Russia is becoming a threat to Ukraine, the West and its own people as a result of Putin’s fascist policies. Because nothing bothers Putin as much as Ukraine’s independent identity.
What matters most in Moscow these days is what is missing. Nobody speaks openly about the Ukraine war. The term is taboo and every statement is dangerous. The only evidence of the fighting 1,000 km further south is heroic portraits of soldiers depicted on billboards. And yet Russia is in the middle of a war.
No torchlight processions are held in Moscow. Rarely does one come across the “Z” symbol, a half swastika, representing support for the war. Stormtroopers do not hold pogroms. Russia’s aging dictator Vladimir Putin does not rally ecstatic youth or call for mass mobilization. And yet Russia is firmly in the grip of fascism.
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Just as Moscow cloaks its war behind a “special operation,” so it cloaks its fascism behind a measure to exterminate “Nazis” in Ukraine. For Yale professor Timothy Snyder, however, the characteristics are unmistakable: “Opinions about what fascism is often differ widely,” he recently wrote in the New York Times, “but today’s Russia meets almost all criteria.”
The Kremlin created a personality cult around Putin and a death cult around the “German-Soviet War” of 1941-45. The Putin regime longs for the revival of a lost golden age and for a cleansing of Russia through salutary violence. Homophobia, adherence to traditional family forms and a fanatical belief in state power could be further added to Snyder’s listings. None of this is self-evident in a secular country with strong anarchist traits and liberal views on sex.
To understand where Russia is headed under Putin, one must first understand the country’s historical background. For most of his reign, the West viewed Russia as a mafia state at the helm of an atomized society. This view was not wrong, but it was incomplete. A decade ago, Putin’s popularity began to wane. His answer was a return to the fascist ideas that revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What may have started as a political calculation brought Putin into a vicious circle of resentment and resentment beyond all reason. It culminated in a devastating war that many had thought impossible precisely because it eluded any assessment of risk and opportunity.
Under Putin’s fascism, Russia is now set on a course of no return. Without victim rhetoric and the use of violence, the Russian ruler has nothing more to offer the people. For Western democracies, this march forward means a hostile and contemptuous dialogue with Russia as long as Putin is in power. When the war is over, many in the West want a return to normalcy – but real peace is not possible with a fascist government in Russia.
A long war awaits Ukraine. Putin’s goal is not only to conquer territory, but also to smash democratic ideals and independent national identity movements in neighboring countries. He can’t afford to lose. Even in the event of a ceasefire, he is anxious to bring Ukraine to its knees, if necessary with tougher measures. He will use violence and totalitarianism to get his way in his own country. He is not only concerned with the destruction of free Ukraine. He also fights against the hopes and dreams of his own people. So far he’s been successful.
What is Russian fascism? The F-word is often used casually. It has no clear definition, but feeds on exceptionalism and resentment, a mixture of envy and frustration born of humiliation. In the case of Russia, the cause of this humiliation is not defeat at the hands of other powers, but mistreatment of the people by their own rulers. Disenfranchised and in fear of authority, the people find compensation through an imaginary revenge on enemies that the state appoints as such.
Fascism includes staging – just think of all the rallies and uniforms – paired with the intoxication of real violence. In all its manifestations, Snyder argues, fascism is characterized by the triumph of will over reason. The title of his column is: “We should speak it out. Russia is fascist”. And indeed, it was the Russians themselves who spoke first.
Among them was Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister. As early as 2007, he recognized the threat posed by Russia’s post-imperial nostalgia. “Russia is going through a risky phase,” he wrote. “We shouldn’t succumb to the magic of numbers, but the fact that there were 15 years between the collapse of the German Reich and Hitler’s rise to power, as well as 15 years between the collapse of the USSR and Russia in 2006-07, admits think.”
Another liberal politician, Boris Nemtsov, unequivocally said in 2014: “Aggression and cruelty are fueled by television, while the key definitions are provided by the slightly obsessed Kremlin master. The Kremlin cultivates and rewards the basest human instincts, which breed hatred and violence. This hell cannot end peacefully.”
A year later, Nemtsov, who had meanwhile been decried as a “traitor to the people”, was murdered near the Kremlin. In his last interview, a few hours before his death, he warned: “Russia is rapidly turning into a fascist state. We already have propaganda modeled after Nazi Germany. We also have a solid base of assault brigades… This is just the beginning.”
No one has signaled the growing influence of fascism more clearly than Putin and his cronies. Far from the prosperous streets of Moscow, the Kremlin has Z-lettered tanks, people, and television stations. The half-swastika has been painted on the doors of Russian film and theater critics who advocate “decadent and degenerate” Western art. For online posts, hospital patients and groups of children, some kneeling, were lined up in a half-swastika.
