Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 11 – Some object
to the application of the term “fascist” to Vladimir Putin and his regime
because he was not the leader of a mass movement, something characteristic of
fascist leaders in the past; but in mid-2014, Igor Eidman says, Putin became
precisely “a genuine mass leader” and thus the term describes both him and his
system.
During the course of a discussion on
Radio Liberty on Friday, Ilya Budraitskis expressed the widespread view that
the term “fascist” should not be applied to Putin and his government because
fascism traditionally involves the coming to power of “a reactionary movement
from below” (svoboda.org/content/transcript/26784761.html).
Putin, the commentator said, could
not be considered “a leader of a fascist type” because “he did not emerge from
such a mass movement, from ‘the streets,’ or from public politics.” Eidman who
also took part in the discussion said he had a somewhat different view but did
not have the opportunity to offer it at the time.
He has now done so in a post on
Facebook, and his argument deserves close attention. “Of course, when Putin came to power,” Eidman
says, “he was not a real public politician or his regime a fascist one. But the
Putin system has undergone an essential evolution” (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=861394667256847&id=100001589654713).
“By the middle of 2014,” he argues, “Putin
had become a genuine mass leader of precisely the fascist type;” and “in the future,
the Russian ‘duche’ will have to meet the expectations of the population that
have been generated by the chauvinist rhetoric and aggressive actions” of Putin
and his entourage.
Because of that, Eidman continues, his
regime will “inevitably” become more fascist over time.
“Even now,” he says, “Putin’s regime
of personal power based on a corrupt bureaucratic oligarchy has many of the
characteristics of a fascist dictatorship: authoritarianism, an aggressive and
annexationist foreign policy, the dominance of state-monopoly capital in
economics and of the force structures in administrations, chauvinism and
clericalism in ideology.”
The existence of private property and a market
economy set it apart from the Soviet system, he continues, and the lack of “real
representative democracy” and “the power of ‘a leader’ who can’t be replaced
via elections” make Putin and his system something very different from “’bourgeois-democratic’
countries.”
But precisely these qualities make
Putin and his system “very close” to the fascist countries of the last century,
especially if one considers fascism in its “broad interpretation” to include “not
only the Mussolini regime in Italy but also Franco in Spain, Salazar in
Portugal, Horthy in Hungary, Antonescu in Romania, Stroessner in Paraguay, and
so on.”
“The Putin regime completely
deserves to be numbered among this anything but enviable group,” Eidman
concludes.
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