MOSCOW -- Miroslav Petkov threw back a triple shot of clear liquor and smiled with a mouthful of rotten teeth. The 21-year-old wasn't effusive about his first taste of Russia's newest vodka -- "It's not fantastic," he said -- but he was clearly impressed by the bottle.

Underneath the words "To victory, comrades!" embossed on the glass, a red-and-black label shows a drawing of a man carrying a sledgehammer. The name "Civil Defence" slants across the bottle in Cyrillic lettering.

"It's very cool," Mr. Petkov said. "Just like the old propaganda posters."

When informed that Nazi propagandists used a nearly identical image in their advertisements for Adolf Hitler, Mr. Petkov only shrugged. "During that period, it was all the same," he said.

The young man, sitting on a curb, drinking in the sun like many other people his age, is exactly the sort of customer targeted by Vinexim, the marketing company that launched Civil Defence this spring.

He's also at the heart of a newly powerful demographic in Russia, voting for the first time in the national elections scheduled for 2007 and 2008. It's not clear how those young people will affect Russian politics, but some worrisome hints have emerged: The growing popularity of racist skinhead gangs, and the rising influence of strident nationalist parties.

The latest addition to that list of disquieting signs, according to some observers, comes in a half-litre bottle sold for the equivalent of $3.63.

Civil Defence is only a brand of vodka, but its owners have already shown themselves strangely accurate in their judgment of the Russian mindset.

Marketing experts at Vinexim were behind the enormous success of Putinka vodka, named in honour of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which proved almost as popular as the President himself.

But with the end of Mr. Putin's second term getting closer, the vodka company started a massive hunt last year for its next big brand.

Experts spent six months studying Russian tastes and attitudes, hosting a series of focus-group sessions in the country's 13 major cities. The participants, all males with average incomes, sampled various formulations of vodka, talked about why they drink and looked at concepts for label design.

Their conclusion: Russia is ready for something stronger, more masculine, more patriotic.

"Our vodka is the voice of people, and our task was to make it the voice of our people," said Olga Tietz, a deputy brand manager at Vinexim.

"We discussed with them the imagery and offered different variants. Their wishes were taken into account. They wanted to see something quite graphical, in bright colours; red, black and white is a popular bright combination."

Ms. Tietz said it's pure coincidence that the final result of this process, the graphic art used to promote the new vodka, bears a striking resemblance to a 1932 Nazi poster with the slogan, "We want work and bread! Choose Hitler!"

"It is not a copy," Ms. Tietz said. "This image was created by hand, and for your information we do not keep Nazi posters in our office."

Ms. Tietz emphasized that the vodka company wasn't trying to make a political statement, and suggested that the name Civil Defence, or Grazhdanskaya Oborona, refers to a punk band from the early 1980s by the same name.

The National Bolshevik Party, a banned group of activists, has used similar imagery in the past. In one of Moscow's public squares recently, a young man saw the Civil Defence bottle and exclaimed: "Ah, the radical nationalists!"

But Avraham Berkowitz, executive director for the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union, said the image was clearly derived from the propaganda campaign, conceived by Joseph Goebbels, that helped Hitler rise to power before the Second World War.

"This designer knew what he was doing," Mr. Berkowitz said, adding that he intends to complain to the company. "The imagery is very uncomfortable. . . . It's not the best time to be awakening nationalist attitudes in this country."

Vladimir Tismaneanu, a professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about fascism in Eastern Europe, said too many years have passed for anybody in Russia to remember the Nazi posters. But those powerful images are often recycled by groups that embrace fascist or racist ideologies, he said.

"Use of such imagery appeals to something dark in the Russian psyche," Prof. Tismaneanu said. "Russian fascism is a real political phenomenon, and it appeals to some among the youth who perceive post-Communism as a realm of cynical plunderers and soulless politicians."

Others weren't ready to imbue an ordinary bottle of vodka with so much meaning.

Irina Vorobyeva, a co-ordinator at Oborona, an anti-fascist youth organization in Moscow, said none of the young people she consulted could recognize the symbolism on the label.

"Girls just like the image of that man," she said. "Boys don't care."