Russia’s Digital Panopticon:

"Amina" and Migrant Surveillance

Russian jurist-bloggers describe "Amina" as "a gift from the President to all migrants". The app is often presented as a tool to help migrant workers register their status quickly and without unnecessary bureaucracy. It seems that this app should make life much easier: under the new rules, registration will take place not at the place of residence but at the address of the migration center. Officials point out that migrants will no longer need a landlord or intermediaries who charge money for their services, as registration can now be completed simply through this mobile app.

However, the app also has features that allow the Russian government to keep tabs on people. A key feature of the app is that it automatically sends the device’s geolocation data to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. This means that literally every move a migrant worker makes can be tracked. What risks does this entail? Beyond the loss of privacy, the app could lead to the criminalization of daily life, as even a minor deviation, such as visiting a different address than the one registered, could trigger suspicion. This data can also be used to justify police raids, stops, or harassment, for instance, when groups are detected gathering in one place or when authorities use the information to single out certain nationalities for checks. Another important objective the app seeks to fulfill is creating dependency on state technology. Migrants cannot opt out of using "Amina" without risking staying in Russia illegally or facing deportation.

At the same time, the Kremlin is shutting down internet access in various regions, creating serious risks for those who are required to use the application. Since September 2025, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development has introduced so-called “whitelists” of online services that are supposed to remain accessible to Russians even during internet restrictions. However, a special correspondent for the Russian media outlet The Bell points out that there is no single standardized “whitelist”. Instead, different operators maintain different “whitelists”, which do not always function properly. As a result, the “Amina” app may not be included in a particular operator’s “whitelist” or may simply fail to work even if it is included.

If the application cannot read geolocation data for several days, the system issues a notification to update the address, and if no information is provided for more than three working days, the migrant could be removed from the register and placed in the register of controlled persons. In Russia, controlled persons are defined as citizens whose activities, actions, or assets owned and/or used by them are subject to state or municipal oversight. This means that migrants risk losing their housing, jobs, and bank accounts.

In addition, there is concern that "Amina" may transmit photos and videos from phones with the app installed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and that it could also activate the camera at any time at the app’s request to monitor which other apps have been opened on the device.

Structural racism refers to the form of racism that is deeply and pervasively embedded in the entire system – laws, policies, work of institutions, media narratives, and everyday practices that consistently disadvantage certain groups while privileging others. In Russia, this system has long roots.

The Soviet Union officially promoted "friendship of peoples" (druzhba narodov), but racism and xenophobia continued to flourish. Despite official slogans of equality, everyday life told a different story, where racial and ethnic prejudices were widespread but rarely acknowledged by the authorities. One of the most notable examples was the African students’ protests in Moscow in 1963, often described as "the largest demonstrations in the USSR since the 1920s". Around 500 students protested over the death of a Ghanaian student who, they claimed, had dated a Russian woman and was killed by Soviet citizens due to racial discrimination.

It is important to note that racism was directed not only at "newcomers" but also at Soviet citizens themselves. The whole system was built on a hierarchy where Russians occupied the dominant position, while other nationalities were marked as outsiders. One of the clearest examples was the so-called "fifth line" in the internal passport system, which required every citizen to list their nationality. This small line had huge consequences: it could determine access to jobs, housing, and universities, and it made discrimination almost automatic.

Central Asians, who were highly visible in Moscow and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), often ended up in the lowest-paid and least desirable jobs, such as street cleaning, construction, or factory shifts. In Moscow, they were frequently denied housing and routinely faced ethnic slurs such as "churki", which reinforced their position as "second-class citizens" within the Soviet hierarchy.

The Soviet practice of associating non-Russian ethnicities with "backwardness" and low-status labor did not disappear with the USSR. In modern Russia, Central Asian migrants remain concentrated in physically demanding and low-paid jobs. However, even this type of work is becoming increasingly difficult for migrants to find. In the summer of 2025, the governor of Saint Petersburg signed a decree prohibiting foreign citizens from working in the delivery and taxi industries. November marks the end of the three-month period during which businesses were supposed to adapt. Officially, the authorities talk about "combating shadow employment" and "[giving] more jobs for Russians". However, in practice, this means job losses for thousands of migrant workers and financial losses for Russian businesses themselves.

The Human Rights Watch report shows that migrants in Russia are subject to police checks and harassment simply because of their appearance. The Nazi Video Monitoring Project notes that after Russians’ interest in the war in Ukraine began to decline in 2022, Russian far-right groups shifted back to their main theme: the harassment of migrants, primarily from Central Asia. The incidents included coordinated attacks by groups of young men of Slavic appearance targeting Central Asian workers. These cases involved beatings or the use of pepper spray, often accompanied by ethnic slurs or xenophobic remarks.

