Nationalities Papers, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2016.1258049 Why fascists took over the Reichstag but have not captured the Kremlin: a comparison of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia Steffen Kailitz a and Andreas Umland b* a Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism, Dresden, Germany; bInstitute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, Kyiv, Ukraine (Received 26 April 2016; accepted 26 April 2016) Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist. Keywords: fascism; Russia; authoritarianism; Weimar Germany; regime collapse Introduction When does an authoritarian regression turn into a fascist takeover? Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia are “crucial cases” (Eckstein 1975) of democratic decline. Yet, they are only two of the dozens of instances of regression from democracy to non-democracy. In contrast, Weimar Germany has, so far, remained an ultimately unique case of a fascist takeover. To be sure, fascists were also part of other interwar governments – for instance, in Austria, Romania, and Spain. Yet, the only other relevant occasion where an indigenous fascist party achieved considerable control of the legislature and executive, independent of foreign influences, was Italy.1 And even the Italian case constituted an incompletely fascist regime. Its ideology was obviously fascistic, yet parts of its social system and reality remained pre-fascist, that is, contained remnants of the Giolittian era. In particular, competing, non-fascist sociopolitical forces, such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church, held on to their influence on Italian society. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini explicitly embraced the idea of totalitarianism and held power for a considerable length of time. He was less successful, however, in implementing fascist ideas and institutions in social life and culture than Hitler (who, to be sure, also did not achieve a fully totalitarian state). That is one reason why Weimar’s fall and Nazism’s rise – rather than Giolittian Italy’s end and Fascism’s partial triumph – has become a paradigmatic example for both comparative analysis of the rise of fascism, and cross-cultural research into the breakdown of democracies.2 Little surprise that since the first academic reference to Weimar Germany *Corresponding author. Email: andreas.umland@stanfordalumni.org © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 2 S. Kailitz and A. Umland in an analysis of late Soviet Russia by Leonid Luks (1990), a growing scholarly literature has, in one way or another, juxtaposed Weimar Germany interwar to Russian post-Soviet politics and society (e.g. Ferguson and Granville 2000; Hanson 2006, 2010; Hanson and Kopstein 1997; Luks 2008; Misukhin 1998; Ryavec 1998; Shenfield 1998, 2001; Yanov 1995; Van Herpen 2013).3 We too have chosen to compare Russia here to interwar Germany rather than Italy – not least because the switch from a hybrid order to a totalitarian regime went further and faster in Germany than in Italy. We specifically address the question of when an electoral autocracy (Schedler 2006) faces the danger of being superseded by a fascist ideocracy. We argue that Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia both met some preconditions for the rise of a fascist party, yet that a shift to fascism happened only in the German case. Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread imperial nationalism, which has started to be more and more aggressively implemented in domestic and foreign policy by Vladimir Putin, since 1999. Nevertheless, the various dissimilarities between the German and the Russian cases, as we will illustrate, are greater than noted in some of the more alarmist recent comparisons of these two failed democracies. Such differences have to do with such facts that, unlike in early interwar Germany, in early post-Soviet Russia the party system is heavily manipulated, and associationism remains underdeveloped. The subsequent rise and continuing political presence of a strongly authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” – Vladimir Putin – prevents the country from becoming a liberal democracy. At the same time, Putin’s authoritarian rule makes it also improbable that the Russian regime will transgress into fascism. In developing this argument, our article builds upon an earlier working paper presented at various conferences4 and published within a working paper series of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Kailitz and Umland 2010). This paper’s aim is to specify and partly modify some conclusions from an earlier debate between Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein (1997) and Stephen Shenfield (1998). We venture to add some hopefully informative observations and thoughts to these arguments and to the findings of Hanson’s later seminal monograph Post-Imperial Democracies (2010) as well as to Luks’ brief, but important survey “Weimar Russia?” (2008). We are aware that our comparison is necessarily wanting, as Russia’s social transition is still in progress. We are thus aiming at a moving target. Neither has the Russian political regime yet fully consolidated, as, among other indicators, the strange switches of positions between Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev of the last years indicate; nor has the evolution of the post-Soviet Russian ultra-nationalist scene yet ended. Moreover, the nature of Putin’s transmuting rule remains disputed among scholars. Recently, an increasing number of non-academic and also some scholarly observers have started to argue that Putin’s rule itself is already fascist. We take issue with this assertion. The fascist potential in Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia Imperial traditions and post-traumatic psychopathologies Unlike most other new democracies – whether of the interwar or