Il Duce served a la Russe

The common misconception about the “democratic” nature of fascist regimes leads to the misconception of “collective responsibility” and “collective guilt” of the population that suffered from regimes initially. Firstly, historical facts disproof the very base of such construction. As Vladislav Inozemtsev in his piece for Republic points out, ‘nowhere and never have fascists come to power as a result of crushing electoral victories or unstoppable popular revolutions’. So, there is no reason to talk about the “collective guilt” of a society crashed by a fascist clique in the first turn. It is just another country occupied by the same bunch of rouges. Secondly, the author opportunely reminds us that the fascism of Putin is not something specifically Russian. There had been attempts to build such states “from Portugal and Romania to Germany and Spain” at “the stage reached after Communism has proven an illusion”.

By the 1990s in Russia, Communism undoubtedly proved to be an illusion with a vengeance. So, the subsequent coming of fascists to power has been predicted since 1939. If it had not been for the “mistakes of the Western politicians of the 1990s, who sought, if not to isolate Russia, then to forget about it as a bad dream”, Russia might have become a normal European democratic state a long time ago. Why not? After all, the first sovereign state in the world that granted women the right to vote on the national level was Russia after the bourgeois revolution of February 1917. This fact is worth reminding.

The same disease will be cured with the same medicine. As it happened to all ex-fascist European states before, the only way to guarantee peace and stability on the continent was to integrate these countries into the Western democratic world. It is worth reminding that Europe has already integrated many indispensable things from Russia.

And the style of serving food is just one of them.

Economist Vladislav Inozemtsev for Republic:

“The Russian people have not named Vladimir Putin “il Duce'” (The Leader). He has been identified as such, just as earlier in history in Italy, by those who saw arbitrariness and violence as a lesser evil than the loss of their elite privileges."

This year saw the anniversary of an event whose significance in history cannot be overestimated. On 31 October 1922, Benito Mussolini, the ideologist of Italian ‘revolutionary nationalism’, who propounded that national unity and patriotism should be placed above class differences and communist internationalism, became Prime Minister of Italy. Fascism, a political movement that was fairly young at the time, had come to power for the first time in a major European country. This was the start of an era that lasted several decades and was marked by attempts to build corporatist states in various European countries - from Portugal and Romania to Germany and Spain. Even the defeat of the Axis countries in World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and fascist governments in Italy, Romania and Hungary did not end the political history of the movement, which survived in a somewhat tempered and modified form in Spain and Portugal until the 1970s.

An assessment of fascism in Europe has once again become relevant in light of the rapid evolution of Russia towards a totalitarian state imbued with an obscurantist imperial ideology that espouses withholding information from the people, ostensibly for the good of society. In 2015, I wrote that a relatively mild fascist regime was beginning to take shape in Russia and stressed that signs of the classical definition of fascism were already easily discernible in the Russian Federation.

One of the world’s foremost experts in the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism, British Professor Roger Griffin, points to the political aesthetics of Romantic symbolism, large-scale mobilisation, an apologia for masculinity and charismatic leadership, and the acceptance of violence produced ‘in the name of the people’ as a mass phenomenon. Many scholarly authors emphasise that fascism has presented itself as a fierce opponent of ‘moral decadence’, believing that this can be achieved through the priority of a ‘single will’ and an authoritarian form of government over the interests of individuals.

One definition of fascism by American political scientist and historian Robert Paxton is worth citing in full: "Fascism is a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Internationally renowned Italian historian Emilio Gentile calls an important feature of fascism: “The corporate organisation of an economy which suppresses trade union freedom, expands the sphere of state intervention and aims to achieve... the unification of 'productive industrial sectors' under regime control while preserving private property and class distinctions”.

It is also worth noting that Peter Drucker, author of the cornerstone book ‘The End of Economic Man’, already posited back in 1939 that: "Fascism is the stage reached after Communism has proven an illusion".

However, a few years ago, the arguments in favour of such comparisons were irregular and inconsistent. For example, Putin's authoritarian traits and his theories about a "Russian genetic code" that he states to have acted as Russia’s “main competitive advantage in the modern world" might have been such arguments. This year the set of features became almost complete. His large-scale war of aggression against the neighbouring country of Ukraine, the mass murder of its civilians and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of citizens of another nation bring to mind virtually all of the practices used by fascist regimes throughout history.

Of course, the modern incarnation of fascism differs significantly from previous ones. But the proponents of finding such differences focus primarily on the absence of a broad mass of fanatics that had elevated il Duce Mussolini, Der Führer Hitler and other duces and fuhrers to their pinnacles of power. Many of those authors who draw on pseudo-intellectual pro-Putin sources such as the Valdai Club and who reject the possibility of classifying Russia as a fascist regime place this very argument at the core of their reasoning. However, I think that it is crucial - especially in light of this year’s anniversary - to point out at least one very important aspect of fascism.

The mass nature of the fascist movement certainly provides much to understand. At the same time, it is worth noting that nowhere and never have fascists come to power as the result of crushing electoral victories or unstoppable popular revolutions. The ‘March on Rome’ itself, which resulted in King Victor Emmanuel III appointing Mussolini as Prime Minister, attracted just over 30,000 people who could have easily been dispersed by the Italian army, while the Fascist Party's parliamentary faction at the time had only 38 deputies.

