The "Putin Jungend"?

Russian president Vladimir Putin has created a new youth organization which is already being likened to the Hitler Jungend ("Hitler Youth") of pre-WWII Nazi Germany.

It has a name (Nashi, or "ours") with apparently "chilling nationalist overtones." The British Telegraph newspaper writes that

When two outsiders – one from an opposition party, the other a journalist – sneaked into its founding conference, they were humiliated and one was beaten.

This, I would point out, is actually somewhat different from Hitler's approach. According to a first-hand account of Education in Nazi Germany published by two British observers in 1938, the Nazis kept the violence and war-mongering to a minimum in the early years of the of the Hitler Jungend, in order to build up its membership.* The ultraviolence came later. It seems as though Putin doesn't feel he has the luxury of time on his side, and is pushing things along rather hastily.

If he is a would-be dictator, the world is fortunate that he's clumsier than the one in whose footsteps he appears to be following.

* No link, alas, it's an obscure booklet that I picked up at a used bookstore that was probably never reprinted.