When I was a graduate student at Chicago back in the 1990s, I sat for a seminar that included discussions of the different ways fascism was interpreted in the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the United States, and the USSR. The USSR was crumbling when I arrived in Hyde Park. It had disintegrated before I sat for the seminar. The seminar was led by the late Moishe Postone, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Postone was also part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.
Thirty years is a long time. What I recall is that the USSR underplayed the anti-Semitic dimension of German fascism, choosing instead to emphasize the nationalist and militarist dimensions. The GDR up-played the capitalist dimension. The Federal Republic emphasized the anti-modern, anti-democratic dimension. The United States fell closer to the Federal Republic.
The crux of this portion of the seminar hung on the fact that the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) had always presented and always understood itself as an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, movement. Their opposition to the communists was therefore extremely complex. The Soviets were guilty of two sins. In the eyes of the NSDAP, the Soviets were guilty of dividing the German people along class as opposed to racial lines. German anti-capitalism favored an economic form that rewarded communities racially. Their second sin was their materialism. The anti-capitalism of the NSDAP was first and foremost spiritual, drawing together the entire spirit of the German people into one unified collective.
Not incidentally, for National Socialists, the connection between capitalism and communism was its “Jewish” spirit. It was, on the one hand, abstract, ungrounded, free-floating — like international banking and finance. On the other hand, it was superficial and materialist, focused the surface, not on the underlying value of work.
The Soviets, for their part, viewed National Socialist Germany as an anti-Slavic, nationalist, movement that aimed at expanding Germany at the expense of the Slavic nations. This view was reinforced by Germany’s explicit ranking of Slavs just a little above Jews. This is critical because Soviet communists did not disagree with German’s ranking Jews at the bottom. They merely objected to being ranked just above Jews. The Great Patriotic War proved that Slavs were superior to Germans.
This rhetoric, in turn, allowed Soviets to adopt the same criticism National Socialists had agains “the West”: it was decadent, materialist, consumerist, interested only in money, without spirit, without depth. In other words, it allowed Soviets to ignore the anti-Semitic, ethno-nationalist dimension of fascism — to which they were attracted — and focus instead on the anti-Slavic dimension of fascism.
Am I mistaken to see this same rhetoric in Vladimir Putin’s speeches? Is he not once again fighting “the West” and showing them the superiority of the Slavs?
Of course, the other dimension of the seminar discussion — noting that the US did not enter the war until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that it turned away ships loaded with Jews fleeing the Holocaust, that it was significantly envious of the industrial success of Nazi Germany — is also worth noting.