The Soviets fought fascism in Spain, but then Soviet military
advisors returning from the Spanish civil war were themselves shot for being
fascist agents. Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, was at one
time called a fascist, as were American, Israeli and West German governments.
And so were various military rulers around the world, from Greece to Latin
America.
Now, the Russian media claims that the “Kyiv Junta” with elected President Petro Poroshenko has joined
this long and diverse list. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s television and state-owned media have dusted
off World War II “fascisms” cliches as they report – ad nauseum, and to the
exclusion of all other news, foreign or domestic – on latest developments in
Ukraine.
Perhaps the Kremlin, in its zeal to fight fascists, should take
a look closer at hand.
Many historians have noted the similarity between communism and
fascism. Both ideologies took hold of mass consciousness during and immediately
after World War I. Both can be seen as a reaction against modernity, against
the new, emerging structure of society and its mind-boggling complexity.
Representative democracy acknowledges the pluralism of the
modern world and seeks to accommodates often conflicting claims of diverse
groups and individuals who comprise modern societies. As stated on the coat of
arms of the United States, “E pluribus unum” – “Out of many –
one”.
The rule of law, political parties, elections, civil liberties
and protection for the rights of minorities comprise the mechanism for
reconciling those claims – and it is what both those totalitarian ideologies
hated most. Italian fascists and Hitler’s Nazis on the one hand, and Lenin and
Stalin’s Bolsheviks on the other persecuted liberal democracy with the same
murderous passion they used to attack each other. Both ideologies offered a radical,
revolutionary alternative to bourgeois democracy – and they based their social
model on the same principle: to simplify and streamline society and remove its
complexities by subjugating the rights of individuals to the exigencies of the
state.
For all their similarities, the two ideologies were quite
different. Communism grew out of the Enlightenment and its belief in reason.
Communists claimed that rational human beings could build a more rational
society than the one that evolved naturally. The proposed to replace the chaos
of the market with a planned economy, private property with common ownership of
means of production and money with knowledge that your work benefits humanity.
Communists were ardent believers in universal education and
scientific progress. Their leaders wanted to be considered great thinkers.
Lenin – who had been expelled from the Kazan University – was declared the most
intelligent man who ever lived, the greatest philosopher in the history of the
world whose brain would be studied by awe-struck future generations. Stalin – a
religious school dropout – was hailed as a “Corypheus of all sciences” and a
world-historical universal genius.
Fascism, on the other hand, was an anti-intellectual ideology.
Even its early ideologues – themselves usually intellectuals and avant-garde
artists – stressed its appeal to visceral emotions, not to the brain. Its
categories were straightforward: homeland, family, power, unity, the enemy. Men
were supposed to be strong, honest and manly, women kind, loving and faithful.
The name of the movement fully encapsulates its basic precepts.
Fasces, a bundle of rods tied together around an ax, was a symbol of state
authority in Ancient Rome and signified strength achieved by joining together
weaker elements. Rods were all of the same length and thickness. Bound by a
ribbon, they fitted together seamlessly. A fasces precludes disagreements and
disputes within the bundle; with all its identical components completely
interchangeable, there is no need for complex institutions of democratic
society, with its parliament and system of checks and balances.
A nation composed of identical elements that are, by
definition, in harmony with one another and subjugated to the will of the state
is in this view a healthy nation. It will come out a winner in competition with
other nations, especially against neurotic, overly intellectual and divided
ones. Military conflicts were inherent in fascism, for war is the way for a
stronger nation to demonstrate its superiority. Hence, fascism’s obsession with
military uniforms and cult of strength and power.
The Roman origins of fasces is equally significant. Fascism
always creates an image of a lost golden age – an era before some “great
betrayal” or ”stab in the back”, a time when everything was simple and
splendid. Mussolini harked back to the greatness of Rome while Hitler found the
roots of Nazism in an early community of warlike Germanic tribes.
Initially, communism was not fixated on a leader figure – the
masses were supposed to be led by the Communist Party, or by a collective
bureaucracy. Based on the communist doctrine, the nation, the state and the
family would eventually disappear, or at least become much less important.
Communists claimed that wars and aggression were caused by private property, so
that the future under communism would be completely peaceful. War is
irrationational and producing arms is a waste of resources. Communism also
persecuted aristocracy, religion and private business, whereas fascists sought
to make use of those traditional institutions.
Despite its belief in reason and science, communism failed
almost immediately. The revolution
didn’t spread to industrialized nations – and the most developed western
provinces of the old Russian Empire chose to split off rather than build a
workers’ paradise. In Russia itself, contrary to Marx’s scientific theories,
the nationalization of means of production, the abolition of money and mass
executions of members of the exploitive classes not only produced no noticeable
increase in prosperity, but rather resulted in poverty and outright starvation.
Class solidarity and universal enthusiasm proved to be nonsense.
Seeing all this, Lenin backpedaled and introduced New Economic
Policy, restoring elements of old-fashioned capitalism. After his death, Stalin
chose a different route. He briefly improvised with the Gulag and
collectivization, and then began moving away from communism, adopting instead
various features of fascism, such as the cult of the leader, militarization of
society and the economy, homoerotic fascination with physical culture, etc. By
the time he was fighting the invading Nazis, his borrowing became blatant. Russian chauvinism
came back with a vengeance, as the blond, blue-eyed Slav were mythologized. So
were some Russian tsars and generals. Many outward elements of the
pre-revolutionary Russian life were brought back, including the Christmas tree
(which became the New Year’s tree), officers’ ranks and uniforms and separate
education for boys and girls. Stalin reconstituted the Russian Empire almost in
its entirety, and stretched his control over chunks of Austrian-Hungarian and
German lands in Central Europe.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then the
persecution “rootless cosmopolitans” which began soon after the end
of World War II would have pleased Hitler. Or rather, it probably would have
confirmed his belief that subhuman nations can’t invent anything original and
are reduced to borrowing ideas from the Master Race.
Be that as it may, both Hitler and Stalin identified their victims
correctly: European Jews did much to bring about the hated diversity and
pluralism as they demanded equal rights for themselves while at the same time
claiming the right remain different from the majority of the population.
Stalin’s creation – a nationalist, militarist, yet still in
many ways Marxist-Leninist hybrid state – endured until the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. It appeared at first that the collapse of communism would allow
Russia to re-enter the modern world it had abandoned in 1917. In the end,
however, it turned out that the 1991 revolution merely eliminated the
Marxist-Leninist elements of the hybrid state. Gone was the creaking
Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the primitive “scientific atheism” and
the fake “proletarian nationalism”. Russia abandoned hare-brained attempts to
build a working economy without private property and private enterprise. The
field was suddenly clear for Russian nationalism, Orthodox obscurantism and
nostalgia for the old greatness.
Russia now has a new, very popular and populist national
leader. Not an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, but a youthful,
energetic, sexually active expert in judo, who, like Mussolini, is happy to
bare a powerful torso at the first opportunity.
Completing the picture is a war in Ukraine, in which the
virile, potent Russia, like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy before it,
confidently expects to kick the butt of those weak, divided, effeminate
democratic states.
