It is trendy nowadays to rummage through the past in search of useful analogies to help explain our current dilemmas. Experts say democracy is in decline worldwide, and there is no shortage of commentators or serious scholars who say fascism is on the rise at home and abroad — just as it was in the 1920s and ’30s in Europe.
In this episode of History As It Happens, political scientist Andreas Umland contends that any analogy must be approached with caution. No two sets of historical circumstances are identical. But history can nonetheless serve as a tool for identifying the conditions that lead to democratic collapse.
In his working paper “Why the Fascists Won’t Take Over the Kremlin (For Now),” Mr. Umland compares the collapse of democracy in the Weimar Republic to the political and economic tumult that rocked post-Soviet Russia. In the former case, democracy gave way to fascist dictatorship in 1933, the year Hitler was appointed German chancellor. In Russia, Mr. Umland hesitates to label the Putin regime as fascist.
“The fascist period has not yet fully kicked in in Russia,” said Mr. Umland, a scholar at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “It is still an authoritarian or totalitarian system, but it is a system of the past rather than a system of the future like the systems of Mussolini and Hitler.” Mr. Umland says, however, that the term fascism makes sense from a Ukrainian perspective, as Russia is fighting a war of conquest to create a “reborn” Ukrainian state in Russia’s image.
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