post-Communist periods – the Weimar Republic and the Russian Federation were new nation-states that had come into being through radical shrinking of once-powerful empires, the German Second Reich and the Soviet Union. (While some would question whether Russia is a nation-state because it is a multi-national federation, it arguably meets the basic criterion by virtue of the fact that 80% of its population is comprised of ethnic Russian.) Weimar Germany and the Russian Federation emerged as a result of these empires’ defeat in World War I and the Nationalities Papers 3 Cold War (Hanson 2006). Large parts of both nations felt, in different ways, humiliated by their former adversaries’ conduct after their defeats. Most Germans felt disgraced by the conditions and accusations laid down by the victorious Entente powers in the Versailles peace treaty. While there was no post-Soviet equivalent to the Versailles dictate, many Russians perceived the West’s behavior in post-Communist Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia to be triumphant and disrespectful of post-Soviet Russia and its selfproclaimed special rights on the territories of the former Soviet inner and outer empires. Both nations have had to deal with the problem that parts of their former core ethnicities, that is, ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians (sometimes collapsed with other Eastern Slavs), were/are living under occasionally problematic circumstances abroad. There were about 8.6 million so-called ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) in eastern and southeastern Europe after 1918, and about 25 million Russian so-called compatriots (sootechestvenniki) in the former Soviet republics after 1991. The two new nation-states found themselves in the strange situation of having exclaves, the cities/regions of East Prussia (as well as the Free City of Danzig/Gdansk) and Kaliningrad/Königsberg, that had once belonged to these nations’ inner empires but were now separated from their “homelands” through territories of more or less hostile states (Poland and Lithuania). As a result, the nationalisms within both countries had/have a strong irredentist as well as pan-German/Slavic dimension. In the Weimar Republic, the issue of Austria’s Anschluss to Germany was particularly prominent. In Russia, the idea of a “union” with Belarus is a major feature of political and intellectual discourse. Moreover, the justification and mode of Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s arguments and implementation of the annexation of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The issue of Russia’s independence from, reaction to, and confrontation with the West plays a major role in all Russian radically nationalist thinking and propaganda. Under Vladimir Putin’s rule since 1999, the definition of Russia’s current situation through its juxtaposition with the West has become popular among many, if not most ordinary Russians, whose views have become increasingly anti-Western and especially anti-American (Umland 2009c). Nevertheless, the radical anti-Westernism of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and other right-wing extremists has, so far, paid off little. In spite of being brought to power as Boris Yeltsin’s protégé, Putin appears, at least so far, more attractive to an increasingly antiWestern electorate than his more extreme ultra-nationalist contenders. The antidemocratic “special path” Decades before the Nazis’ rise, German public discourse had been infected with the belief that Germany had an unfulfilled historic mission and that the German road to modernity diverged from the Western one. Many intellectuals argued that Germany had to follow a Sonderweg, a special path (Faulenbach 1980) – an idea especially popular among the antidemocratic right (Sontheimer 1962). The Sonderweg idea implied that the German imperial state should have the power to lead the nation so as to avoid making compromises between conflicting interests in society. This ideology was by itself not fascistic. Yet, once economic crises shattered the Germans’ trust in their new republic, it helped to pave the way to the erosion of the democratic camp in Weimar’s political spectrum. In Russia’s past and present, the belief that the country must follow a “special path” (osobyi put’) to modernity has been even stronger than in Germany. Russia’s entire modern intellectual and political history has been centered around the conflict between those who believe that Russia is or should be an integral part of Europe, the so-called 4 S. Kailitz and A. Umland zapadniki (Westerners or Westernizers), and the so-called slavianofily (Slavophiles) – those convinced that it is, should, and/or will be something special, if not opposed to the West. To be sure, all non-democratic Russian governments – whether those of the tsars, Communists, or today’s rulers – took an ambivalent stand on this issue, as pointed out by Leonid Luks (2005). Under the Romanovs, the Communist Politburo, and the current regime, Russia has been understood to be both a part of the “civilized world” (a popular Russian term for the community of industrially and socially advanced countries), on the one side, and a geographically and culturally separate country or even unique civilization, on the other. Reminiscent of the German Sonderweg idea, it was the emphasis on the central, almost “divine” role of a largely unaccountable state in Russia’s past, present, and future that dominated all three antidemocratic regimes, before, during, and after the Soviet experiment. What is fascism? Under both regimes, Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, some prominent political actors could be classified as fascist – with the German case less controversial than the Russian one. Most (though not all) scholars would agree that the Nazi Party was a – if not the most important – permutation of generic fascism. But which actors