Testing
Cool; showing off Cyrillic, I presume? 
Yeah, I was thinking about opening a GD thread on the new Putin youth movement that has a name eerily similar to the Hitler youth movement. The name of the movement in the title is pronounce “Nashi”. […shiver…]
I’ll play if you do…
It translates, more or less, to “our(s)” though I’ll hazard a guess it’s a portmanteauing or acronym. I’d bet nobody in Russia has formed the association with the shorthand for Nazional Deutsche Socialistische ArbeitersPartei though.
However, “Putin Youth” has an eerie ring, no matter what the group name may be. Are they themselves calling it that, or is it the commentator’s usage?
In From Russia With Love, Nash is the name СМЕРШ operative Red Grant, posing as a British agent, gives himself when he meets James Bond on the Orient Express.
Polycarp: I’ll bet it’s related to the Latin “nostra”, but that brings to mind “La Cosa Nostra” (Italian for “That Thing of Ours”, aka The Mafia) and I would hardly accuse Vladimir Putin or anyone else in Russia of having any truck with such things.
They might slip Polonium into my food, for one thing.
In Russian, Nashi translates to “ours,” as in “etyi confeti nashi,” or “these candies are ours”
The URL contains “Наши”, a UTF-8 string. Posting seems to kind of screw up how the URL looks but it still works right. That means the actual sequence of bits is the same but the page says its encoding is something other than UTF-8.
Odd but not fatal. I have no idea how reliable the blog post is, of course, I only posted it to see how it would work.
http://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/nashi-Ðаши-youth-movement-run-by-kremlin/
Danja: Yes, I knew that. So does “nostra” in Latin. BTW, how are the vowels pronounced in “nashi”? Same as the vowels in “Nazi”?
And, while we’re there, is “Nazi” the term used in Russian also, and how is it pronounced?
Why shouldn’t Russia have a cult of personality built around a strong leader? What’s the worst that could happen?
Derleth, the ‘a’ in ‘nashi’ is a short a, with the final ‘i’ being more of an ‘ee’ sound (similar to ‘nazi’)
gardentraveler The ‘a’ in ‘natsist’ - нацист - is pronounced similarly to the ‘a’ in ‘nashi’. However, in my experience Russians tend to refer to фашист or фашисты (fashist, fashisti) rather than Nazi.
Caveat: IANA native speaker of Russian.
Well, seeing as the Cyrillic and the conversation are both fully functional, why not just move this thread to GD? 
That’d be fine by me. Would it be a first?
Sure, why not?
Right, and [spoiler]Tatiana doesn’t like him because it means “one of ours” - a Soviet agent.
If he were svoi, he would be one of “theirs”, or a British agent for real. Never figured out if that made sense or not.
[/spoiler]
Regards,
Shodan
Well, okay. Thanks. 
This BBC article might be a good place to start.
This week it emerged that the movement is planning to distribute a booklet to head teachers across the country to help them to spot “fascists and their sympathisers” in schools.
Nashi denounces free market liberals who are ready to sell off Russia’s assets to the highest bidder but they also oppose an ultra-left party, the National Bolsheviks, led by the maverick writer Eduard Limonov.(Note that the writer is using “liberal” in the classical or worldwide sense.)
One question is, who is financing this movement? Obviously, the government, but how is that justified? Also, aren’t there eerie similarities to Hitler Youth in terms of ideals and methods? Opposition leaders, including Kasparov, have expressed fear that the Nashi are helping to end all freedom of expression in Russia.
I’d be the first to agree that developments in Russia are worrisome. Democracy has essentially died there. And the first thing I can see a resurgent Russian doing is trying to reclaim some of the pieces they lost when the Soviet Union broke up. The whole thing feels very much like Hitlerism in embryo.
This thread from July discusses the Nashi.
Sal Ammoniac, Time named Putin its Person of the Year today. I’d check out that article. While I think Putin is an autocrat and a killer, I’m not convinced he’s a Hitler or Stalin.