to obtain a Russian education. <…> At present, more than 6,200 Russian schools abroad are integrated into a unified educational, methodological and information space. <…>. There are more than 6,000 organisations – foreign educational organisations of all types and forms of ownership – of which around 5,400 operate within the CIS. <… > Up-to-date data has been collected on the level of equipment, staff qualifications and the needs of educational organisations offering Russian language teaching and education in Russian from 1,000 organisations located in Hungary, Germany, Greece, Israel, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Finland, France, Croatia, Montenegro, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Cyprus. In 2016, Russian language courses were running in 58 countries worldwide at 63 Rossotrudnichestvo representative offices. Around 16,000 people completed training at these centres. <…> Seven face-to-face professional development events were held, with a total of 672 participants, and 12 scientific, methodological and expert events, with a total of 676 participants. The total number of specialists from CIS countries who undertook professional development in 2016 was 4,615.
In countries outside the CIS (Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc.), 102 events were held, with a total of over 5,700 participants. <…> The annual quota for the training of foreign nationals stands at 15,000. The education quota has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of Russian ‘soft power’ in this area of international humanitarian cooperation. <…> In 2016, Rossotrudnichestvo continued to implement a programme of short-term familiarisation visits to the Russian Federation for young representatives of political, civil society, academic and business circles from foreign countries <…> In 2016, 1,000 young foreign leaders from 100 countries visited the Russian Federation under the programme. [v]
Encouraging the study of the Russian language abroad through programmes developed in Russia and with the help of teachers trained in Russia is, of course, both a propaganda and a recruitment activity, aimed primarily at second- and third-generation emigrants. And this begins from a very young age.
Rossotrudnichestvo’s activities in various countries are centred around its representative offices – the so-called ‘Russian Houses’.
Since 2020, Rossotrudnichestvo has been headed by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Primakov, the grandson of the former Prime Minister and head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov (1929–2015), who succeeded Eleonora Mitrofanova. The previous career of Primakov the grandson – a historian by training, an international affairs journalist and a specialist on the Middle East – clearly attests to his personal involvement with the security services.
Following the start of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Rossotrudnichestvo came under sanctions from the European Union, Canada and Switzerland as “the main state body projecting the Kremlin’s soft power and hybrid influence, including the promotion of the ‘Russian World’ concept’. For many years, it has acted as an umbrella organisation for a network of Russian expatriates and agents of influence.’ Primakov himself was subject to the same sanctions in 2023.
The sanctions hampered the activities of Rossotrudnichestvo’s representative offices in European Union countries, but did not bring them to a halt. Quite the contrary. Since 1922, around 450 intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover have been expelled from EU countries. Their links with agents were severed, so an additional burden fell on the legal influence networks operated by Rossotrudnichestvo.