in post-Soviet Russia are fascist and which are not? We proceed here from Roger Griffin’s familiar definition of generic fascism as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism,” which has become the most widely used concept of fascism in both the study of the Western and non-European radical right, as well as in Soviet and post-Soviet studies of ultra-nationalism (Umland 2015).5 Griffin’s conceptualization treats fascism as an ideology centered around the idea of the newborn nation understood as an absolute value superseding all other individual and collective rights and interests. The radical rejuvenation and cleansing of the national body would, in the fascist worldview, come about as a result of not only a sociopolitical, but also a cultural and even anthropological revolution – the creation of a new fascist man (Griffin 1993, 1995; Griffin, Loh, and Umland 2006). To be sure, some prominent political scientists, such as Zeev Sternhell or A. James Gregor,6 have, in their influential English-language comparative studies, argued that Nazism should not be treated as a fascist outlook. In Germany too, some historians insist on distinguishing between Nazism and fascism, lest the Nazis’ mass crimes be diminished. In contrast, Griffin’s conceptualization clearly situates the palingenetic and ultra-nationalist ideology of the Third Reich within the realm of generic fascism. In general, international mainstream fascist studies, including those in Russian politology, treat Hitler’s worldview as, while having weighty specifics, obviously fascist. Concerning Putin’s agenda, there has been little discussion of its possibly fascist credentials among comparativists of fascism. In contrast, eminent scholar of post-Soviet affairs Alexander Motyl has repeatedly argued that Putin’s rule is “fascistoid” or even fully “fascist” (e.g. 2007, 2009, 2010, 2016). Obviously, the Russian political system has since 2000 accumulated more and more traits that make it similar to a fascist one, for example, authoritarianism, nationalism, imperialism, militarism, personality cult, masculinism, bellicosity, and so on (Umland 2009b). Yet, it has become neither truly palingenetic or revolutionary, nor fully ultra-nationalist or right-wing extremist. As already indicated several years ago (Umland 2009c), Motyl’s approach is peculiar by its consistent ignorance of all other discussions of post-Soviet Russian fascism, whether by (1) influential comparativists who do not read Russian but have nevertheless commented on the issue of post-Soviet Russian fascism (e.g. Roger Griffin, A. James Nationalities Papers 5 Gregor, Michael Minkenberg, and Roger Eatwell); (2) leading researchers of the Russian extreme right who have explicitly addressed the issue of post-Soviet Russian fascism (e.g. Walter Laqueur, Leonid Luks, Stephen Shenfield, Stephen Hanson, Anton Shekhovtsov, and Mischa Gabowitsch); or (3) serious Russian political scientists who have, from a comparative point of view, discussed fascism in post-Soviet Russia (e.g. Aleksandr Galkin, Aleksandr Ianov, Mikhail Sokolov, Valerii Solovei, Vladimir Pribylovskii, Viacheslav Likhachev, and Gleb Misukhin).7 Motyl, in his latest repetition (2016), sets out to not only classify once more Russia’s political system as fascist, but also de- and reconstruct the notion of generic fascism. Yet, his bibliography does not mention those multi-author discussions where exactly this has been tried via juxtaposition of different viewpoints on fascism by comparativists and area students (e.g. Loh and Wippermann 2002; Griffin with Feldman 2004; Griffin, Loh, and Umland 2006). Motyl has, in his latest papers (2010, 2016), also not reacted to repeated critique of his earlier statements (2007, 2009) by, among others, Leonid Luks (2009) or myself (e.g. 2009c, 2015). Motyl’s contributions – though valuable deliberations by themselves – have thus remained extra-academic, in that they demonstratively ignore each and every previous scholarly statement, on this topic. They do not aim to constructively contribute to the emerging subdiscipline of Russian fascist studies. Existence of a relevant fascist actor in Russia It is almost tautological to state that a vital nationalist subculture is a precondition for the rise of fascism. If there is such a subculture and a myth of an antidemocratic national way, usually there will be a relevant fascist actor in that country too. Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s ultra-nationalist LDPR, founded in late 1989 (Umland 1994, 1997, 2006), is only one such example in Russia. Since its spectacular victory in Russia’s first post-Soviet multiparty parliamentary elections of December 1993 (it finished first with 23% of the vote), it has been the most important of Russia’s ultra-nationalist political parties (Umland 2002a). While often laughed at, the LDPR is not only a fascist, but also the only fascist actor worthy of detailed consideration in Russia. To be sure, there are other clearly fascist groups, such as the National-Bolshevik Party led by Eduard Limonov, Russian National Unity led by Aleksandr Barkashov, or the International Eurasian Movement led by Aleksandr Dugin. Yet, they have been active in the subcultural, social, extra-parliamentary, non-electoral, and/or intellectual realms, rather than in high politics, narrowly defined (Shenfield 2001). They are thus no direct equivalents to the Nazis, Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, or other electorally active fascist parties. It goes without saying that the LDPR is only in some regards an equivalent to the Nazi Party. Neither these two parties’ leaders nor their ideologies or structures are fully analogous. But post-Soviet Russia’s oldest political party plays, in more ways than is usually acknowledged, a role similar to that of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany. Zhirinovskii’s plan of a “last dash to the South,” outlined in his 1993 principal political writing and autobiography of the same name, is very different from Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Yet, it can still be read as representing a Russian counterpart to the Nazi’s plan for capturing “living space in the East” (Lebensraum im Osten). The Nazi’s idea of national rebirth was focused on the idea of an initially domestic cleansing and a later territorial expansion as a foreign extension of this revolution at home. In contrast, Zhirinovskii’s permutation of fascism makes territorial annexation and military aggression themselves the instrument, core, and content of Russia’s national resurrection (Umland 1997, 2008, 2010). 