Ruscism

Not to be confused with Racism or Russianism.

A combination of the Saint George's ribbon and the letter Z, both associated with Rashism, that has been compared to the fascist swastika (and called zwastika)

Rashism (Russian: рашизм, romanized: rashizm, pronounced [rɐˈʂɨzm]; a portmanteau of "Russia" and "fascism"; Template:Lang-uk), also known as Ruscism, Russism (Russian: русизм), or Russian fascism (Russian: русский фашизм), is a term used by scholars, politicians and publicists to describe the political ideology and social practices of the Russian authorities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is also used to refer to the ideology of Russian military expansionism, and has been used as a label to describe an undemocratic system and nationality cult mixed with ultranationalism and a cult of personality. That transformation was described as based on the ideas of the "special civilizational mission" of the Russians, such as Moscow as the third Rome and expansionism, which manifests itself in anti-Westernism and supports regaining Imperial lands by conquest. The term "Rashist" is also widely used by the Ukrainian officials and media to more generally identify members of the Russian Armed Forces and supporters of Russian military aggression against Ukraine.

The concept became more internationally well-known after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Etymology and terminology

Rashism and Ruscism are both attempts to transliterate the Ukrainian and Russian term рашизм (Rashizm, pronounced [rɐˈʂɨzm]), a multilingual portmanteau of "Russia" and "fascism". According to Timothy D. Snyder, the word is complex, reflecting and referencing pronunciations of words in both English, Ukrainian and Russian.

History of use

March in memory of murdered Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, 27 February 2016. Sight from the inside. "Stop Ruscism".

The term рашизм (Ruscism/Rashism) became increasingly common in informal circles in 2008, during the Russo-Georgian War. Its popularity in Ukrainian mass media grew after the annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula by the Russian Federation, the downing of a Boeing 777 near Donetsk on 17 July 2014, and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 largely due to the Russian-language song "That's, Baby, Ruscism! [Orthodox Fascism!]" by Ukrainian composer and singer-songwriter Boris Sevastyanov.

The Committee of the Verkhovna Rada on Humanitarian and Information Policy supports the initiative of Ukrainian scientists, journalists, political scientists and all civil society to promote and recognise the term "Ruscism" at the national and international levels.

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

A destroyed Russian MT-LB with a Z symbol during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Z symbol is widely used by the Russian Armed Forces.

A poster against Ruscism

Main article: 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

By 2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the terms Rashism and Rashist had come into common usage among military and political elites of Ukraine, as well as by journalists, influencers, bloggers, et al. For example, Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, actively advocates the use of the word in the meaning of Vladimir Putin's fascism to describe Russia's aggression against Ukraine. He also stated that Rashism is much worse than fascism.

"Today, I would like to appeal to all journalists to use the word 'Rashism', because this is a new phenomenon in world history that Mr. Putin has made with his country – modern Rashists who are not much different from fascists. I will explain why: because before there was no such opportunity to destroy cities with so many aerial bombs, such equipment, there was no such force. Now absolutely other capacities and they use them as inhuman." — Oleksiy Danilov.

On 23 April 2022, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that "[w]hat Russia is doing is Nazism" and called it "Ruscism", a new concept that will be in history books:

"This country will have a word in our history textbooks that no one has invented, which everyone is repeating in Ukraine and in Europe – 'Ruscism'. It's not just random that everyone is saying that this is Ruscism. The word is new, but the actions are the same as they were 80 years ago in Europe. Because for all of these 80 years, if you analyse our continent, there has been no barbarism like this. So Ruscism is a concept that will go into the history books, it will be in Wikipedia, it will be [studied] in classes. And small children around the world will stand up and answer their teachers when they ask when Ruscism began, in what land, and who won the fight for freedom against this terrible concept." — Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Ideological history

Ivan Ilyin

Timothy D. Snyder believes that the ideology of Putin and his regime was influenced by philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954). A number of Ilyin's works advocated fascism. Ilyin has been quoted by President of Russia Vladimir Putin, and is considered by some observers to be a major ideological inspiration for Putin. Putin was personally involved in moving Ilyin's remains back to Russia, and in 2009 consecrated his grave.

According to Snyder, Ilyin "provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism" in the form of a fascist state, and that today "his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin".

