Atlas / Claim checks / Is Russia fascist
Is Russia fascist? The claim, measured
“Putin's Russia is a fascist state.”
Measured against Putinism and National Socialism
Distance is measured across six independent axes, each running from −10 to +10, out of a maximum separation of 49.0. How the scoring works →
Strongest case for the claim
Timothy Snyder and others point to the imperial revanchism, the cult of a leader, the mobilisation of grievance about national humiliation, the elimination of independent media and opposition, the state ideology of traditional values, and a war of conquest justified by claims about a people rather than a border.
Strongest case against
Specialists including Marlene Laruelle argue the regime is demobilising rather than mobilising: it has no mass party, no paramilitary movement, no revolutionary programme and no doctrine of national rebirth through violence directed at its own population. It is closer to conservative authoritarian regimes than to interwar fascism.
What the coordinates show. Putinism and National Socialism converge at or near the ceiling on authority, centralisation and membership, and diverge by seven points on culture and method and by one on economics. Distance 12.3. The specific dispute among specialists is whether mobilisation is a defining feature of fascism or an incidental one, and no coordinate system settles that.
The six measurements
| Axis | United Russia, sovereign democracy | NSDAP | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC · Economic organisation | +03 | +02 | 1 |
| CU · Social and cultural order | +09 | +09 | 0 |
| AU · Organisation of power | +10 | +10 | 0 |
| SC · Scale of decision | +09 | +09 | 0 |
| ID · Rule of membership | +08 | +10 | 2 |
| CH · Method and tempo | −03 | +09 | 12 |
Both cases are stated because the atlas does not settle arguments by assertion. Where the underlying dispute is conceptual rather than factual, that is said plainly rather than resolved.
Full comparisonCheck it yourself
The interactive atlas holds 319 organisations on six independent axes with the evidence for every score. Paste any claim that equates two political things and it will find them and report the measurement.