Given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a lot of media commentary on the possible motives of president Vladimir’s motives, including possibly ideological ones. In that context a number of commentators have made the argument that Putin is a fascist. This article examines the thinking behind those arguments, what would be the implications of the contrary assertion, and why the views of militant anti-fascists generally differ from those of liberal commentators on this question. For convenience we will follow the format of a French secondary school essay, being introduction (this), thesis (Putin is a fascist), antithesis (Putin is not a fascist) and synthesis (what are the takeaways).
Thesis — Putin as fascist
The case for Putin being a fascist is made on two main grounds. The first being the characteristics of his political leadership of the Russian Federation and military aggression abroad, both in the current invasion of Ukraine, and past interventions (Syria, Georgia, etc). The second being his alleged ideological sympathies and affiliations with past and present Russian fascists, Ivan Ilyin (past) and Alexander Dugin (present).
The first ground is that Putin is a reactionary authoritarian nationalist with aggressive ambitions to restore Great Russian power based on a self-pitying narrative of national humiliation and victimisation by a Western-led anti-Russian geopolitical conspiracy. In broad outline, this is incontestable. Still, history is full of reactionary nationalist autocrats with expansionist ambitions that are not generally characterised as fascists.
The second ground is the connection and evident sympathy of Putin for undisputed fascist thinkers like Ilyin and Dugin. Dugin is repeatedly characterised as “Putin’s brain” in strands of the current discourse. Although Ilyin died back in 1954, he was headlined on MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan’s piece on “why Putin is a fascist” on Monday 21st March[1]. Hassan noted Putin’s enthusiasm for Ilyin’s geopolitics, particularly that the latter emphasised that to defend Ukrainian independence from Russia was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Similarly, Alexander Dugin, today’s pre-eminent Russian fascist philosopher (and Ilyin acolyte), wrote a book on geopolitics insisting that a precondition for the redemption of Russia as a world-power required the reconquest of Ukraine.
The language of geopolitics is not specific to fascism, however. The founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, an Oxford don and LSE founder, may have been a loyal British Empire man, but his 1904 book, “The Geographical Pivot of History” was not an early fascist manifesto. It did propose that the Eurasian landmass was “the world island” and whoever controlled its “pivot area” a.k.a. “The Heartland” — what corresponded to the then Russian Empire — would control world history. In many ways this was simply a retrospective theoretical underpinning for the Victorian era’s imperialist “Great Game” of containing Russian power in Central Asia (Afghanistan and all that).
But for all its impeccable imperialism with its attendant structural racism, geopolitics did not partake of the kind of race theory and worldview of facism. Geopolitics, like economics, reduces the human element to mostly a book-keeping entry of numbers. The German school of geopolitics may have provided terms like “Lebensraum” that are today forever associated with the Nazis. But the positivist materialism, geographic determinism and indifference to racial ideology of geopolitics, led the Nazis to denounce the doctrine. Nevertheless the taint of guilt by association led to the discipline being rebranded as International Relations in the post-war period. But the geopolitical strategies of Piłsudski’s “prometheanism” (“there can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine”) and containment were imported into Cold War America by Polish and Central European refugees like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. From that day to this, US and NATO policy has been guided by geopolitics, even if under the official pseudonym of “International Relations”.
In other words, geopolitics is really only the lingua franca of global foreign policy “realpolitik” (to use another associated euphemism). So when Dugin sat down to make his overtures to the post-Soviet Russian state apparatchiks and siloviki, in his 1997 “Foundations of Geopolitics”, naturally he wrote in a language they would understand. In this work his esoteric Evolian ideas of the Kali Yuga, Hindu mysticism, Theosophy and all that, are quietly sidelined, as are the apocalyptic insurgent elements of mystical rebirth and national revolution from below, proper to the fascist strategy. By talking to the state establishment in their own language, Dugin achieved, for a period, a degree of influence. Today his ticket to influence lies indirectly through the appeal of the Russian Orthodox mystical element of his oeuvre to his patron Malofeev, who is very keen on the religious nationalist claptrap.
