Putin’s fascism

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

It appears that Putin and his inner circle seriously believe in their own rhetoric, which is not supported by a shred of evidence. What is more, the country’s state-controlled mass media has done all it could to instil this propaganda message among not only Russians and Russophones in post-Soviet countries but also in Germany and Israel. At the same time, the Kremlin-controlled multilingual television network RT and Sputnik news agency promote this distorted image of reality across the world via satellite and cable TV distributing networks. As a result, this distortion and its uses merit urgent attention in order to understand how the Russian leadership perceives the world. This outlook informs their decision-making process and ultimately what they see as “rational”.

Friends and enemies

Despite the holding of regular parliamentary and presidential elections, few have any illusions about the autocratic character of Russian governance. Putin has time and time again reasserted his position as the country’s unquestioned dictator or “tsar”. Alternative candidates – or Putin’s peers – from the 1990s, who could have become Russia’s democratic leaders, were either side-lined, co-opted, compromised or even assassinated in cold blood, like Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister. The new generation of aspiring democratic leaders in the country are pressured to become loyal cogs in the authoritarian system. Otherwise, they are made to leave the country or are imprisoned on trumped-up charges, as in the case of Alexei Navalny.

In the meantime, more powers were increasingly concentrated in Putin’s hands. Across the length and breadth of the Russian Federation the number of regional, local and municipal elections was reduced, while the powers of remaining elected officials were eroded. Regional leaders were handpicked and encouraged to follow Moscow’s demands. At present, only Putin can legally avail himself of the title “president”. Putin’s party, United Russia, controls the Russian parliament and all the country’s other elected assemblies. The executive is under the Russian president’s tight personal grip, including the electoral process. Thus, potentially successful opposition candidates are prevented from standing for any parliamentary or other assembly mandates. If needed, the election results are rigged. The legally guaranteed recourse in courts of law changes nothing, as it is the executive that dictates to the judiciary. In Russia, justice is dispensed in a highly arbitrary manner.

In Putin’s Russia, the constitutionally guaranteed separation of powers was de facto liquidated, alongside any effective political opposition. On the other hand, the officially accepted “opposition” parties and their deputies are nothing but branches of United Russia under alternative names. All of them are the sitting president’s political friends, pampered with financial perks and other benefits into submissive loyalty. Any attempt on a deputy’s part to practice political independence is short-lived and often suicidal. In recent weeks, as usual, the Russian parliament voted unanimously, but this time even more so, to pass numerous measures that Putin needs to wage the ongoing war on Ukraine. Putin’s enemies, including genuine democrats and any other effective opposition leaders, are now abroad, in penal colonies or dead. Russia’s political system is officially known as a “sovereign democracy” (suverennaia demokratiia). However, it is nothing more than a dictatorship similar to Lenin and Stalin’s democratic centralism. After all, the main goal is to re-establish a new Russian empire with Putin on the throne. Imperialism is the “new-old” ideology’s proper name.

Democracy as understood and upheld in the liberal West is a dirty word in Putin’s Russia of “conservative” values. In turn, such Russian values have more to do with the Soviet ethos of a KGB officer rather than what the term “conservatism” means in the West. Supporters of Putin enjoy mispronouncing the word democracy as dermokratia, which literally means “shit-o-cracy”. The Russian state mass media presents the West to viewers as degenerate and in terminal decline. The leading proof that the Kremlin marshals have for supporting this diagnosis is the western acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons and irreligiosity. In Russia, this acceptance typical of democratic open society is assessed negatively as “un-Christian permissiveness”.

This is all reminiscent of Nazi propaganda’s use of Oswald Spengler’s 1918 reactionary work The Decline of the West to “justify” the replacement of democracy and civic freedoms with totalitarian autocracy under a single and totally virtuous leader’s (Führer) rule. At the same time,  the personality cult of Joseph Stalin as the Soviet people’s “beloved” (vozhd) “great leader, commander-in-chief” flourished. This Russian term was employed to translate Adolf Hitler’s honorific Führer into Russian. In this language both Hitler and Stalin were titled vozhd, basking in the sun of authoritarian camaraderie until 1941. This past has caught up with the present. Almost no one blinks when Putin is declared to be vozhd by the Russian nation.