Aleksandr Dugin

In 1997, Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin in his book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, which had a significant impact on Russia's military, police and foreign policy elites, argued that Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning", "no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness", "[its] certain territorial ambitions represen[t] an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is "sanitary cordon", which would be "inadmissible". The book may have been influential in Vladimir Putin's foreign policy, which eventually led to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Also in 1997, Dugin hailed what he saw as the arrival of a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism" in Russia, in an article titled "Fascism – Borderless and Red"; previously in 1992, he had in another article defended "fascism" as not having anything to do with "the racist and chauvinist aspects of National Socialism", stating in contrast that "Russian fascism is a combination of natural national conservatism with a passionate desire for true changes." Another of Dugin's books, The Fourth Political Theory, published in 2009, has been cited as an inspiration for Russian policy in events such as the war in Donbas, and for the contemporary European far-right in general.

Although there is a dispute on the extent of the personal relationship between Dugin and Putin, Dugin's influence exists broadly in Russian military and security circles. He became a lecturer at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia in the 1990s, and his Foundations of Geopolitics has become part of the curriculum there, as well as in several other military/police academies and institutions of higher learning. According to John B. Dunlop of the Hoover Institution, "[t]here has perhaps not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites comparable to that of [...] Foundations of Geopolitics."

Timofey Sergeitsev

Further information: What Russia Should Do with Ukraine

According to Euractiv, Russian political operative Timofey Sergeitsev is "one of the ideologists of modern Russian fascism".

During the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the victims of the massacres in Kyiv Oblast became known, the website of the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Sergeitsev titled "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine", which was perceived to justify a Ukrainian genocide. It calls for repression, de-Ukrainization, de-Europeanization, and ethnocide of the Ukrainians. According to Oxford expert on Russian affairs Samuel Ramani, the article "represents mainstream Kremlin thinking". The head of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Edgars Rinkēvičs called the article "ordinary fascism". Timothy D. Snyder described it as a "genocide handbook", and as "one of the most openly genocidal documents I have ever seen".

Similar rhetoric appeared in 26 February op-ed by Peter Akopov in RIA Novosti titled "The Coming of Russia and of the New World", which praised Putin for a timely "solution of the Ukrainian question". It was un-published after three hours.

In Russia

A mosaic in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces blending Eastern Orthodox iconography with Soviet military symbolism

File:Rusich meets Jared Taylor.jpg

Paramilitary leaders Alexei Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky of the Russian Wagner Group meeting with American white nationalist Jared Taylor and presenting him with a Kolovrat Rusich badge at Saint Petersburg's International Russian Conservative Forum, 22 March 2015.

Several scholars have posited that Russia has transformed into a fascist state, or that fascism best describes the Russian political system, especially following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2017, Russian academician Vladislav Inozemtsev considered that Russia is an early-stage fascist state, thus claiming the current Russian political regime as fascist. Tomasz Kamusella, a Polish scholar on nationalism and ethnicity, and Allister Heath, a journalist at The Daily Telegraph, describe the current authoritarian Russian political regime as Putin's fascism. Maria Snegovaya believes that Russia as led by Putin is a fascist regime.

In March 2022, Yale historian Odd Arne Westad said that Putin's words about Ukraine resembled, which Harvard journalist James F. Smith summarized, "some of the colonial racial arguments of imperial powers of the past, ideas from the late 19th and early 20th century".

In April 2022, Larysa Yakubova from the Institute of History of Ukraine in her article "The Anatomy of Ruscism" stated that Russia has never reflected on the tragedies of totalitarianism and did not decommunize its Soviet totalitarian heritage unlike Ukraine. Accoding to her, that was the major reason for the formation and rapid development of Ruscism in modern Russia both among political and intellectual/cultural elites. She also noted that Ruscism, in the form of a threat to the world order and peace, will remain until there is a global condemnation of Soviet communist ideology and its heir Ruscism.

On 24 April 2022, Timothy D. Snyder published an article in The New York Times Magazine where he described the history, premises and linguistic peculiarities of the term "Ruscism". According to Snyder, the term "is a useful conceptualization of Putin's worldview", writing that "we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism's revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation". On the wider regime, Snyder writes that "[p]rominent Russian fascists are given access to mass media during wars, including this one. Members of the Russian elite, above all Putin himself, rely increasingly on fascist concepts", and states that "Putin's very justification of the war in Ukraine [...] represents a Christian form of fascism."