The German exile culture critic Walter Benjamin defined fascism in the 1930s as a performance. “The logical outcome of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he observed. Such an aesthetic aims to suppress reason, which ultimately finds its expression in war.
The two TV faces of the war, Vladimir Solovyov and Olga Skabeeva, are now caricatures of Nazi propagandists. Solovyov can usually be seen in a black double-breasted Bavarian style. Skabeeva, strict and edgy, is a bit reminiscent of a dominatrix. Both embody hatred and aggression. Together with their guests, they condemn the West’s declaration of war on Russia and theatrically call on Putin to reduce him to rubble by unleashing the entire Russian nuclear arsenal.
This imaginary Armageddon is contrasted with a real violence that is the bedrock of the relationship between the Russian state and its people. A Levada poll commissioned by the Committee Against Torture (now blacklisted itself) found that 10% of the Russian population had experienced torture at the hands of law enforcement agencies. The country is characterized by a culture of cruelty. Domestic violence is no longer a criminal offense in Russia. In the first week after the war began, young demonstrators were humiliated and sexually abused in police cells. Almost 30% of the Russian population believe that torture should be allowed.
The atrocities committed by the Russian army in Bucha and other occupied cities are not just wartime excesses or indisciplined behavior. They are an expression of army life, which is shared more widely by veterans. The 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade, suspected of being responsible for the assault, was given the title “Guards” by Putin for defending the “motherland and state interests” and was hailed for “mass heroism and bravery, resilience and courage.” In Russia, the Far East-based brigade is notorious for tyranny and abuse.
Like so much from the Kremlin, fascism is a top-down project, a move by the ruling elite and not the product of a popular movement. It does not require mass mobilization, but rather passive acceptance. It’s about incapacitating people and preventing any form of self-organization. The Kremlin and the TV stations are free to control this process as they wish. In the early years of his presidency, Putin resorted to financial means to keep the populace out of the political arena. After the economy faltered in 2011-12 and the bourgeois middle class took to the streets for more rights, he fomented nationalism and hatred. When the political situation calmed down after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, fascism disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
His reawakening in 2021-22 followed Putin’s declining legitimacy, protests over the poisoning and arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the growing alienation of younger Russian citizens who are less receptive to TV propaganda and more open to the West. In their eyes, Putin was an aging, vengeful and corrupt grandfather whose secret palace was revealed by Navalny’s million-viewed YouTube film in 2021. Putin had to shift gears – Ukraine gave him the right opportunity to do so.
The roots of Russian fascism go back to the early 20th century. Following the October Revolution, fascist ideas germinated among the “white emigrants”. After the war, Stalin brought some of these ideas back to the Soviet Union. He feared the empowerment and liberation of his own people through a victory over fascism, which he had won alongside America and Britain. Thus he declared the Soviet success to be the triumph of totalitarianism and Russian imperial nationalism. He turned war allies into enemies and fascists who did everything to destroy the Soviet Union and rob it of its glory.
In the decades that followed, official communist ideology and the personal experience of Russians fighting the Nazis alongside the Western Allies curbed fascism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these constraints disappeared, opening Pandora’s box. With the complete rejection of the old Soviet ideals by the liberal elite in the 1990s, a long tradition of anti-fascist literature and art also disappeared.
All this time fascism had been smoldering in secret within the KGB. In the late 1990s, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of the democratic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, openly called the security services the forerunner of fascism. “The danger of fascism in Russia is real, because since 1917 we have become accustomed to life in a criminal world where a criminal state is in charge. Banditry sanctified by ideology – this phrase suits both communists and fascists.”
This ambiguity was particularly evident in the hugely popular 12-episode television series Seventeen Moments of Spring, produced at the behest of the KGB in the 1970s. At first glance, the series was nothing more than an attempt to revive the Stalinist secret police. Yuri Andropov, former KGB chief and later Soviet head of state, intended to glorify Soviet spies in order to attract a new generation of young men to the service. As it turned out, the broadcasts helped introduce a Nazi aesthetic into Russian popular culture – an aesthetic that would later be instrumentalized by Putin.
The focus of the plot is a fictional Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazi high command under the alias Max Otto von Stierlitz. As a high-ranking Standartenfuhrer of the SS, he is tasked with thwarting a secret plan hatched between the CIA and Germany just before the end of the war. The Nazis in this film adaptation are humanely and attractively embodied by the most popular Soviet actors. Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played the role of Stierlitz, was a paragon of male perfection. Tall and handsome, with perfect cheekbones, he shone in an elegant Nazi uniform tailored for him at the Soviet Defense Ministry.
The citizens of Russia were fascinated. Dmitry Prigov, a Russian artist and poet, wrote: “Our wonderful Stierlitz embodies both the perfect Fascist and the perfect Soviet citizen, transitioning from one to the other with overwhelming and imperceptible ease… He is the harbinger of a new era – one Time of mobility and manipulation.”
