Is Russia Fascist?

Unraveling Propaganda East and West

Marlene Laruelle

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501754142
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe collaborated with Nazi Germany.

Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia, soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground. Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.

1

RUSSIA’S “FASCISM” OR “ILLIBERALISM”?

In this chapter, I look at the field of fascism studies to identify the elements of the debate that present questions relevant to addressing the case of Russia. Because even its main critics recognize that the country cannot be qualified as fully fascist, my investigation begins at the periphery of the definition with a challenging but necessary question: Where does fascism begin? How many features considered fascist by scholars should a country accumulate to be labeled as such? A specific part of the discussion involves questions surrounding the existence of a specific “Russian fascism.” With some exceptions, this subfield of study has been developing outside of any comparative framework, which has contributed to the idea that Russia shows unique features of “deviance” and a recurring “illness” of radical nationalism, often explained by certain cultural characteristics. Accusations of Russian fascism intensified not only with the 2014 war with Ukraine but also with a larger trend toward using Reductio ad Hitlerum as a new tool for character assassination in international affairs. This broader context is rooted in the rise of illiberal movements and ideologies, of which Russia is often seen as the vanguard if not the main funder and hidden hand. The tendency to accuse everyone who challenges liberalism of being a new fascist has dramatically obscured our understanding of today’s Russia as well as the current transformations of the world order and Western domestic scenes.

Defining Fascism and Its Boundaries

Fascism constitutes a puzzling ideology for the social sciences. Of all ideologies, it is probably the one that has elicited the greatest number of scholarly controversies; liberalism and communism have generated more consensual definitions.¹ For a long time, several hypotheses shaped the study of fascism. The first theory was that Italian fascism and German Nazism were somehow unique in world history and that comparative studies were therefore useless in explaining the phenomenon.² The second hypothesis was that generic fascism had no real ideological content; it was less an ideology than a reaction, an “anti-” movement. Different schools colluded to interpret fascism mostly as a social, materialistic phenomenon, or as an ideological one. For example, Marxist schools of thought insisted on understanding fascism as a social action resulting from social struggles rather than just abstract ideas. However, their approach was hampered by perceiving fascism as only a reactionary movement explainable through capitalist contradictions and by marginalizing its ideological components, in particular the role of racism in shaping it.³

Another dividing line has separated historians of fascism: some see fascism as an answer to communism and therefore they tend to study fascism and communism as two products that mirror and influence each other, based on the totalitarianism theory that equates them both.⁴ Others, conversely, root fascism in the longue durée of anti-Enlightenment ideologies, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century to refute notions of progress, universalism, and humanism.⁵ For them, fascism is more than an ideology that rejects liberalism and Marxism; it is a cultural phenomenon more than a political one, primarily based on the refutation of universalism, rationalism, and materialism. Unlike other conservative or reactionary ideologies, it hopes for a revolutionary tabula rasa to rebuild a new society from scratch.

Over the years, almost all social science disciplines have been involved in the study of fascism. Weberian theorists explain fascism as the response of victims of modernization when social changes are too rapid and not equally beneficial to all, which creates a new utopia that restores lost certainties and identifies scapegoats.⁶ Inspired by Frankfurt school thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno or Max Horkheimer, scholars have expanded their Marxist–Hegelian approach by including psychoanalytic insights and sociological findings.⁷ Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” also gave birth to a new generation of scholars who looked at fascism as an extreme, totalitarian case of governmentality that takes control over all aspects of social, private, and public life.⁸ Psychoanalysis and social psychology have investigated the libidinal pattern of the masses, which are prone to violence and easily manipulated by a leader perceived as the all-powerful primal father.⁹ In Lacanian vocabulary, fascist exultation taps into people’s narcissist selves and helps diagnose a collective psychosis.¹⁰

Although history, political philosophy, and political science have remained at the forefront, economics has brought new insights by looking at structural economic dimensions: fascist regimes extended government control over the economy, nationalized key industries, made massive state investments, and introduced several measures of economic planning and price controls.¹¹ Last but not least, cultural studies has helped revive the study of fascism by exploring the importance of visual propaganda, aesthetics, and theatrical staging. This has led to an understanding of fascism as a secular religion that compensates for its doctrinal eclecticism and lack of internal coherence with a powerful visuality.¹²

In the 1990s, a more consensual definition of fascism began to take shape, mostly inspired by the work of Roger Griffin. In his International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (1998), Griffin offers the following definition as a product of majority agreement among scholars: “Like conservatism, anarchism, liberalism, or ecologism, fascism is definable as an ideology with a specific ‘positive,’ utopian vision of the ideal state of society, a vision which can assume a number of distinctive forms determined by local circumstances while retaining a core matrix of axioms.”¹³ Since then, fascism has been understood not as an anti- movement, but rather as a genuine ideology, with its own philosophical coherence and identifiable content. For Griffin, fascism can be summarized and subsumed as a “palingenetic ultranationalism”: the feeling of a rapid cultural decline does not inspire cultural pessimism but instead prompts a call for a revolutionary understanding of the nation’s revival. In an authoritative 2012 article, he proposes a less jargon-laden and more explicit definition of fascism as “a revolutionary form of nationalism which assumes unique ideological, cultural, political, and organizational expressions according to the circumstances and national context where it takes shape.”¹⁴

Having established some consensus on a minimal definition of fascism, Griffin called for the development of a new trend in scholarship, one based on comparative studies over time and space, in order to “decenter” fascism by recognizing the critical role that the study of so-called peripheral fascisms has played in our understanding of the phenomenon. The notion that Italy and Germany are the core models for defining fascism has now been overtaken by the knowledge we have accumulated about fascist movements and ideologies in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and many countries in Central and Eastern Europe.¹⁵ Griffin also invited the academic community studying fascism to enter into dialogue with those working on subjects such as political religion and terrorism. As he concluded in his 2012 article, fascism finds “ways to adapt to the unfolding conditions of modernity, thereby assuming new guises practically unrecognizable from its inter-war manifestations.”¹⁶

