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Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements

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The author starts with a short review on competing conceptualizations of fascism in the Western and Russian literature. On the basis of this, he presents his own, new, eclectic definition of generic fascism. He then asks: Does Russia have a fascist tradition?, and surveys 19th and 20th century Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet nationalist thought and politics. His conclusion is that there have been only few signficant, fully fascist ideas espoused by Russian publicists and politicians before the fall of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, Shenfield identifies Konstantin Leontiev (1831-91) as a significant pre-cursor of Russian fascism, a classification that may raise controversy among students of Russian thought. Shenfield then moves to the contemporary political scene, and searches for fascist tendencies in nationalist intellectual circles, the various communist successor-parties, the Orthodox churches, and the neo-pagan movement. His fourth chapter is devoted to putatively fascist trends in the Cossack, skinhead, and soccer-fan sub-cultures. Chapter five deals with Zhirinovskii's so-called Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia. Chapter six tells the story of the rise and fall of Barkashov's neo-Nazi Russian National Unity party. Chapter seven analyzes two of the foremost Russian neo-fascist publicists, Aleksandr Dugin and Eduard Limonov as well as Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party. Chapter eight surveys a number of lesser-known Russian extremely nationalist parties with fascist tendencies, or a clearly fascist doctrine. Chapter nine compares those organizations identified as fully or partly fascist in terms of their organizational structures, activities, strategies, and ideologies. In his conclusions, Shenfield asks whether it is appropriate to speak of a "Weimar Russia." Although there is "no significant near-term danger of a fascist conquest of power [...] the possibility of [such a development] in Russia in the longer term is not completely excluded." (p. 262) In a short afterword, Shenfield comments on the cracks and beginning dissolution in September 2000 in the party he had paid most attention to, Barkashov's "Russkoe Natsional'noe Edinstvo." His impressive 26-page bibliography is accompanied with a short biographical note on the state of Russian and Anglo-saxon research into contemporary Russian extreme nationalism, and right-radical party politics. Shenfield notes that "English-language scholarly sources on fascist tendencies and movements in post-Soviet Russia are meager. [...] The situation is somewhat better when it comes to Russian-language sources." (p. 299)
Against this background, Shenfield's book is pioneering in, at least, two regards. First, his book represents an exemplary and, so far, uniquely successful venture to synthesize the findings of the author's own, close reading of a multitude of primary sources with a wide variety of Russian and Western secondary scholarly, publicistic and journalistic accounts (many of the latter collected with the help of Robert Otto whom Shenfield singles out in his acknowledgements). With the exception of some relevant German-language books and papers, Shenfield uses almost all the significant Russian and Western secondary literature that is available today (notably including a number of revealing articles from the Russian provincial press).
Second, Shenfield makes a serious attempt to integrate his research into the Russian extreme right into the field of comparative fascist study. In his introductory chapter, he introduces as many as 28 Western and Russian definitions of, or statements on, generic fascism. From this survey, Shenfield's extracts four different definitions of fascism that he uses in the ensuing narrative to test the fascist character of this or that Russian ideology. The limitations of space for this review do not allow to do full justice to the certainly sophisticated, but, in my view, ultimately, misleading interpretation of fascism as an international phenomenon that Shenfield presents.
Apart from Shenfield's idiosyncratic conceptualization of generic fascism, there would be only few principal critical comments I would have to make. With regard to Zhirinovskii's LDPR, Shenfield's characterization of this party's "ideology in the most recent period as one of national-imperial liberalism, severely contaminated, but not overwhelmed, by fascist elements" (p. 104) is, in my view, unnecessarily confusing. The attribute "Liberal-Democratic" in the party's name has to do with its origins as a pseudo-party set-up artificially by conservative elements of the late Soviet ancien regime in 1990 in order to discredit, mislead, and split-up the genuinely liberal-democratic movement rising from Russian civil society at that time.
These and a few other imprecisions, notwithstanding, I would once more single out Shenfield's book as by far the most informative analysis, and pertinent interpretation of the post-Soviet Russian extreme Right published in a Western language since 1993. Shenfield is to be congratulated for having produced as dense an analysis as this of a phenomenon that is now barely 10 years old. His book will surely become a standard reference in both, the study of post-Soviet Russian party politics, and comparative fascist studies.