The horseshoe theory in practice: How Russia and China became fascist states

Three-quarters of a century after the destruction of the fascist regimes that threatened to extinguish freedom during World War II, fascism is back and again a threat to the world’s democracies. The irony is that this new fascist threat comes from two powers whose histories as communist societies presumably distanced them as far as possible from fascism: Russia and China.

The self-proclaimed communist regimes founded respectively in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949 in practice were Marxist dictatorships that after using massive and brutal force to overhaul the societies they controlled, claimed to have established socialism and thereby created the basis for building communism. As the Soviet Union, the world’s first such state, Russia in the 1970s reached what its ruling Communist Party called “developed socialism,” theoretically a stage enroute to communism. Instead, Soviet socialism stagnated and then collapsed, along with the Soviet Union itself, in 1991. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) tried and failed to outdo the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and again in the mid-1960s with its notorious efforts—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution––to transition ultra-rapidly from socialism to full-fledged communism, but the regime itself survived these debacles. Its ruling Communist Party (CCP) ultimately had to settle for what it currently calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or, oxymoronically, “market socialism.”

Definitions of fascism vary, but its key features are an authoritarian state headed by a dictator, a belligerent racial nationalism, and a capitalistic economy subject to strict state control known as state capitalism. Many experts with good reason maintain that since the rise of Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has become a fascist state. Despite continued CCP rule and claims of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the same has been said about China, even though China specialists remain more reluctant to apply what some of them call the “F-word” to China. The problem for those reluctant to use the “F-word” to describe current Russia and China is that conditions in both countries in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries did not match conditions that had produced fascism in the past, raising the question of what exactly caused those two countries to become fascist. The answer, although complex, ultimately comes down to one word: communism.

To understand why, we must turn to the horseshoe theory, which postulates that political similarities and differences should be viewed not as points on a straight line but rather as places on a horseshoe. In the conventional linear political model, communism and fascism are opposites, lying respectively at the extreme far-left and far-right ends of the spectrum. The twain can never meet. In the horseshoe model, however, free political systems are at or near the horseshoe’s center and the most extreme and unfree ones are at or near its ends. Communism and fascism therefore are close to each other—with much more in common than the former has to the moderate left or the latter to the moderate right—a quality revealed by their respective locations at the far left and right ends of the horseshoe that curve toward each other. Far from being unable to meet, the twain are positioned face to face.

The horseshoe perspective has been criticized on the grounds that communism and fascism have radically different visions of how society should be organized and appeal to different social classes. While this may be true, it misses the point. What matters is not the type of presumably perfect society they advocate for or to whom either vision appeals but rather what must be destroyed to achieve these millennial goals. And that is civil society, the vast array of institutions and organizations independent of the state upon which democracy and free-market capitalism are based, precisely what was destroyed in both Russia and China under communist rule.

The fact that civil society was destroyed in Russia and China under communism also explains why fascism as it evolved subsequently in those two countries did not have to be revolutionary—that is, it was not necessary to destroy the old order and remake society––a characteristic many scholars maintain is an essential component of fascism. By carrying out their revolutions, Russian and Chinese communists already had completed that key part of building fascism.

In Russia the destruction of civil society, which had been developing in tsarist Russia since the early 19^th century, began immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and was almost completed by Lenin’s death in 1924. What little remained was obliterated when Joseph Stalin’s industrialization drive and purges turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian society. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempt between 1985 and 1991 to save the Soviet system by making it less politically dictatorial and more economically productive could some seeds of civil society again begin to sprout. But those fragile seeds could not flourish in the societal desert Soviet communism had left behind in Russia, as became clear in the immediate post-Soviet years during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. The only organized forces that had survived Soviet communism were the KGB, albeit with a new name, and organized crime, and within a decade after coming to power Vladimir Putin cooped that criminality and used his renovated version of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus to build the fascist Russian state we see today.

In China the path from communism to fascism was more direct. As in Russia, the destruction of civil society––which existed albeit in limited form and under difficult conditions under the undemocratic but non-totalitarian Nationalist regime––also took place under communism, in this case beginning in October 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party implemented reforms to China’s socialist economy that initially involved small concessions to capitalist enterprise. As this policy succeeded, it was expanded until China’s socialist economy was dismantled and replaced by a tightly controlled state-capitalist economy, the exact type one finds in fascist societies. Meanwhile, the CCP reinforced its totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. But by replacing China’s socialist economy with a form of state capitalism—in effect, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, which some experts have dubbed “party-state” capitalism—Deng and his successors inadvertently removed the most important factor that distinguishes communism from fascism. Meanwhile, the CCP leadership, without admitting what it had done, understood that having abandoned socialism and its promise of equality it needed something new to legitimize the party’s dictatorship, a problem made dramatically clear by the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Massive, brutal repression, which crushed the demonstrations, was not enough.

The good news for the CCP was that what was needed was close at hand, as Chinese Marxism from the beginning featured a strong nationalist component. Therefore, within a year of Tiananmen Square, the CCP already was promoting a militant, anti-Western Chinese nationalism. As a group of CCP intellectuals warned in 1991, the party had to stress the “Chineseness” of the regime by “uniting Marxism with Chinese reality” lest the CCP “establish the Chinese value system on a dry stream bed, on a trunkless tree.” The result, as we see under Xi Jinping, is a militant, expansionist nationalism deeply hostile to Western democracy that, as with Russian nationalism under Putin, is indistinguishable from fascist nationalism.

Russia and China crossed the narrow horseshoe space between communism and fascism differently, but what matters is that they did it. What the horseshoe posited in theory has happened in practice. And it happened in the world’s two signature communist powers, the ones that mattered most. To communism’s (or Marxist socialism’s) horrific record of economic failure, totalitarian tyranny, and death on a genocidal scale must now be added another grim legacy: fascism.

_{Featured image by Oleg Moroz via Unsplash.}