6 S. Kailitz and A. Umland Distinct from Putin’s expansionism, Zhirinovskii’s neo-imperialism is not restorationist, as his expansionist plans go beyond the former borders of both the tsarist and Soviet empires. By “subduing” the unstable “South,” that is, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, through military occupation, as he outlines in “The Last Dash to the South,” Russia will save both herself and the entire world. While this program is substantively different from Hitler’s, Zhirinovskii’s agenda still fulfills Griffin’s fascist minimum and displays thus structural – though only few substantive – similarities to Nazism (Umland 1997, 2008, 2010). In conclusion, the parliaments of both post-imperial proto-democracies of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia contained a weighty fascist party. Why Germany became fascist while Russia has not Actor-centered arguments focusing on political contingencies and discursive peculiarities of public life, including of Germany’s interwar and Russia’s post-Soviet politics, have considerable explanatory power. They become relevant, however, only if contextualized within deeper structural factors – an observation also valid for those fundamental institutional and social features determining the (de)formation of Weimar Germany’s and post-Soviet Russian party politics. Particularistic vs. clientilistic party systems A critical structural difference between Weimar Germany and post-Communist Russia is that Germany, by the time of the Weimar Republic, had already developed an ideologically differentiated and socially entrenched party system (Hanson and Kopstein 1997). When the Russian Federation became an independent state in late 1991, there were only a few unconsolidated proto-parties, let alone a proper party system (Fish 1995; Stoner-Weiss 2001). Under Yeltsin, this legacy resulted in what has sometimes been labeled “feckless pluralism” (Golosov 2004; McFaul 2001; Rose 2001; Rose and Munro 2002). In Russia, only parties that are “radically left-wing” and “right-wing” constitute properly programmatic parties (Hanson 1997) while the remainder, with their vague programs, constitute a so-called “swamp.” In the Weimar Republic, in contrast, all relevant parties had more or less welldefined and coherent political programs by the time democratization started (Bracher 1960, 64–95). The initial Weimar Coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), German Democratic Party (DDP), and Catholic Center – that is, the alliance of relatively liberal parties that brought to life the republic – has no equivalent in post-Communist Russia. “Democratic Russia,” the late Soviet pro-democratic umbrella organization assembling a variety of groups, fell apart after the common enemy – the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – disappeared in the aftermath of the ancien regime’s unsuccessful coup attempt of August 1991. As the various democratic grouplets increasingly quarreled among themselves, there remained few prospects for a strong party with a democratic manifesto to emerge. It also did not help that Yeltsin refused to associate himself with a party. Arguably, he himself did not have any specific political vision – whether social-democratic, liberal, or conservative – that went beyond vague notions about Russia joining “the civilized world.” The Russian equivalent of Weimar’s authoritarian camp started, like the German radical right 70 years before, regrouping after it had overcome the shock of the collapse of the empire (Luks 2008). Yet, unlike their German counterparts, the Russian ultra-nationalists had to act within the flattened political realm of post-Soviet neo-patrimonialism. This Nationalities Papers 7 system is characterized by patron–client relationships, a prevalence of political machines, heavy influence of so-called “oligarchs,” and widespread use of “political technology” designed to keep electoral competition meaningless (Wilson 2005). The lack of programmatic parties in early post-Soviet Russia was a Communist legacy rooted in, among other things, the absence of well-defined social cleavages in postCommunist society. While traditional cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) can explain electoral results in Weimar Germany, it is thus far less helpful for directing analyses of post-Communist Russian elections. The main political cleavage – if one chooses to use that word – in post-Soviet Russia, it has been argued, was based on the fuzzy division between pro- and anti-Kremlin forces, whatever this meant, at a certain point in time (Folkestad 2005). In Weimar Germany, in contrast, the subcultural fixation of parties on certain milieus kept them highly ideologized and made it difficult for party leaders to compromise with other parties. The Zentrumspartei (Center Party) spoke for Germany’s Catholics, while the Social Democrats (SPD) represented almost only the working class. There was little that, for instance, the SPD offered to democratically inclined parts of the bourgeoisie, peasants, or middle class. It was, therefore, less the electoral or organizational weakness of the pro-democratic parties than the extreme fragmentation of the Weimar coalition that made it easy for the Nazis to