‘Re-Stalinisation’ by Tsar Putin, an emperor without ideology
The Kremlin is trying to fill the void left by the decline of ideologies with the cult of the Great Victory. While "Putinism" and fascism share some features, with echoes from Hitler, stressing their similarities tends to obscure their distinctive features. Putinism rejects socialist ideas and scorns the pursuit of equality, while making the messianism of the Russian Orthodox Church a fundamental part of its politics.
Attempts to describe the specific traits of Vladimir Putin's ideology and Russia’s ruling class have so far proven rather fruitless, beyond talk of "Eurasia" or the "Russian World" inspired by rather confused pseudo-philosophers.
The reason is quite simple: the Kremlin has no real ideology, as evinced by the empty proclamations made at St Petersburg Economic Forum, currently underway.
In an age of ideological vacuity, the politics of memory, with the cult of the Great Victory, has become the regime's main tool of legitimation, without any elaborate perspective.
The notion of ideology only complicates any understanding of Putinism. For the past quarter of a century, Russians have lived under the yoke of mafia-like security services, which Putin embodies, in a profoundly corrupt society where nothing guarantees rights or freedoms "neither to the poet nor to the citizen," as Dina Khapaeva, professor at the School of Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology, puts it.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, analysts argued that the crux of the matter lay in the "objective successes" of Putin's government, claiming that he was the guarantor of "stability and order", so desired by Russians after the turbulent 1990s.
As long as the pipelines continued to operate sufficiently to guarantee a semblance of prosperity, at least in the major cities, this argument convinced many.
Now after the war against Ukraine claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Russia itself, and drone strikes have become so frequent that Putin can no longer hold a military parade without Volodymyr Zelenskyy's permission, it has become much less clear why “the people are silent”.
The idea that Putinism is a form of fascism spread among Putin's critics after his second presidential term, which ended with the 2008 war in Georgia.
US political scientist Alexander Motyl, the son of Ukrainians who fled World War II, was one of the first to formulate this hypothesis; in his view, "hyper-nationalism, imperialism, and supremacism" are traits that show up in the ideologies of both Hitler's and Putin's regimes.
For Yale historian Timothy Snyder, pro-fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who emigrated after the establishment of the Soviet regime, has been a major influence on Putin, who likes to quote him in his speeches, and has had his ashes reburied in the Donskoy Monastery.
What is more, many Russian supporters of Putinism openly expressed their sympathies for fascism until, of course, Kremlin propaganda declared the Ukrainians to be “Nazis”.
There are undoubtedly similarities between Putinism (or "Ruscism," as it is called in Ukraine) and fascism: the cult of power and leadership, terror, nostalgia for the past, and militarism.
The desire to label Putin's regime as fascist is understandable: it's a way to force recognition of its criminality.
However, not all criminal regimes are fascist, and overemphasising the similarities with fascism obscures the distinctive features of Putinism. And the obvious differences may even cast doubt on its criminal nature.
Paradoxically, the debate over equating Putinism with fascism has served as a pretext for its normalisation. On the eve of the annexation of Crimea, US historian Stephen F. Cohen expressed outrage at the comparison between Putin's regime and fascism, warning Western public opinion that by "demonising" Putin and calling him a new Hitler, Putinism's critics were pushing the world to the brink of a new Cold War and nuclear catastrophe.
Placing Putinism within the broad spectrum of neoliberalism, French political scientist Marlene Laruelle of Georgetown University believes that Putin’s regime should not be considered fascist, much less a regime dominated by the far right; in her view, it is not an isolated monster, but one of many conservative regimes that are increasingly spreading around the world today.
In addition to the negative aspects of Putinism, Laruelle stressed aspects perceived positively by the Western left, such as the rejection of “geopolitical subordination to the United States”, the rejection of “Western hegemony”, and the opposition to “economic neoliberalism”.
In her interpretation, Putin's regime has become "post-liberal” because, in her view, Russia “learnt firsthand the limits of liberalism.”
Following the great Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky, Laruelle compares Putinism to "a jazz orchestra, with various instruments," although it would be much more appropriate to compare it to other "musicians”, namely the Wagnerians.
Indeed, Putinism differs from fascism. Fascism, especially National Socialism, contained elements of socialism, albeit only for the “Aryan race”. Putinism rejects all socialist ideas and, despite its populism, openly mocks the pursuit of equality.
Furthermore, most fascists were atheists. Although Mussolini maintained relations with the Roman Catholic Church, religious messianism was alien to both Fascist Italy and the Nazi Reich, while Putinism made the messianism of the Russian Orthodox Church a fundamental part of its politics.
The debate over the fascist nature of Putinism has further strengthened researchers' belief that it possesses a different ideology, though not fascist, and many have begun to attempt to describe its characteristics.
Twentieth-century ideologies represented a system of abstract prescriptions, the implementation of which was supposed to lead to the construction of a "better future": world communism or a thousand-year Reich.
They sought to apply these prescriptions on a global scale, which, in the eyes of their followers, justified these regimes' right to world domination, whether in the form of Aryan domination or world revolution.
A focus on the future was a key feature of these past ideologies, while the Kremlin actually has no plans for the future, other than a return to Russia's historical past, to the era of World War II or even the Middle Ages.
As Nikita Savin, a young political scientist who studied at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, aptly observes, Putin and the Kremlin's propagandists manipulate fragments of various ideological systems to adapt them to the needs of the moment, and discard them without hesitation at any other time.
Contradiction and chaotic incoherence are intrinsic traits of Putin's propaganda, much imitated today by Donald Trump. In keeping with postmodernism, propagandists like presidential advisor Vladimir Medinsky bluntly declare that there is no objectivity in history, which gives them complete freedom to distort both the past and the present.
The Kremlin effectively operates under the principle that the more contradictions there are, the easier it is to manipulate people, and when targeting its own citizens, the government systematically employs hybrid warfare tactics, which it has exported to other countries.
Unlike communism or fascism, Putinism offers no holistic explanation of the world, no "golden key" to unlock all the mysteries of the universe.
Regarding global domination, although the phrase "Russia's thousand-year history" is included in the Russian constitution, four years of catastrophic war against Ukraine have not significantly advanced the answer to the question of how the Kremlin can create a new vision of world order.
Renowned historian of fascism Robin Griffin believes that fascism, like communism, presented itself as a revolutionary movement. The Kremlin, however, fears revolutions like the plague, which is the real reason it cannot stop waging war, if not in Ukraine, then perhaps in the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, the separated offshoots of the former Soviet empire.
The cult of war, which extols Stalin as the victorious commander-in-chief, has defined the main thrust of Putin's memory policy: re-Stalinisation.
The Stalinist myth of war was and remains its “living soul”, with the memory of the heroic sacrifice in the fight against Nazism and the liberation of the entire world from the “brown plague”. Now Stalin's successor claims the exclusive right to redraw the map of Europe, Asia, and the entire world as he pleases.
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