History provides a powerful toolkit for political rhetoric, containing actors, their normative classifications and reciprocal relations. This chapter looks at how references to recognised narratives about the past are used by Russian policymakers campaigning in favour of the Foreign Agent law and its amendments between 2012 and 2022. By analysing the rhetoric of actors in charge of the policy, this chapter looks at how ideas about the past are used as a part of the symbolic repertoire rationalising the new measure to broad audiences. The use of semantically charged categorisations decoupled the language of the policymakers from the functional rationales, such as considerations for the transparency of civil society. By signifying and attributing the actor category of Foreign Agent alongside more recognisable notions rooted in various episodes of the nation’s past, the policymakers draw legitimacy to the law. The analysis of this chapter refers to the method of Membership Categorisation Analysis and particularly to the notion of Membership Devices to look at how historical knowledge manifests in the evaluative identification of actors and their mutually binding positions.