In this book I take issue with the placement of fascism within the more general phenomenon of nationalism.¹⁷ I do not believe that defining fascism as something quantitatively more—read: “more radical”—than a putatively “normal” nationalism is heuristic. I see the primacy of a myth of regeneration, termed by Griffin as the palingenetic nature of fascism, as the driving engine that makes a vision of the world and society “fascist.” This perspective allows us to take into account the metapolitical dimension of fascism, which is critical for recognizing the phenomenon and dissociating it from other ideologies. In this book, I define fascism as a metapolitical ideology that calls for the total destruction of modernity by creating an alternative world based on ancient values reconstructed with violent means. The apocalyptic dimension of fascism—destroying to rebuild—appears more relevant than seeing it as an “extreme” nationalism. I therefore share the definition proposed by one of the main Russian scholars of fascism, Aleksandr A. Galkin, who characterized fascism as “rightist-conservative revolutionarism” (pravokonservativnyi revoliutsionarizm), emphasizing the revolutionary aspect more than the nationalist one.¹⁸

In a 1995 article, the celebrated Italian novelist, literary critic, and semiotician Umberto Eco took note of this diversity of definitions of fascism. He remarked that although there was only one form of Nazism, there are multiple fascisms that mix several features in different combinations. He therefore advanced the notion of Ur-Fascism, a kind of generic fascism sharing “minimal” features, such as a cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, fear of difference, obsession with plot, denunciation of pacifism, contempt for the weak, education of all to become heroes, popular elitism, selective populism, machismo, and newspeak.¹⁹

Although Eco’s proposed typology powerfully captures the fascist mindset, it opens the door to two key unresolved questions. First, how many of these features does a regime have to display to be considered fascist? Without some fine-tuning into the typology question, “fascism” may refer only to Nazi Germany and/or Mussolini’s Italy; it may also include the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American cases; or it may embrace dozens of countries. But inflating the number of countries labeled as fascist obviously reduces the heuristic value of the classification; being a nonliberal or antiliberal regime does not equate to being fascist. Second, how does one conceptualize the fact that some fascist features also exist in nonfascist regimes, even in so-called established democracies? In the latter, some constituencies may share several of the characteristics advanced by Eco: fear of difference, obsession with plot, selective populism, machismo, and so forth. Newspeak is anything but a specificity of fascism. If some of the features that define fascism belong on a continuum with “democracy” rather than with a radically different political spectrum, who decides where—and how—to draw the dividing line? Where does fascism begin? These questions are critical for conceptualizing the Russian case.

Searching for “Russian Fascism”: Typologies and Exceptionalism

Most academic literature on Russia’s regime does not build on fascism studies; it discusses the different qualifications of the political system around the broad concepts of hybridity, duality, substitutes, and “in between-ness.”²⁰ Many scholars have brought a better understanding of the Russian regime and society but still continue to assume preconstituted essentialist components.²¹ Russia has so far been defined as a “ ‘patronal’ regime,” “managed democracy,” “elective autocracy,” “managed pluralism,” “competitive authoritarianism,” and so on—all descriptors meant to indicate that the Russian state implements authoritarian practices with the aim of mediating divergent interest groups, while at the same time balancing its need for popular support recognized through cocreational mechanisms and elections.²²

Yet several scholars have borrowed from the fascism studies field to discuss post-Soviet Russia. Two phases can be discerned. The first, in the 1990s, looked at the rapid rise of far-right movements in Russia, with an emphasis on three key personalities: Aleksandr Barkashov, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Aleksandr Dugin. At the same time, a parallel debate developed on the relevance of juxtaposing Weimar Germany and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, a second phase has concentrated on labeling both Putin’s regime and his personality as fascist. Linking these two phases over three decades, the figure of Dugin has remained core in the Western obsession with identifying fascism in Russia.

As early as the 1980s, several scholars noticed the revival of Russian nationalism among dissident circles and Soviet state structures, and drew parallels with prerevolutionary organizations such as the Black Hundreds (Chernia sotnia), conventionally presented as Russia’s first protofascist movement, and the broad reactionism of the late tsarist governments.²³ In the 1990s, scholarly attention turned to the rapid rise of the Far Right and paramilitary brigades. These multifaceted phenomena were labeled as fascist by many authors, such as Stephen Shenfield in his classic Russian Fascism, or Walter Laqueur in his Black Hundreds, and some went further by speaking about the “Nazification of Russia” or capturing all far-right movements under the Nazism label.²⁴ In the majority of these works, fascism, conflated with all forms of Russian nationalism, tended to be seen as a deviance, leading to the proliferation of medical metaphors: the body of Russia was sick, nationalism was a cancer or a gangrene for which medication or cures must be found, and so on. Sociological perspectives were rare, which contributed to keeping the study of “Russian fascism” in the field of intellectual history, without taking into consideration the deep transformations undergone by the society. ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Russia’s “Fascism” or “Illiberalism”?
• 2. The Soviet Legacy in Thinking about Fascism
• 3. Antifascism as the Renewed Social Consensus under Putin
• 4. International Memory Wars
• 5. The Putin Regime’s Ideological Plurality
• 6. Russia’s Fascist Thinkers and Doers
• 7. Russia’s Honeymoon with the European Far Right
• 8. Why the Russian Regime Is Not Fascist
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index