Why Putin Can’t Tap Fascism’s Greatest Resource
Neither he nor Russia’s hard-core nationalists have come up with convincing arguments to persuade ordinary post-Soviet Russians to die in a discretionary conflict.
They had what Putin wishes he had.
Photographer: Print Collector/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
The Bucha atrocities and more recent evidence of torture from the areas near Kharkiv recently retaken by the Ukrainian military create an impression of a Russian genocidal zeal — the kind exhibited by Nazi German troops in the territories they captured or, say, by Italian fascist troops in Ethiopia. Yet Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine adventure is such a flop precisely because he is failing to ignite the kind of hatred and self-righteousness in the Russian nation that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini inspired in Germans and Italians.
The Italian empire had a population of some 56 million in the 1930s compared with modern Russia’s 140 million, yet Mussolini’s 20,000 Blackshirt storm troops quickly expanded to 115,000 in 1935-1936 for the Ethiopian campaign, Pier Paolo Battistelli and Piero Crociani wrote in “Italian Blackshirt 1935–45.” There was no shortage of volunteers.