Abstract
When Putin became acting president on December 31, 1999, he was unknown to the larger public. He seemed not to stand out from the crowd, rather resembling another of these grey apparatchiks and faceless bureaucrats who populate the Russian ministries and government agencies. However, in the years that followed, he carefully built another image: that of a virile, powerful, sportive macho action man. One could see pictures of the Russian president, shooting a tiger with a tranquillizer gun in Siberia. Another time he was taking the measurements of a polar bear, or shooting a whale with a crossbow. He went in a minisubmarine and dived to the floor of the world’s deepest lake and he watched a bare-knuckle fight with Hollywood macho star Jean-Claude Van Damme. In August 2010, he flew as a second pilot in a BE-200 firefighting aircraft over the Ryazan region when great fires ravaged Russia—showing that he himself was in charge of the rescue operations. Other pictures showed him naked from the waist up, on fishing and hunting trips. In August 2010 he was interviewed by a reporter from Kommersant, wearing a polo shirt and dark glasses, driving 1200 miles across Russia’s Far East in a yellow Lada sports car, testing a new part of the highway that connects Moscow with Vladivostok. Three months later he had his hands on the steering wheel of a Formula 1 Renault racing car.
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Notes
V. De Grazia (1993) How Fascism Ruled Women, Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press), p. 43.
M. Belpoliti (2010) Berlusconi-Le corps du chef (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes), p. 22.
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, o.c., p. 55. Cf. also Z. Sternhell, M. Sznajder, and M. Ashéri (1989) Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Gallimard), p. 27: “Tous les futuristes ont le culte de l’énergie, du dynamisme et de la puissance, de la machine et de la vitesse, des instincts et de l’intuition, du mouvement, de la volonté et de la jeunesse.”
F. T. Marinetti (1909) The Futurist Manifesto. Available at http://cscs.umich.edu/-crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
H. Rosa (2005) Beschleunigung-Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), p. 81.
W. Laqueur (2009) Mein 20. Jahrhundert-Stationen eines politischen Lebens (Berlin: Propyläen), p. 154.
A. J. Motyl (December 3, 2007) “Inside Track: Is Putin’s Russia Fascist?” The National Interest online. Available at: http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=16258
Cf. R. Griffin (1993) The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge), Chapter 1;
K. Marx, “Herr Vogt VIII-Dâ-Dâ Vogt und seine Studien,” in Marx Engels Werke (1969), Band 14 (Berlin DDR: Dietz Verlag), p. 498.
In December 1924, hard core radicals of the Fascist Party even sent an ultimatum to Prime Minister Mussolini, demanding him to complete the fascist revolution. As a result of their pressure Mussolini decided in January 1925 to suppress the still remaining opposition parties in parliament. (Cf. R. De Felice (2002) Brève histoire du fascisme (Paris: Éditions Audibert), p. 55.
And R. De Felice (1995) Mussolini il fascista 77. L’organizzazione dello Stato fascista (1925–1929) (Turin: Einaudi), Chapter 1).
Hitler’s successor Dönitz said in 1945 (in captivity) “that in June 1934 Hitler had to navigate between two opposites: According to the radical Nazis (Röhm), the Nationalist Socialist revolution had not gone far enough; according to the conservatives (Papen), it had gone too far” (J. Lukacs (1998) The Hitler of History (New York: Vintage Books), p. 119). We can only measure the enormous challenge posed by SA leader Ernst Röhm to Hitler’s authority, when we take into account the fact that in 1934 Röhm’s SA troops, after the incorporation of the Stahlhelm group, were some 4.5 million strong and that he also wanted to incorporate the army in his organization. Hitler’s control was further weakened because two-thirds of the SA men were not members of the SDAP. (Cf. I. Kershaw (2001) Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, London (New York: Penguin Books), pp. 502 and 741).
P. Milza (2001) Les fascismes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil), p. 126.
Cf. M. Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in M. Weber (1968) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, edited by J. Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr-Paul Siebeck), p. 212.
U. Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” in Umberto Eco (2001) Five Moral Pieces (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest Books).
Already in November 1922—scarcely one month after Mussolini’s March on Rome, when Mussolini had formed a government—Grigory Zinoviev, who was Lenin’s right-hand man, warned of an “epoch of fascism” at the IVth Congress of the Communist International (Komintern). (Cf. A. Bauerkämper (2006) Der Faschismus in Europa 1918–1945 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun.), p. 19).
