How the fascism label contributes to understanding Russia’s war
Historical analogies are by definition incomplete and inaccurate. However, according to the author, classical fascism offers striking parallels with Putin’s policy towards Ukraine and with his nationalist and imperialist doctrine. For Ukrainians themselves, Putin’s fascism is obvious: Ukraine was already a “land of blood,” according to Timothy Snyder, during World War II and after the Soviet reoccupation.
The use of the term fascism in connection with the actions of the current Russian state has at least three dimensions. Firstly, it is a historical analogy used to guide public interpretation of events in the light of well-known developments in the recent past. Secondly, it is a Ukrainian cipher that expresses the lived experience of millions of Ukrainians today. It is communicated by Kyiv with the aim of, among others, generating international sympathy for the victims of Russian mass terror in Ukraine. Thirdly, fascism is an academic generic term that serves scholarly classification, enables comparisons across time and space, and highlights differences and similarities between historical fascism on the one hand and today’s Putinism on the other.
Fascism as a historical analogy
Most public characterizations of Putin’s regime as fascist fulfill the function of a diachronic analogy or metaphorical classification to better understand current developments in Russia and its occupied territories. The historical equation and verbal visualization of a current phenomenon with events and images from the past helps to recognize crucial characteristics and challenges in today’s Russia. Attributing fascism to Putin’s regime serves to illustrate to the general public what is happening in Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories.
This comparison is justified insofar as there are numerous parallels between the domestic and foreign political rhetoric and actions of Putin’s Russia on the one hand and of Mussolini’s Italy as well as Hitler’s Germany on the other. By the end of 2024, a number of political, social, ideological, and institutional similarities have accumulated. They range from the increasingly dictatorial and, in some respects, totalitarian characteristics of the Russian regime to the revanchist and increasingly genocidal features of the Kremlin’s external behavior. Influential US historian Timothy D. Snyder has also pointed out that Russia’s official historical memory and political iconography have, in coded form, become pro-fascist.
In 2018, for instance, Snyder drew attention to a right-wing intellectual of the Russian emigration in the inter- and post-war periods who has become fashionable under Putin – the Mussolini and Hitler admirer Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954). In his reflections on a post-communist, dictatorial, and nationalist Russia, Ilyin, in Snyder’s words, “provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. Today, his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin.” In 2018, Russian political scientist Anton Barbashin added: “Ivan Ilyin is quoted and mentioned not only by the president of Russia, but by [then] Prime Minister [Dmitry] Medvedev, Foreign Minister Lavrov, several of Russia’s governors, Patriarch [of the Russian Orthodox Church] Kirill, various leaders of the [ruling] United Russia Party and many others besides.”
At the end of September 2022, Putin concluded his speech on the occasion of Russia’s official (illegal) annexation of the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson with the following quote from Ilyin: “If I [Ilyin] consider Russia my motherland, it means that I love, reflect and think, sing and speak in Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my sorrow; its flowering is my joy.”
Today’s Russian domestic and foreign policy has a number of similarities with that of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Therefore, the use of the term fascism to analogically explain and metaphorically label the character of Putin’s regime serves an illuminating function for political debates in the mass media, civil society, civic education, and public discourse. In view of some demonstrative references by Putin and his entourage to historical Russian proto- or pro-fascism, such as Ilyin’s ideas, it seems heuristically useful to speak of Russian fascism today.
Fascism as a lived experience
The application of the term fascism to Putin’s regime by external commentators aims to give audiences outside Russia and Ukraine an impression of current Russian domestic and foreign affairs. By contrast, the Ukrainian use of the term fascism and the neologism Ruscism (rashizm) – a combination of Russia and fascism – is primarily an expressive act. In Ukraine, labeling Russia as fascist since 2014 expresses the collective shock, deep sorrow, and continued despair in the face of the Kremlin’s morbid cynicism toward ordinary Ukrainians – especially in the past 1,000 days of war.
Fascism and ruscism are also used by the Ukrainian government and society as battle cries to mobilize domestic and foreign support for the resistance against Russian aggression. These terms are intended to alert the outside world to the serious implications of Russia’s war of extermination for Ukraine. The adjectives fascist and ruscist indicate that Russia’s military expansion is not just about conquering Ukrainian territory. Russia’s revanchist adventure, especially since 2022, is aimed at destroying Ukraine as an independent nation state and a cultural community separate from Russia. The words and deeds of the Russian government are largely congruent in this regard. Even before February 24, 2022, statements by Russian government officials, parliamentarians, and propagandists indicated that Russia’s intentions with regard to Ukraine went beyond a mere redrawing of state borders, restoration of regional hegemony, and defense against the Westernization of Eastern Europe. Since 2014 at the latest, Moscow has been ruthlessly suppressing Ukrainian national identity, culture, and sentiment.