And Putin benefited. Immediately before his appointment as Russian president in 1999, voters named Stierlitz in polls as their ideal candidate for the post – right after Georgy Zhukov, the commander of the Red Army in World War II. Putin, a former KGB man stationed in East Germany, had cultivated the image of a modern-day Stierlitz.
When the opinion research institute VTsIOM repeated the survey in 2019, Stierlitz took first place. “There has been a reversal,” say the pollsters. “In 1999, Putin appeared to be the preferred candidate largely because he looked like Stierlitz; In 2019, the image of Stierlitz will remain relevant because it will be implemented by the country’s most prominent politician.” On June 24 this year, a statue of Stierlitz was unveiled in front of the headquarters of the foreign intelligence service (SWR), which had been part of the Soviet KGB.
For Putin, the fascist aesthetic and the particular Russian fascist philosophy go hand in hand. So he and much of his former KGB colleagues embraced capitalism and agitated against liberals and socialists. They also projected across the country the humiliation they suffered in the first post-Soviet decade and portrayed the end of the Cold War as betrayal and defeat.
Their prophet is Ivan Ilyin, an early 20th-century philosopher who was exiled by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who joined fascism in Italy and Germany. Ilyin saw fascism as a “necessary and inevitable phenomenon… based on a healthy national consciousness”. In doing so, he justified the self-appointed role of politicians as guardians of the state. As such, they were called to control its resources.
After the end of World War II, Ilyin condemned what he believed to be mistakes made by Hitler, such as: B. Atheism and its crimes, including the extermination of the Jews. Despite this, he continued to believe in the fascist idea of national rebirth. In 1948 he wrote: “Fascism is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and, historically speaking, far from being outlived”. In line with this view, Putin embraced religion, rejected anti-Semitism, and eschewed collective leadership in favor of his plebiscite-confirmed direct governance.
Ilyin’s book Our Tasks was recommended by the Kremlin as required reading for state officials in 2013. It concludes with a short essay to a future Russian leader. Democracy and elections based on Western models would ruin Russia, it says. Only a “united and strong state power, dictatorial in essence and national in nature” could save the country from chaos.
Ilyin’s work, which Putin allegedly repeatedly read, is entitled What the Breakup of Russia Would Mean for the World, and dates from 1950. It argues that the Western powers will try to “conduct their hostile and ridiculous experiment even in the post-Bolshevik chaos, deceptively presenting it as the supreme triumph of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘federalism’… German propaganda has invested too much money and effort in Ukrainian separatism (and perhaps not only in Ukrainian)”.
After Ukraine’s first popular uprising, known as the “Orange Revolution,” in 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He used anti-Ukrainian sentiment in his country to put it on a confrontational course with the West. In the same year, Ilyin’s body was brought back to Russia from Switzerland, where he had died in exile in 1954. According to reports, Putin paid for the tombstone from his own savings. In 2009 he laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave.
That Putin has embraced fascist methods and thinking is alarming news to the rest of the world. Fascism works by creating enemies. It makes Russia the brave victim of the hatred of others, while at the same time justifying dislike for its real and perceived enemies at home and abroad.
Putin’s predecessor and “modernizer” Dmitry Medvedev recently said on social media: “I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates. They want us, Russia, dead… I will do everything I can to make them disappear.” Who he was referring to was not disclosed. Russian hostility is directed at three targets: the liberal West, Ukraine and traitors at home. You all need to realize what Russian fascism means.
Putin has long sought to undermine Western democracies. In Europe he has supported far-right parties such as France’s Rassemblement National (RN), Hungary’s Fidesz and Italy’s Lega. Hoping Donald Trump would win over the Democrats, he interfered in the American elections.
But even if the fighting in Ukraine comes to a standstill, the Ilyin supporters in the Kremlin will not come to terms with western democracies. Putin and his people will do everything in their power to fight liberalism and sow discord.
Russia has been part-European for centuries. However, as political scientist Kirill Rogov recently noted, the Ukraine war allowed Putin to sever this part of Russian identity. While Putin is in power, Russia will form alliances with China, Iran and other anti-liberal countries. As always, it is at the forefront of ideology.
For Ukraine, the forecasts are even bleaker. A few weeks after the war began, Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti published an article calling for the elimination of “the ethnic component of self-identification among residents of the Soviet-created territories of historic Little and Novorossiya [Ukraine and Belarus].”
According to Putin, Ukraine is the origin of deadly viruses and home to American-funded biological laboratories that experimented with strains of coronavirus and cholera. “Biological weapons are being produced in close proximity to Russia,” he warned.
