Another fan is Leonid Shaiderov, a precocious 16-year-old with a keen interest in politics. He said he liked listening to Mr. Nevzorov instead of the jingoistic propagandists on state television because “only he speaks the truth” about the dangers of militaristic patriotism.

For all of his irreverence, however, Mr. Nevzorov has avoided aligning himself with opposition politicians like Aleksei A. Navalny and seems to have stayed in the good graces of at least some of those in power whom he skewers so relentlessly. He recently appeared as guest, for example, on a popular late-night talk show on state television, “Evening Urgant.”

“I belong to no camp, no party, no movement,” he said. “I say and do only what I want.”

Raised largely by his maternal grandfather, a general in the Soviet-era K.G.B., Mr. Nevzorov never knew his father, who he says was a Native American from Lawton, Okla., who had an affair with his mother while visiting the Soviet Union briefly in 1957 to attend a World Festival of Youth and Students. Mr. Nevzorov later tried to track down his father, a member of the Comanche tribe, but was told that he had become a drug dealer and been killed in a shootout with the police.

After a wayward youth on the streets of St. Petersburg, Mr. Nevzorov rose to stardom in the 1980s as a gritty crime reporter on Soviet television and a pioneer of what seemed to be a new era of Western-style reporting.

His drift into radical nationalism, particularly his on-camera appearance in 1991 alongside Soviet troops as they stormed the television tower in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, appalled some of his previous fans but made him a cult figure among Soviet revivalists.

“When the Soviet Union was dying, there were only 25 or so young boys who fought to defend it — and I was one of them — in Vilnius and Trans-Dniester, and a few writers and journalists,” he recalled.

To attract more followers, Mr. Nevzorov set up a quixotic “national resistance” movement and called it “Nashi,” or “Ours.” Its name and ideology were later seized on by the Kremlin under Mr. Putin when it in 2005 launched its own patriotic youth movement.