Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the Twentieth Century (Russian and East European Studies) - Softcover

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Introduction.
Entangled Far Right: Distorted Mirrors between Europe and Russia
 
Marlene Laruelle
 
 
Since the early 2010s and more visibly since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, Russia's support to the European far right'as to conservative and populist leaders more globally'has become a cornerstone of the West's perception of Moscow as a 'spoiler' on the international scene. Russia is now apprehended as a danger to 'established democracies': its support for far right politics is interpreted as part of a broader strategy that also includes direct meddling in elections and referendums'the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, Brexit, and the Catalonia referendum, among others.
            Many observers expected that Russia, if it chose to intervene on the European political scene, would reactivate Soviet soft power toward the European left. The fact that Russia's most fervent supporters are now to be found on the right of the ideological spectrum therefore came as a surprise.
            Two key points explain the present reality. The first is that the European left has undergone dramatic changes since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the European left's stance on international affairs may share some ideological components with Russia's position'such as being anti-NATO, cautious toward transatlantic institutions, and reluctant to see a too neoliberal European Union gain more power over nation-states'they are deeply divided on social issues. Both the 'old' left, which maintains a certain proximity to communism, and the 'new' left, as it has emerged in Greece, Spain, and among many anti-globalization movements, are very liberal in terms of gender values and militant on environmental issues'two elements that either do not speak to Russia's current regime or directly clash with its ideological positioning. If there are indeed some sections of the European left that (for geopolitical reasons) support Russia's policy today, a far larger segment sees Russia as a country with which it is difficult'or even impossible'to partner.
The second, which is at the center of this volume, is that the European right and far right have always had Russophile tendencies, but these were obscured during the Cold War, when rightist forces were decidedly anti-Communist. However, being anti-Communist did not mean being anti-Soviet, nor less anti-Russian. Being anti-Soviet without being anti-Russian is quite easy to formulate, and was indeed a posture shared by many on the Cold War-era European far right who admired pre-revolutionary Russia, whether for its autocratic regime or for the role given to Orthodoxy. The fall of the Soviet Union, they believed, would result in the rebirth of an 'eternal' Russia whose ideology would ally with far-right worldviews. Being anti-Communist and not anti-Soviet is a more complex articulation to decipher. It requires understanding that for a segment of the European far right, the transatlantic world that emerged after 1945 was seen as more destructive to 'authentic' European identity than the risk posed by Communism. For all those who were openly anti-American and hoped for the rebirth of an independent, unified, and 'white' European continent, the Soviet Union was far from the worst danger and could even be seen as a potential ally. As early as the late 1970s, figures such as Jean Parvulesco, a Romanian-born émigré who was close to the New Right, claimed that the Soviet Union's destiny was to save the white race.[1] Moreover, some minority groups were'assumedly or not'impressed by the telluric forces unleashed by the Bolshevik revolution and could not help but see similarities with interwar fascist regimes, including Nazi Germany. On the Russian/Soviet side, meanwhile, there was a complex magnetism toward the European far right.
This volume traces the 'intellectual romance' that existed between European far right groups and their Russian/Soviet counterparts during the long twentieth century, their mutual borrowings, distorted interpretations, and fantasmagorical readings of each other.[2] This edited volume complements an earlier one, Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Russia'Europe Relationship (2015), that investigated the role of the notorious neo-Eurasianist and neo-fascist geopolitician Aleksandr Dugin in cultivating contacts with the European New Right and, directly or indirectly, opening the way for the Russian authorities to find new fellow travelers among European far right groups.[3]
The Second World War continues to shape our perception of the relationship between the European far right, especially its fascist and national-socialist components, and the Soviet Union: the conflict was a fight-to-the-finish between the two so-called totalitarian regimes. This memory is cultivated in Europe, and even more so in Russia, where the 27 million who died fighting the German enemy are revered as national heroes and saviors of humanity. Alternative memories exist, but they remain marginal. In the Baltic states, Poland, and now Ukraine, the authorities, along with a large part of the historian community, criticize this conventional reading of the war. They prefer to emphasize what they see as the shameful collaboration between the Soviet and Nazi regimes associated with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939'1941 and the mutually influenced patterns of violence in the occupied territories. These memory wars have gained visibility in recent years, especially with the 2014 Ukrainian conflict, and have become an integral part of countries' foreign policy toolkit. The Putin regime brandishes the threat of a 'fascist junta' in power in Kyiv, while the Poroshenko government, following a trend that has grown in Ukraine since the Orange Revolution in 2004, puts the Nazi and Soviet pasts on an equal footing.
This volume investigates how diverse elements of what can be defined as the far-right repertoire have traveled between the European and the Soviet/Russian spaces. This approach can sometimes be perilous due to the semantic confusion around the term 'fascism'. If the scholarly community has reached partial agreement on how to define it,[4] the use and abuse of the term in the public space, the lack of terminological consistency, its name-calling value, and countries' varying sensitivities based on their own memories of the Second World War make it difficult to study the term's transnational aspect, as well as its persistence throughout the twentieth century. In the United States, Europe and Russia, these terms are used in the political and intellectual arenas as epithets to identify and denounce enemies. The derogatory content is so high than the notion of fascism has become an insulting label that sometimes bears no connection to the actual ideological positions of the individuals being accused. In Soviet and post-Soviet culture, the semantic space of fascism is even more complex. The consensus around the Soviet Union's defeat of fascism in Europe remains the critical driver of Russia's social cohesion even today, and the mere suggestion that some Soviet citizens or contemporary political groups might refer to fascism positively is offensive to the majority of public opinion.
This volume has to face another significant methodological problem, namely its location at the intersection of diverse disciplinary approaches. It finds its inspiration in the trend of building a European transnational history that keeps the focus on pan-European phenomena, cultural transfers, and mutual borrowings beyond the borders of...