[Dr. Andreas Umland teaches at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, edits the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html), and compiles the biweekly “Russian Nationalism Bulletin” (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism/).]

In his articles “Is Putin’s Russia fascist?” published on the site of The National Interest Online on December 3, 2007 (http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16258) and “Surviving Russia’s drift to fascism” published in the Kyiv Post, January 17, 2008 (http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/28182/), Professor Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University seems to argue that Putin’s Russia can be classified as a fascist state.

Many observers of Russia will be sympathetic to Prof. Motyl’s concern about the decline of democracy in Russia, and unsympathetic to the Kremlin`s policies of the last years. Nevertheless, Motyl`s comment on “Russia`s drift to fascism” appears as unhelpful, if not misleading. Motyl obfuscates the issue of Russian fascism in so far as, indeed, there are representatives of fascism in Russia today. Yet, Putin is not among them.

Motyl is crying wolf too early. By Motyl`s standards, not only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but a number of other non-democratic regimes of the 20th century would have to be classified as fascist. In fact, if we would apply Motyl´s loose conceptualization of fascism to contemporary world history, we might find so many “fascisms” that the term would loose much of its heuristic and communicative value.

Most people associate fascism with military conquest, total war and ethnic cleansing. While the Kremlin´s current rhetoric is imperialistic, bellicose and nationalistic, this is still far from amounting to an ideology of revolutionary ultra-nationalism – the most consensual definition of fascism available in international comparative fascist studies today (see, for instance, Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right. Stuttgart & Hannover: ibidem-Verlag 2006). To be sure, it would be also wrong to argue – as Russian observers frequently do – that Russian fascism is identical with marginal neo-Nazi groups like Russkoe Natsional´noe Edinstvo (Russian National Unity). Without any doubt, Russian fascism, represented by such figures as Vladimir Zhirinovskii or Alexander Dugin, reaches deeply into the mainstream of Russian high politics and public discourse. Yet, neither Zhirinovskii nor Dugin are members of the Russian presidential administration or government. While it cannot be excluded that a person like them might one day enter Moscow`s Kremlin or White House, this has not yet happened.

In this context, Motyl`s comment is in so far unconstructive as he deprives researchers of Russian nationalism of an important analytic tool. If Putin´s administration is fascist: How should one label all those Russian right-wing extremist who complain that its policies are still too liberal and pro-Western? If Russia is already fascist: What is the whole fuss about “Weimar Russia”? The Weimar Republic was, in its early phase, an unstable and unconsolidated, and its last years a declining and subverted democracy. But it was not fascist. While most researchers agree that the Weimar Republic was, after the World Economic Crisis, destined to collapse, it was until January 1933 unclear where this collapse would lead.

In Russia too, the outcome of Putin`s gradual destruction of democracy is still open. A regime inspired by fascist ideology is one of Russia´s, but, perhaps, not her most likely future. In assessing Russia´s fate today and in the next years, we should reserve the label “fascist” for only those scenarios that indeed deserve this most value-laden term of the 20th century.