MOSCOW, July 2 — Yulia Kuliyeva, only 19 and already a commissar, sat at a desk and quizzed each young person who sat opposite her, testing for ideological fitness to participate in summer camp.
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Yekaterina Savina/Agence France-Presse

Nashi members held photos of a young Russian killed in Estonia.

“Tell me, what achievements of Putin’s policy can you name?” she asked, referring to Russia’s president since 2000, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Well, it’s the stabilization in the economy,” the girl answered. “Pensions were raised.”

“And what’s in Chechnya?” Ms. Kuliyeva asked, probing her knowledge of a separatist conflict that has killed tens of thousands and, although largely won by Russia’s federal forces and Chechen loyalists, continues.

“In Chechnya, it’s that it is considered a part of Russia,” the girl responded.

“Is this war still going on there?”

“No, everything is quiet.”

Ms. Kuliyeva is a leader in the Ideological Department of Nashi, the largest of a handful of youth movements created by Mr. Putin’s Kremlin to fight for the hearts and minds of Russia’s young people in schools, on the airwaves and, if necessary, on the streets.

Nashi, which translates as “ours,” has since its creation two years ago become a disciplined and lavishly funded instrument of Mr. Putin’s campaign for political control before parliamentary elections in December and a presidential election next March.

It has organized mass marches in support of Mr. Putin — most recently gathering tens of thousands of young people in Moscow to send the president text messages — and staged rowdy demonstrations over foreign policy issues that resulted in the physical harassment of the British and Estonian ambassadors here.

Its main role, though, is the ideological cultivation — some say indoctrination — of today’s youth, the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia.

To Nashi, young people are neither the lost generation of the turbulent 1990s nor the soulless consumerists of Generation P (for Pepsi) imagined by the writer Viktor Pelevin in 2000. They are, as Nashi’s own glossy literature says, “Putin’s Generation.” “Why Putin’s generation?” Nashi’s national spokeswoman, Anastasia Suslova, asked at the group’s headquarters. “It is because Putin has qualitatively changed Russia. He brought stability and the opportunity for modernization and development of the country. Thus we, the young people — myself, for instance, I am 22, and these eight years were the longest part of my conscious life when we were growing up, and the country was changing with us.”

Nashi emerged in the wake of youth-led protests that toppled sclerotic governments in other post-Soviet republics, especially in Ukraine in 2004. It was joined by similar groups, like the Youth Guard, which belongs to the pro-Putin party United Russia; Locals, a group created by the Moscow region government that recently launched an anti-immigrant campaign; and the Grigorevtsy, affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.

The groups, organizers and critics say, are part of an effort to build a following of loyal, patriotic young people and to defuse any youthful resistance that could emerge during the careful orchestration of Mr. Putin’s successor in next year’s election. Nashi, the largest and most prominent of the groups, now claims 10,000 active members and as many as 200,000 participants in its events.

“The Kremlin decided that youth organizations can be exploited,” said Nikolai V. Petrov, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He compared the youth activists to “Landsknechts,” medieval foot soldiers hired to carry out military campaigns.

Russia’s youth, like their parents, remain largely apolitical, seeing what passes for politics here as something remote from their daily lives. Nashi’s goal is to change that, spurring youthful activism, although within the careful limits of the Kremlin’s sanction.

Nashi’s ideology is contained in a manifesto, based on the writings of Vladislav Y. Surkov, Mr. Putin’s chief political adviser, who has been called the Karl Rove of the Kremlin. At Nashi events and in interviews like Ms. Kuliyeva’s, members cite the manifesto’s passages, or “Surkov’s text,” like cant.