Just as Moscow conceals its war behind a “special military operation”, so it conceals its fascism behind a campaign to eradicate “Nazis” in Ukraine
and Germany near the end of the war. Played by the best-loved Soviet actors, the Nazis in the film are humane and attractive. Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played the role of Stierlitz, was a model of male perfection. Tall and handsome, with perfect cheekbones, he shone in a sleek Nazi uniform that had been tailored in the Soviet defence ministry.
After the second world war, Ilyin rejected what he saw as Hitler’s errors, such as atheism, and his crimes, including the extermination of the Jews. But he retained his faith in the fascist idea of national resurgence. In 1948 he wrote that “fascism is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and, historically speaking, far from being outlived.” Accordingly, Mr Putin embraced religion, rejected anti-Semitism and eschewed collective leadership for his own direct rule, confirmed by plebiscites.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and “moderniser”, recently posted on social media: “I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates. They want us, Russia, dead…I’ll do all I can to make them disappear.” He did not bother to say who he had in mind. But Russia’s hostility has three targets: the liberal West, Ukraine and traitors at home. All of them need to take stock of what Russian fascism means.
The outlook for Ukraine is even more bleak. A few weeks after the start of the war Ria Novosti, a state news agency, published an article that called for the purging “of the ethnic component of self-identification among the people populating the territories of historical Malorossia and Novorossia [Ukraine and Belarus] initiated by the Soviet powers.”
Talk of bodily contamination and cleansing is not limited to Ukraine. Russia also contains alien elements—oyster-slurping,-eating traitors who mentally live in the West and are infected with ideas of gender fluidity. The Russian people, Mr Putin declared in aaddress, will “simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth” leading to “a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society”.
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