Snyder followed this article in May with an essay titled "We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist". According to Snyder, "[m]any hesitate to see today's Russia as fascist because Stalin's Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist", stating that the key to understanding Russia today is "Stalin's flexibility about fascism": "Because Soviet anti-fascism just meant defining an enemy, it offered fascism a backdoor through which to return to Russia [...] Fascists calling other people 'fascists' is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. [...] [It is] the essential Putinist practice". Based on this, Snyder refers Putin's regime as schizo-fascism. The German magazine Der Spiegel wrote, citing a confidential Federal Intelligence Service report, that on early March and sometime before early April at least two Russian neo-Nazi groups—the Russian Imperial Legion and Military-Patriotic Club "Rusich"—had joined the Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

Characteristics

The greatest extent of the Soviet Empire (Soviet Union proper plus satellite states).

The Russian Empire in 1867, including Alaska.

One element of Rashism is irredentism, revanchism and a desire to restore Russia to a perceived "former glory". Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005 called the dissolution of the Soviet Union "a genuine tragedy" for the Russian people, as "tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory", and as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century".

A 2007 photo of a shirtless Putin fishing in Tuva published on the official Russian President website.

In 2017, Yuliia Strebkova (Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) indicated that Rashism in combination with Ukrainophobia constitutes the ethno-national vector of the more broad Russian neo-imperial ideological doctrine of "Russian world".

In 2018, Borys Demyanenko (Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi State Pedagogical University) in his paper "'Ruscism' as a quasi-ideology of the post-Soviet imperial revenge" defined Ruscism as a misanthropic ideology and an eclectic mixture of imperial neocolonialism, great-power chauvinism, nostalgia for the Soviet past, and religious traditionalism. Demyanenko considers that in internal domestic policy, Ruscism manifests itself in a violation of human rights alongside with a freedom of thought, persecution of dissidents, propaganda, ignoring of democratic procedures. While in foreign policy, Ruscism demonstrates itself in a violation of international law, imposing its own version of historical truth, the justification of occupation and annexation of the territories of other states.

Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky argues that Rashism is disguised as anti-fascism, but has a fascist face and essence. Political scientist Ruslan Kliuchnyk notes that the Russian elite considers itself entitled to build its own "sovereign democracy" without reference to Western standards, but taking into account Russia's traditions of state-building. Administrative resources in Russia are one of the means of preserving the democratic facade, which hides the mechanism of absolute manipulation of the will of citizens. Russian political scientist Andrey Piontkovsky argues that the ideology of Rashism is in many ways similar to Nazism, with the speeches of President Vladimir Putin reflecting similar ideas to those of Adolf Hitler.

According to Alexander J. Motyl, an American historian and political scientist, Russian fascism has the following characteristics:

• An undemocratic political system, different from both traditional authoritarianism and totalitarianism;
• Statism and hypernationalism;
• A hypermasculine cult of the supreme leader (emphasis on his courage, militancy and physical prowess);
• General popular support for the regime and its leader.

According to Professor Oleksandr Kostenko, Rashism is an ideology that is "based on illusions and justifies the admissibility of any arbitrariness for the sake of misinterpreted interests of Russian society. In foreign policy, Rashism manifests itself, in particular, in violation of the principles of international law, imposing its version of historical truth on the world solely in favor of Russia, abusing the right of veto in the UN Security Council, and so on. In domestic politics, Rashism is a violation of human rights to freedom of thought, persecution of members of the 'dissent movement', the use of the media to misinform their people, and so on." Oleksandr Kostenko also considers Rashism a manifestation of sociopathy.

Timothy D. Snyder argued in an essay that a "time traveler from the 1930s" would "have no difficulty" identifying the Russian regime in 2022 as fascist, writing:

"The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer."