Fascists and Nazis

In the rhetoric of Putin and his supporters, democratic opposition leaders, LGBTQ+ activists and western liberals are all fascists, since they do not support or even dare to oppose Russia’s “sovereign democracy” and “conservative” values. According to the Kremlin, the problem is that the West is unable to see the light that emanates from Russia. After all, the Latin saying goes ex oriente lux (“out of the East, light”). This reluctance to embrace Moscow’s kind ideological offer only proves the West’s deepening degeneracy. As a result, from Putin and his followers’ perspective, the West is becoming fascist again, much like prior to the Second World War.

The fact that during the 1930s fascist dictatorships replaced continental Europe’s democracies does not concern Moscow’s ideologues too much. Putin the vozhd’s guiding hand firmly steers public discourse away from this cul-de-sac that might muddle a typical Russian’s
“correct” thinking and views. Likewise, in 2021, any comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, or Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were banned in Russia. Stalin and Hitler’s red-brown alliance of 1939-41 must be consigned to oblivion.

What counts most for modern Russia’s ideology is the Great Patriotic War (Russia’s term for the Second World War). This war began with Germany’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, which forced Stalin to switch allies from the fellow totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany to the hated West’s liberal democracies of Britain and the United States. The war as such is not really mentioned in Russian school textbooks. Propaganda mainly focuses on the Allied victory over Germany. The symbolic significance of this event has been so huge that neither the collapse of communism, nor the official breakup of the Soviet Union, have managed to erase it from everyday practices in the post-Soviet states that chose autocracy. In 2001, I observed in Tajikistan how a newlywed couple made a sombre beeline to the local Great Patriotic War monument. They laid flowers and paid their respects in silence. It was explained to me that the couple did this to ensure prosperity and the quick arrival of their first son. Soviet gods still rule supreme three decades after the end of the Soviet Union.

Soviet, Russian and western textbooks agree that Nazi Germany’s Hitler was worse than Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. In Putin’s Russia, this conclusion translates into the gradation of the official slurs as employed for branding the regime’s opponents. As a result, the terms “fascist” and “Nazi” are not simple synonyms. In today’s Russian rhetoric, a Nazi is the worst kind of fascist. As a result, the Kremlin’s official labelling of the Ukrainian government and Ukrainians, who are fighting effectively against the Russian invaders, as Nazis means that they are like Hitler and wartime Germany’s Nazis. In turn, this conclusion “justifies” not observing any agreements that post-Soviet Russia had concluded with Ukraine. It is subsequently fine for Moscow to employ all its tactical tricks and illegal kinds of weaponry to ensure “victory over fascism-Nazism” in Ukraine.

After all, in Putin’s view, this war against Ukrainian Nazis is like the Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany. It does not matter that Russia pounced on Ukraine in 2022 much like the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union. Supposedly, Russia’s very existence has been at stake, leaving the Kremlin no choice in this regard. That may be a correct diagnosis, but it is based on a misreading of the actual causes of such an existential danger. Should Russia fall or break up soon, it will not be of Ukraine’s making, but due to Putin’s ill-thought-out decisions and his personal demons. The Russian elite and the Russians at large allowed themselves to be led by this apparently unbalanced dictator into the abyss.

Who is a fascist?

There is no single and universally accepted definition of fascism. However, most understandings have a considerable overlap with one another when it comes to the ideology’s main observed elements and practices. For instance, British historian Ian Kershaw believes that fascism often consists of hyper-nationalism, racial exclusiveness, the complete destruction of political enemies, and an emphasis on discipline, manliness and militarism.

One of the goals of Russia’s current war on Ukraine is to “regain” Kyiv. In the variety of Russian ethnolinguistic hyper-nationalism as espoused by Putin, all Eastern Slavs (Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians) constitute a single nation. In this ideological outlook, Belarusians and Ukrainians are Moscow’s younger brothers who need to give up on their “peasant, lowly” languages and cultures in order to merge with the mighty Russians who produced world-class high culture and a language of international importance. In this way of thinking about the past and future, the medieval polity of Rus’ with its capital in Kyiv cannot be seen as an early or medieval Ukraine. The Kremlin maintains that it was early Russia, while Kyiv was Russia’s first capital. It is no wonder that Putin’s messianic politics convinced him to attack Ukraine in order to seize what “rightly belongs” to Russia.

It appears that racial exclusiveness does not play an obvious role in Putin’s self-made ideology. Yet, his imperial-style identification of all Russian native speakers as members of the Russian nation, irrespective of their own identification and whether they are holders of Russian citizenship, points in this direction. Ethnolinguistic nationalism played an important role in Nazi Germany’s ideology. All ethnic Germans were expected to be fluent in German or to soon learn this language. The German nation (Volk) was defined as a biological entity in dire need of “living space” or Lebensraum. The only group of German speakers excluded from the German nation as defined by Nazis were Jews.

