The F-Word

Yes, THAT f-word

Some Writing News

A funny thing happened last month. There had been some teeth-gnashing in the press recently over the use of the word ‘fascist’ when discussing contemporary, wartime Russian politics. Tim Snyder, the eminent historian, recently reopened the argument in the New York Times, much to my annoyance. The question - ‘is Russia fascist’ - is unfortunately pretty standard, especially for the last ten years or so. I happen to hold a firm view on this subject (NO, AND PLEASE STOP). In any case, I thought I’d pitch a little commentary piece on the subject, and wrote up a short draft for an online publication.

A few ups and downs later, the draft ended up being passed on at the initial place I’d sent it. But I’d also asked my colleague Marlene Laruelle to take a look at it. My position happens to be in opposition to some senior and influential scholars (such as Snyder, for example), so I wanted to get a gut-check on if I was too far out in left-field. She liked the draft, and said if it fell through to send it her way. This is how my little piece ended up at Russia.Post, a brand-new “humanities corridor” online platform that is hosting essays and commentaries on Russian politics - primarily for Russian scholars and others from the wider post-Soviet region.

Naturally, I mislaid the email telling me the article had been posted, so it was actually out in the internet aether for a few weeks before I realized it. And given that the piece amounts to a short commentary responding to other commentary, I may have missed the timing a bit…

Ah well, nevertheless. In any case, I invite you to read my little article, “We Just Can’t Shake the F-Word.”

The piece is short. In prose that probably needed one more round of edits (as always), I make the argument that we should really try to avoid finding excuses to use the ‘fascism’ descriptor when making claims about adversary or, if you prefer, ‘malign’ foreign governments. Yes, even if they are certainly authoritarian regimes. Yet we also need to admit that at the end of the day, searching for these sorts of evocative comparisons and labels are inevitable. Thus:

“…it is unavoidable that we will – and do – make comparisons between the Putin regime and prior examples of authoritarian rule. The question is only which comparisons hold genuine analytic insight amid a sea of motivated misclassification.”

Ultimately, our vocabulary is and certainly should be larger than overreliance the eternal fascism boogeyman. There are many ways to describe the Russian regime without resorting to the f-word, and very good reasons to eschew the f-word in the first place.

I also highlight Grigorii Golosov’s takedown of the fascism claim that was published at RIDDLE Russia as well in response to Snyder’s article. Golosov does a great job making mincemeat of the (bad, wrong, incorrect, silly) comparative claims between fascist ideologies of the 1930s and Russia today. He writes:

“In explaining the essence of fascism as an ideology — or even as a political philosophy — Snyder begins with a brief formula which he has substantiated in his academic writings and which, from his point of view, apparently needs no further elaboration: fascism is about ‘the triumph of will over reason’. Frankly speaking, I would refrain from attributing such a philosophy to Vladimir Putin. Some of his actions, especially of late, do not look particularly reasonable, but it is easier to explain them as strategic miscalculations rather than as the fundamental belief that reality is a product of the will of prominent individuals and the masses guided by them, which was indeed characteristic of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.”

Even better, he tests the thesis with provocative comparisons beyond the European context and finds them conceptually groundless:

“…a broader picture of recent political realities reveals quite a few countries where all of these attributes [claimed as central to fascism by Snyder] were present, but classifying these countries as ‘fascist’ makes little sense. Let us consider Africa and, to avoid offending any of the continent’s incumbent rulers, let us focus on the long-gone regime of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana (1957−1966).”

[he then describes in detail about how postcolonial Ghana fit the common, poor definition of ‘fascism’ being bandied about far too flippantly]

“Such phenomena can [also] be observed en masse in countries that used to be regarded as the ‘Third World’....I believe that if a country establishes a personalist regime that uses nationalist rhetoric (a combination I find very natural and almost inevitable), then — if the country has resources at hand to pursue an aggressive foreign policy — it is extremely difficult to avoid both the appearance of all three features of fascism mentioned by Snyder and attempts at military aggression. However, these examples show that not all countries become fascist in the sense that, according to Snyder, can be extrapolated from the Eastern and Central European experience of the 1930s and 1940s. It would probably be better to say that these are autocracies which are nationalist in their ideological orientation.”

