In 2022, months into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, two articles defined Russia as a fascist state. One was by Timothy Snyder and the other –– by Oleg Orlov, a Russian scientist and prominent human rights advocate. On May 19, The New York Times published Snyder’s essay, “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.” He wrote that, although definitions of fascism vary, Putin’s Russia met “most of the criteria.” The regime had developed a cult around a single leader, embraced the myth of the country’s exclusiveness and greatness, and was fighting a war of destruction. “A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist,” Snyder wrote. “The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain.” Like Hitler before him, Putin aims to colonize Ukraine, destroy its statehood, enslave its people, and absorb the territory into his own empire. Kremlin propaganda refers to Ukrainians as “the Nazis” to designate them “a subhuman enemy.” The inversion of the term is also consistent with fascist practices, he wrote. As in Europe of the 1930s we live in an era when democracy is in retreat and fascism on the march, so the need to learn from history has never been greater.
Orlov’s opinion piece, “They Wanted Fascism, They Got It,” appeared in the French newspaper Le Club de Mediapart on November 13. (Mediapart publishes analysis by independent journalists and Russian dissidents.) Since the early 1990s, Orlov monitored human rights violations in military conflicts of post-Soviet Russia, work he continued through the worst outbreaks of violence, in the first and second Chechen wars. A co-chairman of the Human Rights Center Memorial that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, he also served on Putin’s presidential council for human rights. In 2006, when a fortnight after Anna Politkovskaya’s assassination, Putin in Dresden spoke derisively of the journalist, saying that her murder dealt a greater blow to Russia than her writings, Orlov resigned from the council. He protested the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Red Square, holding a sign “USSR-1945: the country that triumphed over fascism. Russia-2022: the country of triumphant fascism.” He was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for opposing the war and for his opinion piece where he used Russia’s own definition of fascism to prove his point. In 2024, after serving six months, he was included on a major prisoner exchange along with Vladimir Kara-Murza and Evan Gershkovich.
Unlike many in Russia’s political opposition in exile, Orlov doesn’t hold Putin alone responsible for the war. The idea of restoring the Soviet empire, he writes in the essay, appealed to the country’s “darkest forces” among the bureaucracy and security apparatus, as well as the poor in need of identity. For many Russians, “nostalgic for the Empire,” the war on Ukraine, framed as the war on “the Nazis,” served as the unifying force: “Those ‘at the topʼ and those ‘at the bottomʼ have merged in an ecstasy of ‘patriotism’ and hatred of independent Ukraine.” During the war Putin’s regime destroyed the last remnants of freedom and political opposition, and essentially brought back the one-party system. “The country that left behind communist totalitarianism thirty years ago has slipped back into totalitarianism, only now of the fascist variety.” Russia has a single leader and single party; its refusal to recognize Ukraine as a separate nation, “zombification of the youth,” and validation of war as “a means of resolving problems between states” make it fascist. Orlov concludes his essay by saying that if Russia is allowed to emerge victorious from the war with Ukraine, its fascist regime will continue for a long time and will threaten Europe.
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In the early 2000s, long before these articles appeared, journalist Anna Politkovskaya alerted her countrymen and Europeans to the rise of fascism in Putin’s Russia. Anna reported on the second Chechen war, which Putin launched in 1999 on the pretext of fighting terrorism. In Chechnya, as later in Ukraine, Russia’s army deliberately attacked civilians committing war crimes with impunity. Anna chronicled the army’s lawlessness –– kidnapping for ransom, torture, and extra-judicial executions that left mass graves across Chechnya. Tens of thousands were killed or have disappeared during punitive expeditions by Russian troops who looted and burned entire villages –– crimes she likened with those committed by Nazi Germany.
