Fucking hell those guys were dicks, that guy with the beard, what a cunt and the knife fight guy was so like the Russian Gareth from the office, I cringed so hard when that other guy told him that race mixing was like a mongrel vs a thoroughbred or whatever. Oh man I used to watch reggie yates on smile on bbc2 I'm not sure how I feel about him confronting neo nazis and stuff.

I mean I know that nazi iconography is used pretty self servingly by racist ultra nationalist groups all across the world, but shit it was bonkers to see Russians do nazi salutes and have faux nazi flags. What shit has to go down so that you get a Russian Nazi, and a Nazi member of the 'slavic union' aswell. I mean didn't the actual Nazis have slavs as 3rd on their list of people who should be wiped out behind jewish people and gypsies, I'm pretty sure they at least aimed to murder two thirds of the population of slavs across Europe and have the rest as slaves. I mean Hitler'd be turning in his grave (if he had one).

I thought it was like a strange cross between the 'stacey dooley investigates' type stuff, where a lot of the 'entertainment' of the show comes from her personality and naive reactions to stuff, a louis theroux style documentary, where he tries to subtly get human interest as well as cringe out of people with faux naivety, and an actual proper one person piece of investigative journalism.

It was part of the narrative that the kind of odd nationalism of SET was some huge organisation, but he says himself that SET has thousands of people so I think it was overblowing it a little, but it's still popular. The only thing I could find on the russian scary russian action bronson/david brent and russian gareth with his knives was that their party 'Russkiye' "boasts tens-of-thousands of members" so not exactly mussolini here. But also on the other hand what he said about 80% of Moscovites favoring kicking all non russian workers out and that

A poll conducted in early October showed 54 percent of Russians support the idea of "Russia for ethnic Russians", who account for about 80 percent of the country's population of 142 million

I think that the brent group has very little chance of getting into power though, because they seem (from all of the arrests etc) to have little or no institutional support (one of the reasons the documentary could go ahead imo). I guess you could argue that the attacks on immigrants are in the interests of employers who want a scared and compliant cheap labour force though. I think it's going a long way before they get to the level of other far right east european parties that have actually taken power.

So it was kind of not giving a proper picture of what's going on in that way, and I thought it chose scary action bronson/david brent guy over really looking at the reasons behind the growth of nationalism in Russia; like unemployment and poverty, low wages and poor services etc that seem to be associated with rising resentment of 'outgroups' almost everywhere. Also the stuff that preceded it, i.e. Yeltsin and a demographic and economic disaster, and NATO expansion into the old Warsaw pact (which apparently went against either an explicit or tacit guarantee to Gorbachev not to) and that Ultra nationalism has been fermented as a way to distract from the obvious problems and divisions of the country to provide a sense of community and a convenient enemy etc. It's kind of understandable why Russians love Putin so much because he arrested that slide into chaos somewhat.

I also found it strange that Putin has so much support, is this something worrying for the rest of the world, considering the strength Russia has. Is this something that could potentially effect all of us, in terms of another world war?

imo there is almost no chance of a major war. The aim of russian nationalism is mostly domestic, something similar has been going on in other places in Eastern/central Europe and also China since the end of the Tiananmen square turmoil. And the stuff in Ukraine is a result of russian weakness, both economically and militarily, with the EU and NATO encroaching on the some of the inner parts of the traditional russian 'sphere of influence' and Russia 'drawing a line' in a scumbag, sloppy and bloody way, but everybody knows that the stakes are too high for a major war. This is a totally different situation to (only example I can think of sorry) Germany in the 30's which had an explicit aim to dominate Europe and was amassing an unprecedentedly large, modern army and air force or, even Italy in that period. I think that people say that more small and/or 'low intensity' conflicts are likely in the states bordering Russia though.