[9][10] The congress positions itself as a meeting of “the only representatives of society and the state who have the democratic legitimacy they received from Russian citizens”.

Several participants of the Congress who took part in its work remotely from Russia were forced to hide their names and faces for security reasons.

[13] Prior to the start of the congress, the organizing committee included Nina Belyaeva, Gennady Gudkov, Elena Lukyanova, Ilya Ponomarev, Mark Feygin, Pyotr Tsarkov and Arkady Yankovsky.

To conduct current political activities between meetings, an Executive Council of 11 people was created to replace the organizing committee.

Deputy Kostromichev from Northern Tushino suggested renaming the Congress: I strongly disagree with the name of our meeting.

At the congress, there were speeches about the murder of Putin, in particular from Ponomarev himself, as well as the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Alexei Goncharenko and the founder of the Artpodgotovka movement Vyacheslav Maltsev, who is considered by many in the opposition to be a provocateur.

[22] Former deputy from the Voronezh Oblast Nina Belyaeva accused Ponomarev of distorting the draft document on lustrations prepared by her.

The next day, Ponomarev called Belyaeva "a person with psychological problems" in response to an offer to negotiate her claimed intellectual property rights, and the organizers turned off the microphone of the SOTA journalist when he began to find out what led to the conflict.

[28] Russian activists living in different cities of Poland did not recognize Ilya Ponomarev and his congress:[29] Without denying the need for a coordinating council of the Russian opposition, we declare that the legitimacy of such a body can be based solely on the electoral procedure, conducted honestly and taking into account the actual reputation of the candidates.

However, many strong opposition candidates (notably Ivan Zhdanov, Vladimir Milov and Lyubov Sobol) were never allowed to run in Russian elections.

Thus, firstly, we question whether the participants in the "Congress" could have won a fair election; secondly, we believe that over the long time that has passed since their election, their electoral potential has changed.The Free Nations League issued a statement that they do not recognize “any political forces and centers that will justify the preservation of the Russian Federation in its modern form,” because the wording from the draft declaration of the congress contradicts the approach of the FNL and Ponomarev's statements.

Journalist Harun Sidorov noted that the dispute over who will determine political self-determination - national and regional movements or Russian revolutionaries - so far looks like dividing the skin of an unkilled bear.