Alexey Nikolsky/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images Defining fascist statesīut, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.Ĭlassifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. One day before his army invaded Ukraine, Russian President Putin attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to mark the Defender of the Fatherland Day in Moscow on Feb. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.

Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.įew policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”

When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb.

Unherd political bias