In her coverage Anna revealed that post-Soviet Russia remained a violent empire and that Putin’s “anti-terrorist operation” was in reality a colonial war. It aimed to subjugate and punish the people whose leaders had aspired to independence from Russia. As she wrote in her book, Putin’s Russia, “Our society ignored what was really going on in Chechnya, the fact that the bombing was not of terrorist camps but of cities and villages…” Had we paid more attention to Anna’s dispatches from Chechnya, Russia’s war on Ukraine would not have taken us by surprise.
Putin’s ascent to presidential power began with a bloody provocation: its historical parallel wasn’t lost on Politkovskaya who compared his rise with that of Hitler’s. In September 1999, several apartment buildings across Russia were blown up killing over 300 people. The FSB blamed the carnage on Chechen militants, but provided no proof of their involvement. There was no proper investigation and none was possible: the authorities swiftly bulldozed crime scenes and destroyed evidence. Putin, a former director of the FSB and newly appointed prime minister, took charge of events, promising to wipe out the terrorists and keep Russians safe. When on September 22, the last bombing was foiled by residents of Ryazan, the perpetrators who planted hexogen in the building’s basement were detained by police. Suddenly, the public learned that the culprits were FSB operatives –– not Chechens, who long denied responsibility. In response, the FSB claimed that in Ryazan they conducted a training exercise to keep citizens alert. As for the bags that tested positive for hexogen on the spot, the FSB said it only contained sugar. The story was widely disbelieved, but by then, Russian planes were bombing Chechnya and on October 1, a land invasion began.
To ensure public support for the war, the Kremlin launched massive anti-Chechen propaganda. On October 7, in her column for Novaya Gazeta, entitled “The Tale of Love and Fascism,” Anna wrote that “the tragic terrorist bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk are far too rapidly coming to resemble another distant event: the burning of the Reichstag.” Her column captures an outbreak of terror and xenophobia in Moscow, and police raids on apartments of ethnic Chechens. Routinely arrested on false charges, branded “a nation of terrorists,” and marked for deportation, Chechens are held collectively responsible for the bombings. Anna returns to the historical analogy: “The theory of the criminal nation was particularly fashionable in Nazi Germany. Then they targeted the Jews and Gypsies. …. Shall we be forced to admit to our children and grandchildren that we aided this fascism, and did nothing to prevent it happening?”
In early 2000s, Anna joined an independent commission investigating the bombings. The commission’s work did not go far: its two most prominent members, the Duma Deputes Sergei Yushchenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin (also a famous investigative journalist), were assassinated in 2003.
Among several books on the 1999 apartment bombings David Satter’s The Less You Know the Better You Sleep stands out as the most credible and consequential. An American journalist and historian, Satter witnessed the end of the Yeltsin era and the beginning of Putin’s. In 1999, while in Moscow, he conducted his own investigation. His book, published in 2016, amasses strong circumstantial evidence revealing that the FSB masterminded the plot. “The only reason there is no direct evidence,” he writes, “is that the Putin regime has concealed it.” Blowing up the apartment buildings “provided a justification for a new war in Chechnya.” Putin, put in charge of the war, had achieved overnight popularity, which in turn, opened the path to the presidency. Satter’s book raises important issues: refusal to believe that the Kremlin was capable of murdering their own citizens made western policy towards Russia “naive and ineffectual. From the moment Putin took power, the West maintained an image of Russia that bore no relation to reality.”
In early 2000s, when Western leaders welcomed Putin to world stage, Anna Politkovskaya wrote of his disdain for human life and prophesized that he would drive Russia back to totalitarianism: “In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars.”
The war on civilians has become an established tactic of Russia’s military. In Ukraine it employs new technology to commit mass murder. In the fifth year of the colonial war on Ukraine, residential buildings are blown up with missiles, burying civilians underneath. War crimes, committed daily by Putin’s regime, get little attention in the world press that has become inured to mass murder. Fascism is on the march in Europe where Ukraine is fighting alone as did Chechnya and later Georgia in the past.
In my next blog post I will discuss Politkovskaya’s prescient column “Who in Europe Should Take Responsibility for a War in Europe.”