Modern practice of implementing state monitoring and control in the field of countering the spread of destructive ideology in Russia

Abstract

The Russian normative and strategic framework treats destructive ideology as a threat to national security and to traditional spiritual and moral values, whereas the supervisory and monitoring toolkit remains tied to the formally defined offences of extremism and terrorism; a gap opens between a broad policy objective and a narrow set of legal triggers. The study aims to determine to what extent the existing system of state monitoring and control is able to cover destructive ideology in the broad sense set by Presidential Decree No. 809 and by the Strategy for Countering Extremism adopted in December 2024. The research relies on formal-legal and systemic analysis of the normative acts governing the monitoring of interethnic and interreligious relations, the maintenance of registries of prohibited information, and the federal list of extremist materials. It is established that the monitoring function of early warning and analytical forecasting and the control function of supervision, blocking and imposition of liability rest on different legal grounds and are weakly synchronised, while destructive ideology lacking the formal features of extremism remains primarily an object of observation rather than of suppression. The mismatch between the scope of the protected category in strategic documents and in supervisory legislation shows that the effectiveness of the policy is achieved by aligning the conceptual apparatus and by separating the regimes of monitoring and control, not by multiplying prohibitions.