October 1922 was marked by Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome. Now, in October 2022, we are watching Putin’s March on Europe. The fascist danger, as Oxford University historian Timothy Garton Ash rightly points out, lies in Moscow, not Rome. Putin’s Russia is a fascist regime, a secular theocracy inspired by revolutionary eschatology. It is rooted in revenge, resentment and resentment.

On September 30, the President of the Russian Federation delivered a speech that undoubtedly proved that he lives in a parallel reality. In fact, it’s quite possible that they don’t even believe that reality exists. After opening his speech with an implied scathing criticism of Boris Yeltsin, the very man who paved the way for Putin to become Russia’s henchman, he publicly apostrophized Yeltsin and other post-Soviet leaders who “destroyed our great country and basically let the people take care of themselves. “

Nostalgia, regret and anger over the collapse of the USSR have long been characteristic features of Putin’s thinking, starting as early as 2005, when he made a similar statement: “First of all, it should be recognized that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And it became a real tragedy for the Russian people. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots found themselves outside the Russian territory.”

According to Putin, Russia has a thousand-year mission. He imagines himself as the new St. George who defeated the Dragon. For decades he entertained apocalyptic fantasies, and they became the lens through which he viewed the world. Putin inherited from Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism and the USSR Weltanschauunga Manichean, polarized universe in which opposing political entities cannot coexist. You must win; the other must perish. Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982. His successor was Yuriy Andropov, the former head of the KGB. At that time, the officer Vladimir Putin, born on October 7, 1952, was the young hope of the foreign intelligence department of the KGB.

Cynical, but obedient and devoted to the system, young Vova (the Russian diminutive of Volodymyr) was a true Soviet man. He knew how to deal with the Leviathan of the Soviet bureaucracy. Putin liked living and working in the realm of the Stasi. He spent four years in Dresden as deputy director of the KGB department. Then came 1989. Public protests; police repression; social movements from below; thousands of people fleeing through Hungary from “real socialism”; opposition of Erich Honecker, Zbir of East Germany, to loudness; the fall of the Berlin Wall; Lenin’s twilight. The so-called “first German state of workers and peasants”, the GDR (German Democratic Republic), met its ignominious end on October 3, 1990.

For Putin, the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 was a personal tragedy. National and global catastrophe. The victory of the evil, rotten, decadent, degenerate, diabolical West. He mourned the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a short period of time, Putin lost two places he loved: the GDR and the USSR. If we take this trauma into account, we will understand the underlying motives of his kleptocratic imperialism. Putinism is a predatory and vengeful fantasy.

What dark impulses and distorted worldviews drive the Russian army to torture its prisoners, both military and civilian? After the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, there were commissions to oversee the de-fascism of the cultural sphere, broadly speaking. The papers of the Union Commission in Japan are at the University of Maryland in College Park, where I teach. They show the importance of a methodical analysis of the means of propaganda used by the fascists. Democratic Russia would have to overcome not only its political neuroses, but also – above all – its mental shackles. In other words, it must overcome the culture of violence, arrogance, subservience and mystical awe of authority. The crucial moment is the cultivation of a sense of responsibility, without which arbitrariness and cruelty prevail over decency and assumed responsibility. Russians must learn these truths just as the Germans and Japanese came to understand the criminal nature of the defeated dictatorships in their countries.

Ironically, while denouncing Western hegemony and expansionism, Putin – who is annexing territories and holding mock elections to claim legitimacy as he tries to conquer Ukraine – does not hesitate to cast himself as a champion of anti-imperialism at the same time. Wanting to lead an “anti-colonial movement” against the West, he proudly proclaims: “We must close this shameful chapter. Western hegemony will be defeated. It is inevitable. We must do it for our people, the great historical Russia.” For Putin, modernity is the enemy. It is time to return to Tradition, to a healthy, clean, homogeneous community.

Russia’s barbaric war in Ukraine showed that tyrants despise humanitarian behavior. Putin does not feel sorry for Ukrainians and treats his subjects as statistical fictions. 300,000 enrolled in “partial mobilization” are only one-time figures for him. Paying tribute to Stalin’s immoral calculations, Putin treats human life with contempt. Man has no God-given rights, but only duties to the holy Motherland. The speech on September 30 on Red Square was evidence of futile pragmatism. This is a paradoxical attempt to achieve both strategic and ideological goals. Kate Langdon and I developed and applied Jacob L. Talmon’s concept of totalitarian democracy to explain Putin’s system (our book is out in Spring 2020). According to Putin, Russia’s special mission is to protect the world from decay, rot and, above all, “Satanism” of Western origin. The devil himself claims to perform planetary exorcisms. In fact, Putinism is an updated, Russified version of the glorification of the mythical general will (la volonté générale), about which Jean-Jacques Rousseau speaks. He who doubts the triumphal speech is an “enemy of the people.” Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro