West has Missed Rise of Putin’s Fascism Because Kremlin Leader is Imposing It Gradually, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 30 – The reason most in the West missed the rise of fascism in Russia under Vladimir Putin is that the Kremlin leader imposed it only gradually and did not do so via either the involvement of “a spontaneous mass movement” or “a pre-formulated doctrine,” Vladislav Inozemtsev says.

    Instead, Russian fascism “was built ‘from above’ and from ‘whatever was at hand,” the Russian economist and commentator says, a reality that is underscored by the points Putin aide Aleksandr Kharichev has made in a new article (ridl.io/ru/izobretaya-lenivyj-fashizm/; for background on Kharichev’s argument, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/russian-state-authority-is-sacred-and.html).

    According to Inozemtsev, “Kharichev’s article is significant precisely because it inventories, years after the regime’s foundations were laid, the ideological scraps that serve as its conceptual props. There’s nothing new or original in it.” Indeed, there could not be’ and “it does not provide any potential for the regime’s development.”

    And that calls attention to something else: “While Putin’s system has already lived twice as long as Hitler’s Third Reich, that likely only reflects the well-known biological fact that simpler organisms or in this case regimes often prove more capable of recovering from problems than do those which have a greater internal complexity.”
    
    Kharichev’s text contains two big ideas, the commentator says: first, that Russia is as it always was and always will remain in that unchanged form; and second, that Russia is about territory, the state and the readiness of the population to serve the state. The first is a radical departure from Hitler’s ideas; but the second is in many ways the full embodiment of them.

    Like Hitler, Putin has an enemy who must be opposed and then destroyed. In Hitler’s case, it was international Jewry; in Putin’s, it is Western liberal democracy. But the two systems are different in that Hitler required the transformation of Germans while Putin wants them to remain what they are, the subservient bearers of Russian traditional values.

    In Kharichev’s summary, Inozemtsev continues, “Putin’s ‘ideology’ becomes an apologia for passivity and non-development – and we see the results of this clear after a quarter century of its chief proponent’s rule: the country has stalled in terms of development if not in fact regressed from where it was earlier.”