When Katya Girenko answered the door of her family's rundown St. Petersburg apartment early one Saturday morning in mid-June, she saw two teenagers through the peephole. They asked if they could speak to her father, Nikolai Mikhailovich. When he went to the door and asked what they wanted, a gunshot rang out. The bullet smashed through the flimsy door and ripped into Girenko's chest, killing him almost instantly.

At first glance, Girenko might seem an unlikely target for assassination. A tall, somewhat fragile 64-year-old with a bushy gray beard, he was an ethnographer and anthropologist who earned his reputation as an academic specializing in Swahili studies and research on kinship. But he was also the leading expert on an indigenous Russian tribe — the country's growing band of neo-Nazis. As founder of the Group for the Rights of Ethnic Minorities (GPEM), Girenko had been a key adviser in 15 Russian ethnic hate-crime trials, including the current prosecution of six members of the St. Petersburg neo-Nazi group Schultz88 for violent assault. Girenko's work has been crucial in ensuring that racially motivated assaults are classified as hate crimes, rather than mere hooliganism, and therefore warrant harsher sentences. He was gunned down as he was preparing for another trial, this one on charges of inciting racial hatred and violence involving a regional branch of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity (RNE) party in nearby Novgorod. Police cite Girenko's expert advice as the most likely motive for the hit, but are tight-lipped about possible suspects. No arrests have yet been made.

"Pity they didn't knock off that bastard sooner," says Alexei, 22, one of the Schultz88 members being prosecuted in St. Petersburg. "He really tried to put me behind

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) bars." In May, Alexei was released from six months in pretrial detention, but still faces the charges of violent assault. He says he had nothing to do with Girenko's murder.

A squat, powerfully built man bristling with barely contained aggression, Alexei is part of a new wave of nationalism that's sweeping through Russian society. As democratic reforms have foundered and living standards plummeted since the collapse of communism in 1991, the country's latent xenophobia has morphed into a more radical, virulent form — and more and more young people like Alexei are coming under the sway of neo-Nazi ideology as a way to reassert lost national pride.

Girenko's "assassination came as a catastrophe we had long been dreading," says Alexander Vinnikov, a friend and colleague who's also a member of the GPEM. That sense of dread is spreading among members of Russia's ethnic-minority communities. Just four days before Girenko's assassination, a group of neo-Nazis killed an Azeri passerby in Saratov, some 1,400 km south of St. Petersburg; and in May, human-rights groups claim a neo-Nazi gang beat a Pakistani student to death in Ulyanovsk, 350 km northeast of Saratov. According to the Moscow-based daily Izvestia, neo-Nazis have violently assaulted at least 15,000 people over the past seven years. A recent report by the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights says 20 to 30 victims a year die from such assaults, which are increasing at an annual rate of 30%. And according to Alexei, Girenko's murder marks a turning point for Russia's neo-Nazi movement. "[We are] a white man's al-Qaeda," he says. "We don't care how many [ethnic minorities] end up dead. The more, the better. The time of our jihad has come."

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Since 2001, Alexei says, Schultz88 and other neo-Nazi groups have organized themselves into cells, modeled on al-Qaeda, which come together for an attack and then disperse. Schultz88 is one of an estimated 50 neo-Nazi groups in Russia, 17 of them based in St. Petersburg. "Direct action [by Schultz88] has sent several hundred [people] to hospital," he says, lounging on a bench in St. Petersburg's lovely Arts Square, with two Schultz88 members sitting by his side. Members of the various neo-Nazi groups keep in touch "through the Internet and by other means, both domestically and abroad," he explains, instinctively clenching and unclenching his fists.

Casting a glance at a bronze statue of Alexander Pushkin, Alexei twists his mouth scornfully and tosses off some vile talk about the father of modern Russian literature, who was descended from an Abyssinian slave. "How could he be the Russian national poet?" Not that Alexei cares much for culture. After what he considers to be a lifetime of oppression, he says he's ready for war. A lathe operator by trade, his role models include Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma Federal Building bombing and was executed by lethal injection in 2001, and Robert Jay Mathews, leader of the Order, an American white supremacist group, who died in a shoot-out with police in December 1984. "We don't consider ourselves Russian," Alexei says. "We belong to the white race!"