The Kremlin’s current definition of the Russian nation to a degree excludes Russia’s non-Slavs, who account for a fifth of the country’s population or 30 million people. A certain reprieve is offered to these citizens in the form of assimilation through mastering Russian, rejecting their native languages, and by accepting at least Orthodox culture as their own, if not Orthodox Christianity. Ethnically (East) Slavic Russophones are seen as “better” or “more promising” Russians than non-Slavic ones. The fact that after the breakup of the Soviet Union so many of this group live outside present-day Russia is an ideological scandal. In Moscow’s eyes, this tragedy proves that the Russian Federation is too small a state for the Russian nation and that the Russians urgently need more Lebensraum.

As discussed above, the Kremlin uses suppression, expulsion and liquidation to get rid of political opponents. In other words, the government pursues the complete destruction of its political enemies. In Putin’s Russia, militarism rules supreme. Even elementary schoolchildren are encouraged to “man up” by donning military-style uniforms, joining paramilitary youth organisations, or learning how to shoot and kill “fascists”. The de facto censorship of all of the country’s main mass media, coupled with a repressive and arbitrary judiciary, ensures ideological unity or discipline within Russian society.

Kershaw believes that these ideals, now present in Russia, are used as a means of achieving fascism’s goals. These are namely the building or rebuilding of an empire and the construction of a new man for such an empire. At the same time, the country in question will do away with the degenerate West’s “wrong values”, including capitalism, and ensure each citizen an appropriate place in a new society in line with their loyalty and skills (corporatism).

Putin’s criticism of the breakup of the Soviet Union and his ideology of the Russian world (Russkiy Mir) offers a millennial vision of a renewed Russian empire. In the Russian leader’s thinking, such an empire should include all the territories that used to belong to the Tsarist empire when the Great War began in 1914. The new man that would befit from such a rebuilt Russian empire would pledge unwavering loyalty to the vozhd, become fluent in Russian, follow Orthodox culture, and bravely join any war to which the empire calls him. In turn, the new man would be required to reject the degenerate West. For instance, this would entail a “struggle” against the “disease” of LGTBQ+ persons who sully the purity of the Russian nation, alongside the rejection of capitalism. The latter process of doing away with a capitalist economy began with Putin’s subjection of the oligarchs to his politics and ideology, as exemplified by the imprisonment of the defiant Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. At present, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has encouraged the West to impose punishing economic sanctions on Russia and its ally, Belarus. As a result, unless the Kremlin desists and stops this conflict, the Russian government has no choice but to prop up an economy in free fall through the state’s direct intervention. Russia’s economy is rapidly becoming state-owned and state-controlled like its Soviet predecessor.

If the pariah Russian state’s new and rapidly emerging socio-economic system is going to last, the individual citizen’s place in it will be decided by their constantly expressed and assessed loyalty to the vozhd and the empire. For instance, in North Korea the most trusted citizens, whose loyalty has been checked time and time again over the course of several generations, constitute the elite. Beyond the hardcore loyalists, the “wavering caste” consists of those who follow the state’s requirements but without too much enthusiasm. Additionally, in the past, some of their relatives even crossed some of the ruling ideology’s red lines. Lastly, the remaining caste are the “hostile population”, who are to be re-educated in concentration camps or in some cases executed. Today’s Russia, with its security police and special task forces inherited from the Soviet period and modernised under Putin’s rule, has already embarked on this course in recent years. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and the imminent collapse of Russia’s capitalist economy are only going to hasten this process. Furthermore, the Gulag concentration camps, now known as penal colonies, survive to this day, ready to house a new wave of inmates. Free forced labour may once again be an answer to Russia’s coming economic woes.

Pax Rossica?

The Russian language term Russkiy Mir tends to be officially translated as “Russian world”, meaning all the lands where Russian speakers live. With Putin’s war on Ukraine raging on, I believe that it is fair to propose that the term is nothing more than a code name for a “new Russian empire”. Another meaning of this term immediately discernible to any Russian speaker is “Russian peace”. Bearing this in mind, an Orwellian intimation of 1984’s newspeak becomes immediately obvious: war is peace; lies are truth.