Cf. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944—His Private Conversations, introduced and with a Preface by H. R. Trevor-Roper (2000) (New York City: Enigma Books), p. 490, where Hitler is quoted, saying, “I am firmly opposed to any attempt to export National Socialism.”
Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, La Dottrina del Fascismo, II. Dottrina politica e sociale, p. 7. Mussolini, however, was not always consequent in speaking out in favor of this universal character of Italian Fascism. In 1928, for instance, it was still denied by him, when he made the famous statement: “Fascism is not for export.” (Quoted in S. G. Payne (1997) A History of Fascism 1914–45 (London: UCL Press), p. 463).
Joseph Goebbels, for instance, wrote in his diary: “(Fascism) is (…) nothing like National Socialism. While the latter goes deep down to the roots, Fascism is only a superficial thing.” And about Mussolini he wrote: “(The Duce) is not a revolutionary like the Führer and Stalin (sic!). He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a worldwide revolutionary and insurrectionist.” (The Goebbels Diaries 1942–1943, New York, 1948, respectively p. 71 and p. 468). Quoted in H. Arendt (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), p. 309.
This opinion is expressed by G. Allardyce (1979) in his article “What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” American Historical Review, No. 84, pp. 367–398). And equally by Renzo De Felice, who found that the extreme racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime set it apart from Fascist Italy. But even if Fascist Italy did not organize a racist genocide, it constituted an unequivocal racist regime which in 1938 approved a racist law that forbid marriages between Italians and “elements (sic!) that belonged to the Hamitic, Semitic and other non-Aryan races” (Dichiarazione sulla razza, votata dal Gran Consiglio del Fascismo il 6 Ottobre 1938).
It is interesting to note that in his letter to Churchill of March 15, 1942, Stalin spoke about “the battle-front against Hitlerism,” and did not use the word fascism or Nazism. Possibly, Stalin had a fascination, even a secret admiration for his opponent. Did Stalin in “Stalinism” not have his own -ism? (Cf. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, The Second World War Volume IV, o.c., p. 294). A special variant of the “Hitlerism” theory was developed by the German historian Golo Mann (a son of Thomas Mann), who presented Nazism as an “alien” element. “Many elements of Nazism,” wrote Mann, “have been of non-German origin; starting with the title which the alien migrant [Hitler! MHVH] gave himself, the salute with which he let himself greet, which was a Roman invention; until the whole machinery of the ‘total’ one party state, which was copied from the Russians, the Italians.” (G. Mann (1977) Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag), pp. 812–813). Was Golo Mann, by presenting Nazism as something “alien,” also trying to disculpate the Germans?
Especially the book of C. Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski (1956) Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), played an important role in this interpretation. It is interesting, however, that the word “totalitarian” was used for the first time by Mussolini to refer to his regime, when he wrote: “In tal senso il fascismo è totalitario” (Gentile and Mussolini, o.c., I. Idee fondamentali, p. 2).
Weber did not yet mention “fascism.” He died in June 1920, just before fascism started its ascent in Europe. But it is clear that for him “fascism” would have represented a similar complex historical phenomenon as “liberalism” or “imperialism.” It would have been an excellent candidate to be analyzed with the help of an ideal type. This opinion is shared by Stefan Breuer, who wrote that Weber has “supplied important building blocks in order to construct an ideal type that can be applied to fascist parties” (Cf. S. Breuer, “Max Webers Parteisoziologie und das Problem des Faschismus,” in G. Albert, A. Bienfait, S. Sigmund, and C. Wendt (eds) (2003) Das Weber-Paradigma, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), p. 353). Weber’s ideal types are equally applicable to smaller phenomena, such as fascist parties, as to broader phenomena, such as fascist movements and regimes. Ernst Nolte, however, was critical of using ideal types for the analysis of fascism. He wrote that “the construction of an ideal type as an only imagined radical fascism that is built from the most extreme traits of all fascisms seems not be very fruitful” (Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, o.c., p. 22). Nolte seems not to have understood the heuristic significance of ideal types. Building ideal types might have prevented him from considering the anti-Marxism of Italian Fascism and German Nazism the central characteristic of both fascisms.
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© 2013 Marcel H. Van Herpen
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Van Herpen, M.H. (2013). What is Fascism?. In: Putinism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282811_6
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