Putin’s Genocidal Quest for Symbolic Immortality, Part 4
“A fascist coup!”
This is part four (out of six) of the essay “Putin’s Genocidal Quest for Symbolic Immortality”. Previous parts: (1) Introduction, (2) “Moscow is silent”, (3) His-story of Ukraine.
Legend has it that when Stalin’s executioners prepared to shoot Grigoriy Zinoviev – a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and close ally of Lenin who later fell out of favour with Stalin – he shouted that his execution was “a fascist coup”.1 Zinoviev’s life and death were paradoxical: he helped build the Soviet dictatorship, only to be destroyed by the very system he helped create. Equally paradoxical were the political consequences of his use of the term “fascism”, whose interpretation and manipulation may have contributed to many triumphs of inhumanity.
It was Zinoviev, then the chair of the Communist International, who introduced, in 1923, the concept “social fascism” to smear and undermine the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as “nothing else than a fraction of German fascists under a socialist mask”.2 The adoption of the concept of “social fascism” by the German communists deepened hostilities between them and the SPD. These hostilities eventually fractured the German left-wing forces and thereby paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s.3
And it was Zinoviev who, while in exile in 1933, produced a peculiar translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One peculiarity was that Zinoviev omitted sections dealing with Hitler’s autobiographical reflections and discussions of Nazi Party-building. The other was significantly more consequential: Zinoviev manipulatively overemphasised Hitler’s anti-Communist and anti-Soviet positions, portraying fascism primarily as a geopolitical threat to the USSR, while downplaying its broader ideological and racist dangers.4 Zinoviev’s Russian version of Mein Kampf was published as a limited edition “for official use” by the Soviet Communist Party elite and therefore had a direct impact on how the Soviet leadership – including Joseph Stalin – viewed fascism.
Officially and academically, Soviet leaders largely adhered to the Marxist interpretation of fascism as “an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capital”.5 However, more casually – and especially after the Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union – fascism came to be seen first and foremost as “anti-Sovietism”.
On a deeper symbolic level, the Nazi invasion of the USSR – which the Soviets referred to as “the Great Patriotic War” – was not perceived as a class war, as the Marxist definition of fascism would suggest. Instead, it became a “sacred war”,6 not against the Soviet system, but against the Soviet people, thus framing fascism as a threat to the nation, rather than to the class-based social structure.
After the Second World War, references to the struggle against fascism in the Soviet Union took on clear aspects of symbolic immortality, often intertwined with Soviet nationalism. Phrases such as “the immortal feat of the Soviet people”, “eternal glory to the heroes”, “your name is unknown, your feat is immortal”, and “heroes never die” became integral to the Soviet politics of memory surrounding the “Great Patriotic War”.7 These expressions became indispensable, quasi-religious clichés used in state ceremonies, popular culture, journalism, education literature, and beyond.
These concepts and sentiments did not disappear from Russian public discourse after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but their post-Soviet reproduction was transformed: “Soviet” was often either directly replaced by “Russian”, or the two terms coexisted in the Russian politics of memory – in both cases, collapsing the meaning of “Soviet” into “Russian”. The replacement of “the immortal feat of the Soviet people” with “the immortal feat of the Russian people” came to appear natural.
The Soviet-era framing of fascism as an ideology targeting the Soviet people, combined with the post-Soviet blurring of the line between “Soviet” and “Russian”, has organically led to the reimagining of fascism as an ideology directed specifically against the Russian nation. Moreover, the fight against fascism – now narrowly interpreted as anti-Russian ideology or practice – has acquired sacred characteristics, promising symbolic immortality to its combatants, just as “Soviet heroes” were immortalised with the claim that they would “never die”.
Two major political and cultural consequences have flowed from these metamorphoses, especially since Putin came to power and set Russia on an increasingly anti-Western course.
The first is that the Kremlin – along with the agents of its influence – now feels entitled to brand any political development perceived as hostile to Russia or the Russian people as “fascism” or “Nazism”. In the case of Ukraine, this has reinforced the Russian leadership’s portrayal of nationally conscious Ukrainians striving for genuine political independence as inherently anti-Russian – a framing that culminated in the depiction of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as a “neo-Nazi coup d’état”, necessarily manipulated by the West.8 This, in turn, allowed Putin to frame the war against the Ukrainian nation as an operation of “denazification” – a term conveniently unpacked by one pro-Kremlin political technologist as the straightforward de-Ukrainisation of the territory of modern Ukraine.9
The second consequence is that the “denazification” of Ukraine – essentially a coded way of describing the destruction of a Ukrainian nation independent of Russia – has been cast as a sacred mission, promising symbolic immortality to all those involved in carrying it out. For Putin, in this sense, the elimination of Ukraine represents a way to fortify Russia – and, by extension, to reinforce the illusion of his own permanence.
The twisted logic behind this is rooted, in part, in the belief that a truly sovereign Ukrainian nation is an instrument of the West’s centuries-old “hybrid war” against Russia. By this reasoning, the destruction of the Ukrainian national project neutralises that instrument and delivers a retaliatory blow to the West without confronting it directly.
The erasure of Ukrainian identity thus becomes both an end in itself – an “immortal feat” – and a means to an end: retribution for the West’s Cold War victory over the Soviet Union, which, until its collapse, had shielded Putin from existential dread. One way or another, the eliminationist war against Ukraine became a pathway – direct or indirect – to his own immortality.
Continue reading: Part Five, “The architecture of a crime”
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 202.
Zinoviev quoted in Lea Haro, “Entering a Theoretical Void: The Theory of Social Fascism and Stalinism in the German Communist Party”, Journal of Socialist Theory, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2011), pp. 563-582 (565).
Haro, “Entering a Theoretical Void”, p. 581; Roger Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), p. 15.
Aron Brouwer, “Authoritarian Anti-Fascism in Russia: Embracing Fascist Symbols and Practices in the Name of Anti-Fascism”. Paper presented at the Fifth Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies, “Beyond the Paranoid Style – Fascism, Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy”, held at the University of Florence, Italy, on 14-16 September 2022.
Quoted in Griffin, Fascism, p. 16.
The chorus of the “The Sacred War”, one of the most famous Soviet songs of the “Great Patriotic War”, read: “Let noble wrath boil over like a wave! This is the people’s war, a sacred war!”.
See a helpful discussion of these developments, especially in the post-Sovet period, in Galia Ackerman, Le Régiment immortel: la guerre sacrée de Poutine (Paris: Premier Parallèle, 2019).
“Signing of Treaties on Accession of Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions to Russia”, President of Russia, 30 September (2022), http://en.special.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69465.
Timofey Sergeytsev, “Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat’ s Ukrainoy”, RIA Novosti, 3 April (2022), https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html. See the English translation here: Timofey Sergeytsev, “What Should Russia Do with Ukraine?”, StopFake, 6 April (2022), https://www.stopfake.org/en/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-publication-by.