The paper analyses official youth politics as the counterpoint to these politics of radicalization. It shows that youth politics developed in response to a range of alleged threats to the Russian statehood – terrorist attacks, conspiracies to overthrow the government and a concerted weakening of the national, quasi-racial corpus. Youth became understood as a political group that tends to radicalize due to depression, the sheer impossibility of upward social mobility and an unformed political consciousness. Youth politics give youth the chance to be discovered and offer them positive identifications with their lives and 'Russia'.
The paper looks at how political events of international and national range constituted subsequent possibilities for the Putin administration to endue its youth politics with historical legitimacy and discredit other forms of political activism as radicalism. Because the government's policies are not easily susceptible to the Western European binary divisions of politics (into left and right, democratic and authoritarian) the Russian politics of radicalization enhance our understanding of New Right ideologies more generally.
