(...) “In the analogy we’re talking about, Russia is [Nazi] Germany. And I think that is generally productive as a comparison, but it’s also generally taboo. And the fact that it’s generally taboo has been one of our problems from the beginning.”
People are “weirdly hesitant” to call Putin’s Russia fascist, he says. “But there are many levels on which the analogy [with Nazi Germany] holds.”
For Snyder, the west’s lack of historical clarity on Russia has been a deadly mistake, and continues to be at the core of our misreading of Putin. He decries our ongoing focus on “pragmatic” solutions to the conflict, and a conceptualising of Putin as some kind of cynical, but ultimately relatable, power politician in the western mould.
Putin’s radical ideas have been catastrophically minimised in our analysis, Snyder believes. “Ideas, it turns out, matter. Until far too recently [western] policy discussions about Putin were shaped by our own ideas about technocracy and pragmatism and stability — categories which I think have already worn out their welcome.”
And yet, I say, the poisonous ideology of Hitlerism, even if dynamic, was arguably there from the outset, congealing in Hitler’s mind out of a soup of völkisch ideas in German society. Hitlerism, such as it was, went on to shape the modus operandi of the Nazi state. But with Putinism, is it not the case that the modus operandi — a cynical, power-hungry kleptocracy — has, conversely, arrived at the only ideology left that it can govern with?
Snyder is hesitant about this argument. For him, Putin’s ideas have been gestating for a much longer period; we were just blind to them. “When Putin returned to the office of the presidency [in 2012] you could see in his Russian-language proclamations, radio interviews and in print, a clear worldview, which is essentially the world view that has become more familiar to us since February 2022, according to which it’s not about states, it’s about civilisations; it’s not about interests, it’s about missions.”
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