The peaceful Ukrainians going about their own business must be “fascists”, while Putin’s fascist regime is a “pure Russia” destined to defeat the degenerate West and save the world. However, what if all of this does not go according to plan? The vozhd has already thought about this worrying possibility. If necessary, he will unleash a worldwide nuclear war as a Plan B in order to win in this clash of civilisations. Putin sees himself as even more of a religious figure than the Pope, the Moscow Patriarch, Iran’s Supreme Leader, or let alone the Dalai Lama. After wiping  humanity from the face of the planet, the Russians will go straight to heaven, while the rest of us will just die like animals.

What solace! What joy! What Russian wisdom! Straight from the mouth of this delusional KGB officer. Mr. Putin, spare yourself shame, man up, and at long last make good use of your issued sidearm.

Postscript: Russian occupation

What if Putin manages to occupy Ukraine? Swamping a country of 40 million and the size of France with a quarter of a million of Russian and Belarusian troops is a realistic possibility. But what then? The Kremlin’s official line is that the Russian military is liberating Ukraine from “fascists”. These fascists are meant to be a minority of the population or the country’s “nationalist and corrupt” elite. They “illegally” kept Ukraine’s inhabitants in an unwanted stranglehold, preventing them from enjoying the joys of good relations with Russia. Freed from such fascists’ ugly control, the inhabitants were supposed to welcome their liberators with bread and salt.

This deluded dream of Russian propaganda did not come true. The danger now is that the Kremlin may interpret this fact as proof that the majority of the population were poisoned by fascism. Increasingly, Russian propagandists equate what they see as fascism with Ukrainian language, culture and statehood. Thus, any effective Russian occupation of Ukraine would need to be heavily militarised and entail the widespread use of brute force to “denazify” the Ukrainians. For the Kremlin, the country’s population must understand that they have always been Russians and that Ukraine is nothing but an “artificial state” maliciously created by fascists and imposed on this fertile land’s peaceful Russians.

A genocide of the Ukrainians by Russia’s politicians and military is now on the cards. This is in place of Moscow’s big lie about a concocted genocide of Russians by “Ukrainian fascists”. The Kremlin is no novice when it comes to using genocidal measures to force Ukraine into submission. Putin extols Stalin and wants to be seen as his worthy successor. In 1931-32, this Soviet vozhd unleashed state-imposed hunger on Soviet Ukraine to convince this country’s peasants to give up their farms for the sake of the collectivisation of agriculture. The resultant Holodomor cost over four million Ukrainians their lives.

The Ukrainian language’s elite and culture were subsequently liquidated in the late 1930s. As many as 30,000 people were repressed. Thousands were summarily executed and more died in the Gulag concentration camps. Eighty-six per cent of the interwar period’s Soviet Ukrainian language writers perished. This was a mighty blow to Ukrainian language and culture, as it allowed Moscow to accelerate its Russification of Soviet Ukraine after the Second World War. Today, this process would be classified as a case of cultural genocide.

Chillingly, it is reported that the Kremlin is busy drawing up blacklists of Ukrainians to be killed or deported to concentration camps. The plan is a repeat of Stalin’s repressive policies in Ukraine but ten times more efficient, as it is meant to be completed in less than a year. Stalin took extra care and pursued intricate subterfuge to conceal what his regime was doing from the West. On the contrary, Putin is more than happy with the thorough live coverage of Russian atrocities and war crimes. Russia’s vozhd believes that he is above any human or international law. What westerners now see on their television and smartphone screens is meant to frighten them witless, so that no western country would even dare to think about standing in Moscow’s path.

But what is the Kremlin’s constructive and peaceful plan for an occupied Ukraine? First,  it is pursuing a military conquest with a vast loss of lives on a genocidal scale, alongside the wanton and rampant destruction of urban areas, production plants and vital infrastructure. Rockets and increasing exposure to the elements will beat the surviving Ukrainians into docility. Second, with the blacklists ready, Putin is busy preparing a genocide of the Ukrainian elite. Siberia’s frozen emptiness – more than three times larger than the EU itself – will welcome them to its deathly embrace, as it did in the past in the case of their grandparents and great grandparents. A cultural genocide of the Ukrainian language and culture will follow in quick succession. In neo-imperial Russia’s future province of Velikaia Novorossiia (Greater New Russia), Ukrainian will be banned from any official or public use. After all, the Tsarist administration in 1863 already declared that “the [Ukrainian] language has never existed, does not exist and cannot exist.”

We have now been reassured that death is a master from Russia in the early 21st century. The great Nazi-fascist vozhd in the Kremlin can cast a calm glance southward as the empire expands once again. There will be no talk of such things like decolonisation. Putin’s legacy is a new dark future for Russia and Europe.

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

fascism, imperialism, Russia, Vladimir Putin