Ruscism
Ruscism (Ukrainian: російський фашизм; Russian: российский фашизм), or Raschism, is a new word formed by combining Russia and fascism.[1] Those who support Ruscism are called Ruscists,[1] or Raschists.[1]
Overview
[change | change source]Ruscism refers to a unique form of 21st-century Russian state ideology that features authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and aggressive imperialism.[3]

Usage
[change | change source]The word has gained popularity among Eastern Europeans and Western academics since Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022,[1][3] who observe that supporters of Ruscism in Russia (and among the Russian diaspora) tend to reject democracy and see the Russian race as so superior that they are entitled to invade Russia's former colonies.[1][4] They also miss the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991) for its vast territory and sphere of influence,[1][4] which stretched from East Germany to Far East Asia.[1][4]
Current situation
[change | change source]In Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, traces of Ukrainian culture and identity have been systematically erased,[5] e.g. Holodomor memorials replaced with Russian monuments,[6] which has been seen by critics as "a classic example of how the oppressor uses imperial symbols to mark the space of the oppressed".[6]
Particularly, 40,000 Russian citizens of Russian, Buryat, Tuvan and Caucasian origin had been brought into Mariupol by summer 2023.[5] Similar to this also happened in Crimea after its 2014 Russian takeover,[5] where a million Russians had been brought in by Putin's regime.[5]


Associations with other ideologies
[change | change source]Neo-Nazism
[change | change source]Some Ruscists are also Neo-Nazis,[7] including the Wagner Group,[7] Russian Imperial Movement,[7] Aleksei Milchakov,[7] and Yan Petrovsky,[7] who has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Finland on March 14, 2025 for his war crimes in Luhansk committed on September 5, 2014.[7] However, these facts are not acknowledged by many Western leftists,[8][9] who are sympathetic to Russia out of anti-Americanism or Soviet nostalgia,[8][9] while having huge influence in Western academia.[10][11] Writing for The New Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv-based film critic Oleksandra Povoroznyk noted:[12]
Privileged Western anti-imperialists support the imperial brutal invasion of Ukraine [. ...] preach equality and resistance to oppression and yet accuse [...] feminist queer [...] of being Nazis because we don't want to kneel over and die in silence.
Western views
[change | change source]Putin's regime in Russia is based on Ruscism.[1][4] Many scholars consider it one of the biggest threats to world peace.[1][4]
Alexander J. Motyl
[change | change source]American historian Alexander J. Motyl said that Ruscism had the following features:[13]
- Statism and hypernationalism
- A hypermasculine cult of the supreme leader
- General popular support for the regime and its leader
- An undemocratic political system, different from both traditional authoritarianism and totalitarianism
Timothy Snyder
[change | change source]In a May 2022 article, American historian Timothy Snyder pointed out that:[14]
[m]any hesitate to see today's Russia as fascist because Stalin's Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist [. ...] Because Soviet anti-fascism just meant defining an enemy, it offered fascism a backdoor through which to return to Russia [...] Fascists calling other people 'fascists' is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. [...] essential[ly] Putinist practice [. ...can be called] schizo-fascism [...] fascism disguised as a struggle against fascism.
Francis Fukuyama
[change | change source]In July 2022, Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama said that Putin's regime in Russia looked like Nazi Germany because they both feature extreme nationalism, though Russia's one is "less institutionalised and revolves only around one man Vladimir Putin".[15]

Slavoj Žižek
[change | change source]In February 2023, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said:[16]
[t]he ideology of people around Putin, and Putin himself, seems quite clear-cut. It's Neo-Fascism. 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. — this mindset is the core of what we would call Neo-Fascism.
Ukrainian views
[change | change source]
Oleksandr Kostenko
[change | change source]As early as March 2014, professor Oleksandr Kostenko (Ukrainian: Костенко Олександр Миколайович) said:[17]
Ruscism is an ideology [...] based on illusions [. ...] 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 [. ...in domestic politics] 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 [. ...] a manifestation of sociopathy.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
[change | change source]On April 23, 2022, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the new concept Ruscism will be in history books:[18][19]
This country will have a word in our history textbooks that no one has invented, which everyone is repeating in Ukraine and in Europe – 'Ruscism' [. ...] The word is new, but the actions are the same as they were 80 years ago in Europe [. ...] if you analyse our continent, there has been no barbarism like this. So Ruscism is a concept that will go into the history books [...] 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.