advance and, eventually, gain power (Lepsius 1978, 41). In the framework of the preceding Second German Empire of 1871–1918, the democratic parties had become used to putting forward maximalist claims on behalf of their supporters and the democratic parties failed to adapt and turn Germany’s first republic into a functioning party democracy (Stürmer 1980; Vogt 1984).8 Against this background, the Nazis, with their distinctly populist, pseudo-egalitarian form of nationalism, developed a novel trans-class appeal (Breuer 2005). In view of their ethnically exclusive, yet socially inclusive nationalism, the Nazis, in distinction to the democratic and Communist parties, were not limited by class or religious boundaries. Instead, the Nazi Party became, in terms of its social foundations, Germany’s first catch-all party (Childers 1983; Falter 1991). The ideology of an “ethnic community” (Volksgemeinschaft) attracted people from all classes, Protestants as well as Catholics (Broszat 1984, 207–219). Post-Communist Russia has – in sharp contrast to Weimar – been characterized by clientelistic pragmatism of the parties and factions often functioning as mere political machines (e.g. Hale 1999). Even before Russia turned into a full-blown electoral autocracy under Putin, factional conflict in the Duma was typically driven not by different policy positions but by the question of whether the Duma should follow the president on this or that issue. In such cases, sometimes, even archenemies voted together. Numerous deputies of the Duma, especially independents, but also entire party factions in the 1990s, could be “convinced” to vote in a certain way in exchange for wealth or position. The clientelistic element in Russian politics fostered the strength of the president, reduced the salience of party-political conflicts, and decreased the relevance of all ideologies – including fascism. Even the leaders of the most clearly programmatic parties, LDPR’s Zhirinovskii and the Community Party of the Russian Federation’s Gennadii Ziuganov, showed opportunistic behavior when they, for instance, both voted in favor of Yeltsin’s budget in 1997. General democratization theory assumes that institutionalized party systems with programmatic parties foster democratic transition and consolidation (Kitschelt 1992). Few political scientists would disagree that a well-developed party system, like Weimar’s at the end of the 1920s, is a higher barrier against a regime’s degradation toward electoral autocracy than a fragmented system of non-institutionalized parties, like that in Russia at the end of the 1990s. However, the meaning of this configuration changes once a political regime has made the transition to electoral autocracy and becomes threatened by further degradation 8 S. Kailitz and A. Umland toward totalitarian ideocracy. Paradoxically, the absence of broadly representative party structures, as in Putin’s Russia, appears to diminish rather than enhance the chances of an already non-democratic regime’s further radicalization and ideologization eventually leading to fascistization, such as happened in Weimar in 1932–1934 (see also Hanson and Kopstein 1997). Like their political structures, the level of civil society development had key, but differing, roles in interwar Germany and post-Soviet Russia (Umland 2002b, 2009a). Weimar had, by both historical and comparative standards, an exemplary robust civil society. Interwar Germany was characterized not only by a highly developed, but even pathological associationism (Vereinsmeierei). The second Russian Republic of 1991–1999, in contrast, emerged under conditions of an organizationally weak, partly corrupted, and insufficiently entrenched civil society. Within the neo-Toquevillian approach to the role of civil society in democratization, a strong Third Sector is often regarded as a (if not the) foundation of sustainable democracy. However, among others, the interwar German case illustrates that a differentiated civil society may not only be an insufficient guardian for young democracies suffering from substantial defects in other spheres. As, for example, Sheri Berman (1997) has shown, the German clubs and societies provided the Nazis with channels through which they spread their ideas and recruited their followers. Thus, Germany’s vigorous associational life paradoxically facilitated rather than hindered the rise of fascism in the Weimar Republic.9 In the Russian case, apparently the reverse applies. Contradicting the civic intuition of pro-democratic observers, Russia’s fascist groups may – as much as pro-democratic groupings – have been suffering rather than benefiting from the lack of self-organization in Russian society, and from the predominance of state institutions in public life. At least so far, post-Soviet “uncivil society” has proven to be insufficiently strong to function as a catalyst of a transformation of Russia’s electoral autocracy into a fascist ideocracy, as had been the case in Weimar Germany or northern Italy in the interwar period (Umland 2002b, 2009a). This observation was also made as early as the 1990s by Hanson and Kopstein, who argued that “while the legacy of totalitarianism indeed poses significant obstacles to the formation of a post-Communist ‘civil society,’ social atomization may also simultaneously pose obstacles to the creation of a workable authoritarianism” (1997, 277). While this is in general true, we partly disagree in relation to the Weimar/Russia comparison. Social atomization may indeed provide the breeding ground for a subversion of democratic institutions as well as for the establishment and functioning of an authoritarian regime. The weakness of civil society, however, in a modern society may present obstacles to ideologically driven groups, in general, and to a fascist takeover in particular. For the same reasons that it is unlikely that Russia will any time soon become a fully developed liberal