Luke Harding
Its stunts have included hounding Britain's former ambassador to Moscow, comparing Estonia's president to a pig, and encouraging young patriotic Russian girls to wear knickers with Vladimir Putin's name on them.
But now Nashi – the Kremlin's fanatical youth organisation – has embarked on a new campaign against the west and its media, suing the Independent and three other European newspapers last week for libel.
Nashi has taken legal action against the Independent over accusations that its activists issued death threats against a Russian journalist. The organisation is also suing France's Le Monde, and Le Journal Du Dimanche, as well as the liberal German daily Frankfurter Rundschau.
Earlier this month, Nashi activists picketed the home of Alexander Podrabinek, a Soviet-era dissident, after he wrote an internet article criticising local officials.
The officials had forced the owner of a Moscow kebab shop to change its name from Anti-Soviet to Soviet. Podrabinek accused the current Russian authorities of trying to whitewash the image of the Soviet Union – prompting Nashi to demonstrate outside his flat and call for him to be kicked out of Russia.
In an article published on 2 October, the Independent's Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, reported how Podrabinek claimed he had been forced to flee after he and his family received threats. The Frankfurter Rundschau compared Nashi's alleged behaviour to "banditism", describing it as reminiscent of the Stalin era.
Today, Nashi's lawyer, Sergei Zhorin, said the youth group wanted the papers to withdraw claims that activists had directly threatened Podrabinek. "The papers printed wrong information. They damaged Nashi's reputation and image," he said. Nashi was a harmless "young anti-fascist organisation," he added.
Nashi has asked for 500,000 roubles compensation (£10,500) but was prepared to come to a "peaceful settlement" if the newspapers backed down, Zhorin said. Walker said he hadn't received formal notification from Nashi that it was suing. "We are waiting to hear from them," he told the Guardian.
This isn't the first time Nashi has targeted its perceived foreign enemies. It has previously staged a noisy campaign against Tony Brenton, Britain's former ambassador to Moscow, picketing the British embassy and comparing him to Hitler after he shared a platform with Eduard Limonov, a radical Kremlin critic.
It has also sent an inflatable tank to Estonia's embassy.
The nationalist organisation enjoys the blessing of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's leaders, both of whom have turned up in short sleeves at Nashi's annual summer camp on the shores of Lake Seliger.
The Kremlin's chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, founded the organisation in 2005 apparently to forestall a pro-western uprising in Russia following Ukraine's Orange Revolution. According to today's Moscow Times, Surkov reportedly met with Nashi leaders recently and instructed them to harass Podrabinek.
The opposition activist, who was arrested in the 1970s and spent several years in Soviet labour camps, recently emerged from hiding to address a rally commemorating the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. In his article, he wrote that the Soviet past was "bloody, false and shameful" – a view that contradicts the Kremlin's recent attempts to rehabilitate Stalin.
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