Abstract
This essay describes some of the literary, psychological, and historical causes of Russia’s war in Ukraine (2022) based on observations of the national character found in the fiction of Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky and in philosophical and psychological essays of Petr Chaadaev, Sergei Askol’dov, and Sigmund Freud. The political ideology that stands behind the war can be characterized as schizofascism, or schizophrenic fascism that embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and corruption and cynicism, on the other. Citing the controversial results of sociological polls indicating both Russians’ aspiration for friendship with Ukraine and their support for the aggressive war, the author explores the deep ambivalence inherent in the psychology of Russians as historical successors of the Golden Horde and the Moscovite State, incorporating the legacy of nomadism, militarism, messianism, and autarky.
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Notes
In his recent essay “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,” Timothy Snyder says that “calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice... I have called it ‘schizofascism” ” (New York Times, May 19, 2022). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html. In fact, the first usage of this term was in publications of mine from 2015–2017 that dealt, in particular, with “the difference between the two neomedieval periods: fascism of the 1920–1940s and schizofascism of the early twenty-first century. Fascism proper is an integral worldview that combines racial theory, imperialism, nationalism, xenophobia, bigotry, anticapitalism, antidemocracy, and antiliberalism. Schizofascism is a split worldview, a kind of parody of fascism, but a serious, dangerous, and aggressive parody... A particularly striking feature of schizofascism is to act under the guise of fighting against fascism.” Mikhail Epshtein, Ot sovka k bobku. Politika na grani groteska (From Homo Sovieticus to Bobok Character. Politics on the Edge of Grotesque). Franc–Tireur USA, 2015, pp. 143–144; 2nd, revised, and expanded edition. Kyiv. Dukh i Litera, 2016, pp. 261–262. This term also appeared, both in Russian and English, as a separate entry in Mikhail Epshtein, Proektivnyi slovar’ gumanitarnykh nauk (The Projective Dictionary of the Humanities). Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017, pp. 552–553. “Schizofascism. Fascism in the guise of fighting fascism…” https://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/1052218/432/mihail-epshteyn-proektivnyy-slovar-gumanitarnyh-nauk.html.
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Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz
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Epstein, M. Schizophrenic fascism: on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Stud East Eur Thought 74, 475–481 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09487-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09487-w