As the 21st century has become increasingly engulfed in wars, crises and rising authoritarianism, it has become harder to avoid the parallels with the fascist militarism of the previous century. Russian president Vladimir Putin has in fact set out consciously to prompt these comparisons.
In his notorious February 2024 interview with the far-right US television personality, Tucker Carlson, he offered an extensive lesson in the fascist reading of history, arguing that Poland’s refusal to cede the Danzig corridor to Nazi Germany left Hitler with no choice but ‘to start World War Two by attacking them’. The thinly disguised implication was that Russia is today playing the role of Nazi Germany, and Ukraine was wrong to follow Poland’s example of resisting their neighbour’s insatiable appetite for conquest and empire.
Putin, and the Russian state’s global propaganda network, exist in a world where ideas and arguments of history are merely instrumental devices mobilised in the service of the neo-colonial policy of a fascistic state. Ukraine is denounced as a ‘neo-Nazi regime’ in the same breath as Hitler’s Germany is showered with praise. As a Ukrainian facing this information system, it can be a struggle. It is easy to become burnt out – and there is a particular fatigue that arises from seeing the Putin narrative sometimes reproduced by my comrades on the left.
This recalls George Orwell’s observation from the frontlines of the Spanish struggle against fascism in the 1930s that it is ‘not a nice thing’, having seen first-hand the horrors and hardships of war, ‘to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets’ to show that each victim is a ‘fascist in disguise’. The left needs to be true to the history of anti-fascist struggle that is trenchantly opposed to such propaganda.
The nature of Russian fascism
Why is it so hard to recognise the Russian fascism ‘hidden in plain sight’? One factor concerns the nature of the knowledge we produce about Russia and its place in international relations. This scholarship is often ‘ahistoric’ – decontextualised and consequently problematic in how it represents what Russia is and was, regionally and domestically. While western imperialisms have enjoyed much-deserved critical scrutiny, Russia’s geopolitical interventions and the self-victimisation narratives that service the authoritarianism of the Putin regime have had nothing like the same levels of attention.
Mainstream and right-wing narratives also move all too easily between glorifying and vilifying Russia. Former US president Donald Trump, for example, described Putin as a ‘savvy genius’ on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, only to then one month later appear to advocate a nuclear first strike on Russia. This bipolar framing of Russia clouds the much-needed critical scrutiny on its place in global geopolitics. A thinking left should be able to offer this.
The progressive left can also play a role in analysing how we got to this global conjuncture. Putinism as a historical phenomenon is inseparable from the violent contests that characterised the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This has sometimes been described as the march of the ‘violent entrepreneurs’, the constellation of criminals, spies and bureaucrats that fought over the spoils of the overthrown planned economy, and were enabled in this theft by the neoliberal frameworks of American hegemony. Putin rose to dominate this system. He became the leader of these bandits and was able to exert discipline on them. In the current era of global crises, an environment has emerged in which he has sought to apply the same techniques overseas.
Putin is attempting to revive a 19th-century style of imperialism using the language of ‘multipolarity’
Putin is inseparable from what I have called the (dis)integrating empire of capital: the fall of the Soviet Union integrated the post-Soviet space into a chaotic and predatory, ‘disintegrating’ system of global capitalism. This created the circumstances that drove the current crisis. Putin is now attempting to revive a 19th-century style of imperialism using the language of ‘multipolarity’. He imagines Russia to be recreating the (neo) colonial invasions of this era that saw the imperial state pursue internal colonisation and ‘Russification’ in Belarus and Ukraine, as well as expand in central Asia, and seize control of Moldova and Poland.
Ukraine’s place in this vision was infamously put forward in a July 2021 essay by Putin, ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. The text is now widely seen as a prelude to the full-scale invasion, stating ominously that ‘the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’ was a false construct of ‘Polish and Malorussian’ (‘Little Russia’, a pejorative imperial term for Ukraine) intellectuals.
Russia’s failure to modernise or maintain its regional geopolitical superiority after 1991 has fostered this turn. The Russian version of multipolarity is thus only counter-hegemonic in a sense that it disrupts the liberal institutional order. It does not offer any kind of progressive alternative to neoliberalism and the (dis)integrating empire of capital. Looked at through the prism of the Russo-Ukrainian War, one can detect Russia’s authoritarian entrenchment, its manufacturing of the narrative of civilisational exceptionalism, ‘self-othering’ and self-victimisation, and the way in which this drives neo-colonial domestic and foreign policies.
As Russia has failed to build a functioning capitalist state, it has fallen back on its petrostate rents as a means of maintaining its legitimacy and political control. This kleptocratic system has now extended itself to the policy of land grab and settler colonialism within Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. It is a process that started with the 2014 invasion of Crimea with near impunity and the establishment of the fake ‘people’s republics’ in Donbas. The enormity of these earlier crimes has only been fully appreciated by many, including on the progressive left, after the full[1]scale Russian invasion of February 2022.
Towards a new global order
Eighty years after the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of the second world war, this militarised fascism is on the global political scene again. This has thrown up many important questions of analysis, such as: why is there a resurgence of neo[1]imperialism, which was thought to be an artefact of the past? Was not the new multipolarity meant to be a positive development, undermining US hegemony and neoliberalism? And what does this mean for the ability of people to exercise their human rights? A simple and encompassing answer to these questions is that wars and genocides keep occurring because the perpetrators do not suffer the consequences of their criminal actions.
The international institutions created after the second world war reflected the power structure of the time. They are in a dire need of modernisation and their own process of ‘decolonising’. Too many countries have entered the world economic and security system from the mid[1]20th century onwards as ‘rule-takers’, marked by relatively unfavourable conditions with an offer of loans and a laundry bill of conditions.
In this sense, the destiny of the post-Soviet states in the 1990s was to a degree preordained by the treatment of the post-colonial states of the global south and east. This is why the power rebalancing needed in the UN system has to go alongside a process of reform of the international financial institutions (IFIs). It is a critical peaceful ‘weapon’ towards the building of a more just and peaceful world. This could include updating the developmental banks’ missions to fit current needs and the resolution of unsustainable debts that incapacitate even the most well-meaning of governments. Ukraine has been one of very many victims of this global system of debt subordination and erosion of sovereignty by IFIs and private bond holders.
There are numerous other failures of the current global political economy that are inseparably bound up with the Russo-Ukraine War: exploitation of migrant labour, refugee flows and racism and xenophobia; ecocide, warfare emissions and contamination; the need for climate justice and reparations. There are the numerous intersectionally experienced oppressions that require collective resistance, action and solidarity. To tackle all of these issues together requires mutual solidarity and dialogue, through listening to and supporting each other. It means not imposing our understanding of what’s best for those fighting elsewhere.
Together we can collectively resist and stop the divide-and-conquer tactics of encroaching fascism globally. Finally, I often hear this fearful narrative of Russia’s demise, usually from people outside Ukraine or Russia. So, I must reassure you that we, Ukrainians, and all oppressed peoples of the region do not fight to destroy Russia. We fight against Russian imperialism and for our survival, for our children and prisoners to come home, for our cities and villages to have a chance of life again. The citizens of the Russian federation also need this victory, otherwise they will be stuck with the prison of a fascist regime with its neo-colonial gains and insatiable further ambitions.
The world needs Ukraine to win. However imperfect the global liberal order is, Putin’s fascism is immeasureably worse. The left has the history and intellectual tools to answer this moment. No pasarán. Help Ukraine win.
