Soon after coming to power in Italy, Benito Mussolini pledged to eradicate the Mafia, Sicily’s ancient scourge, jailing organized crime bosses, their lieutenants and foot soldiers. Il Duce moved against the Mafia because during the half-century of the constitutional monarchy after the unification, the Mafia permeated the political life on the island. Its pervasive influence constantly undermined the total control of society that fascism aspired to.
But there was an added aspect to Mussolini’s struggle against the Mafia. At its early pre-1933 stages Italian fascism had a close link to futurism. It adopted the futurist aesthetic as well as the ultra-modern, anti-traditionalist social order which that aesthetic was supposed to promote. The Mafia, on the other hand, was based on an archaic, highly retrograde worldview and rooted in the traditional society which fascism aspired to change.
In reality, however, fascist ideology was not that much different from the Mafia’s. Both shared the cult of masculinity and insisted on traditional gender roles, where men made all the decisions and women were confined to the home as faithful wives and saintly mothers. Both proclaimed honor and loyalty as the highest virtues, with blood — spilled or used to pledge allegiance — as a sacred substance. Both divided the world into “us” and “them”. Both had their own code of conduct and openly flouted the laws and norms imposed on them from the outside. Finally, both demanded utmost respect and unquestioning obedience to the top man.
Thus it can be said that Italian fascism and Italian criminal organizations, while being rival power structures, closely resembled one another in many practical respects.
Soviet communism also originally embraced the ideology of the future, promising a definitive break with everything traditional — from the social organization and economic principles to the arts, culture and family life.
That didn’t last long. By the 1930s traditional values and tastes were aggressively reasserted by Joseph Stalin. Futurist, constructivist and other non-realist artists and writers were silenced — some physically — while others had to shift to the archaic style of socialist realism if they wanted to continue to work — and in many cases to live.
The model communist family became the nuclear family, while the promiscuous Bolsheviks in Stalin’s own entourage disappeared into the Gulag. With the Soviet victory over the Nazis some of the previously absent elements of fascism — such as blood-and-soil Russian nationalism and witch-hunting of outsiders, notably the Jews — were appropriated by the Stalin regime.
Curiously, Stalinism didn’t regard Soviet organized crime as a rival, but rather as an ally. Of course, at the time the fraternity of “thieves in the law” as they called themselves was considerably less dominant in society than the Mafia was in Sicily. Be that as it may, the NKVD, Slatin’s political police, favored professional thugs, terming them “social allies” and using them to harass and repress victims of political terror in labor camps.
It was the criminal code of conduct, the thugs’ notorious “laws”, that banned members of the fraternity from cooperating with the authorities. It was all a pose, and the police and prison administration usually had little trouble bribing career criminals into cooperation. And even though after Stalin’s death successive governments tried to crack down on crime, the Soviet Union clung to the same retrograde views that were fairly close to the ideology of the thieves in the law.
Interestingly, fascism and Soviet communism shared with organized crime a hatred of liberal democracy. Sure, the openness and relative permissiveness of democratic societies make it easier for criminal syndicates to operate, while the adversarial legal system, short sentences and comfortable prisons reduce the cost of being caught. But from the point of view of institutional self-preservation, an open society makes it more difficult, for example, to suborn and corrupt government officials, judges and the police and in general it presents a long-term existential danger to various mafias.
In a murky environment in the Soviet Union, the KGB and the police continued to maintain close ties to organized crime and when communism collapsed criminals proved best equipped to take advantage of social and economic turmoil during the 1990s. As Vladimir Putin’s career in St. Petersburg attests, the KGB and other similar agencies, which found themselves briefly superannuated after the fall of the Soviet Union, promptly merged with the Russian mafia. With Putin as its president, over the past two decades Russia became a bona fide mafia state, where loyalty at all levels of bureaucracy is demonstrated by willingness to steal and send kickbacks up the multilayered criminal structure.
Yet, it would be a mistake to think that the Russian mafia state is devoid of ideology. Like other organized syndicates, it shares an ideology that is rooted in traditional society and infused with the hatred of modernity, diversity, individualism and openness. This makes it both a mafia state and a fascist state. The ideology, in turn, appeals to those who feel threatened by the complexity of the modern world and yearn for the simpler “old days” and more homogenous social structures. This is why even though many Russians know that all Putin is interested in is to amass the world’s largest fortune and to keep it, they still see in him a kindred soul.
Donald Trump may not be a Russian agent — even though this proposition requires a more thorough looking into — but in the years before becoming US president he certainly lived on the fringes of the Russian mafia state. Whether or not Russian intelligence agencies cultivated him, he was selling his condos to Russian criminal figures, maintained partnerships with known Russian thugs in the US and, allegedly, borrowed money from the Russians or Russia-influenced organizations.
Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin, with whom he speaks on the phone about subjects that are never reported to the general public. At the very least, as Trump aspired to be an American Putin. His well-documented corruption and self-dealing, as well as efforts to promote the businesses of his children and associates using his official position, are, on a much smaller scale of course, things that Putin and his entourage routinely do in Russia. But it is his embrace of the traditionalist fascist ideology that has made him so appealing to some 70 million Americans who see the world turning more complex, diverse and hostile to the one-time world-leading nation.
