On
Vladimir Putin’s Fascism
March
6, 2022
I first visited
Russia, then the dominant part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in
the summer of 1968 with a group of Russian language students from Indiana
University. Especially during the one week that I spent in what was then
Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) I began to learn of the horror that
what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War and we call World War II had
been for the Russian people. During that week I began to learn of the German
siege of Leningrad. It was one of the most diabolical humanitarian disasters
not just of that war but of all of human history. It lasted from September 8,
1941, to January 27, 1944. Up to 1,500,000 people died in the city during the
siege. Another 1,400,000 were evacuated through the narrow corridor the Red
Army was able to keep open across Lake Ladoga. Many of those people died as
well. The leading cause of death was starvation. During that first visit I made
to Leningrad our guide took us to the Piskaryovskoe Memorial Cemetery, where
something like 500,000 civilians who died during the siege are buried. Most
Americans have no idea of the disaster that the German siege of Leningrad was.
For purposes of comparison, fewer than 500,000 Americans died in all of World
War II, not that that number in itself doesn’t represent tragedy. It certainly
does, but experts estimate that around 20,000,000 Soviets, most of them
Russians or Ukrainians, died in that war.
From September,
1975, to June, 1976, I lived in Soviet Russia doing PhD dissertation research.
I spent most of that time in Moscow with my wife and toddler son, and I also
spent some time back in Leningrad. I continued to learn more about the
catastrophe that the Great Patriotic War had been in Russia. Yes, the Soviet
government used the war as an excuse for the sorry state of the Soviet civilian
economy, but the government’s cynicism in no way reduced the very real national
trauma of the war. There was no one in Russia who didn’t lose someone in that
war. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s brother died in that war. In the 1960s
and 1970s it seemed that the Russian nation, though justifiably proud that they
had won the war, was still in a state of shock. That’s how bad the war had been
for the Russians.
During my time in
Russia I learned that the Russians usually don’t call the people who attacked
them in 1941 the Nazis. Nor do they call them just the Germans. They call them
“nemetskie fashisti,” German fascists. Fascist is about the worst thing a
Russian can call anyone. The word immediately brings up what was perhaps the
greatest trauma any nation has ever faced in all of human history. Once, when
some minor bureaucratic functionary was giving me a hard time about something
or other and saying that she was just doing her job, I wanted to say to her
“That’s what the German fascists said!” Mercifully, if I remember correctly, I
didn’t say it. To call a Russian a fascist is about the worst thing you could
possibly call them.
On February 24,
2022, Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sent the mighty Russian
army into Ukraine. Putin’s attack against a peaceful neighboring country was
utterly unprovoked. The nature of the Russians’ mission in Ukraine still is not
entirely clear. We do know that as one of the specious justifications for that
unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign nation Putin says that the
Ukrainian government is “fascist.” He also spoke of “de-Nazification,” but his
calling the Ukrainians fascists would have the greatest effect on the Russian
people. Putin hurls the word fascist at most any non-Russians he doesn’t like.
He intends fascist to be a word of radical condemnation. To most Russians that’s
exactly what it is.
Which makes it
particularly ironic that Putin is himself a Russian fascist. He doesn’t call
himself a fascist of course, and he would be profoundly offended and would
vigorously deny that charge if he heard someone make it against him. Yet
fascist he is, and to understand why it is fully appropriate to call him a
fascist we must begin by gaining an understanding of just what the word fascist
means.
Historically
speaking the word fascist comes from the name of the political party and
movement Benito Mussolini led in Italy that began during World War I and grew
in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The word comes from the Italian word “fascio,”
the primary meaning of which is just “a bundle of rods.” Fascio comes in
turn from the Latin word “fasces.” That word also meant a bundle of
rods, but it also referred to a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. A fasces
in this sense is a bundle of rods bound together by a cord with an axe head
protruding from it to the viewer’s right. It became the symbol of Italian fascism.
Mussolini’s fascism was the specifically Italian form of a much broader
right-wing phenomenon in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. That phenomenon’s most
powerful and demonic manifestation was Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Today’s
definitions of fascism try to capture what the fascist regimes of Italy,
Germany, and elsewhere stood for and how they operated. One online definition
of fascism says that it is
a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the
Fascisti) that exalts nation…above the individual and that stands for a
centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe
economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.[1]
This site’s second definition of
fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial
control….” Another online dictionary gives as its first definition of fascism
“an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social
organization.”[2] This
site’s second definition of fascism is “(in general terms) extreme right-wing
authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices.”
From this brief
historical and linguistic overview we see that the word fascism has come to
have both a specific meaning and more general one. In its most specific sense
the word means the party and movement Mussolini headed in Italy in the early
decades of the 20th century. A more general meaning of the term is
that it applies to any movement or regime that is more or less like Mussolini’s
regime, that is, is a regime or movement characterized by nationalism,
dictatorial control of society and economy, and forcible, often violent
suppression of opposition. I would add to these definitions the truth that
fascist regimes often initiate military attacks on other nations.