Larysa Yakubova
[change | change source]In April 2022, Larysa Yakubova (Ukrainian: Якубова Лариса Дмитрівна) from the Institute of History of Ukraine wrote in her article The Anatomy of Ruscism:[20]
Russia has not reflected on the tragedies of totalitarianism and did not decommunize[21] its own Soviet totalitarian heritage [. ...] the major reason for the [...] rapid development of Ruscism in modern Russia [. ...] will remain until there is a global condemnation of communist ideology as well as its heir – Ruscism and Putinism.
Russian views
[change | change source]Andrey Piontkovsky
[change | change source]Political scientist Andrey Piontkovsky argued that Ruscism is similar to Nazism, with Putin's speeches reflecting similar ideas to those of Adolf Hitler.[22][23]
Grigory Yudin
[change | change source]Sociologist Grigory Yudin emphasized the importance of the "social atomization" and "depoliticisation" of Soviet society during the "Era of Stagnation" and later under Putin, followed by Russian society's mobilization to invade Ukraine in 2022. Yudin said that historical fascist regimes atomized the societies to mobilize them, adding that:[24][25]
[t]he image of general popular support for Putin is false [...] used by Putin to threaten the elites and the people: the elites fear that 'the people' will support repressions against them, while individuals of the atomized society fear that if they express their disagreement, they will alone confront the non-existent "people masses".
Stanislav Belkovsky
[change | change source]Political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky argues that Ruscism is a form of fascism disguised as anti-fascism.[26]
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8
- Snyder, Timothy (April 22, 2022). "The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 27, 2023. Retrieved January 15, 2023.
Three-quarters of the letters in a Ukrainian neologism from English ("Pаша") are brought together with five-sixths of the letters from an adopted Italian word ("фашизм," fascism) [...] The Ukrainian language has offered a neologism whose formation helps us to see deeper into the creativity of another culture, and whose meaning helps us to see why this war is fought
- Spišiaková, Mária; Natalia, Shumeiko. "Political Euphemisms and Neologisms in Online Media Content: Amid the War in Ukraine" (PDF).
- "Zelenskyy Compares Evil of Nazism to 'Current Evil of Ruscism'". Voice of America (VOA). May 8, 2023. Archived from the original on July 28, 2023.
- Rudyi, Nazar (2023). "Ruscism as a variant of the fascist form of state-legal regime" (PDF). Social & Legal Studies. 6 (2): 54–60. doi:10.32518/sals2.2023.55. ISSN 2617-4170. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 7, 2023.
- "NATO Parliamentary Assembly Defines Russia's Crimes Against Ukraine as Genocide". Ukrainian World Congress (UWC). May 23, 2023. Archived from the original on November 11, 2023.
- Snyder, Timothy (April 22, 2022). "The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 27, 2023. Retrieved January 15, 2023.
- ↑ "Putin: Soviet collapse a 'genuine tragedy'". NBC News. Associated Press (AP). April 25, 2005. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1
- Mohammed, Zahraa Jasim; Challoob, Mahmood Ghazi (2021). Некоторые Инновационные словообразовательные процессы в популярных интернет-текстах в русском и арабском языках [Some innovative word-formation processes in popular Internet texts in Russian and Arabic]. Journal of the College of Languages (in Russian) (43): 186–207. doi:10.36586/jcl.2.2021.0.43.0186. S2CID 242426043. Archived from the original on April 22, 2022. Retrieved April 22, 2022.
- Samoilenko, Sergei A.; Keohane, Jennifer; Icks, Martijn; Shiraev, Eric (2019). Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management. Routledge International Handbooks. Taylor & Francis. p. 367. ISBN 978-1-351-36832-2. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
Ukrainian press has been presenting .... the term Rashism, which conflates Russia and fascism
- "Jak raszyzm rozlewał się na zachód Europy" [How Ruscism spread to Western Europe]. Rzeczpospolita (in Polish). April 22, 2022. Retrieved May 25, 2022.
- Garner, Ian (May 21, 2023). "Russia's Frighteningly Fascist Youth". Foreign Policy (FP).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 * Gregor, A. James (March 1998). "Fascism and the New Russian Nationalism". Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 31 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1016/S0967-067X(97)00025-1. JSTOR 48609343. S2CID 153638678.
