Understanding Russian Fascism
...” and the extension of movements in other countries that closely modeled themselves to the Italian prototype (Shenfield 3). The way that Shenfield approaches the task of explaining the definition of fascism is by the means of critical survey along with the views of other writers on fascism. Shenfield says, “There is a tendency to attach the fascist label not only to movements with a genuinely strong resemblance to classical interwar fascism, but to all authoritarian regimes.” Shenfield explains that fascism easily comes to signify the reign of unconstrained violence and oppression, whoever may perpetrate it and for whatever purpose, although scholars can hardly be satisfied by such a vague usage. The definition that I found to be the most well rounded is the one where he states, “Fascism is an authoritarian populist movement that seeks to preserve and restore pre modern patriarchal values within a new order based on communities of nation, race, or faith” (17). One of the main things that Shenfield looks and in the chapter about Russian tendencies is The Russian Orthodox Church. Besides the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, The Russian Orthodox Church is another very large organization in Russia that many people consider to observe fascist tendencies. The worldview of the church has in fact been characterized as Orthodox fascism. Any fascist tendencies within the church are a matter of special concern. It is true that relatively few self-identified believers are deeply religious, and the reason that most of them call themselves Orthodox is because Orthodoxy has become socially respectable and fashionable, but even the non believers are presumable influenced by the trends in the church by some degree (Shenfield 60). In the case of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, an assessment of fascist tendencies in the church requires us to consider first how close to fascism are those tendencies within the organization that some consider fascism, and the strength and future prospects of the tendencies concerned. The next section that was focused on in the book was how skin heads and soccer fans played a role. The skins are still today an international cultural youth movement with crude racist ideology. They are known by the way that they shave their heads bald, and wear steel toed boots and wear tattoos. They hate nonwhites, Jews, homosexuals, and to some degrees even some white foreigners. Skinheads made their appearance in Russia in the early 1990’s, and their number and continued to grow. Shenfield says, “There were over 10,000 of them in Russia as a whole. In 1998 it was estimated that there were 3,000 to 4,000 skin heads in Moscow alone.” Many Russian skinhe...