82 - Putin the Fascist: War without End
Is the war in Ukraine a result of Putin’s fascism as well as naked ambition and unrequited narcissism? This week’s Economist, drawing in part on the writings of acclaimed Yale historian Timothy Snyder, ascribes the lamentable and inexcusable invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s refusal to claim victory and withdraw to a fundamental acceptance of fascism as an ideology and as a working creed.
The Economist and other sources say that unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and other modern late Soviet leaders, their KGB secret security service operatives were fascists more than communists. That is, within the KGB there was a sense that Soviet political leaders were soft; only the KGB could effectively protect the Soviet state from its nominal rulers. Putin worked at a modestly low level for the KGB in East Germany, but he fully imbibed the prevailing KGB ethic of fascism.
Fascism feeds off humiliation and a feeling of having been betrayed. Nazism grew on the back of humiliation by the victorious Allies at Versailles. Putin certainly feels that humiliation personally, and claims to feel it on behalf of Russia when his country is demoted economically or is shunned internationally. It is not being threatened by NATO’s expansion but by being excluded that is Putin’s poisoned chalice.
“Fascism works by creating enemies,” albeit often false or imaginary ones. Putin’s Russia is battling back against the imagined hatred of others - the West, NATO, the U.S., you name it. So paranoia is either promoted or imagined as a way to stoke the allegiance of the masses to a necessary form of revenge. Ukrainians are suffering as a result. So do many citizens elsewhere, even in America, because politicians invent conspiracy theories to justify or explain to themselves their own ambitions.
When Putin and his acolytes claim to eradicate Nazism in Ukraine, and rationalize the invasion with that mantra, they are projecting onto Ukraine their own adherence to the methods of the real odious Nazis and the men of Mussolini who propagated fascism in Italy.
As Hitler and Mussolini created fictional abuses that their maniacal regimes were supposedly purging, so Putin seeks to restore the real Russia that existed during the Soviet years and was lost or forfeited by Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Putin wants to recover a gloried past; violence will enable the new Russia to reclaim what was glorious formerly, and will also help Putin personally feel that, in justice, he is the reincarnation of Peter the Great, with some of the lasting power of Stalin.
Putin also idolizes Ivan Ilyin, an eccentric twentieth century Russian philosopher (d. 1954) who believed that fascism was necessary and inevitable, and strengthened patriotism. Putin particularly accepted and promoted Ilyin’s notion that Western style democracy would ruin Russia. Dictatorship was a better answer.
According to the Economist, and frighteningly, “Without the rhetoric of victimhood and the use of violence, Mr Putin has nothing to offer his people.” So long as he remains in power, Putin will always exude “hostility and contempt.” What this means is that Putin will never want peace (even if he should agree to it). “There can be no true peace with a fascist Russia.” Moreover, there is unlikely to be an accommodation with the West. Putin will “do everything in [his] power to battle liberalism and sow discord” -- including trying to influence elections in America.
In consequence, Putin’s aim is not fundamentally about territory. He wants more grandly to “crush the democratic ideal” that is at the very heart of the war. That ideal motivates Ukraine, NATO, Europe, the U. S., and countries like Moldova and Georgia that seek to escape Putin’s aggrandizement. The Baltic States have been vehement. They want no return to Soviet thralldom -- Putin’s goal.
Putin seeks to extinguish Ukraine’s separate identity as a near abroad former satrapy that is populated by similar Slavs. Putin cannot afford, he avers, the possibility that the former Central Asian Soviet Republics like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, or a Caucasian free polity like Georgia, will flourish outside his (or the Russian) orbit. The Economist also reminds us that Putin is fixated not only on crushing a Ukraine that thinks itself free and acts independently, but is also today (so far successfully) “waging war against the best dreams of his own people.”
Hence he sanctions the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and dissidents living in Britain, orders the murder of Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politskaya, welcomes the sexual abuse of women protesters in police cells, and sanctions torture of opponents throughout Russia (and in Ukraine). The war crimes committed already in Ukraine are not exceptional excesses, they are just as much integral to the fascist-inspired approach to Ukraine’s war as the Holocaust was to Hitler’s assault on Europe.
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Labelling Putin a fascist is helpful. It sharpens our appreciation of his dangers to us, to the free world, the whole globe, and even to mother Russia. But the fact that Putin employs fascist methods does not, in my view, minimize the fact that Ukraine and its backers are sadly dealing with a criminal mind whose operations were fed by Western and American failures to check him in 2006, 2014, and 2015. Putin’s sense of omnipotence, his Peter the Greatness, was fed by Washington’s failures to be tough and determined at critical moments. Putin’s murderous rise to global ogre is our fault even if it is only easy in retrospect to know when to go to war over crossed red lines.
Whether or not Putin’s mother dropped him on his head as a child, he doubtless believes today in his own grievances, projects Russia’s relegation from great power status onto his own sense of loss of personal efficacy, and usefully may be called a fascist even if there is something even more profound driving his irrational warring against supposed kin.
One obvious conclusion is that Putin cannot now contemplate defeat. Thus any ceasefire or peace negotiations will be instrumental, not conclusive. Washington and Brussels need to think about how best to remove Putin. Regime change is necessary.