So the day when Putin starts giving speeches about the terminal depravity of the current age, the Kali Yuga, and the need for the revolutionary nationalist youth to rise up and smash the corrupt institutions of the fallen Russian state, we can say that he has taken the fascist vision of Illyin and Dugin fully to heart. But while he continues to lean his power on the might of the state, backed by the votes of the over-50s outside the metropolitan cities, then the coincidence of his geopolitical vision with that of the Russian fascists, is merely an overlap on foreign policy. No matter how disconnected the ideological vision of restoring Russian greatness is from the mundane realities of the global balance of power and actual Russian military capacity (in demographic, rather than technological or materiel terms).
Antithesis — Putin is a lumpen-apparatchik, not a fascist
The immediate problem in proposing that Putin is not a fascist is that a lot of people internally translate that statement into “he’s not as bad as you’re making out”, i.e. apologism. And if fascism was merely a label on a moral scale of badness next to “absolute worst”, then that would be a reasonable reaction. But for anti-fascists focusing on the dangers of fascism, not in an abstractly moral way but in the sense of a specific threat, is a matter of pragmatic, tactical and strategic importance.
In his Monday night piece on Putin-as-fascist, Hassan read out a quote from academic fascism scholar Robert Paxton, defining fascism as:
“…a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood 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.”
Sharp-eared listeners to the piece will have noticed that, having read the passage out in full, Hassan then goes on to reference the ideological and state practices that precede and follow the section we have bolded above. But Paxton’s “mass-based party of committed nationalist militants” disappears from the account. And therein lies the rub.
For anti-fascists in the militant tradition, fascism is not a set of ideological traits in the abstract, but also a strategy for social change that relies on building an autonomous power, within civil society, outside of the existing state (“deep” or otherwise) and using that to destroy any competing political tendencies and so force their agenda on the state, by means beyond the electoral system (although not necessarily abstaining from electoralism). In the Three-Way Fight tradition of anti-fascism this is characterised as the “insurgent” or even “revolutionary” political strategy of fascism, which sets it apart from other far right tendencies.
By contrast, Putin’s background is in the KGB in the old USSR and then the successor FSB in the post-Soviet era. He is a man of the thuggish end of the state bureaucracy, a lumpen-apparatchik. At no stage in his political journey has he ever organised or mobilised an autonomous force apart from the state in order to impose a political direction upon it from the outside. Not only has he never been a proponent of insurgent or revolutionary anti-state politics, his entire career has been the repression and stamping down on any such potential. And his repressive authoritarian autocracy today is a continuation of this same fundamental strategy. Putin is not an insurgent against the deep state, he IS the deep state, come out from behind the curtain.
Certainly Putin has created an asto-turf political party of lackeys and placemen in the Duma. But no one expects any of these politicians ever to replace him (at least by their own initiative). All observers of Russian politics accept that the real power around the Kremlin lies not with the politicians or even the oligarchs (although some of these, like Prigozhin and Dugin’s patron Malofeev are part of his circle), but the “siloviki”, the “men of power”, securocrat apparatchiks that control the ministries of state that each maintain their own armed forces and spetsnaz.
The danger that Putin and his autocratic regime of silovik barons and oligarch courtiers pose to Ukraine and the world is not to be underestimated. When we say that this is not fascism, we are not downplaying the danger the regime poses, by any means. But grassroots anti-fascist resistance could not have prevented his rise to power, because he did not come from the streets at the head of a fascist paramilitary party, but from within the existing corridors of power of the collapsing Soviet state.
Synthesis — what are the stakes of quibbling over a word?
If the specific threat of genuine fascism were truly a thing of the past, then there would be no important stakes in pushing back against the semantic drift in the meaning of the word. But if actual fascism remains a clear and present danger in the near future, as militant anti-fascists (and not only us) maintain, then we need to retain a grasp on its specific threat to know how to fight it. While at the same time reminding everyone that fascism is far from the only threat facing global humanity at this time of impending climate crisis.
Putin’s geopolitical Greater Russian chauvinist ideology and militarist aggression presents a danger to not only the millions of Ukrainians currently forced into flight, dying in bombardments or fighting to resist this abominable invasion, but wider regions and peoples in Europe and beyond. There is no need to mentally disarm ourselves against the fascist threats of the present and near future by confounding the two dangers. A tiger can kill as well as a snake, but the tactics to survive both are different.