How Putin Made Russia into a Fascist State.

Putin preaches a fascist ideology to an oblivious Russian population, who then parrot fascist insults at Ukrainians they call Nazis…

Peter Winn-Brown
18 min readApr 29, 2022
Ivan Ilyin, Russian fascist philosopher, painted by Mikhail Nesterov, 1921
The Thinker; Ivan Ilyin. By Mikhail Nesterov, 1921.

“We have the great moral right to be principled and insistent in defending our positions, because it was our country that bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism…The young people of today are the heirs of the true freedom fighters…We will always be faithful to their valour, and that means we have a future*…Glory to Russia!”

Vladimir Putin, excerpt from Victory Day speech, May 9th, 2012. (1)

*Putin used the phrase ‘budushcheye yest’ which is an implied response to the idiom ‘budushchego net’, or ‘there is no future.’ A direct translation is not possible.

Nazi and Nazism are words that require no explanation normally. They bring such a weight of dreadful baggage and trauma that even if one is unable to find the words to construct a definition the meaning is abhorrently clear.

But both these weighty words, complete with their leaden baggage, are being thrown around by the media and on social media with such rampant frequency of late often without any understanding of what is actually being said.

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Peter Winn-Brown

The past can illuminate the present if we shine the light of inquiry openly, truthfully, with attention to detail & care for the salient facts.