It’s becoming relatively normal in the western press to say Russia is becoming a Fascist state, and to compare it to Nazi Germany.

Thus, The Spectator last week declared that “Fascism looms” in Russia. The Economist talked of the appropriateness of using the “F-word” when describing modern Russia. Its renowned Central and Eastern correspondent, Ed Lucas, talks of Putin’s “Fascist thugs” on his blog. George Soros compared the appropriation of Yukos by the state to Nazi Germany’s confiscation of Jewish property.

It’s not just foreigners making the comparison. Leading domestic liberals say the same thing. Yegor Gaidar earlier this year compared Putin’s Russia to inter-war Germany in its imperial nostalgia, Garry Kasparov said Putin’s Russia akin to Nazi Germany, Andrei Illarionov has compared Russia to Germany in the 1930s, Vladimir Ryzhkov has suggested Russia is moving away from an imperial model of the state to one closer to the Reich.

Should we be getting worried? Well, yes. These are serious charges by serious people, and they make valid and severe criticisms of the increasing racism of the Russian government.

But Fascist?

Let’s not forget what Fascism was. Here’s a rough definition of its key tenets, as embodied in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy:

- It relied on a semi-mystical leader figure, who embodied the people’s dreams, and who roused them to a state of patriotic intoxication through impassioned demagoguery, beamed out by radio, TV and cinema.

Has anyone seen Putin on TV? Do you think him capable of rousing anyone to a state of patriotic intoxication through his impassioned demagoguery? The guy is as stiff as a plank of wood. Look at the show ‘Direct Line’, where he speaks to a carefully assembled group of Russians. This is the closest he gets to directly addressing the Volk. He sits in an antiseptic TV studio, sipping a cup of tea, besides two awkward looking TV presenters, and he goes through figure after figure – GDP up this much, this many hospitals built, inflation down to this level. It’s impressive, in the sense he has so much data at his finger-tips. But it is totally a technocratic performance. He’s a technocrat.

Now watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Watch the Nuremburg rally. The utter theatrics of it. The midnight torch rallies. The banners. The stirring orchestral music. Hitler’s own speech, how he wrenches his body this way and that, flings his fist around, screws up his face, looks to heaven as if in some kind of ecstasy. That’s to say –

- Fascism is a form of ‘political religion’ (cf Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich). It relies on large gatherings of crowds, whipped up into a state of ecstasy by the leader, who feel themselves joined in a mystical bond of nationhood.

We’ve seen one or two mass gatherings organized by United Russia – I’m reminded of the Victory Day celebrations, when thousands of Nashi students were bussed in to Moscow to sing the government’s praises. But that’s the only instance that comes to mind. This is a government that is afraid of crowds. It’s an elitist government of technocrats, not a street-fighting, rabble-rousing government, like that of the Bolsheviks or National Socialists. They much prefer the people to stay at home and watch TV, while they take care of the business of governing and stealing. Look how they react with fear every time a crowd takes to the street. A few hundred babushki march against benefit reform, and the government practically wets its pants. So in this key respect, United Russia seems miles from Fascism.

- Fascism provides a ‘quick-fix’ dystopian solution to economic problems through a Romantic ideology of violence, war and death.

That’s to say, the roots of Nazism, as Isaiah Berlin has argued, are in Romantic Nationalism. Nazism faced the problems of massive inflation, national debt and economic collapse, and rather than slowly working through these technical problems, it leapt to an easy emotional escape – a narcissistic fantasy of the Volk rising up through its heroic will, risking everything in an all-or-nothing military campaign for world domination. The quiet merchant balancing his books was a miserable bourgeois slave. Nazism prided themselves on the idea of heroic, fanatical self-sacrifice for the state, let the consequences be damned.

Putinism, if it can be called that, reacted to the 1998 economic crisis completely differently. The government did not turn away from practical economic solutions to its problems in favour of a Romantic escape from reality. It didn’t immediately start looking for scapegoats. On the contrary, it set about balancing its books, reforming its tax system, putting aside its oil revenues, paying off its debt. Can you imagine a less likely representative of Romantic Nationalism than Alexei Kudrin? The man is a bean-counter, through and through. He doesn’t care about the Volk. He only cares about his precious Moody’s investment grade rating.

And the general economic atmosphere which I see travelling around Russia is a far cry from the desperate “all-or-nothing” ethos of Nazism. Russians are not trading their long-term future for a short-term ‘quick fix’ solution. They are not ignoring their own long-term economic self-interest in the intoxication of a state-religion. On the contrary, they are setting up bank accounts, taking out mortgages and consumer loans, buying apartments, doing remonts, going on holiday, buying insurance. They’re investing in their future. The future that most of them look forward to, the future that we see reflected in advertising billboards all over the country, is not some dark Romantic future of death and glory. It is a bourgeois future of debt and scatter cushions. IKEA, OBI and Russian Standard are the ideological pillars of Putin’s Russia, not Nietzsche, Wagner or Alexander Dugin.

- Fascism showed a wanton disregard for international treaties and laws.

Russia under Putin has signed the Kyoto Protocol, is about to join the WTO, is working to support the International Proliferation Treaty, and is a much more vocal supporter of the UN than the United States. Admittedly, it won’t sign the European Energy Charter. But that’s because it goes directly against the Putinian idea of using Gazprom as an arm of foreign policy. In general, the government has shown itself more happy to sign up to international treaties than the US, which has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, or the treaty on the International Court of Human Rights, and which has twice gone to war in the last decade without the support of the UN Security Council.