Anyway, read the whole piece - it is a good takedown. I try not to replicate what Golosov has already said. Indeed, I admit that it is natural for us to make some kind of comparative claim - and that it probably will not do to just rely on dry academic terminology. I suggest that careful comparisons with other regime leaders from different time-periods may fit the bill of getting a better sense of political system while giving a little more flavor than the rather academic “personalistic hegemonic electoral authoritarian regime” or what have you.

Better (?) Comparisons

Unfortunately for me, I pitched this as a very short essay, so I did not do a particularly thorough job of providing either a good list of comparisons or giving a good explanation of the reasons for them. I provide this short, insufficient conclusion:

“To that end, I suggest when reaching for a comparison or a quick term to describe whatever is going on in Russia today we consult the usable history of actually-existing authoritarianism in the 20th century. Many options in the historical record abound without the need for the f-word. The first, antipolitical decade of Putinism is perhaps comparable with the technocratic style of Antonio Salazar’s Portugal, albeit with the controlled electoral politics of Morsi’s Egypt. The conservative, official multiculturalism under increasingly personalized rule over the course of the 2010s has the feel of 19th century monarchies in some senses. Meanwhile today, with its growing national-irridentism and sharply confined internal decision-making does make Interwar-era comparisons viable. Perhaps we shall see the movement-regime and truly totalitarian impulses of fascism fit as the Russian regime confronts the situation it has made for itself. For now, perhaps it is better for us to cool our typological heels and wait.”

This is pretty meager stuff as far as a commentary goes, in all honesty. And that’s a shame because I do think there’s merit to reaching a little further into the grab-bag of historical authoritarian regimes when trying to make claims about ‘What Russia Is Today.’

I bring up Portugal in part because I’ve recently been thinking and reading about Salazar’s Estado Novo. Tom Gallagher’s new biography of Salazar is excellent reading - and a bit revisionist to boot - and it’s kickstarted my own thoughts on that regime. This was also prompted by a conversation with one of my dissertation committee members, Nathan Brown, who has mused about Salazar’s style of government in relation to recent Egyptian authoritarian regimes.

Admittedly, I think the main thread that comes out of the Estado Novo experience is how ‘antipolitical’ it was, especially after the brief ideological flirtations of the 1930s. I’ll leave it to another time to explore this in more detail, but I have a sense that there’s something here worth thinking about, especially for Russia’s earlier regime contours in the 2000s.

Anyway, Russia today does have a little bit of an Interwar-era ‘vibe’ as it were, but it’s distilled through the multiethnic, imperial legacies that have shaped the country (and it’s Soviet predecessor) far more than the ethnic nationalist regimes that usually come to mind when thinking of 1920s-30s Europe. There’s certainly something nationalist about how Putin talks about the ‘triune unity’ of the East Slavic peoples in a way that wasn’t really there a decade ago, but it meshes uneasily with what amounts to a sort of ecumenical imperialism that also shapes how the internal regime justifies itself.

Marlene Laruelle has a new paper out at The Washington Quarterly where she tries to make sense of this. The full paper is here. She writes:

“Even after the war's shocking effects, the Russian regime is best described as personalistic, patrimonial, authoritarian, promoting revisionist positions on the international scene, and posessing [sic] an illiberal and imperialist ideology.”

The article is great (you should read it as well - a longer-form compliment to Golosov’s piece, in fact), but it doesn’t really tell us what the exemplar comparison is - or whether it even exists at all. Indeed, it’s much easier to say what modern Russia is not than what it is.

So after all this, I’m still not quite sure what the proper historical analogy is, to be honest. Although I will certainly let you know as I think through the question some more. In the meantime, I open the question up to readers!

- Julian