Writing Is Russia Fascist? was a difficult intellectual exercise, as it feels counterintuitive to spend years working on a concept, only to refute its validity. Yet it eventually brought more than I envisioned, helping me conceptualize the notion of illiberalism as a more accurate term for capturing the pre-war Russian regime’s ideological nature. Another important take I got from writing this book has been the centrality of memory wars for the whole of Europe, and the need to analyze Russia while looking in the mirror at “our” (read “Western”) own ambivalent, multi-voiced, memories of the 20th century. I am therefore grateful to the reviewers for their interest in the book and for bringing forward so many new arguments to the discussion.

I received many comments on the definition of fascism I selected, and obviously this plays a role in answering the question of Russia’s potential for fascism. Many countries may have regimes that are both authoritarian and nationalist in different combinations, but there is no fascism without the revolutionary ideology of building a New Man on the ashes of the destruction of the existing world – and this revolutionary aspect was missing from pre-war Russia. One could argue legitimately that fascism may not be a regime but mostly a potentiality, a goal to reach for, a direction for development, and in that case the numbers of pretenders to the term of fascism would grow to include, for instance, Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, as well as some Latin American military regimes. But even here, I didn’t see pre-February 24, 2022 Russia fitting the definition, as it was still offering much more in the way of everyday individual freedoms to its citizens than the above-mentioned regimes, was not as massively repressive as they were, and exhibited a much more fragmented ideological mosaic in which modernizing, liberal, or Soviet nostalgic narratives coexisted with an illiberal mainstream sometimes flirting with a fascist repertoire.

And that has been my central argument: research on Russia’s ideologies tends to focus on those that are easily identifiable because they are doctrinally formulated and stand out from the vague, undefined mainstream. The fact that we do not yet have a comprehensive study of Russia’s liberalism today (the term should probably be plural: liberalisms) while we have plenty of literature on Russia’s conservative doctrines is revealing in terms of the bias of academic production: we tend to study what makes Russia seem alien more than what might make it feel too familiar to us. We tend to stress the provocative declarations of some outspoken figures such as Dmitri Rogozin, Sergey Glazyev, Vladimir Medinsky, or Elena Mizulina, but we do not study the voices of the majority of government members or Duma MPs, whose discourses are/were boringly technocratic and devoid of incendiary statements. We then tend to miss the forest hidden behind the trees and do not capture the level of non-representativeness or “non-normalcy” of those flirting with or promoting far-right narratives.

I am not saying these figures are/were marginal – some of them hold high senior positions in the administration – but that they are/were not representative of the everyday language used by the Russian state in communicating with its citizens. That would be one of my answers to Mitchell Orenstein’s comments that my book in fact validates Timothy Snyder’s assumptions, while I see it precisely as a refutation of Snyder’s arguments. I believe that Snyder is concealing the huge tree of the “normalcy” of the pre-war Russian state’s language and of Russian society globally by fixating his attention on extreme cases such as the groups rehabilitating the archconservative philosopher Ivan Ilyin. In his Road to Unfreedom, Snyder then draws a conclusion that he applies to the whole of Russia,Footnote ¹ while it in fact explains the political positioning of only one of Russia’s many ideological ecosystems, which remains largely unknown to a large part of the Russian population (including part of the elite) who are not interested in these sophisticated ideological constructions.

Anton Shekhovstov shifts the focus toward Russia’s connection with the Western far right and brings many nuances to the short overview of these complex and evolving relations I summarized in one of the book chapters. He explains the need to revisit my division in three main waves by demonstrating that some of these contacts have been existing over the three phases, but became officialized by the regime at different moments in time. And indeed, we agree that, as I explained in the book, Russia’s support for the European far right constitutes a direct refutation of its claim to be a responsible stakeholder in European affairs.

However, my understanding of the notion of soft power differs from Anton’s. If soft power is defined as “the ability to influence through affinity and attraction with resources such as one’s nation’s political values, culture and foreign policies,” I do not see why Russia’s attraction to the European far right would not fit the definition: after all, promoting illiberalism is part of Russia’s “political values, culture and foreign policies” and gives Moscow “the ability to influence through affinity and attraction.” That this attraction is exerted over only one part of the European constituency, and not over the liberal-democratic majority, does not alter the soft-power aspect of it. It just confirms that soft power is not necessarily universalistic – as it is supposed to be for the US or Europe – but is rather what I have called in another piece a “niche soft power”: that is, microtargeting some specific audiences that may be receptive to Russia’s culture, history, or political status today. This strategy has emerged as the result of Russia’s awareness of its limited outreach capacity when compared with US soft power, both financially and in terms of cultural and brand production to export worldwide. Thus, it is based on a smart “SWOT” analysis of the country’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also reflects the decentralized nature of the country’s soft power, with a multitude of nonstate actors involved, to different degrees, in promoting Russia abroad.