- Motyl, Alexander J. (April 23, 2015). "Is Putin's Russia Fascist?". UkraineAlert. Atlantic Council. Archived from the original on April 22, 2022. Retrieved February 26, 2022.
- Kalisz, Stanisław (April 26, 2022). "Raszyzm, czyli "byt kształtuje świadomość" – a może już na odwrót? Portret" [Rashism, meaning "being shapes consciousness – or maybe the other way around? Portrait]. Europrojekty (in Polish). Archived from the original on September 26, 2022. Retrieved May 25, 2022.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 "Behind the Lines: Russia's Ethnic Cleansing". Center for European Policy Analysis. July 27, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "The Cultural Colonization of Mariupol: How Russia Erases the Ukrainian Memory in the City". UkraineWorld. February 29, 2024. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5
- "Neo-Nazi 'Wagner Group' Of Russian Mercenaries Claim To Be Fighting In Ukraine". Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). February 25, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- "Russia sends in notorious neo-Nazi mercenaries to Ukraine". The Telegraph. April 8, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
The openly fascist and far-Right fighters in the Rusich task force undermine Russia's claims it is fighting to 'de-Nazify' Ukraine
- "Who Are The Neo-Nazis Fighting For Russia In Ukraine?". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. May 27, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- "What You Need to Know About the Wagner Group's Role in Russia's War Against Ukraine". American Jewish Committee (AJC). February 21, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
- "Finland sentences Russian neo-Nazi mercenary Yan Petrovsky to life for war crimes in Ukraine". Kyiv Independent. March 14, 2025.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1
- Győri, Lóránt; Krekó, Péter (June 13, 2016). "Don't ignore the left! Connections between Europe's radical left and Russia". openDemocracy. Retrieved December 8, 2024.
- Monbiot, George (March 2, 2022). "We must confront Russian propaganda – even when it comes from those we respect". The Guardian. Retrieved December 8, 2024.
- La Botz, Dan (2022). "Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, And the Origins of Campism". New Politics. Vol. XVIII, no. 4. Retrieved December 8, 2024.
- "Adam Zivo: The sad truth about socialist 'anti-imperialists' who defend Putin". National Post. September 17, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- Wagner, Wolfgang (November 7, 2024). "Contesting Western support for Ukraine. The radical left in the European Parliament". Journal of European Integration. doi:10.1080/07036337.2024.2424186. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1
- Jones, Sarah (March 3, 2022). "Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Tests the American Left". New York Magazine. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- Bourcier, Nicolas (March 31, 2022). "Across Latin America, the left takes Putin's defense". Le Monde. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- Dutkiewicz, Jan; Stecuła, Dominik (July 4, 2022). "Why the U.S. Far Right and Far Left Oppose Helping Ukraine". Foreign Policy. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- Garcia, Raphael Tsavkko (June 27, 2023). "The Left's Peculiar Alignment with Russia | Opinion". Newsweek. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- Tsurkan, Kate (January 29, 2025). "Slavoj Zizek: Leftists falsify the choice that Ukrainians face during wartime". Kyiv Independent. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- ↑
- Pollack, Eunice G. (2013). Racializing Antisemitism: Black Militants, Jews, and Israel 1950-present (PDF). Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Israel. p. 4.
- "Malcolm X founded Harvard University's antisemitism". Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). 22 February 2024.
Jews and Zionism have been cast as the ultimate oppressors of black Americans.
- Pierre, Dion J. (June 17, 2019). "How Anti-Semitism Became a Staple of 'Woke' Activism on Campus". National Association of Scholars (NAS). Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- "Nation of Islam". Anti-Defamation League (ADL). January 9, 2021. Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- ↑
- "The uncomfortable truth about BLM, Malcolm X and anti-Semitism". The Spectator. January 26, 2021. Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- Pollack, Eunice G. (June 1, 2022). "Black Antisemitism in America: Past and Present". The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (Special Publication). Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- Royden, Laura; Hersh, Eitan (April 17, 2023). "Antisemitic Attitudes among Young Black and Hispanic Americans". Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. 8 (1). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- Rossman-Benjamin, Tammi (June 19, 2013). "Identity Politics, the Pursuit of Social Justice, and the Rise of Campus Antisemitism: A Case Study" (PDF). AMCHA Initiative. Indiana University Press. Retrieved October 27, 2024.