It would be going too far to equate Russian Ukrainophobia with the biological and eliminationist antisemitism of the Nazis. Moscow’s irredentist war “only” seeks to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a self-aware polity and independent civil society; the Kremlin does not aim to physically annihilate all Ukrainians, as the Nazis attempted with the Jews. Nevertheless, the Russian agenda goes beyond the “mere” expulsion, harassment, deportation, re-education, and brainwashing of Ukrainian residents. It also includes the expropriation, terrorization, imprisonment, torture, and murder of those Ukrainians (as well as some Russians) who oppose Russia’s military expansion, political reign of terror, and cultural dominance in Ukraine with words and/or deeds.
It is hardly surprising, then, that many Ukrainians, as well as some Russian observers, spontaneously describe Russia’s genocidal behavior as fascist. Millions of Ukrainians who remained in Ukraine in 2022 or returned home after fleeing abroad are experiencing first hand Moscow’s evil in the form of weekly air strikes across the country. Many Russian missile, bomb, and drone strikes into Ukraine’s hinterland are not aimed at military objects or arms factories. Instead, they are deliberately aimed at civilian buildings with no direct connection to Ukraine’s defense effort, including residential homes, supermarkets, hospitals, and educational institutions.
Military historians may argue that deliberate attacks on civilians and non-military infrastructure are not unique to fascist warfare. Nevertheless, the fascism label comes first to mind for most Ukrainians to describe their experiences, as their family history includes experiences with historical fascism, especially German Nazism, including air raids by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Some older Ukrainians still remember the German war against the USSR.
Fascism as a scientific concept
An increasing number of prominent experts on Central and Eastern Europe now describe Putin’s Russia as fascist. By contrast, many comparative historians and political scientists avoid using the term fascism to categorize Putinism. This has to do with the narrow definitions of generic fascism that many of these academics use. According to them, the defining feature that distinguishes fascists from other right-wing radicals is their goal of political, social, cultural, and anthropological rebirth.
Fascists often refer to a supposed Golden Age in their nation’s distant history and use ideas and symbols from this mythologized past. However, they do not seek to preserve or restore a past era, but to create a new national community. Fascists are extreme right-wingers, but they are revolutionary rather than ultraconservative or reactionary. Today, many comparativists would be cautious about applying the term fascism to Putinism, since it seeks to restore the Tsarist and Soviet empires rather than create an entirely new Russian state and people.
On the other hand, Putinism has developed over the past 25 years, both in terms of its ultimate goals and daily rhetoric, as well as in terms of its policies and spontaneous actions. Putin originally began his political career in the service of Russia’s two most prominent pro-Western democrats of the 1990s, working for the first mayor of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. After Putin became prime minister in 1999 and president in 2000, Putinism also showed some liberal and pro-European traits for several years. Under Putin, Russia remained a member of the Council of Europe, the NATO-Russia Council and the G8 group in the 2000s and early 2010s. Moscow even negotiated a comprehensive partnership agreement with the European Union until 2014.
Russia’s domestic political regression from a proto-democracy back to an autocracy began with Putin’s rise to power in 1999. But it was only eight years later, with his infamous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, that Putin announced Russia’s turning away from the West. Since then, Putinism has become more illiberal, anti-Western, nationalist, imperialist, and bellicose with each passing year, with some fluctuations during Dmitry Medvedev’s “palliative presidency” from 2008 to 2012. Gradually, the Russian pseudo-federation transformed from a semi-authoritarian to a semi-totalitarian state. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and simultaneous turn toward authoritarian or totalitarian Asian states was more of a continuation than a reversal of earlier trends.
For most comparativists, these and similar changes in the last quarter century of Russian history would still be too few to classify Putinism as fascism. But Putin’s transformation of Russian domestic and foreign policy over the past 25 years has had a clear direction and deepens further every day. Russia’s transformation has meant and continues to mean the continued increase of rhetorical aggression, internal repression, external escalation, and general radicalization, which now culminates in monthly Russian threats of a nuclear world war.
Furthermore, Russia’s policy in the occupied Ukrainian territories could be characterized as quasi-fascist in a more direct sense. The ruthless Russification campaign that the Russian state is waging in the occupied parts of Ukraine through targeted terror, forced reeducation and material incentives, aims to achieve a profound sociocultural transformation of these areas. Although such irredentist, colonizing, and homogenizing policies are not considered fascist as such in comparative research on imperialism, the instruments used by the Kremlin to implement its policy in Ukraine and the results it seeks to achieve are in some ways similar to those of fascist domestic revolutions, such as those that took place or were attempted in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
Moscow wants to fundamentally transform the conquered Ukrainian communities and turn them into cells of a culturally and ideologically standardized Russian people (russkii narod). Russian imperial ultranationalists regard large parts of Ukraine as originally Russian land and refer to them as “New Russia” and “Little Russia” (Novorossiya, Malaya Rossiya). Ukrainians – if the term is accepted at all – are thus merely a sub-ethnic group of the greater Russian people, speaking a Russian dialect and having more of a regional folklore than a national culture.