Under different political and economic conditions and in different circumstances, other fascist leaders were ‘ordained’ to power by the legitimate leaders of their respective countries. Thus, in 1932, António Salazar was appointed the Prime Minister in Portugal, in 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, and in 1940 Jon Antonescu took over the Romanian government. Only General Francisco Franco came to power through rebellion and civil war, which even then could not have been won by his supporters without a massive German-Italian intervention.

It was only after their emergence at the helms of their respective state machines that fascist leaders exterminated competing political parties within a few months to a couple of years or formed ‘national fronts’, eliminated competitors, abolished democratic procedures, brought their economies under control and began preparing for war.

It was only after fascists had taken over institutions of state power that National Socialist torchlight marches began in Nuremberg in Germany or tens of thousands of people began to gather at staged pro-Putin rallies (so-called ‘Putings’) at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, and the leaders of both of these movements were deified by servile propaganda.

In Russia, this transformation of a country to complete fascism has taken more than a decade, but this can be explained by the fact that the general humanisation of society at the beginning of the twenty-first century would not allow for such direct and drastic action as was possible 70-100 years ago.

Vladimir Putin's rise to power and the destruction of Russia's democratic norms, the rule of law and a complete abandonment of human rights, in my view, cannot be explained by the history of the Russian people, the imperial nature of the Russian state, or the scale of the country's economic and political humiliation in the post-Soviet period. It can, however, be explained by the nature of the ruling class that seized power in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and which, from its very outset, sought to consolidate its powers and opportunities rather than to build a democratic state governed by the rule of law.

This ruling class in Russia ensured the adoption of a constitution in 1993 that was far too reminiscent of Germany’s infamous Ermachtigungsgesetz of 1933 which was adopted after Hitler came to power. This ruling class in 1996 used unprecedented pressure to force Boris Yeltsin's re-election as president. It was also this ruling class, realizing the failure of its new economic policies, that first turned to its oligarchs for financial support and then to KGB officers for guarantees of security.

The fatal role of the "Russian Hindenburgs" (to whom, I note, many domestic opposition figures pray to this day and who are considered to be almost the main beacons of freedom and democracy), in my view, has not yet been addressed as the central cause of the destruction of dozens of Ukrainian cities and the shooting of hundreds of civilians in Bucha and Izyum in Ukraine.

. [the author means not only Boris Yeltsin, who formally appointed Putin as his successor, but the vague circle of powerful figures who supported and organized transition of power from Yeltsin to Putin. This circle included the “seven bankers” group that consisted of Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and others and the political party SPS, which decided to support Putin’s candidacy at the presidential elections in 2000. The leadership of SPS included Boris Nemtsov and Egor Gaydar. All these personalities might be considered as “beacons of freedom and democracy”, one way or another - REM).

The communist period inarguably left an indelible mark on Russia’s history. Fear on the part of both the elite as well as the general population of a return to power of the communist functionaries (nomenklatura) was so great that any disregard for the law and bringing into power a leader with even the most primitive ideas about how to move forward seemed to be justified. This included tolerating President Yeltsin’s order in 1993 to dissolve the Russian legislature and to shell the Russian Parliament building, abolishment of the Federal Treaty that was supposed to guarantee comparative independence and equality among Russia’s regions and the launching of a war in Chechnya.

All of these moves led to a financial default and another wave of impoverishment.

The Russian people have not named Vladimir Putin Il Duce (‘The Leader’). He has been identified as such, just as earlier in history in Italy, by those who saw arbitrariness and violence as a lesser evil than the loss of their elite privileges.

Fascists in Europe were largely brought to power by the struggle between social democrats and communists and generally fragmented democratic forces. However, in Russia, the new fascist regime has been formed as a consequence of the unwillingness of self-proclaimed democrats to share power with those who do not share their views on the direction of the further development of Russia but who would generally be forced to act in a democratic manner (The author reminds us of the transformation of communists, who staged an armed revolt in 1993, but later came to terms with the ruling regime, switched to peaceful campaigning and became the second largest political party in the parliament. – REM)

Of course, fascist regimes do not last forever - their leaders lose wars even with less serious opponents (and here, the parallels between today's Russia and Italy in the first half of the twentieth century are very appropriate). They are forced to adapt to the needs of economic development and geopolitical realities when left alone (one can recall here the evolution of the Franco regime).

However, the history of contemporary Russia provides a very important stimulus for reflection on trends which seemed to have already been appreciated and assimilated by the world by the end of the last century. It has been widely recognised that national humiliations and failures not only do not contribute to the formation of ‘normal’ countries - and Russia is no exception here - but also cannot make such humiliated countries safe for the world.

As a result of this understanding, Germany and Italy were quickly integrated into Atlantic institutions after the Second World War (Italy became a founding member of NATO and Germany joined the alliance in 1955; both countries co-founded the European Economic Community in 1957); Spain was swiftly accepted into NATO and the EEC after the dismantling of the Franco regime. Russia, by contrast, was not included in the community of Western democracies in the 1990s - and today we, and the world, are largely bearing the brunt of that mistake.

The mistakes of the domestic Hindenburgs are unlikely to be repeated. However, I am convinced that it is just as important not to repeat the mistakes of the Western politicians of the 1990s, who sought, if not to isolate Russia, then to forget about it as a bad dream.

Fascism does not go away by itself - even when defeated, it does not go away without a trace. The countries that suffered from fascism in the past needed to go through a period in which fascism was intentionally eliminated, like the program of Denazification in Germany.

The main challenge in this elimination of fascism is that it can only be achieved by integrating formerly fascist countries into structures of the Western democratic world. We can see examples of how this was done with Italy, Germany and other societies that took a false step.