Putin’s System Not Last Stage of Bolshevism but First Stage of Fascism and Won’t Die without Outside Intervention, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 10 – Some analysts and politicians are deceiving themselves or at least justifying inaction on their part by insisting that Vladimir Putin’s system is the last stage of a decaying Bolshevism and thus acting on the basis of the hope that it will die out on its own without outside intervention, Aleksandr Skobov says.

            But in fact, the Moscow commentator argues, Putin’s regime is not only the first stage of fascism in Russia but part of a broader revolt against the present liberal order and its problems and like Hitler’s won’t die out on its own but rather requires the intervention of outside powers just as the end of the Nazi regime did (graniru.org/opinion/skobov/m.285747.html).

            For all its ugliness, Skobov argues, “the USSR remained part of Western civilization” at least in its aspirations. “And perhaps that is why the world coped with “the Soviet disease” without such surgical intervention.” It died as a result of its own international contradictions and lack of outside support.

            Like Hitler, Putin does not want to be part of Western liberalism. He wants to negate and destroy it and to restore an archaic system that has nothing to do with Western civilization, Skobov says. Tragically, he is not the only such leader on the planet today, and thus is part of a broader revolt of the archaic against the modern.

            That makes the task of the West both harder and more urgent especially “at a time when the liberal-capitalist civilization has piled up a mass of contradictions during its ‘post-industrial transition,” Skobov points out. And despite what many would like to believe, it is “not a setting star but a rising one.”

            “The star of ‘illiberal capitalism’ is naturally assuming the form of fascism,” and like Hitler’s system, it won’t pass away on its own. “It must be extinguished again as the first one was. That will require first understanding and then effort, and the understanding requires that people stop deceiving themselves in order to avoid making the effort.

            Like many Russian analyses, this one is buried in a dispute between Skobov and London-based Russian analyst Vladimir Pastukhov. But the differences between the two while interesting as part of an intellectual discussion are far less important that the conclusion Skobov makes about the need to stop deceiving oneself that Putinism will disappear without an enormous effort.