“Rappers didn’t try to bend to get on TV, which would mean purging all traces of drugs, expletives and all sexual comment from their texts,” said Andrei Nikitin, 40, editor of The Flow, a website that has followed the scene for years.

Rap has begun capturing the minds of young people in Russia just as those aged 24 and under are moving from being the group most supportive of Mr. Putin’s government to one that is increasingly critical of it, according to multiple polls.

The Kremlin seems to be worried. In 2018, dozens of concerts were canceled, and in November, the rapper Husky, also known as Dmitri Kuznetsov, was detained by the police in the city of Krasnodar after he tried to give an impromptu performance on top of a car after a gig he had been due to play was called off.

In December, Mr. Putin convened a meeting of the council that advises him on culture, and ordered his administration to develop a program that would increase the state’s role in pop music by introducing grants and by opening music studios around the country. The government said it would move to filter undesirable content on the internet, but so far has been unable to find an effective technical solution to do that.

“The impact of hip-hop has been massive,” said the rapper Oxxxymiron, 34, a pioneer of independent hip-hop in Russia. He added that, “Through music, visual art, movies, dance, clothing styles and more, key values of hip-hop have spread through contemporary Russian culture.”