democracy, it paradoxically appears also as improbable that Russia will turn into a properly fascist – that is, revolutionary ultra-nationalist – state. To travel either path, parties with coherent party manifestos and grassroots in society are necessary. Moreover, these well-institutionalized party systems would have to be accompanied by a developed Third Sector that would interact with parties providing personnel resources, channels to spread ideas, and instruments for building support among the population. Weak president/strong contender vs. strong president/weak contender Among others, Roger Griffin (1993, 210) has argued that fascism only has a chance to take off where there is no alternative “strong non-fascist ultra-right to take over.” Throughout the Nationalities Papers 9 twentieth century, firmly established ultra-conservative and fully authoritarian regimes that needed no additional support from fascist competitors seemed, as Stanley Payne (1995) has argued, to represent effective safeguards against fascist takeovers. In both cases of independent transfers of power to fascists, that is, in Germany in the early 1930s and in Italy in the early 1920s, it was the formally legitimate head of a hybrid and unstable government rather than of a consolidated authoritarian regime who handed power to fascist parties. In the Weimar Republic, in 1933, the traditional authoritarian actors came, in the framework of a formally semi-presidential setting, to believe that they needed an alliance with the Nazi Party to provide for continuing legitimacy of their right-wing regime, and that they could “tame and frame” Hitler (Jasper 1986). Reichspräsident Hindenburg, no democrat at all (Pyta 2007), under the pressure of the public – wanted to end the phase of temporary governments with their emergency regime (Notverordnungsregime; Mommsen 1998, 657). The form of rule by presidential cabinets practiced by Hindenburg between 1930 and 1933 had brought no improvement of the economic situation. It failed to calm society and lacked popular support. Hitler thus came to power when, oddly, Hindenburg wanted, in a way, to “re-democratize” his electoral autocracy in reaction to a lack of economic success and popular support of his changing presidential cabinets. Actors do matter, and it seems likely that a younger healthier and more energetic president in Weimar Germany might have been able, even within the context of the Great Depression, to preserve or reform Germany’s electoral autocracy and would have prevented a fascist takeover. This condition is fundamentally dissimilar to that of the authoritarian regime that has emerged in Russia since 2000. Putin, as of 2016, continues to have sufficient popular support for his rule – even if his popularity has been heavily doctored by cunning “political technologists” (Wilson 2005). He did not need the help of other political forces – and certainly not of Zhirinovskii’s LDPR. To be sure, the Russian political system continues to be under considerable stress, as indicated by such signs as political assassinations, economic ups and downs, enduring social grievances, ongoing fighting in the North Caucasus, as well as the Kremlin’s escalating foreign policy adventures as instruments of securing popular support in times of declining living standards. Yet, Putin was initially able to take credit for an impressive economic development and related social improvements during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Recently, he has used the “peaceful” annexation of Crimea and allegedly “civil war” in eastern Ukraine to strengthen the legitimacy of his rule on the basis of popular irredentism, public paranoia, conspiracy theories, and rabid anti-Westernism. After more than 15 years in power, in spite of the 2011–2012 protests, he continues to appear as a strong leader to most Russians and has even managed to increase his public support against the background of his putative foreign policy successes and a perception of increasing international threats to Russia. Moreover, the major Russian fascist party, the LDPR, was, among others, different from the Nazis, in that Zhirinovskii has been – for a variety of reasons – acting (or forced to act) more opportunistically than his German equivalent had been in the early 1930s. At times, Hitler was remarkably stubborn in defending his idiosyncratic political stance and confrontational public behavior. Not the least because of Hitler’s seemingly “principled position,” the vote share of the Nazi Party in Weimar had continually risen until summer 1932. In contrast to the shifting voting behavior of the LDPR in the State Duma, the Nazis rarely compromised their political position in the Reichstag. While Zhirinovskii has made contradictory statements on a regular basis, Hitler’s public discourse was more consistent, if often irrational or even antirational. The Nazis started supporting Germany’s still largely conservative government only after Hitler had become head of a coalition cabinet composed of representatives of various nationalist forces, on 30 10 S. Kailitz and A. Umland January 1933. Even after his large support had begun declining in late 1932, Hitler shrewdly continued refusing every offer of mere participation in government and kept – eventually successfully – demanding appointment as chancellor. Moreover, the vote share of Zhirinovskii as presidential contender and the LDPR as a parliamentary party showed dynamics different from those the Nazis and Hitler. It first rose rapidly from 7% in 1991 to 22.9% in 1993, then fell to 5.7% in 2003, and lately stabilized around 10%. While in the elections of 1993 the LDPR was the strongest party, it had by 1999 fallen to fifth place. Under Putin, it established itself as Russia’s fourth or third component of the regime’s officially allowed party system – a construction somewhat reminiscent of the bloc party system of the East German Communist regime, which