ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — As a wildly popular television journalist when the Soviet Union was falling apart, Aleksandr G. Nevzorov took up a gun in January 1991 and joined the Soviet special forces on a violent but fruitless mission to stop Lithuania from breaking away.

He then traveled to the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova to support an armed rebellion by Russian-speakers intent on preserving Moscow’s empire. He also cheered a failed August 1991 coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev, viewing the Soviet leader’s retreat from conquered lands as a betrayal of Russia’s destiny.

Of all the grifters, nationalist fanatics and die-hard imperialists who rallied in vain to preserve Moscow’s territorial reach, Mr. Nevzorov, the star of a Soviet television news show called “600 Seconds,” stood out as a singularly dashing, determined and seemingly doomed defender of Russian power.

But now that his lost cause of nearly 30 years ago has stirred back to life under President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Nevzorov, 60, has a sobering message for a new generation of Russian nationalists: Don’t get seduced by the poisonous fruits of imperial fantasy the way I did.

“I understand this plague, because I got sick from it,” he said in an interview conducted shortly after he finished giving his polemical take on Mr. Putin’s Russia — a weekly event — to a paying audience in the conference room of a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg, his hometown.

“I was a Soviet child raised on the ideals of this empire,” he said. “You have to go through it, to study it and get over it, and acquire immunity once and for all from all such terrible ideas.”

At a time when many of the pro-Western liberals who dominated the Russian news media and politics in the late 1980s and 1990s have become cheerleaders for Mr. Putin and his drive to reassert Russia as a great power, Mr. Nevzorov has moved firmly in the opposite direction, denouncing Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and pouring scorn on the Kremlin’s tub-thumping patriotism.

“It is impossible to be a patriot of Russia. Being a patriot of Russia is like being a patriot of Kunstkamera,” he said, referring to a St. Petersburg museum of ethnographic and medical oddities. “To love something like this, you must be either a complete zombie or mentally ill.”

But he pays a backhanded tribute to the former liberals who now hail Mr. Putin as Russia’s savior and hold posts in government, the state-controlled media and state corporations, believing that their opportunism “saves us from real fascism.”

Without them, “we would have the gulag again” and “dictatorship by the church,” he says, “but, fortunately, Russia is controlled by crooks and cowards” who have no real commitment to religion, Mr. Putin or his push to revive state power.

After losing faith in Russian nationalism in the mid-1990s and four terms as an elected member of Russia’s Parliament, Mr. Nevzorov moved out of what he calls his Jurassic Period. He turned away from politics and public life, focusing his energy instead on a new passion, the development equestrianism in Russia. He set up the Nevzorov Haute Ecole to promote humane treatment of horses.

In recent years, he has moved on from horses, devoting himself instead to thundering against the Kremlin, its glorification of Russia’s past and traditional values, and its embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church.

With his own show on Ekho Moskvy, an independent radio station, and a channel on YouTube, Mr. Nevzorov has become a hate figure for his former comrades on the nationalist barricades and an irreverent hero for Russians dispirited by the country’s nationalist drift and the suffocating moralism of the church.

He has been declared a “saint” by the Russian Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a spoof religion run by atheists, and has attracted a dedicated following among young Russians who delight in his caustic, often profane, attacks on their elders and their hypocrisy.

Yelena Sheidlina, a Russian model and Instagram celebrity who has acquired more than four million followers with odd, dreamy pictures of herself, said she had attended Mr. Nevzorov’s recent talk because “I am usually flying in the clouds, but here I can land on firm ground and see what is really happening.”

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” in Russian. Its name and ideology were later seized on by the Kremlin under Mr. Putin when it in 2005 launched its own patriotic youth movement.

“Today, to be a nationalist, an Orthodox Christian and a supporter of a strong state is popular because it is profitable,” Mr. Nevzorov said. “All these people who now yearn for the Soviet Union, who say how wonderful it was and how devoted they are to the Russian state, are all liars and cowards.”

Mr. Nevzorov said his disenchantment first set in when he traveled to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to support Russian troops fighting to crush a separatist rebellion that flared there from 1994 to 1996. “It happened in Grozny, when I saw a regiment raping a woman whose hand had been blown off at the wrist,” he said.

Soon after this, he took a trip to Paris and visited Disneyland, where he realized “what a hole my country is” and how “sidelined the country is that we were taught to be so proud of.” He also got married, a union that, unlike those of many prominent Russians, including Mr. Putin, is still intact. His wife of 27 years, Lydia, acts as his manager. They have one son, Aleksandr, now 12.

A lifelong resident of St. Petersburg, Mr. Nevzorov said he crossed paths frequently in the 1990s with Mr. Putin, who lived in the city until moving to Moscow in 1996, and found him “very smart, totally stable and sober.”

His view of Mr. Putin today is one more of pity than anger. For all Mr. Putin’s immense power, Mr. Nevzorov said, he cannot possibly succeed in building a powerful, modern state “because Russia has 30 million wooden outhouses without plumbing — put them side by side and they take up more space than New York.”

Sitting atop a vast state structure filled with thieves and opportunists, Mr. Putin, in Mr. Nevzorov’s view, understandably has no interest in the rule of law, fair elections, the free press or anything else that would threaten the decrepit system over which he presides.

“Only the course of autocracy provides him with personal comfort,” Mr. Nevzorov said. “I would behave in exactly the same way in his place, even worse.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.

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