Nashi, Russia's new militant nationalist movement

A new militant nationalist youth movement in Russia, known as 'Nashi' (Russian for Ours), has developed a formidable organisation to oppose alleged enemies at home and abroad to glorify imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, a media report said on Monday.

In its upcoming issue, Newsweek magazine has described the movement as President Vladimir Putin's shock forces and contends that the movement is newest weapon in the drive to reclaim Russia's bygone regional dominance and is lavishly bankrolled by Kremlin.

Hours after Estonia removed a statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from Tallinn on April 27, the magazine says, a virtual blitzkrieg struck the tiny Baltic nation's computer systems. Massive onslaughts of spam brought down the Web sites of government agencies, banks and news services and paralysed large parts of Estonia's cyber-reliant economy.

NATO, the magazine reports, sent emergency Internet security assistance to defend the embattled member state. The Kremlin denied any role in the assault, whose source had yet to be positively identified as the electronic bombardment finally subsided last week.

However, Newsweek says it is the United States, not Estonia, that is Nashi's particular bugbear.

"It is time to put an end to America's being the strongest and most influential empire," the magazine quoted Nikolai Panchenko, a ranking member of the group, as saying.

Panchenko was echoing the views of the Russian leadership, whose stance toward the United States is more belligerent now than at any time since the cold war, the report noted.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Moscow last week, seeking to calm down the hostility before Presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin sit down together at a G8 summit next month in Germany.

Nevertheless, in two days of talks Rice won no concessions from the Russians beyond an agreement to cool the anti-US rhetoric such as Putin's grim reference in a speech earlier this month to certain countries' making claims of exceptionality and becoming a new threat, as during the time of the Third Reich, Newsweek recalls.

New recruits to Nashi, it says, are given basic military training and can graduate to the black-uniformed street patrols of the Nashi Police or the fledgling Nashi Army, which earlier this month held military exercises 25 miles south of Moscow in Podolsk, marching, running obstacle courses, field-stripping firearms and practicing marksmanship.

The group, which now claims 15,000 ranking members and 100,000 supporters, was launched by the Kremlin in response to the pro-democracy Orange Revolution that toppled a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine in 2004, the report says.

"The idea was to create an ideology based on a total devotion to the president and his course," it quotes Sergei Markov, one of the Russian youth movement's architects, as saying.