May 7: Explainer: Defining ruscism

Explainer by CDS Daily Brief, published on May 2, 2023

Defining ruscism, CDS Daily Brief

Ukraine's Parliament has defined Russia's political regime as "ruscism" and condemned its ideological foundations and social practices as totalitarian and misanthropic.

The Parliament understands "ruscism" as:

"a new type of totalitarian ideology and practice that underlies the regime formed in the Russian Federation under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin and is based on the traditions of Russian chauvinism and imperialism, the practices of the communist regime of the USSR and National Socialism."

Source: SOFREP

The key features of that political regime are:

• systemic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms; the cult of power and militarism;

• the cult of the leader's personality and the sacralization of state institutions;

• self-aggrandizement of Russia and Russians at the expense of violent oppression and/or denial of the existence of other peoples;

• use and spreading of the Russian language and culture, the Russian Orthodox Church, the media, political and public institutions, promoting the ideas of the "Russian world" among other peoples for the purpose of implementing an expansionist state policy;

• systematic violation of norms and principles of international law, sovereign rights of other states, their territorial integrity and internationally recognized borders, non-compliance with the principle of non-application and threat of use of force;

• creation, financing and armed support of illegal armed formations and separatist movements on the territories of other sovereign states;

• creation and support of terrorist organizations;

• use of prohibited methods of waging war and systematic commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity;

• systematic organization and implementation of mass murders, executions, torture, deportations, creation of artificial conditions for the occurrence of hunger and other types of mass physical terror, genocide, and persecution for ethnic, national, religious, political and other motives;

• regular application of the practice of economic and energy blackmail to other countries;

• regular threat of using nuclear weapons against other countries and creating man-made disasters.

The Putin regime has all features of Ur-Fascism as defined by Umberto Eco, yet it has its own homegrown features reflected in Ukrainian Parliament's definition.