In 2022, Boris Kagarlitsky wrote in "Fascism in the Era of Postmodernism" that "the symbolism of the so-called 'special operation' and numerous ceremonies, reveals a clear and conscious reliance on the aesthetics of the Third Reich" and that "[p]ropaganda materials are unambiguously written in the style of Hitler's Volkische[r] Beobachter of 1939–45 and use the same arguments and terms". However, he noted, that unlike "the classical fascism", "which was not just an ideology, but a complex system in which the eclectic combination of elitist and egalitarian slogans, anti-communism and criticism of bourgeois democracy served the goal of the totalitarian-corporate reorganization of capitalism within the framework of the nation-state", Putin's regime is "[f]ascism in the era of [p]ostmodernism", "when a coherent worldview is replaced by a haphazard pasting together of ideas, scraps of concepts and randomly assembled images", "the product of the social and cultural degradation of late Soviet society combined with the degradation of late capitalism": "using totalitarian ideology and rhetoric, the system is unable to build a workable totalitarian machine that corresponds to these principles, either in the sphere of governance or in the sphere of production and exchange" since "the classical industrial system on the basis of which it arose no longer exists, while the neoliberal market order has long ago become the fundamental mechanism of elite reproduction, not only in business, but also in state administration". He also thinks that "Russia is not only not a tragic exception, but on the contrary, it is moving in the general direction of the ideological evolution of contemporary bourgeois society" as elements of this kind of "post fascism" can be "observed even in old and still solid liberal democracies".

Reactions

In Russia

Russian economist Yakov Mirkin said that the term "Rashism" is incorrect because it equates the entire Russian nation with "the ideology that brings trouble". He noted that as Nazism has never been called "Germanism" and Italian fascism has never been called "Italism", Putin's ideology should be called "as you wish", with "the most cruel nicknames", but not "Rashism".

Artyom Yefimov wrote in Signal (email-based media created by Meduza) that although the word "Rashism" was created in Ukraine as an emotional cliché, it may become a real term, as history knows examples of pejoratives being turned into real terms (e.g. Tory and Slavophilia); in Ukraine, he writes, it is being used in scientific works since 2014 (although rarely in scientific publications of other countries).

Official reaction

Russian television presenter Tina Kandelaki, who supported Russia's war against Ukraine, criticized Wikipedia's use of the term "Rashism" on her Telegram channel, accusing Wikipedia of "digital fascism" targeting Russian people and calling Russians to stop using it.

Russia's federal censor Roskomnadzor reportedly ordered the English Wikipedia on 18 May 2022 to take down the articles "Rashism" and "2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine", asserting that they contain false information about the war the Russian government calls a "special military operation".

On 20 May 2022, during the show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, the host Vladimir Solovyov and his panelists responded with outrage at Timothy D. Snyder's article "We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist", an article which according to Russian media watchdog Julia Davis has "spread through Russian state media like wildfire". Solovyov attacked Snyder by calling him a "pseudo-professor of a pseudo-university [...] He is simply a liar", and, addressing Americans, stating: "Let me tell you a secret: first of all, your signs are idiotic in their nature. Secondly, looking at your listed indications, how are they any different from the election campaign of Donald Trump?".

Outside Russia

Latvian journalist Bens Latkovskis of Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze has criticized the equation of Russism to fascism as terminologically inaccurate, stating that the main difference between the two ideologies is one that actually places them on almost opposite sides of the political spectrum. He argues that, unlike fascism that sought to create a new anthropological order and required mass social involvement, Russism is counter-revolutionary, strictly opposed to any social reforms and social mobilization and aims at the depolitization of society, which it sees as a threat to its existence.

See also

• Anti-American sentiment in Russia
• Anti-Europeanism
• Black Hundreds
• Chekism
• Eurasianism
• Nashism
• Political groups under Vladimir Putin's presidency
• Propaganda in Russia
• Putinism
• Putler
• Russian allegations of fascism against Ukraine
• Russian imperialism
• Russian irredentism
• Russian nationalism
• Russianism
• Russification
• Russian war crimes

Further reading

• Motyl, Alexander John (3 December 2007). "Is Putin's Russia Fascist?". The National Interest. Archived from the original on 31 July 2013. Retrieved 13 April 2022.
• Motyl, Alexander John (March 2016). "Putin's Russia as a fascist political system". Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 49 (1): 25–36. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2016.01.002. ISSN 0967-067X. JSTOR 48610431. S2CID 146647838. Archived from the original on 22 April 2022. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
• Umland, Andreas (26 March 2008). "Is Putin's Russia really "fascist"? A response to Alexander Motyl". History News Network. Archived from the original on 22 April 2022. Retrieved 13 April 2022.

External links

• neveragain.media/en/
• WHAT IS RUSCISM? (video)