MOSCOW — The student activist, looking bohemian with stylishly mussed hair, pointy black shoes and black jeans, had to beg off his appointment. He had just been summoned by "the authorities."
But Nikita Borovikov didn't seem particularly apprehensive. In fact, he seemed rather pleased.
As one of the leaders of a new wave of youth groups that are loudly rallying around President Vladimir V. Putin, he's already met with the Russian leader two times, he said.
"So what?" he added defensively. "Let me ask you a philosophical question: What's bad about supporting the authorities?"
Meet Putin's sidewalk avengers, scruffy cheerleaders and foot soldiers. In the last few years of the powerful president's reign, tens of thousands of Russian students have joined hastily organized youth groups and headed into the streets, young people who believe that the stability of their homeland depends upon squashing political opposition and propping up their beloved father figure.
Members of Borovikov's organization are bombarded with talk of the dangers of "fascists," a term organizers throw around to refer to political rivals, including neo-Nazis and pro-democracy liberals such as former chess champion Garry Kasparov.
"We're trying to tell people about the movements that don't say they're fascist, but they are," said Borovikov, deputy head of Nashi, or Ours.
"People should understand what can happen if they support this or that political force. . . . They are fascists in disguise. We want to open their eyes."
The youth groups were formed around the spring of 2005, after the pro-democracy "color revolutions" had swept through the former Soviet bloc. In Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, street protests had pushed Kremlin-backed leaders out of power, bringing in governments that leaned toward the West.
The groups are a symptom of the times in Russia, of the peculiar buzz around Putin that is somehow both neo-Soviet and relentlessly capitalistic. Having reinvented himself, going from unknown KGB spy to revered and iconic leader, Putin is to leave the presidency in May. He has announced his willingness to serve as prime minister, and is widely expected to keep hold of his considerable power.
In Russia, they call these youths "Putin's generation": too young to remember much of Soviet times, but old enough to recoil from memories of the tumultuous Boris Yeltsin years.