These
understandings of the word fascism fit Vladimir Putin like a glove. He has
concentrated virtually all political power in Russia in himself. He has quashed
nearly all opposition. He has jailed some of his opponents and killed others.
He has confiscated or otherwise shut down television networks that didn’t toe
the line. He has had his rubber stamp parliament, the Duma, tighten the laws on
freedom of expression and enact draconian penalties for demonstrating against
him or his policies. Perhaps the people of Russia still have a bit more
personal freedom than they had under the Soviet communists, but Putin, a former
KGB agent and former head of the FSB, the Russian successor of the KGB, seems
to be working to control the Russian people as tightly as the communists did
and oppress them just as much.
Fascism always
elevates the nation above all else. There is a reason why the Nazis liked the
first line of the German national anthem so much: “Deutschland, Deutschland, ὓber
alles,” “Germany, Germany above all else.” This aspect of fascism fits Putin
like a glove too. His thinking and his policies are thoroughly Russocentric. Putin
says he has rejected the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he has
called the dissolution of the USSR the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the
twentieth century. He means by that statement that Russia’s loss of empire and
standing in the world that came when the USSR ended is the greatest
geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century for Russia. It is simply stunning
that he would make that claim. He didn’t experience the Great Patriotic War
himself. He was born in 1952. But of course he knows how horrific that war was
for his beloved Russia. He is from Leningrad, after all. That he considers
Russia’s loss of empire and status after 1991 to be a greater tragedy than the
Great Patriotic War in which something like twenty million Soviet people, most
of them Russians, died shows how radically Russocentric his thinking has
become. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him singing “Rossiya, Rossiya, ὓber
alles.”
As I noted above,
fascist countries often initiate wars of aggression against other countries. Mussolini’s
Italy attacked Ethiopia and Greece. Hitler’s Germany attacked Czechoslovakia,
Poland, the USSR, France, and other nations. Now Putin has followed suit by
invading Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. He didn’t invade Ukraine for the purpose of
exterminating all the Ukrainians to create Lebensraum for the Russians the way
Hitler did for the Germans, thank God. Yet his motive was still completely
Russocentric. He claims that there really is no such thing as Ukraine, and
there are no Ukrainian people. He has reverted to the thinking and policies of
the lost and unlamented Russian Empire. Like that empire, Putin says that
Ukrainians really are just Russians who speak not the Ukrainian language but
the Ukrainian dialect of Russian. He says the same thing about Russians living
in Ukraine (of which there are millions) as Hitler said about Germans living in
Czechoslovakia. And just as Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Putin has invaded
Ukraine.
To call a Russian
a fascist is a great insult. The German fascists who called themselves Nazis
inflicted unspeakable horror upon the Russian people and others in the Soviet
Union including the Ukrainians. Yet the facts about Vladimir Putin don’t lie. He
fits all of the characteristics of a fascist. I have long maintained that Putin
is a product of Russian history. He is, but he takes some of the unfortunate
characteristics of that history to an extreme they haven’t reached since the
days of Stalin. Putin rules Russia in large part as a Russian autocrat with
fascism added onto the autocratic model. Putin, as brutal as he has been, is
not yet as vicious as Stalin was, and he doesn’t claim to serve the proletariat
the way Stalin did. Yet he is fully brutal and nationalistic enough to have
earned the label fascist. That he has is a tragedy, but it’s true.
Does it matter
that Putin has all the characteristics of a fascist? On one level, no, it doesn’t.
Putting the label fascist on him is after all on a superficial level merely a
linguistic exercise. Yet in other ways it does matter. It says to the Russian
people that they are ruled by a man with many of the characteristics of their
country’s worst enemy ever, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps if they would start to think
of him as a fascist they would rise up at the polls or otherwise and remove him
from office. Calling Putin a fascist may have a meaning beyond Russia too. Fascism
didn’t arise in Russia, and the term has a broader reach than Russia only.
People around the world have heard the word. Even if they don’t know the
particulars of fascism, they know that it is a bad thing. If people hear Putin
called a fascist often enough, the international community will apply pressure
of various kinds on Russia beyond the sanctions already in place that will
hasten his exit from public life.
So Vladimir Putin
is truly a Russian fascist. He hasn’t set up genocide camps the way the German
fascists did, thank God. But he rules Russia virtually as a dictator. He
suppresses all dissent. He is nationalistic in the extreme. He wants more than
anything else to make his Russia a major economic, political, and military
player in world affairs. He wants the world to respect Russia the way he thinks
it did when Russia controlled the USSR. The final proof that Putin is a true
fascist is his immoral and illegal invasion of one of Russia’s peaceful
neighbors. We can only hope that he will lose the power to do such fascistic
things sooner rather than later.
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