Mick Hartley

It's no doubt a waste of time trying to understand Putin's mental state – whether he should be described as evil or not seems more to the point – but it's certainly worth trying to understand his beliefs. Jason Stanley and Eliyahu Stern at Tablet argue that Putin's animating philosophy is a particularly Russian form of classic fascism:

To help decode the Russian leader’s position, it’s instructive to look at the positions espoused by Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has done much over the years to formulate what appears to now be the Kremlin’s dominant ideology. While often described in Western media as “Putin’s brain,” Dugin’s influence on Russian leaders has waxed and waned over the years. More than political influence, his major contribution has been his ability to make the geopolitical ambitions of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia intelligible.

Dugin began his intellectual career as a critic of the Soviet Union, identifying with underground nationalist and spiritual movements. Some of these groups, such as the ultranationalist Pamyat, promoted antisemitic sentiments. Eventually he disavowed these ties and emerged as a leading spokesperson for Eurasianism, a political movement that sees Russia playing a central role in the geopolitical order bridging the divide between Europe and Asia.

The French scholar Marlene Laruelle has described Dugin’s political philosophy as an attempt “to rehabilitate fascism in Russia” by stressing its nationalist orientation while disowning its associations with Nazism and racism. Tellingly, Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine has exemplified this vision.

Fascism embraces a mythic past, where the nation, once great, has experienced humiliation and loss of land, the result of weakness and decadence brought on by liberal democracy. To make up for these losses, real and supposed, fascist leaders encourage violent reassertion of previous greatness, as well as the destruction of liberal democracy in favor of a one-party state or, more typically, a single autocratic ruler who is synonymous with the nation.

In the Russian nationalist version of the mythic past, Ukraine is central. According to this mythology, there are no Ukrainians—just lost Russians living, whether they know it or not, in the heart of historic Russia. Under Putin, Russia has been harshly sexist and homophobic, familiar manifestations of fascist ideology. But Russia’s violent imperial war against a neighboring cosmopolitan democracy that it seeks to absorb is the clearest manifestation yet that its animating ideology is something akin to classical fascism….