vyelkin posted:

First and foremost, Putin's Russia has an unusual relationship to Nazism that differs from the way most cspammers are likely to think about Nazism. Under Putin, Russia has reconstructed its official version of history, and studies have shown that this reconstruction has also made its way into Russians' popular understandings (i.e., it isn't just an official narrative, it's also something that a lot of ordinary people have internalized to some degree). Putin's narrative of Russian history is defined by victory in WW2, which is seen as the pivotal, defining moment in Russian history. The Putin-era state is seen as the successor to the strong Soviet state that was necessary to unite the Russian nation and defeat Nazism in WW2. This narrative is stripped of the ideological context of socialism vs. fascism or the pivotal role of the Communist Party, which were central to the Soviet historical narrative. The Putin-era narrative preserves the symbols and triumphalism of the Soviet era but strips it of the ideology, instead framing it as a national struggle of Russia against Nazi Germany. It even injects current nationalist motifs that had no place in the Soviet-era narratives, like the centrality of the Orthodox Church, backwards into history. This narrative, however, fails to actually teach what Nazism was or why the Nazis wanted to invade the USSR, because it lacks the ideological basis to explain fascism vs. socialism. Putin's Russian state has no interest in glorifying communism or condemning fascism, because it is an anticommunist state whose aggressive reactionary nationalism lands closer to the ideological interests of the Nazis than of the communists (see, for one of countless examples, his reactionary speech from October condemning minority rights like protecting trans children and instead advocating for traditional models of the nation and family). It does raise up Stalin as a leader, but it does so in a way that glorifies him as a leader of the broad Russian nation rather than as a leader of Soviet communism. The scholar Nikolay Koposov describes that as follows:

The new Russian myth of WW2 also marginalizes the Holocaust and the specific nature of Nazi racial ideology in favour of promoting the broader Russian nation as the primary victims of Nazi aggression. In this narrative, Russia is both the principal victim and the principal hero in the story of WW2, because it was the Russian nation that was the primary target of the Nazi campaign for domination and it was the Russian nation that ultimately defeated the Nazis. By making this the primary myth of WW2 and by making WW2 the defining moment of the history of the Russian nation, this makes Russia an antifascist nation by default, without ever having to actually examine what antifascism means as an ideology. Koposov, again, explains the ramifications of this:

According to this model of the Russian nation, the defining attribute of Nazism is not antisemitism or racial hierarchy or reactionary social policy, the defining attribute of Nazism is being anti-Russian. Russia brands all its enemies fascist because its enemies are anti-Russian and Russia is by definition an antifascist nation. Yet by stripping out all the ideological content of what antifascism actually means, this simply sets up an idea of a civilizational clash between antifascist Russia and the fascist West, despite that clash actually being defined by geopolitics rather than by ideological struggle, as it was during the Soviet era when the USSR legitimately offered a contradictory ideology. Putin's reactionary right-wing nationalism, by contrast, has many similarities to reactionary right-wing nationalism in the West, except for the sticking point that Russia defines all its enemies as fascists by default.