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Russian President Vladimir Putin has memorably called the breakup of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a tragedy, and that has led many to believe that he is hoping to restore the old USSR as he consolidates control within Russia and projects military power outward into Ukraine and beyond.
However, the government Putin is building in Moscow bears little resemblance to Socialism, Communism, or anything that Karl Marx would have endorsed based on his thinking. Surely, the man who described religion as the “opium of the people” wouldn’t likely associate himself with a regime that has rehabilitated the Russian Orthodox Church as a key element of Russians’ patriotic identity.
No, the new Russia looks more like a copy of a totalitarian state from Europe’s dark past, dressed in 21st century clothing.
“When you hear the word Fascism you always have to ask yourself: what are they talking about, how are they using the word?” Oxford University Professor Roger Griffin, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Fascism, once warned in a 2012 interview. “The word ‘Fascist’ can be a simple way of insulting somebody, of saying that they are horrible, nasty, that they should go away.”
Indeed, it’s a favorite epithet of none other than Vladimir Putin, whose surrogates in the Russian leadership alternately accuse the government in Ukraine of either associating with Fascists or actually being Fascist.
What we have here, though, may be an example of what mental health professionals call projection.
A more precise definition of Fascism, according to Griffin, is a political ideology with three broad elements: populist ultra-nationalism, the claim that the country has become soft or ‘decadent,’ and a “rebirth myth.” The third is the promise, typically made by Fascist leaders, to restore a country to some sort of former greatness, usually taken from it treacherously by its enemies, either external or internal.
American scholar Robert Paxton has identified other elements of Fascism, including an obsession with reversing national decline, usually blamed on betrayal, through restriction of civil liberties, purification of the people, military strength, and national expansion. Violence, Paxton notes, is not seen as inherently bad in a Fascist system, and its use to eliminate challenges to the state is glorified.
Given the massive changes imposed on Russian society in the past several years, it’s easy to argue that, under Putin, the country is turning into at least a quasi-Fascist state.