Ruscism

[22][23] The term was, in the form Russism (Russian: русизм, romanized: rusizm) popularized, described and extensively used in 1995 by President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Dzhokhar Dudayev, who saw the military action by Russia in Chechnya as a manifestation of the rising ideology.

[34][35] Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council Secretary, prominently advocated for "Ruscism" to describe Russia's aggression,[36] asserting it as worse than fascism: Today, I would like to appeal to all journalists to use the term 'Ruscism,' because it is a new phenomenon in world history that Mr. Putin has created with his country.

And small children around the world will stand up and answer their teachers when they ask when Ruscism began, in what land, and who won the fight for freedom against this terrible concept.

[45] On 7 March 2024, American President Joe Biden has given the 2024 State of the Union Address where he compared Russia under Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler's conquests of Europe.

[46] Timothy D. Snyder of Yale University believes that the ideology of Putin and his regime was influenced by Russian nationalist philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954).

[58] According to Snyder, Ilyin "provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism" in the form of a fascist state, and that today "his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin".

"[65] Another of Dugin's books, The Fourth Political Theory, published in 2009, has been cited as an inspiration for Russian policy in events such as the war in Donbas,[66] and for the contemporary European far-right in general.

According to John B. Dunlop of the Hoover Institution, "[t]here has perhaps not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites comparable to that of [...] Foundations of Geopolitics.

[86] From 1999 to February 2020 Vladislav Surkov was an influential Russian politician and was dubbed the ‘Grey Cardinal’ and the Kremlin's main ideologist and also was commonly regarded as the mastermind of Putin's policies towards Ukraine.

[97] Putin has repeatedly denied Ukraine's right to exist, calling the country "an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space".

[115] According to The Economist, as a political calculation in response to his waning popularity in the early 2010s, Vladimir Putin began to draw more heavily on post-Soviet fascist thinking, concepts which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[117] Tomasz Kamusella, a Polish scholar on nationalism and ethnicity, and Allister Heath, a journalist at The Daily Telegraph, describe the current authoritarian Russian political regime as Putin's fascism.

[120] In March 2022, Yale historian Odd Arne Westad said that Putin's words about Ukraine resembled, which Harvard journalist James F. Smith summarized, "some of the colonial racial arguments of imperial powers of the past, ideas from the late 19th and early 20th century".

"[122] On 24 April 2022, Timothy D. Snyder published an article in The New York Times Magazine where he described the history, premises and linguistic peculiarities of the term "Ruscism".

And moreover, if you look at the way the Russian troops are conducting themselves in Ukraine, it looks an awful lot like fascism in action — not least the appalling scenes that we've now seen in film clips from Bucha ...

They don't use this term, but the entire framework of Russian imperialist views — with the right to aggressively expand the state borders, the internal politics with regard to oligarchs, etc.

Demyanenko considers that in internal domestic policy, Ruscism manifests itself in a violation of human rights along with a freedom of thought, persecution of dissidents, propaganda, ignoring of democratic procedures.

While in foreign policy, Ruscism demonstrates itself in a violation of international law, imposing its own version of historical truth, the justification of occupation and annexation of the territories of other states.

[131] Political scientist Ruslan Kliuchnyk notes that the Russian elite considers itself entitled to build its own "sovereign democracy" without reference to Western standards, but taking into account Russia's traditions of state-building.

In foreign policy, Ruscism manifests itself, in particular, in violation of the principles of international law, imposing its version of historical truth on the world solely in favor of Russia, abusing the right of veto in the UN Security Council, and so on.

In domestic politics, Ruscism is a violation of human rights to freedom of thought, persecution of members of the 'dissent movement', the use of the media to misinform their people, and so on."

[136] Timothy D. Snyder argued in an essay that a "time traveler from the 1930s" would "have no difficulty" identifying the Russian regime in 2022 as fascist, writing: 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.

[11]Boris Kagarlitsky describes the reigime as "Post-Fascism", a logical outcome of "neoliberalism and postmodernism", lacking "the goal of the totalitarian-corporate reorganization of capitalism" that Fascism had, when "the system is unable to build a workable totalitarian machine that corresponds to" its "totalitarian ideology and rhetoric" as the industrial system of the first half of the 20th century no longer exists; it is a "product of the... degradation of late Soviet society combined with the degradation of late capitalism", which "suggests not integration but fragmentation of society", so the regime follows not "a coherent worldview", but "a haphazard pasting together of ideas, scraps of concepts and randomly assembled images.

Budraitskis believes that "Russian society... has consistently been reduced to a state of silent victimhood, a malleable material from which a full-fledged fascist regime can be built.

[139][140] Kagarlitsky argued that the term "molecurization" is more adequate, as the society is split not into atoms, but into "molecules – households, which can be considered the last historical form of existence of the Russian community.

[28] In 2015, Russian journalist Andrei Malgin compared Putin's desire to restore a "lost" empire and his support for the church and "traditional values" to the policies of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

[148] In 2023, Oleg Orlov, the chairman of the Board of Human Rights Center "Memorial", said that Russia under Putin had descended into fascism and that the army is committing "mass murder".

Solovyov attacked Snyder by calling him a "pseudo-professor of a pseudo-university" and "simply a liar", and, addressing Americans, stating: "Let me tell you a secret: first of all, your signs are idiotic in their nature.

"[159] He believes that the political system in Russia is "more a revival of the creed of Tsar Nicholas I in the 19th century that emphasized 'Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality' than one resembling the revolutionary, modernizing regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.

"[159] Historian Roger Griffin notes that unlike the Fascist dictators who gave themselves absolute dictatorial authority, Putin prefers to manipulate "the trappings of the proto-democratic system", pretending to "defend and guarantee the Russian Constitution" and making amendments to it instead of completely rejecting it.