Putin had come to know in 1985–1990 firsthand. While Zhirinovskii’s endurance over the years has been, in some ways, remarkable, it looks likely that the LDPR will, in the future, stagnate or decline rather than revive or even rise to power. Not only the political ideology, style, and location of the Nazis and the LDPR, but also the dynamics of Hitler’s and Zhirinovskii’s own electoral performances show differences. In the 1932 presidential elections, for instance, Hitler won 36.8% of the vote against the incumbent Hindenburg and scored thus only marginally less than his party in the same year’s summer parliamentary elections. In contrast, Zhirinovskii personally never received as high a degree of support in national elections. Although or because the LDPR is, within Russia’s public, perceived as “the Zhirinovskii party,” the Russian fascist leader mostly scored lower in presidential elections than his party in parliamentary polls. To some readers, such comparisons could appear as redundant insofar as, in both Russian and Western journalistic assessments, Zhirinovskii is mostly seen as a political clown, entrepreneur, showman, and/or fringe phenomenon. It is worth remembering, however, that Hitler was often also seen in this way before January 1933. On 29 September 1930, Great Britain’s Guardian wrote that Hitler is “the ranting clown who bangs the drum outside the National Socialist circus.” Another respected British newspaper, The Observer, in February 1932 still called the Nazi leader a “mere agitator and rank outsider” (as quoted by Kershaw 2007). We argue here that the LDPR is a genuinely political and less of merely a cultural phenomenon than is often assumed in both journalistic and scholarly assessments of his party – even though the behavior and speeches of Zhirinovskii make it sometimes hard to take him seriously. Zhirinovskii’s political clownishness as well as his partly Jewish family background – a problem for many Russian nationalists – had the (somewhat beneficial) effect of “corrupting” the emerging fascist niche in post-Soviet Russia’s party spectrum at an early stage of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation. As his public image thus remained ambivalent, especially to extremely right-wing voters, Zhirinovskii achieved less impressive electoral results than Hitler, and was thus never in a position to plausibly make claims comparable to Hitler’s. His most remarkable electoral performance of December 1993 was immediately (and, as turned out later, correctly) interpreted as an exception. In distinction to Hitler’s strategy, Zhirinovskii thus chose to place his party’s representatives in federal or regional executive positions within administrations not dominated by the LDPR. A high governmental position for the LDPR leader himself has, as far as is known, never been seriously discussed. Since 1999, the LDPR leader has been confronted with a highly popular non-fascist authoritarian and increasingly nationalist competitor. In contrast to the reverse and larger age gap between the authoritarian Hindenburg and totalitarian Hitler, Vladimir Putin is six years younger than Zhirinovskii. Putin’s public image is that of a resolute administrator and vigorous national leader gifted with charismatic traits. These were qualities that Zhirinovskii himself had been claiming throughout the 1990s for his political leadership. Putin’s Nationalities Papers 11 type of electoral authoritarianism presumed that Zhirinovskii would either join the informal pro-Putin coalition or have to leave high politics altogether. Given these alternatives, Zhirinovskii had no choice, if he wanted to continue sitting in parliament and appearing in influential mass media, but to transform his party from a fundamentally anti-systemic force into a more or less pro-governmental actor. In conclusion, it is not too far-fetched a speculation to say that if Weimar had produced a political leader within the authoritarian camp as young and charismatic as Russia’s Putin, then Hitler’s move into the chancellor’s office would not have happened. Not only Weimar’s authoritarian camp, but also its democratic spectrum suffered from a lack of alternative charismatic political leadership. Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Stresemann, the most admired leaders of the early Weimar democratic camp, had both died by the late 1920s. At the same time, there was no young non-fascist authoritarian leader with charismatic qualities available to the traditional authoritarian camp, while its most electorally potent leader, Hindenburg, was getting senile. Hitler benefited significantly from the absence in the early 1930s of energetic and popular non-fascist politicians.10 Conclusions In this paper, we claim that there was fertile ground for fascism in both the Weimar Republic and post-Soviet Russia. In both countries, we found that the post-imperial legacy combined with post-traumatic collective psychopathologies to create an explosive cocktail of resentment, conspirology, and palingenetic daydreaming. As a result, both countries developed vital nationalist subcultures that gave birth to a variety of essentially fascist actors, some of whom entered the national political stage. We tried to explain why – notwithstanding such far-reaching resemblances – Russia has not become fascist and seems unlikely to face a fascist takeover (at least, not one similar to the Germany of 1933) in the near future. We discovered an irony in post-Soviet Russian political affairs: Russia’s transition toward electoral authoritarianism was facilitated by an underdeveloped party system, rudimentary civil society, and the rise of a charismatic authoritarian actor representing the ancien regime. These same autocracy-facilitating factors, however, help prevent Russia from becoming a fascist ideocracy. It would take an additional major disruption of post-Soviet Russian political development – for instance, a further