Ukrainians use the term rashizm to describe the Putin regime’s ideology. It’s a neologism combining “Russia” and “fascism.” Ukrainians note that Russia’s invasion aims not only to acquire territory but also to destroy Ukraine as an independent nation and culture. They note further that many Russian airstrikes are aimed at civilian non-military infrastructure. But such attacks are not unique to fascists.
Is the “fascist” label appropriate for Putin’s regime? What does the term mean anyway? At its heart, fascism is corporatism: a centrally managed society which subordinates individual liberties to collective goals. A fascist elite mobilizes society towards these goals through a combination of nationalism, racialism, war, and a cult of personality.
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. The goal is to create a new national community. Fascists are extreme nationalists, but they are revolutionary rather than ultraconservative or reactionary. Today, many scholars would be cautious about applying the term fascist to Putinism, since it seeks to restore the Tsarist and Soviet empires rather than create an entirely new Russian state and people.
The Rise of Putinism
Putinism has developed over the last 25 years. Putin began his political career working for Russia’s two most prominent pro-Western democrats of the 1990s, the first mayor of post-Soviet St. 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 initially showed some liberal and pro-European traits. 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 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 truculent speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, that Putin announced Russia’s turning away from the West. Since then, Putinism has become more illiberal with each passing year, with some fluctuations during Dmitry Medvedev’s “palliative presidency” from 2008 to 2012. Gradually, the Russian pseudo-federation transformed itself from a semi-authoritarian to a semi-totalitarian state. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and simultaneous turn towards totalitarian China was more a continuation than a reversal of earlier trends.
Russia’s military interventions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2015 were not only successful as foreign operations. They also had a stabilizing effect on Putin’s rule within Russian domestic politics. While there are numerous fascists in today’s Russia, including in the political and intellectual elite, the majority of Russia’s key policymakers and opinion makers are cynics rather than revolutionaries. 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.
Putin’s Goal in Ukraine
Thus Putin tried again in 2022. But now Moscow wants to 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” 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.
Moscow’s occupation policy in Ukraine aims to reverse the Russian civilization’s split, supposedly caused by foreign influence. Ukrainians are viewed in Russian imperial nationalism as inhabitants of 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, “Ukraine.” Foreign actors such as the Catholic Church, Imperial Germany, the Bolsheviks of the 1920s and the West today have divided the pan-Russian people and alienated the “Great Russians” (velikorossy) of the Russian Federation from the “Little Russians” (malorossy) of Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s goal is to create a new “Little Russia” in Ukraine, 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.
Conclusion
In Russia itself, Putin’s ideology is still far from fascist. Putin and his entourage are not domestic revolutionaries, but rather representatives of the pre-1991 ancien regime. They seek to restore the Tsarist and Soviet order as far as possible, rather than give birth to a completely new order. Putin is less like Hitler and comparable to the last German Reich President Paul von Hindenburg (who made Hitler Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933).
But how are we to categorize the ideology behind Moscow’s intentions in Ukraine, which include the mass murders in Bucha or Mariupol in 2022, the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children, forced reeducation, the mass torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war and air strikes on Ukrainian civilians? These crimes are not the collateral damage of military operations. A cautious classification of the ideology behind Russia’s war of extermination as “illiberal” is insufficient. Many observers familiar with the details of Moscow’s policy in Ukraine would find such term inadequate, or even misleading.
Russia’s policy of russification in the occupied Ukrainian territories should be characterized as quasi-fascist. It aims to achieve a profound sociocultural transformation of these areas. 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 in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
