German Fascism as Interpreted by the Russian Conservative Émigré Community

This article examines the question of how fascism was collectively perceived within circles of the Russian conservative émigré community. The author identifies a segment of this milieu as a group of individuals who sincerely considered themselves Russian patriots, yet failed to grasp the origins and underlying meaning of German National Socialism — an ideology originally aimed at erasing the unified Russian identity from history. The discussion focuses on Russian conservatives in exile, such as Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Shmelyov, Piotr Donskov, and others. The article explores the inadequacy of certain émigré interpretations of German fascism, arguing that the primary distorting factor in the perception of fascism by this segment of the Russian émigré community was the mythologization of post-Christian Europeanism. This includes a Russian faith in the West as a “land of sacred miracles” and the magical image of “Europe’s ancient stones”. Similar concepts became objects of veneration even among patriotic conservatives. Since reflection on the foundations of knowledge is typically suppressed by mechanisms of culture and collective psychology, European fascism as a phenomenon inevitably escaped moral scrutiny within this émigré circle, despite its members’ Christian convictions. The author also contends that fascism was not a “reaction to communism”, as later claimed by German revanchist historians, but rather a reaction to the broader crisis of historical modernity, regardless of the specific ideological forms that crisis took in the 20th century. According to the article’s logic, fascism should be understood as a far more expansive historical phenomenon than Hitlerism alone. Its roots in the culture of the modern age granted fascism greater historical longevity compared to communism, while also establishing a historical succession that links Pan-Germanism, Hitlerism, and Atlanticism. The article emphasizes that a genuine understanding of the nature of fascism is impossible without accounting for the full trajectory of European modern thought.

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