escalation of one or more of Russia’s foreign or armed domestic conflicts (e.g. Ukraine or Chechnya) – fundamentally reconfiguring once more domestic affairs and political discourse in Russia to make our assessment invalid. As long as such fundamental shattering of the current status quo does not happen, it seems more likely that Russia – in some ways, reminiscent of Mexico in the second half of the twentieth century – will remain an electoral autocracy with some, but not much, room for opposition, for years to come (for a comparison of Russia and Mexico, see Konitzer 2005). As a result, we disagree with Gregory Luebbert, who concluded, in his structural analysis of interwar Europe, that “leadership and meaningful choice played no role in the outcomes [i.e. whether an interwar country turned to liberalism, fascism, or social democracy]” (1991, 306). According to our findings, actors and their ideologies matter a lot. That does not mean that socioeconomic and institutional conditions are irrelevant. But especially under conditions of deep political crisis, institutional structures become malleable and the space for maneuver for the main actors broader than in normal times (Dobry 1986; Hanson 2010). As transition theory would suggest, a regime does not collapse unless and until some viable alternative to the ideology of the powers-that-be is able to attract large sections of 12 S. Kailitz and A. Umland the political elite and population (Przeworski 1986). As long as there is no real such alternative, even a regime with as vague a political ideology as that of the current Russian electoral autocracy can enjoy “inverse legitimation” (Valenzuela 1992, 78). When actors play a crucial role, it becomes difficult to predict an outcome. Therefore, if we want to know where Russia is headed, we must both follow developments in society (survey results, associational life, public discourse, etc.) and study the behavior, composition, and attitudes of Putin’s wider entourage. Acknowledgements We have greatly benefited from numerous helpful comments received during our presentations at several international conferences. We would especially like to thank Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom (Vancouver) and Leonid Luks (Eichstätt) as well as the two anonymous reviewers of Nationalities Papers for their careful reading of an earlier draft of this paper. Funding Umland’s research was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD-Fachlektorat), Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (Initiative on the new far-right forces in Russia), and Research Council of Norway (NEORUSS project). Notes 1. Only in these countries, fascists assumed control without the intervention of a foreign fascist force, as later would be the case with Nazi Germany’s de facto installation of the fascist, yet dependent regimes of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, Croatian Ustashi, and North Italian Salo Socialist Republic. 2. That these two fields are closely related to each other is illustrated, for instance, by the seminal contributions to both subdisciplines of eminent political scientist Juan J. Linz (e.g. 1976, 1978). 3. There are hundreds of further publications on this topic from partly prominent politicians, journalists, and publicists, who would, in a different setting, be worth considering (e.g. Starovoitova 1993). 4. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2009 MPSA Convention (Chicago), 2009 IPSA Congress (Santiago de Chile), 2009 ECPR Congress (Potsdam), and 2009 AAASS Convention (Boston). 5. It is clear from this conceptualization of fascism that Putin’s Russia, for all its authoritarian features, cannot be classified as fascist or even as “fascistoid” or proto-fascist, as has been repeatedly and unhelpfully argued by Alexander Motyl (2007, 2009, 2010, 2016). 6. Most of the relevant secondary literature that makes up English- and German-language comparative fascist studies is listed in the endnotes of Griffin, Loh, and Umland (2006). 7. Several dozen relevant references are listed in Umland (2009c, 2015). 8. Among classical analyses of the party system of Weimar are those of Bracher (1960, 529–558) and Neumann (1968). In Prussia, parliamentary democracy worked better than on the national level, as the Social Democrats, Catholic Center, and DDP continuously worked together until 1933. See Möller (1985). 9. In interwar Italy, too, such a mechanism was at work: the Fascist movement emerged first in the societally well-developed north, with its strong civic traditions, and only later spread to the traditional south, with its family-centered social structure (Putnam 1993). 10. Even so, given merely these circumstances in early 1933, Hitler would not have succeeded – at least not via the semi-constitutional road on which he eventually got power – without the intrigues of Papen, Hindenburg’s son Oskar, and Hindenburg himself (as well as some others), who arranged for the Hitler chancellorship behind the scenes. On the significance of crucial actors’ behavior for the (in)stability of interwar democracies, see Kailitz (2009). Nationalities Papers 13 ORCID Steffen Kailitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7251-3265 Andreas Umland http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7916-4646 References Berman, Sheri. 1997. “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic.” World Politics 49: 401–429. Bracher, Karl Dietrich. 1960. Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie. Villingen: Ring-Verlag. Breuer, Stefan. 2005. Nationalismus und Faschismus: Frankreich, Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Broszat, Martin. 1984. Die Machtergreifung: Der Aufstieg der NSDAP und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Childers, Thomas. 1983. The Nazi Voter: the Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dobry, Michel. 1986. 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