Re: Fascism as twisted Socialism

["Paul Flewers" <hatchet.job@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

According to John Stephan, The Russian Fascists (London, 1978), Konstantin
Rodzaevsky, who led a very nasty Russian fascist group in Harbin, Manchuria in
the 1930s and 1940s, returned to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1945 on the
grounds that he thought that Stalin had become a fascist. He wrote to Stalin:
'Not all at once, but step by step, we came to this conclusion. We decided that:
Stalinism is exactly what we mistakenly called "Russian fascism". It is our
Russian fascism cleansed of extremes, illusions and errors.' Actually, he was
tricked by a Soviet secret police operative into returning, assuming that he
would get a friendly welcome; but he was tried and hanged in 1946.   There was a
very interesting article on National Bolshevism in Germany by Arthur Spencer in
Survey, October 1962. Unfortunately, I don't have a scanner, so I'm unable to
reproduce it here, but it goes into the phenomenon in some detail, looking at
how people on the far right in Germany thought that some sort of alliance with
the Soviet Union would help the former country against the Versailles powers,
and how various people on the left went along with this, or came up with
analogous schemes. It also looks at the way the Soviet communists tried to deal
with it, particularly in respect of Karl Radek, who spent a lot of time in
Germany, and also with the way the German Communist Party revived some its ideas
in the 1930s in a vain attempt to outflank the Nazis.   There is also some stuff
on early National Bolshevism in Pierre Broué's epic The German Revolution, the
English-language version of which should appear sometime next year.   Paul F