The Architecture of Repression: Russia’s Emerging System of Indoctrination, Digital Surveillance & Foreign Interference

This report does something the disinformation literature rarely attempts: it maps the internal machinery rather than the external effects. Pamment and his co-authors trace how the structures within Russia’s Presidential Administration that manage domestic indoctrination, population surveillance, and control connect to the apparatus of foreign interference — treating these not as separate phenomena but as two outputs of the same institutional system. The sourcing is methodologically serious, combining public documents, leaked materials, and employment-history analysis to reconstruct organisational architecture that its principals have no interest in making legible.

For FIMI practitioners, the operational implication is significant. If domestic repression and foreign interference are products of the same system rather than parallel programmes, then understanding one requires understanding the other. The report’s focus on institutional design — who reports to whom, what resources flow where, which programmes exist and at what scale — provides a structural baseline that campaigns-and-narratives analysis cannot supply on its own. The section assessing implications for Ukraine and European security translates the architecture into threat terms without overreaching the evidence.