- ↑ Povoroznyk, Oleksandra (August 2, 2022). "The paradox of the Western leftists". The New Voice of Ukraine. Retrieved March 14, 2025.
- ↑ Motyl, Oleksandr (March 8, 2022). Війни творять нації, а народні війни творять непереможні нації [Wars create nations, and people's wars create invincible nations]. Lokalna Istoriya (in Ukrainian). Archived from the original on April 25, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
- ↑ Snyder, Timothy (May 19, 2022). "We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist". The New York Times. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
- ↑ Francis Fukuyama: Russia now 'resembles Nazi Germany', Deutsche Welle, retrieved July 23, 2022
- ↑ "'What I don't want is Western triumphalism' Slavoj Žižek on Putin's expansionism, Western complicity, the denial of death, and preventing a global ultra-conservative turn". Meduza. February 3, 2023. Retrieved March 2, 2023.
- ↑ Kostenko, Oleksandr (March 18, 2014). Що таке "рашизм"? [What is "Rashism"?]. The Day (in Ukrainian). No. 48. Archived from the original on March 4, 2022. Retrieved April 25, 2022.
- ↑ Khmelnytska, Vira (April 23, 2022). Рашизм – це поняття, яке буде в історичних книжках, в умовних вікіпедіях, залишиться на уроках – Зеленський [Rashism is a concept that will be in history books, in conditional Wikipedias, will remain in the lessons — Zelenskyy] (in Ukrainian). Television Service of News. Archived from the original on April 24, 2022.
- ↑ Kizilov, Yevhen (April 23, 2022). "Zelenskyy: The word "Ruscism" will enter history textbooks all over the world". Ukrayinska Pravda. Archived from the original on April 23, 2022. Retrieved April 23, 2022.
- ↑ Yakubova, Larysa (April 6, 2022). "An Anatomy of Ruscism". The Ukrainian Week. Retrieved April 26, 2022.
- ↑
- Kasianov, Georgiy (April 27, 2023). "In Search of Lost Time? Decommunization in Ukraine, 2014 – 2020". Problems of Post-Communism. 71 (4): 326–340. doi:10.1080/10758216.2023.2198135. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
- Kamiński, Łukasz (2024). "Decommunization of Public Space in East-Central Europe". History in Public Space (1 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 9781003366348. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
- Lubik-Reczek, Natasza; Vomlela, Lukáš; Podgórska-Rykała, Joanna (2024). "Political Parties in the Face of Decommunization in the Light of the Concept of Militant Democracy. The Case of the Czech Republic". Przegląd Prawa Konstytucyjnego (English: Constitutional Law Review). 5 (81). Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek: 281–292. doi:10.15804/ppk.2024.05.20. ISSN 2082-1212. Retrieved March 13, 2025.
- ↑ "Путинский режим — постмодернистский фашизм" ["Putin's regime is postmodern fascism"] (in Russian). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. August 11, 2021. Retrieved February 26, 2022 – via YouTube.
- ↑ Що переможе: здоровий глузд чи імперські амбіції? Андрій Піонтковський. [Which will win: common sense or imperial ambitions? Andrey Piontkovsky.] (in Ukrainian). ATR. February 11, 2022. Retrieved February 26, 2022 – via YouTube.
- ↑ Olaf Scolz in der Moskauer Metro Archived July 27, 2022, at the Wayback Machine – деkoder, reprinted from Neue Zürcher Zeitung
- ↑ "Anatomiya grazhdanskoy passivnosti (Grigoriy Yudin, Boris Kagarlitskiy)" Анатомия гражданской пассивности (Григорий Юдин, Борис Кагарлицкий) [Anatomy of civil passivity (Grigory Yudin, Boris Kagarlitsky)]. YouTube (in Russian). July 12, 2022. Archived from the original on July 27, 2022. Retrieved July 27, 2022.
- ↑ Sytnik, Marharyta (March 23, 2014). Путин будет захватывать новые территории, чтобы проложить путь к Балканам – эксперты [Putin will seize new territories to pave the way to the Balkans – experts]. Тсн.ua (in Russian). Television Service of News. Archived from the original on April 25, 2022. Retrieved February 26, 2022.