Alexander Rodham-Ross and Shane Nuland throw in their two cents worth.

By Alexander Reid-Ross and Shane Burley, Anarchist Library

Into the Irrational Core of Pure Violence

On the Convergence of neo-Eurasianism and the Kremlin’s War in Ukraine

At the same time as Russian forces began blasting munitions at the Babi Yar memorial, the ravine in Kyiv where Nazi troops massacred over 33,000 Jews, the country announced that it would be holding an “anti-fascist” congress. Inviting other nations with which Russia hopes to partner, such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seeks to frame Ukraine as controlled by the far-right, thus making it a pariah. By arguing that Russia is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, Putin positions that country for regime change—an act that he presents as progressive benevolence. Through an appeal to antifascism, the Russian leadership plays on the history of the Soviets defeating the Nazis on the Eastern Front during World War II, while distorting an already-confused and often-frightened public conversation about the role of the far-right in instigating global conflict.

On February 26, the New Fascism Syllabus published co-director of the department “Communism and Society’” at the Leibnitz Center for Contemporary History at the University of Potsdam, Juliane Fürst’s “On Ukraine, Putin, and the Realities and Rhetoric of War,” which makes important contributions to the study of the rhetoric of “fascism” in use today by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Reflecting on her experiences growing up in Germany, Fürst describes feeling some relief that the Soviet Union replaced the association between Germans and Nazism with the broader category of “fascism,” but explains that “the category was elastic and inclusive, in the bad sense of the term.” Bad, particularly, for western Ukrainians, whose repudiation of Soviet oppression left them open to a nationalist “response to an official Soviet narrative (created by Stalin and intensified by Brezhnev) that left no room for nuances and personal recollections running counter to the story of Soviet liberation from fascism and Nazi occupation.”

Such anti-Soviet nationalism became a kind of counter-culture, not only in Ukraine but among bohemians throughout the Soviet republics. In Moscow, an esoteric, Traditionalist group with a penchant for Nazi symbolism called the Yuzhinsky circle gathered for celebrations of fascism. While some of the Yuzhinsky circle’s ultranationalist commitments were genuine, a ludic obscurantism also prevailed. As Fürst notes, “fascism had been degraded to a cypher for some vague notion of provocativeness, blending out its dark features and grim history,” and yet by this turn, antifascism too has become subject to degradation, a question of enemy pollution and infection rather than the repudiation of a specific ideology. Thus, through “de-Nazification,” Putin deploys the connotations of Stalinist de-Nazification—a campaign to purge all those contaminated—in Fürst’s words, to change “not only the Ukrainians’ physical reality of living in their own state, but their very notion as a people separate from Putin’s vision of Russians.”

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