One of the unfinished or unfulfilled features of the book relates to the discussion about Russia’s imperialism or colonialism, which Yoshiko Herrera develops in her review. In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, narratives about Russia’s “natural” imperialism have boomed, a feature that would confirm Russia’s alienness to Europe. I agree that Russian culture still has strong colonial features, mostly visible in its Russia-centric vision of Eurasia’s histories and cultures and in its disdain for its former colonies. But I do not see that colonial culture has intrinsically and automatically connected to the nature of the Russian political regime. For me, as a French citizen, belonging to a generation shaped by our own culture wars with the Maghreb, being a colonial empire does not mean automatically being a non-democratic country: the main European colonial powers, France and the UK, were democratic to part of their own citizenry while dominating undemocratically their colonies. There has been a “liberal imperialism” – something literature from and on the Global South has well developed – so linking Russia’s essentialized feature of “imperialism” with “authoritarianism” seems to be a reductionist perspective.

More important in the war context, I dissociate Russia’s strong colonial culture from imperialism as a political tool. And I see Russia’s political imperialism mostly as a reactive one: for a long time, the Putin regime hoped to be able to get recognized as a great power, having its say in Europe’s security architecture and in post-Soviet Eurasia through integration into the world community, both politically and economically. A succession of failures and disappointments at not getting the status of being a co-creator of the post-Cold War architecture has pushed the Kremlin to reinvent Russia as an imperial power, conquering territories as the last resort in order to be heard and having chips to bargain with. Thus, there is an intricate triangle between Russia interpreting the West as pushing for a normative imperialism, and replying to this with an old-fashioned territorial imperialism. I therefore dissociate the colonial features of Russia’s culture – still very vivid but common to many postcolonial powers – from a reactive imperialism of conquest as the answer to Russia’s failures at burnishing its own great-power status.

I partly share a realist interpretation according to which Russia’s aggressive policy is the by-product of the inability of the West to send clear messages about NATO expansion specifically, and more globally about the design of post-Cold War Europe and the place of Russia and Ukraine in it. I thus see the West as partly responsible for the strategic deadlock that preceded the war and its inability to propose a future to Ukraine that would not be obsessively focused on NATO integration and to imagine a neutral Ukraine moving toward a European path without clashing with Russia. But contrary to John Mearsheimer,Footnote ² for instance, I do believe that Russian authorities are responsible for the war itself and share responsibility also for the failure of Europe’s security architecture: they have slowed down the (always painful) process of moving from a colonial to a national state and have conflated the regime’s short-term security with Russia’s long-term “ontological” insecurity along its western borders.

To move beyond the Russian case, I read the way Western experts and media have jumped on the “fascist”-labeling bandwagon to denounce all their opponents holding illiberal and/or conservative views as both an intellectual capitulation and a policy misstep: one has to recognize the intertwined nature of liberalism and illiberalism to be able to propose solutions to the current crisis. There are pockets of illiberalism in our so-called liberal democracies, and pockets of liberalism in illiberal regimes. Liberalism in its economic neoliberal version, in its geopolitical unilateralism (or what is perceived as such by many countries), in its implicit colonial/imperial power hierarchy, is, too, partly “illiberal” in the sense of not promoting inclusiveness and equity and keeping alive, if not aggravating, socioeconomic and cultural inequalities. Accusing those who think differently of being the ultimate evil means that there is no more room for empathy, as the capacity of each of us to see ourselves as others see us is always limited.

I would conclude by coming back to Mitchell’s last comment in his review about the Putin regime being more von Hindenburg than Hitler, and why this is not reassuring. Written before the war, his concerns have been, unfortunately, confirmed. Yet the obsessive drawing of parallels between today’s Russia at war and Nazi Germany remains problematic. The Russian regime has now surely become highly repressive, personalistic, and autarkic. However, we are still missing the grassroots aspect of fascism, that of an enthusiastic crowd of citizens seeing the war as an occasion to regenerate the nation. The authorities themselves prefer to have a demobilized population, rather than a mobilized one, and hide the fact that the country is at war.

There are also policy consequences of forcing the Russian peg into a fascist hole and overlooking the complexities of the Russian state and Russian society. Drawing comparisons with Nazi Germany is comforting because we know how the history ends and who was on the right side of it. But it implies that the war should end for Russia the way it ended for Nazi Germany in 1945: total capitulation, collective guilt, foreign military occupation, and a Nuremberg-style trial for its leaders. This is a feel-good solution, but the chances of Putin killing himself in his bunker on the ruins of Moscow are null. Russia will not become a neutered North Korea. There won’t be a rejuvenated liberal order to come through a crusade against Russia.