Russian state television describes the Ukrainians as worms. Speaking on a recent talk show, Mr. Solovyov joked, “When a doctor deworms a cat, for the doctor it’s a special operation, for the worms it’s a war, and for the cat it’s a purge.” The editor-in-chief of the state-controlled international television network RT, Margarita Simonyan declared “Ukraine must not continue to exist.”
The aim of the invasion is not only to conquer territories, but also to eliminate the separate Ukrainian identity, which poses a threat to Russia’s imperialist orientation. Along with its punitive troops, the Kremlin has sent hundreds of teachers to re-educate Ukrainian children in the occupied territories. The country equates an independent, sovereign Ukraine with Nazism. Either Ukraine will lose its status as a nation state, or Russia itself will be infected with the notion of emancipation that will destroy its imperial identity.
The prospects for Russia are particularly bleak. Putin did not expect a war of attrition. He proceeded from the assumption that an attack on Kyiv would result in rapid regime change in Ukraine and the subjugation of Ukrainian society. So far, Putin has failed to defeat Ukraine. On the other hand, he successfully defeated Russia.
The issue of physical contamination and cleansing is not limited to Ukraine alone. Foreign bodies also exist in Russia – oyster-slurping, foie gras-eating traitors who live mentally in the western world and are infected with gender-fluid ideas. The Russian people, Putin explained in a televised address, will “simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth,” leading to a “natural and necessary self-detoxification of society.”
Like Stalin, Putin fears and distrusts the people. It must be controlled, manipulated and, if necessary, suppressed. He excludes it from actual decision-making. As Russian sociologist Greg Yudin argues, the people are needed for the election ritual, which demonstrates the leader’s legitimacy, but the rest of the time they are meant to remain invisible. Yudin calls this approach “people on call”.
The war changed everything. Hitler said to Goebbels in the spring of 1943: “The war … made it possible for us to solve a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times”. Putin was soon able to set up a de facto military government and assume censorship control. He blocked Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and all remaining independent media, isolated the country from the toxic influence of the West and drove out all opponents of the war. Any public statement challenging the Kremlin’s version of events in Ukraine carries a 15-year prison sentence.
Gregory Asmolov of King’s College London believes that this new political reality was unimaginable just a few months ago and now marks the Kremlin’s greatest achievement in the conflict. The war enabled Putin to transform Russia into what Asmolov calls a “disconnected society.” He argues: “These efforts rest on the notion that protecting the internal legitimacy of the current leadership and the loyalty of the citizens are impossible if Russia remains relatively open and connected to the globally interconnected system.”
So far, Putin has managed to paralyze Russian society rather than mobilize the masses. Stagings of unity and mobilization happen through the television stations, which operate within an information space without alternative. Among the audience – mostly people over 60 – more than 80% support the war. It is less than half of the 18 to 24 year olds who get their news from the Internet. This may be the reason why the Z-operation’s symbolic figures are not working men and women, but a babushka with a red flag and an eight-year-old “grandson” (on murals or chocolate wrappers). They are the ideal television viewers and reality show extras.
The combination of fear and propaganda creates what Rogov calls a “forced consensus.” The state publishes opinion polls showing that the majority of Russians welcome the “special operation”. The main reason for supporting Putin is the belief that everyone else is doing it too. The need to belong is strong. Even if information about the population does leak out, it is “simply ignored or talked away so as not to destroy the concept of self, country and power created by the propaganda,” according to sociologist Elena Koneva.
The engine of fascism does not run in reverse. Putin cannot return to realistic authoritarianism. Expansion is in its nature. And he will try not only to expand geographically, but also to penetrate into people’s private lives. As the war progresses and the number of casualties increases, the question arises as to whether Putin will be able to mobilize the passive majority or whether it will slowly become restless. The elites in the Kremlin, in the army and in the security services will be closely monitoring the situation.
Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who fought in World War I and survived World War II, wrote that “Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures that were forced upon them in repetition a million times.” In his book “The language of the Third Reich” he describes how the prefix ent- became established in Germany during the war.
When Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine in the early hours of February 24, Putin opened his war against Ukraine with the same distance-creating prefix. The goal, he explained, was de-Nazification and de-militarization. The state news agency RIA Novosti later added: “De-Nazification inevitably means de-Ukrainization.”
“National Socialism almost destroyed Germany,” Klemperer wrote. “The task of curing it of this deadly disease is now referred to as ‘denazification’. I hope and believe that this terrible word … will disappear and only lead a historical existence as soon as it has fulfilled its present task … But that will take a while, because not only the National Socialist deeds have to disappear, but also … the typical National Socialist way of thinking and its breeding ground: the language of National Socialism.”
The article first appeared in The Economist under the title “Vladimir Putin is in thrall to a distinctive brand of Russian fascism” and was translated by Cornelia Zink.
Originally translated as “Putin under the spell of a unique Russian fascism” comes from The Economist.
