A couple of weeks back, while news readers were averting their gaze from photographs of a shirtless Vladimir Putin fishing in Siberia, two videos circulating on the Internet laid bare a different, much more chilling, portion of the Russian body politic. The first was a crude bit of agitprop thought to originate with the Nashi, a Kremlin-funded youth movement loyal to Putin whose work involves denouncing the president's critics as fascists, homosexuals or foreign-controlled traitors.

The eight-minute clip, which eventually found its way to YouTube, was ostensibly meant to persuade draft-eligible teenagers to seek a career in the army. But its true object was to foment paranoia. Images of U.S. soldiers marching on unidentified soil flashed across the screen, while a narrator warned that America aims to "colonize" Russia for its oil. Former Soviet satellites in the 'Stans and eastern Europe were depicted as beachheads for an impending invasion. One animated segment portrayed worm-like tentacles emanating from the United States and creeping around the globe through former Soviet republics like the Baltics, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. "They are right next door," the voice-over said. "They will take any available opportunity to take us over."

The clip passed largely unnoticed in Washington and London, where even state-funded disinformation from Russia is greeted these days with a yawn. But the second video, for which the far-right group National Socialists of Rus later claimed responsibility, shocked the sensibilities of Western viewers. In it, two men labelled onscreen as immigrants from Tajikistan and Dagestan were seen kneeling, bound and gagged, in a wooded area somewhere in southern Russia. A giant swastika hung in trees behind their heads. Heavy metal music blared in the background. Then, without warning, a masked man appeared in the frame, grabbing the head of one victim and hacking it off with a hunting knife. Moments later, he drew a gun and shot the second victim in the head. "Glory to Russia," the killer shouted as the body fell into an open grave. With that, the screen abruptly went black.

Strictly speaking, the two clips were unrelated -- random postcards from a nation defined by lurid rhetoric, lawlessness and tragedy. But as Russia drifts ever further from familiar notions of civil democracy, human rights watchers and political observers are starting to see threads between officially sanctioned groups like the Nashi, and the fringe-dwellers responsible for the online executions. Both draw inspiration from Nazi-style ultranationalism, with its obsession about ethnic and ideological purity. Both invoke a Russian destiny to wield power throughout its hemisphere. Both do their business under the nose of -- in the Nashi's case, with the blessing of -- a government that purports to wage a war against extremism.

The 100,000-strong Nashi, whose name means "Ours Together," has been dubbed the "Putin Youth" by liberal critics and intellectuals. "This is a way for the Kremlin to entrench its xenophobic, authoritarian political culture in the next generation," says Edward Lucas, the British author of a forthcoming book called The New Cold War And How To Win It. And the Hitler echoes go beyond blind loyalty. At a rally north of Moscow in July, 10,000 members gathered under images of ballistic missiles to burn works of "unpatriotic" fiction and non-fiction, while studying a manifesto that calls on young people to mobilize in defence of the motherland. Couples were even encouraged to bolster Russia's "pure" population by using special tents set up for sessions of connubial intimacy.

As for the National Socialists of Rus, they're precisely the sort of group Putin claimed to target five years ago with the passage of draconian anti-extremism laws. But after beefing up the legislation again this summer, the Kremlin seems more interested in deploying it against political rivals, leaving violent radicals to their own devices. The result has been predictable: at the end of July, the country's chief prosecutor reported that hate crimes had gone up sixfold since last year, while independent think tanks count fully 37 homicides this year related to political extremism. The Moscow daily Noviye Izvestia recently pegged the number of radical youth groups in Russia at 141, with membership totalling about a half-million.

No one's predicting that Europe is headed for another 1938, of course -- at least not yet. But for years, Western leaders have proceeded on the comforting hope that the enigmatic president's drive for central political control would ultimately lead to greater internal stability. Now, as Russia heads toward an election next March, the question seems not whether Putin's United Russia party will retain its current level of support, or whether his hand-picked successor -- according to the current constitution, Putin cannot run again -- will share his ability to galvanize the electorate. It's whether anyone has the capacity, or the inclination, to control the forces he's unleashed.

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