According to Vyacheslav Sukhachev, professor of sociology at the University of St. Petersburg and an expert on Nazism, this kind of racism is seeping into society at large. Polls back this assertion up. In a survey by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Studies (VTSIOM) published last month, 61% of those polled approved of the "Russia for Russians" slogan, almost twice the 31% level recorded in 1998. According to a March study by the Moscow-based Ekspertiza Foundation, an independent think tank, 60% of those surveyed wanted to limit the presence of people from the Caucasus (Chechens, Dagestanis, Azeris and

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Armenians, among others) in the country, while 51% wanted similar constraints on the Chinese and 42% wanted to limit the influence of Jews. "The soft encroachment of nationalism increasingly permeates Russia," says Sukhachev. "What is happening is unprecedented.

Milder forms of racism have long been part of the Russian political scene. The Liberal Democratic Party, led by nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as the new Motherland Party and elements within the Communist Party, all espouse nationalist policies. The people of the Caucasus "must separate from us completely and never come over here!" Zhirinovsky recently told a reporter from the Armenian daily Novoye Vremya. Some 35% of the electorate supported nationalist parties in the last parliamentary elections, according to the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights.

As leader of the neo-Nazi Freedom Party, based in St. Petersburg, Yuri Belyayev would love to be part of the political mainstream. A burly former police officer who positively beams with forced joviality, he supports President Vladimir Putin and believes the President shares some of his goals. "He is for rubbing out the [ethnic minorities] and for a strong Russia," Belyayev says, "and so are we."

Back in the fall of 1999, Putin pledged "to rub out the terrorists on the john" in response to the bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities that were attributed to Chechen separatists. Sick of the war in Chechnya — in which more than 10,000 Russian soldiers have died over the past 10 years — and encouraged by nationalist propaganda, many Russians blamed people from the Caucasus as a whole. Though Putin was clearly referring to terrorists in his remarks and has repeatedly said all manifestations of racism "are absolutely impermissible," some wrongly took his statement to mean that nonwhite ethnic minorities were no longer welcome in Russia. Many people interpreted the remarks as "legitimizing what had been piling up in the mass psyche," says Olga Starovoitova of the Institute of Sociology in St. Petersburg.

Belyayev now frets that Putin is not a tough enough leader, and the country is disintegrating under the influx of nonwhite immigrants. Unless the Kremlin formally recognizes the neo-Nazis and shares political power, he says, the movement will be forced "to launch our version of Sinn Fein to keep talking to the government and our version of the I.R.A. to practice terror."

Belyayev sees himself as a defender of Russian interests, participating in politics but condoning violence "as the only self-defense left for Russian youth." He brags that a member of the Freedom Party pushed a Syrian student under a train in the St. Petersburg subway a couple of months ago. The student was killed. But Belyayev's political engagement leaves him open to accusations of weakness from more radical neo-Nazis.

Alex, a member of the Nationalist-Socialist Society, a newly launched movement that seeks to build a "unitary Russian state," says older Nazi leaders "will be wiped out as failures." Future success, he believes, will come from attacks launched by networks of autonomous cells and the use of genetics to achieve racial purity. Alex, a post-graduate student at a major Moscow university, says his colleagues are intent on gaining positions in business, politics and the media. "Getting people to gradually accept our ideological maxims will get us further than just drawing blood in the streets," he says. "That way we'll pack them into ovens in the long run."

According to Petr Khomyakov, a leading proponent of Russian nationalism, similar ideas are spreading among educated young people like Alex. "I've been watching these kids for years," Khomyakov says. "They meet each other in university classes and scientific seminars. They have this ingrained genetic friend-foe identification system."

Khomyakov warns that both the government and established neo-Nazi leaders are losing control of this kind of grass-roots group. "Nobody knows what's brewing down there," he says. Sociologist Starovoitova agrees that neo-Nazi beliefs are slowly creeping into the mainstream. A few years ago, she says, neo-Nazis wouldn't dare court publicity over the murder of a scholar like Girenko who defended ethnic-minority rights. Now, they do.

Neo-Nazism is like radiation, says the University of St. Petersburg's Sukhachev. "People don't see it, but it's here and it kills. Now it killed Girenko." It will certainly kill again, unless Russians wake up to the threat.

• YURI ZARAKHOVICH | St. Petersburg
• Inspired by al-Qaeda, Russia's neo-Nazis have declared war on ethnic minorities