Vladimir Putin is a textbook fascist

When President Putin gave the green light to invade Ukraine on February 24, he insisted that Russian forces would only conduct a “special operation” in the neighboring country to “denazify” it. He liked to describe Ukraine’s actions against the Russian-speaking population in Donbass as “genocide”. This is one big lie. Because it is not Ukraine, which has a Jewish president and in which the use of the Russian language is widespread, that has come under the control of «Nazis», but Russia itself has developed into a classic fascist state under Putin.

It is no coincidence that the Ukrainian fighters constantly refer to the Russian invaders as fascists and call the Russian president “Putler” to emphasize the parallels with Hitler. At least after the outbreak of war, such a formulation seems obvious, but the debate about the similarities began shortly after the Russian annexation of Crimea, when Mikhail Iampolski (New York University) or Alexander Motyl (Rutgers University) tried to portray Putin’s state as fascist – without getting visible support from the guild of political scientists.

Putin is not a Nazi

I reacted positively to this attempt in the Russian free press at the time and was later condemned for it, including by Marlène Laruelle (George Washington University), who wrote a special volume in defense of Putin’s Russia.

I would like to try to approach the topic from a theoretical perspective and avoid political labels. I use Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism as a starting point. Fascism is “a form of political behavior marked by an obsession with the decline of one’s community, its humiliation or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, strength, and purity in which a party of nationalist fighters united in loose but works effectively with traditional elites, abandoning democratic liberties and pursuing goals of internal cleansing and external expansion with messianic violence and without ethical or legal restraints”.

What Putin reproduced during his reign is the prototypical fascist model propagated by Benito Mussolini.

Almost every one of these points reflects what has been going on in Putin’s Russia for years. One could also add features that Umberto Eco contributed to the understanding of fascism, such as the “cult of tradition” (or “conservatism”), the fact that “disunity is treason” (as reflected in the search for “foreign agents »), the «fear of difference» (present as an obsession with «stability»), the reliance on «anti-intellectualism and irrationalism» (which led to the religious «revival» in Russia), the «obsession with a conspiracy» (read: the influence of the “declining West”), then “selective populism”, “Newspeak” and lies.

It is worth remembering a sentence that the economist Peter Drucker formulated more than eighty years ago: “Fascism is the stage that is reached after communism has proved to be an illusion.”

Regarding Putin’s fascism, it should be noted here that the regime he has built in Russia since the noughties has very little in common with Nazism, which historians have in turn associated with fascism in the Soviet Union. Putin is not a Nazi. Even he found that the Russian nation is held together not by “race” but by a “common cultural code” that is all the more “valuable” because it is the product of a “centuries,” even “millennia-old” blending of cultures emerged. This idea, supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, feeds the doctrine of the «Russian world». What Putin reproduced in his reign is the prototypical fascist model as developed by Benito Mussolini – laced with elements of social democracy, a strong sense of the greatness of the lost empire, a corporate organization of the national economy, and a more measured repression of political opponents.

Four Pillars

The first pillar of Russian fascism is the praise of irredentism (that is, the goal of uniting as many members of a “people” as possible in one state) and militarization. Putin has made both of these a core part of his ideology. Recent celebrations of Victory Day over Nazi dictatorship surpassed anything seen in the Soviet Union—some overzealous politicians even proposed giving surviving relatives of war victims the right to vote in national elections.

The cult of the glorious past provided the very best pretext for military rearmament. Alongside this, Putin nurtured a hatred of the West from which he interpreted the end of the Cold War as the result of a conspiracy and betrayal that led to the defeat and demise of the Soviet Union. Most recently, Putin and his followers even claimed that the West wanted to dismantle and destroy the Russian Federation itself. This very threat has been cited as the main reason for a “pre-emptive” attack on a Ukraine whose President Zelensky is nothing more than a Russophobic puppet of Washington.

The second pillar was the progressive statization of the Russian economy. A century ago Mussolini proclaimed: ‘The fascist state claims dominion in the economic sphere no less than in other spheres; it exerts its effects throughout the country through its corporate institutions, with all the economic forces of the nation, organized in their respective federations, circulating within the state.

According to Emilio Gentile, one of the most important features of fascism is the «corporate organization of the economy, which suppresses freedom of union, widens the sphere of state intervention, and seeks, through technocracy and solidarity, to bring about the cooperation of the ‘productive sectors’ under the control of the regime – this in order to achieve the power goals set, but at the same time to preserve private property and class distinctions». The Russian economy is also dominated by bureaucrats under Putin. At the same time, the word “technocrat” is used to describe the best minds in the Kremlin administration.

Third, under Putin, Russia has become the country of “law enforcement agencies.” In recent years there has been an increasing restructuring of the administration in order to enable the new Duce to exercise absolute power and violence. In 2002, the Federal Guard Service joined the Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Service. In 2007 the power apparatus expanded to include the investigative committee and in 2016 the National Guard. All of these entities are run by Putin’s most loyal companions and are not even mentioned in the updated version of the Russian constitution. Paramilitary units then sprung up across Russia – from “private armies” run by state companies to “ethnic guards” like those in Kadyrov’s Chechnya (now fighting the Ukrainian army on the outskirts of Kiev).

Fourth, symbolism and propaganda must not go unmentioned here, both of which are essential factors for fascist regimes. In contemporary Russia one can observe both a “legitimate” codification of history and an attempt to pursue alternative historical readings. There is an arbitrary definition of “extremism” and an arbitrary restriction of political activity. The main mass media are under state control. Their populist rhetoric about a “national renaissance”, about the “strength of the country” and “measuring strength with the enemy” has intensified from year to year.

Curiously, the coat of arms of a Russian law enforcement agency, redesigned years ago, shows nothing more than a bunch of those “fasci” emblazoned on the emblem of the Italian Fascist party, only now they rest proudly in the claws of a double-headed eagle. Putin’s propaganda is thorough and so effective that the Russians have no problem with the Kremlin ruler calling Kharkiv a “Russian city” while at the same time proclaiming the bombing as a “fight against the Nazis.” In 2022, the average Russian is as indoctrinated and immoral as the Italians and Germans were in the late 1930s.

The West must get involved

Putin’s fascism was born in the early 2000s, when he declared the fall of the Soviet empire the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and staged the transfer of the remains of Russia’s most famous fascist philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, from Zollikon, Switzerland, to Moscow as a state act. It intensified in the years that followed with the aggression against Georgia and the annexation of Crimea.

All these years there have been naïve Western scholars who have described Russia as a “normal country” and tried to understand its “sovereign democracy” more deeply and better. Meanwhile, the subject of Russian fascism is no longer just of theoretical interest. The Russian fascists meanwhile have set about bullying and, if necessary, killing the Ukrainian civilian population, while the master in the Kremlin pretends that the Ukrainian army is using them as a living shield, just as the fascists did during World War II.

The war in Ukraine is more than just a conflict between parts of the former empire. It resembles the advance of the fascist brothers in pre-war Europe, as known from Italian and German assistance in the Spanish Civil War. In order to prevent a new world war, the liberal western world should stand resolutely behind the bravely fighting Ukrainians. It should tighten the economic and political sanctions against Russia, but also against Belarus, until both regimes falter. What is at stake is nothing more and nothing less than a complete and deep defascization of Russia.

Vladislav Inozemtsev is a well-known Russian economist and the founder and director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies in Moscow. – Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.