- Fascism was a racist ideology based on the idea of the ethnic purity of the nation, which saw enemies in other ethnicities who undermined the nation, and worked ruthlessly to exterminate these other ethnicities.

The main point that champions of the “F-word” theory make to support their argument is that the government is increasingly using other ethnicities as scapegoats to foster a sense of belligerent victim-hood and ethnic nationhood, or ‘Russia for Russians’.

Certainly what is happening to Georgian immigrants is disturbing. And if you speak to immigrants from other former Soviet Republics, they will tell you similar stories of police harassment and extortion. Russian police are, on the whole, a racist, bullying, drunk bunch of criminals. And the government only seems to have encouraged them with Putin’s remarks about dusky thieves in the market.

I agree that the climate of Russian politics in general is becoming more nationalist. I think Ryzhkov may have a point that the country seems to be moving away from an imperial model of the state to one closer to the idea of the Volk. But some Russian analysts – Geoffrey Hosking in particular – have argued that Russia will never emerge as a constitutional democracy until it moves away from being a multi-ethnic empire and becomes a nation-state. And that process of becoming a nation-state, he warned, might well involve excesses of nationalism, as it did in Turkey, for example, when it moved from the Ottoman Empire to the Attaturkian state.

Still, there is the worrying question of to what degree nationalism should be tolerated as a necessary stage in the development of a nation-state. It’s not a question I feel qualified to answer. It’s one thing to sit and watch the emergence of a nation-state from a lecture hall or library, it’s another thing to watch markets being ethnically cleansed.

At this stage, however, Russia still is a multi-ethnic empire, with a Jewish prime minister, a Muslim minister of the interior, with several Buddhist and Muslim governors, and a German-speaking and Germany-loving president. Voronezh and other towns in the South may be the site of skin-head attacks, but other parts of Russia are still tolerant and extremely diverse – go to Ulan-Ude or Kazan, and see how well the different ethnicities get on there. Modern Russia is extraordinarily ethnically diverse – Chuvash, Tatars, Buryats, Finns, Germans, Jews, Chukchi, Khanti, Chechens, Ingush, Abkhaz, Karelians, Sami, Kalymks, Yakuts, Veps etc etc. You’d have to be an idiot to try and claim ‘Russia for Russians’. That’s exactly what most skin-heads are doing, but I don’t think the government is quite so stupid, yet…Hopefully, some figures in the government understand, as Russian Newsweek stated in its cover story last week, that the Russian economy desperately needs immigrants if it is to ride the coming demographic crisis.

And what also gives me confidence that Russia isn’t about to veer into a racist ferment is that I don’t see ordinary Russians spitting with racist venom. That’s to say, many Russians are racist. If I was black, the last place I would go on earth would be Russia. But ordinary Russians – OK, the relatively well-off Russians I meet – are not cursing their fate and blaming a conspiracy of Jews and darkies. They’re getting on with their own lives, building their own futures. They’re doing well, they don’t need to find a scapegoat.

Nor do I see a typically Fascist rejection of international finance (or international Jewry as Fascists would put it) by the government. On the contrary, Putin’s economy is characterized by a weird, even unnerving embrace between the state and international bankers. The fact Putin recently had a personal meeting with the heads of the world’s top investment banks shows this.

I do see some similarities between Putinian Russia and Fascist Italy in terms of economic ideology. Russia does seem to be moving towards corporatism – the embrace of the state and big business, working together on monumental projects like new dams or motorways. The government calls this PPP, but I call it corporatism. There’s no better example of this than the state’s relationship with Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, which is helping build new dams in Krasnoyarsk, and which recently took a stake in, yes, the government’s main road-building agency.

- Fascism fostered a fanatical and total devotion to the state among the young through youth movements.

“F-word” theorists’ attempts to compare Nashi to the Nazi Youth (as The Spectator did) seem misguided to me. Anyone who has been to a Nashi summer camp, as I have had the dubious honour of doing, and spoken to the Nashi kids realizes this is pokazukha. It’s just for the TV news. It’s nasty, and cynical, and exploitational – pure Vladislav Surkov in other words. But it’s not fanatical. Neither the creep bureaucrat who runs it, Vasily Yakimenko, nor the kids themselves, are taking part in any shining-eyed paroxysm of patriotism. They’re all doing it for the freebies – either for a free holiday or free mobile phone, or to try and climb the bureaucratic greasy pole. Nobody believes in it.

I don’t want to apologize too much for the Putin regime. It’s a dictatorship, a TV dictatorship, whose prison-guards are glamorous news-readers with blonde hair and glossy smiles. It’s a kleptocracy, in which bandits with FSB connections can in a few years become some of the richest people in the world, while many Russians don’t even have electricity or running water. It’s an international bully, bullying Georgia, Ukraine and anyone else at its mercy.

But it is not a Fascist country, at least, not comparable to Nazi Germany. You have to remember quite how insane Nazism was, quite how irrational, quite how bloody and homicidal. You have to remember to what extent it was a mass movement of fanatical nationalism. I’m not saying Putin’s Russia is good. I’m saying Fascist Germany was a lot worse.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

December 7, 2006