The spy agency has drafted legislation that would allow FSB officers to take part in the work of juvenile commissions across the country and feed intelligence on so-called “troubled youth” into government blacklists and databases.
The FSB’s new prison-and-detention empire, relaunched only this summer, will also be folded into the system for “preventing juvenile crime.” The Lubyanka openly admits that this latest move is a reaction to efforts by Ukrainian security services to recruit Russia’s young people.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian minors have increasingly been caught attempting acts of sabotage — from setting fire to railway equipment to planting explosives on military bases. In September 2024, for example, the FSB arrested two 16-year-olds for an arson attack on a helicopter at a military airbase in Omsk, Western Siberia. They confessed to being offered $20,000 by an unknown man who had contacted them on Telegram and provided instructions.
According to official statistics for last year, 308 teenagers were brought to court for “crimes against public safety,” including 48 for terrorism, while another 39 were punished for “crimes against the constitutional order.”
It appears the FSB is eager to reintroduce the KGB’s old practice of political crime prevention, known as profilaktika. In the Soviet era, this meant being summoned to a local government building and into a soundproofed room, where a state security officer would lay out the options for a rebellious individual — and the consequences of defiance, ranging from career destruction to imprisonment.
Today, the role of those special rooms seems set to be played by the offices of juvenile commissions operating across Russia. But that is likely to be only the first step. If a teenager refuses to comply, the next summons could well be to an FSB-run detention facility — to make the potential consequences clearer to both the child and their family.
The new legislation is part of a broader Kremlin crackdown on teenagers. Alongside the prevention and blacklisting of “potential troublemakers,” there is a push for harsher repression and punishment. A bill lowering the age of criminal responsibility for sabotage-related crimes from 16 to 14 has already passed its first reading in the State Duma and is expected to become law soon.
The same legislation will abolish the statute of limitations for sabotage-related crimes, eliminate suspended sentences for participation in sabotage organizations, and restrict parole rights until three-quarters of a sentence have been served.
The FSB has also been adding minors to official lists of terrorists since the start of the war in Ukraine, alongside Islamist extremists.
Since 2022, Russian security services have been reintroducing Soviet methods, moving swiftly backward through history in search of inspiration — from the KGB of the 1980s to the post-Stalin agencies of the 1950s, and even to Stalin’s secret police of the 1940s.
This trajectory suggests the FSB may ultimately adopt the early practices of the Soviet security services for “troubled youth.” After all, both the KGB and the FSB have long praised the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, for his supposed compassion toward street children made homeless by the revolution and the Civil War. Dzerzhinsky’s admirers rarely mention that in 1935, his successors pushed through a resolution entitled “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Delinquency,” which lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12. Punishments included the death penalty.
That brutal measure was prompted by a letter from Marshal Kliment Voroshilov to the Soviet leadership, in which he proposed the state execution of children, citing rising juvenile crime in Moscow — including an incident where the son of a deputy prosecutor was wounded by a nine-year-old boy. To the Soviet authorities, it looked like an attack on a government official — an act of terrorism. The logic behind that decision strongly resembles that of the current regime.
The reintroduction of Soviet-style repressive practices toward teenagers is troubling enough, but it likely marks only the beginning of a broader campaign.