The people who live “na Ukraine” – that is, “on the [or on an area called] Ukraine” – are viewed in Russian imperial nationalism as inhabitants in territories “on the edge” (okraina) of the great empire and not of an independent country. These West Russian border dwellers, according to the Russian irredentist narrative, were misled by anti-Russian forces to form an artificial nation, “Ukrainians”. Foreign actors such as the Catholic Church, Imperial Germany, the Bolsheviks of the 1920s and/or today’s West have divided the pan-Russian people and alienated the “Great Russians” (velikorossy) of the Russian Federation from the “Little Russians” (malorossy) of Ukraine.
Moscow’s occupation policy in Ukraine to reverse the Russian civilization’s split, supposedly caused by foreign influence, could be seen as an attempt to create a newborn “Little Russia”. The Kremlin’s goal is to bring about a local political, social, cultural, and anthropological revolution in the Russian-annexed areas of Ukraine. While population homogenization campaigns have been common in history and are not exclusive to fascism, the policy of Russification in Ukraine is similar to classic fascist domestic and occupation policies, so that Moscow’s transformative goals regarding Russia’s Ukrainian “brothers” could be considered quasi-fascist.
Conclusions
The development of Russia itself is still far from fascism in that Putin and his entourage are not domestic revolutionaries, but rather representatives of the pre-1991 ancien regime. They are seeking to restore the Tsarist and Soviet order as far as possible, rather than to give birth to a completely new empire. Putin is less of a Russian Hitler than comparable in some respects to the last German Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, who made Hitler Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933.
On the other hand, in Russian imperial nationalism, Ukraine is not a foreign country but the western border area of Greater Russia. While most non-Russian observers understand the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy as an expression of Moscow’s foreign priorities, many Russians would consider it an internal Russian affair. Moscow’s aggressiveness in dealing with Ukrainians has a lot to do with many Russians’ assumption that this is a family affair to which international legal rules and humanitarian conventions do not apply.
For many Ukrainian victims and non-Ukrainian opponents of what Moscow is doing in Ukraine, the refusal of most comparatists to call Putin’s Russia fascist seems inappropriate, if not disingenuous or even amoral. Russia’s forces and occupation administration in Ukraine, especially since 2022, have been behaving in a terrorist, genocidal, and sometimes sadistic manner. In this context, it seems strange to insist that Moscow’s policies and the ideas behind them are unequivocally, absolutely and exclusively non-fascist.
To be sure, there is no Russian equivalent of the Nazi gas chambers – just as there was no Italo-fascist equivalent of this German crime. But how are we to categorize Moscow’s intentions behind the mass murders in Bucha or Mariupol in 2022, the blowing up of the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children, the mass torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war or the Russian air strikes on Ukrainian civilians? These crimes are neither mere collateral damage of military operations, nor are they ordinary variations of neocolonial politics, as they take place under all occupation regimes. A cautious classification of the ideology behind Russia’s war of extermination as “illiberal”, “conservative” or “traditionalist” seems insufficient. Many observers familiar with the horrific details of Moscow’s policy in Ukraine would find such terms inadequate, or even misleading.
On the other hand, reducing Putinism exclusively to fascism is also unhelpful. An explanation of Moscow’s motivation for its military aggression that emphasizes only ultra-nationalist fanaticism is incomplete. While there are numerous fascists in today’s Russia, including in the political and intellectual elite, the majority of Russia’s key policy makers and shapers are cynics rather than fanatics. An important – if not the decisive – factor in Russia’s foreign policy adventures before 2022 was their political ease, strategic predictability, military victoriousness, economic affordability, and societal popularity.
Russia’s military interventions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2015 were not only successful as such. They also had a stabilizing effect on Putin’s rule within Russia’s rudimentary domestic politics and conformist society. Not trying the same trick again in early 2022, when Putin’s popularity ratings were once more in relative decline, would have been somewhat irrational given the positive foreign and domestic policy experiences that Putin had gained from his previous military adventures.
Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, which is part of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI), an associate professor of political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and the director of the "Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society" series published by Ibidem Press in Stuttgart. His most well-known book is Russia’s Spreading Nationalist Infection (2012).
