Brown label

Political scientist Grigory Golosov writes on one of the social networks:

“ About 10 months have passed since T. Snider’s article on“ fascist Russia ”, which at the time of birth caused a whole avalanche of texts that accepted this characteristic as the truth in the last instance. Then several statements were made, including my own, according to which personalist autocracies, like the Russian, differ from fascist party regimes and, in particular, exclude massive political mobilization over the lack of interests and mechanisms. Today it is clear that the mobilization rhetoric is finally driven into the narrow niche of the Solovyov-Live audience and “military commissars” (and also manifests itself in some particularly retreating and incomprehensible officials, mainly in the field of secondary education), and the main television department is fed with a picture about the peaceful restoration of Mariupol and the stories that everything is normal in Russia. Military mobilization, albeit through a stump of college and a limited scale, passed and probably continue in some volume, but the political one was not and not. This is precisely the picture that a year ago was derived from the characteristics of the regime as a personalist autocracy, and not a fascist regime. The whole story shows well (1) that conceptual discussions are not empty disputes about words, and therefore they can be useful for understanding prospects, and (2) that they are often not a horse's horse. In mass perception and in the journalism oriented on it, shortcuts are usually more important than content. ”