Why Putin can’t tap fascism’s top resource

The Bucha atrocities and more recent evidence of torture from the areas near Kharkiv recently retaken by the Ukrainian military create an impression of a Russian genocidal zeal — the kind exhibited by Nazi German troops in the territories they captured or, say, by Italian fascist troops in Ethiopia. Yet Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine adventure is such a flop precisely because he is failing to ignite the kind of hatred and self-righteousness in the Russian nation that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini inspired in Germans and Italians.
The Italian empire had a population of some 56 million in the 1930s compared with modern Russia’s 140 million, yet Mussolini’s 20,000 Blackshirt storm troops quickly expanded to 115,000 in 1935-1936 for the Ethiopian campaign, Pier Paolo Battistelli and Piero Crociani wrote in “Italian Blackshirt 1935–45.” There was no shortage of volunteers.
Germany, with a population of about 85 million, saw the Waffen SS, the Nazi party’s own army, grow from a maximum of 28,000 to 150,000 in the first year of World War II, George Stein wrote in “The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War, 1939-1945” — this despite the SS troops’ still extreme selectiveness at the time.
Both in Germany and in Italy, the professional militaries were jealous of the dictators’ party troops, which signed up voluntarily for much longer service terms than those decreed for ordinary soldiers. Both Hitler and Mussolini had to compromise, keeping the numbers of Waffen SS and the combat-ready Blackshirts down and placing them under regular military commanders in the field. But even the regular troops — at least in Germany — were permeated by Nazi ideology. There is lots of evidence of Wehrmacht soldiers’ ideologically driven atrocities, even though its conscript soldiers may not have been Nazi party members.
Putin can only dream of the volunteer numbers the 20th-century fascist regimes could raise. Months into the war, the combined strength of the volunteer battalions formed in the Russian regions was barely in the tens of thousands, and it was hard to say if many of the volunteers were motivated by patriotism in the sense Putin or the Russian far right understand it. Rather, the battalions’ main lure for able-bodied men was the promise of salaries they couldn’t count on in their home regions. The message the Wagner Group private military company is pushing in its ads is that of romanticised, testosterone-fueled adventure as an alternative to boring work in a factory — but its actual promise, too, is of a high, reliable income. Even the prisoners Wagner is recruiting to flesh out its private army are offered substantial cash in addition to a pardon after six months on the front lines.
One could say Russians aren’t joining Putin’s war in Nazi Germany-like numbers simply because they fear for their lives, or because they’ve heard stories of how poorly equipped and commanded the Russian military was, or simply because Russia doesn’t appear to be winning. But one could also argue that a strong ideological motivation could push these concerns into the background. The ever-swelling Waffen SS was an all-volunteer force well into 1942. Belief in the superiority of the German Volk and the “Aryan race,” and thus in their final victory, prevailed for many months after Hitler’s armies ceased to be unbeatable.
Russians don’t believe in anything of the kind, nor do they, en masse, hate Ukrainians. In August 2022, the Levada Center, one of the last pollsters still trying to obtain objective results in Russia, reported that 68% of Russians held a positive opinion of Ukrainians — down from 83% in October 2021, but still an overwhelming majority, especially given the realities of an oppressive regime. Many respondents would hesitate to tell a pollster — who might be a secret police official or some other kind of informer — that they like the folks the Russian military has been fighting for the last seven months.
Attitudes towards Ukraine as a state have been mostly negative since long before the war: Only 34% of Russians were sympathetic towards it in February 2019, according to Levada, and that was down to 23% in August 2022. That, however, is hardly a robust foundation for genocide: A Russian soldier, after all, has to shoot at actual Ukrainians, not at an abstract state or government.

—Bloomberg