One of the cases that intensified public attention to this issue was an incident that took place in December 2025 in the settlement of Gorki-2 near Moscow. According to reports, a teenager carried out an attack at a school: he used pepper spray and later stabbed a security guard and a fourth-grade student. The boy, a citizen of Tajikistan, died from his injuries. In its official statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Tajikistan stated that the attack had been motivated by ethnic hatred.

However, Amina is not limited to migrants from Central Asia. It also targets workers from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine, placing them under the same digital surveillance regime. Each of these groups has its own history of marginalization in Russia. Migrants from the South Caucasus are frequently stereotyped as criminals or members of ethnic mafias, and the term "persons of Caucasian nationality" (litsa kavkazskoi natsional’nosti) became a coded way of marking them as suspicious in police reports and media coverage. Ukrainian workers, despite their cultural and linguistic proximity to Russians, have also been subject to xenophobic abuse, often labeled as "cheap labor" whose presence threatens the stability of the domestic job market.

In colloquial Russian speech, certain nicknames emerged to refer to people from neighboring countries. These terms often reveal deep-seated stereotypes inherited from Soviet and imperial pasts, when Russia positioned other nations as "provincial". For example, Ukrainians have often been called "khokhly" - a word that originally referred to the traditional Cossack hairstyle but over time came to stereotype Ukrainians as "rustic" and "too simple-minded". Russian media are filled with stories portraying Ukrainian migrants as criminals. For example, Komsomolskaya Pravda published a story claiming that a Ukrainian man named Stepan in the Samara region beat a girl for coming to a shop in a swimsuit, allegedly explaining that it was "according to Sharia law". This narrative was especially misleading, as it attempted to connect Ukrainian identity with Islamic extremism, which is entirely detached from reality, given that Islam has a very limited presence in Ukraine. In August 2025, the Russian regional media outlet Ivanovonews published an article titled "Khokhly will give lectures on the adaptation of labor migrants in the Ivanovo region". The piece described the results of a local grant competition, highlighting that a Ukrainian cultural organization named "Mriya" ("Dream"), later renamed "Slavyane" ("Slavs"), received public funding to conduct lectures on migrant integration. The author used the slur word "khokhly" to refer to Ukrainians and implied that the organization was concealing its national identity to obtain financial support.

Interestingly, Moldovan labor migrants are usually overlooked by Russian propaganda, despite their significant presence in the country. According to the Russian state news agency TASS, the Moldovan diaspora in Russia numbered more than 300,000 people in 2025. This relative silence can be explained by the perception of Moldovans as politically and culturally nonthreatening, given the Russia-occupied region of Transnistria, which Moscow often presents as part of its sphere of influence. Nonetheless, Moldovan migrant workers remain vulnerable to stereotyping and labor exploitation and are also compelled to use the Amina application.

The introduction of the "Amina" app must be read in this context. It does not operate as a neutral digital service but as a continuation of long-standing hierarchies that place work migrants under suspicion by default. Its constant geolocation tracking and reporting to the Ministry of Internal Affairs effectively automates racial profiling - every deviation from «normal» movement can be flagged as suspicious, justifying further police intervention.

Russia is steadily building a system of digital authoritarianism, where apps, biometric databases, and internet restrictions merge into a single infrastructure of control. What appears on the surface as modernization or digital convenience is, in reality, a mechanism for surveillance and repression.

One of the clearest examples of this strategy is the rollout of the new app "MAX", which is the Kremlin’s new state messenger, pre-installed by default on all new smartphones and tablets from September 1, 2025, promoted as a "national alternative" to WhatsApp and Telegram, and designed as a super-app that unites messaging, government services, and payments. However, the app is not simply an aggregator of everyday services such as paying bills or booking appointments. It is also designed as a tool of surveillance, binding citizens to the state through mandatory digital interactions and creating opportunities for unprecedented monitoring. The app's privacy policy explicitly states that "MAX" will not only collect data such as IP addresses and locations, but also reserves the right to transfer this data to third parties and government agencies.

Unlike apps designed for the general population, "Amina" specifically targets migrant workers, combining elements of surveillance and behavioral monitoring under the guise of assistance. It does not merely extend the state’s digital governance to new groups but creates a separate, racialized layer of control in which migrants’ movements, communications, and compliance can be continuously tracked and evaluated. At the same time, advertising for "MAX" is actively directed at all residents of Russia, suggesting that the Kremlin’s strategy is to extend digital control over everyone living within its borders through multiple, overlapping instruments of monitoring.

Taken together, those tools exemplify how Russia’s pursuit of digital sovereignty is, in fact, a project of social control. By merging administrative convenience with coercive monitoring, the state normalizes surveillance as an ordinary feature of civic life. In this system, technology becomes an infrastructure of obedience, where visibility to the state replaces personal autonomy.