Young Russia Rises; The Kremlin has a new weapon in its war on real or imagined enemies, from opponents at home to foreign revolutionaries.

Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova

The attacks came in waves, with military precision. Hours after Estonia removed a World War II statue of a Soviet soldier from downtown Tallinn last month, virtual war broke out. News agencies, banks and government offices were targeted in a blitzkrieg of spam--an onslaught of billions of e-mails, many apparently generated in Russia, that brought down servers and jammed bandwidths to bursting. As "eTonia's" famous digital-based free markets and democracy buckled under the strain, top NATO Internet security experts last week rushed to construct defenses against the world's first massive cyberstrike by a superpower on a tiny and almost defenseless neighbor.

In Moscow, the attacks took a decidedly less modern cast. Activists from a Kremlin-created youth movement called Nashi stormed a press conference by Estonia's ambassador, retreating only after the diplomat's bodyguards sprayed them with Mace. Others blocked the birch-lined highway from Russia to Estonia with barriers and a large sign reading YOU ARE DRIVING TOWARD FASCIST ESTONIA. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, commemorated the Soviet victory over Nazism with a massive military parade and dark warnings of "new threats" to world security, "as during the time of the Third Reich."

The historical echoes are unsettling. Once again the Kremlin is on the offensive. And the shock troops in its war against Russia's enemies, real or imagined, is a new generation of impassioned young militants--the ...