Putin’s cheerleader: Maria Sergeyeva

Vladimir Putin has a new cheerleader. Step forward Maria Sergeyeva, a 24-year-old model and leading light of the Young Guards, a band of political zealots who believe that the Russian Prime Minister is nothing short of a living deity.

While some fanciful commentators claim that her hero is considering making Sergeyeva a minister, her critics, who have dubbed her 'Putin's pin-up’, say that she is being used by the former KGB leader to whip up jingoism via her blogs and webcasts.

Although Sergeyeva claims that she holds no official position in the Young Guards, she is suddenly ubiquitous in Russian society - writing newspaper articles, attending political rallies (which, unlike so many others, don't get banned) and pontificating via the internet. One recent speech that was made available online had 140,000 hits, crashing the political website hosting it.

Her nationalist rhetoric is far from subtle. Immigrants grab our work, she has said. They should work in places where Russians don't want to, or they should go back home.

It doesn’t stop there. Maria said of the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of Putin's few public critics, that he has sold himself to American spies. Another opponent, writer Eduard Limonov, was dismissed as having the face of someone who is psychologically abnormal.

However, while she is critical of many Western European politicians, mostly because of their condemnation of Russia's invasion of Georgia last year, Sergeyeva, the great-granddaughter of a Stalinist secret service officer who died in the siege of Leningrad, does have a soft spot for Lady Thatcher.

"I love Thatcher and Churchill because they are self-made leaders," she told the Mail on Sunday. "I think Thatcher and I have some similarities. I don't like how my voice sounds when I am making speeches and I have read that Thatcher corrected her vocal cords to make her voice sound better - I may do the same. She worked hard. She is a good example for me.”