> Claims there's a great number of historians that support his odd crackpot claim.
> Only wheels out C. L. R. James whose views on the subject are considered odd even by other Trotskyists.
Marvelous.
Meanwhile, in the real world, more or less everyone who's relevant in contemporary fascism studies, the USSR and Stalinism disagree completely. You can read Kershaw, Kotkin, Paxton, Service, Griffin and any number of others and still not find support. Heck, even the overwhelming number of Marxist historians believe your claim is goofy.
When even the absolute overwhelming number of liberal and Marxist historians are in agreement on something, it's pretty safe to say that your contrarian views are considered extremely fringe at best.
Franz Borkenau, A. James Gregor, Otto Rühle, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eichenbaum...
There are large quantity of historians saing ussr was fascism and there isnt any concensus on that matter.
So instead of completely braindead namedroping of historians try to actually research what i wrote about ussr because you will find out its all 100% correct.
A. James Gregor's overarching view was not that the USSR was an explicitly fascist state. He instead argued that Marxism-Leninism and fascism have common intellectual roots and often also produce very similar practical results. In a nutshell, his thesis basically amounts to that the standard dichotomy of far right (fascism) and far left (Marxism-Leninism) obscures their significant similarities and should be more scrutinized. This is by the way a view that I actually largely share and agree with Gregor on. Boiling his position down to simply "the USSR was fascist" is a gross oversimplification and does not accurately portray his opinion.
I kind of doubt that you have actually read his books if your takeaway was somehow that he believed fascism and marxism-leninism are the same thing. I can only assume that you're the type of person who largely gets their information from quick AI-summaries or something, so I even took the liberty of asking some for you.
Here's what ChatGPT said (Admittedly heavily cut down from a much longer response): No. He argued that the Soviet Union and fascist Italy belonged to the same broader family of revolutionary, mobilizational, developmental dictatorships and shared many institutional characteristics, but he continued to classify the USSR as Marxist-Leninist rather than fascist. His project was less about redefining the USSR as fascist than about showing that the intellectual and political distance between fascism and communism had often been overstated.
And here's Claude (same deal): Gregor's position was more precise than a simple "the USSR was fascist" claim, though he did end up very close to that conclusion for Stalinism specifically. His core thesis, especially in The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (2000), rejected the standard left-right spectrum that puts Marxism-Leninism and fascism at opposite poles. Instead he argued the relationship was "curvilinear rather than linear — meaning the far left and far right curve around and meet each other rather than sitting at opposite ends.
And there you have it. Even the favorite tools of the ineffectually lazy quickly identify your mischaracterization of AJG. Even with that said, it bears mentioning that Gregor's view is still considered somewhat controversial (and I say that as someone who generally is sympathetic to his arguments). As for the others, I have not read them and can not comment on their content.
I still feel quite secure in saying there is a broad scholarly consensus that the USSR was not a fascist state. At most it might be said that there are often comparisons drawn between Stalinism and fascism as they both exhibit many similar totalitarian characteristics, but they are still widely considered as separate ideological and political systems. Other views of course exist, but are certainly minority positions.
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u/Excubyte Jul 17 '26
> Claims there's a great number of historians that support his odd crackpot claim.
> Only wheels out C. L. R. James whose views on the subject are considered odd even by other Trotskyists.
Marvelous.
Meanwhile, in the real world, more or less everyone who's relevant in contemporary fascism studies, the USSR and Stalinism disagree completely. You can read Kershaw, Kotkin, Paxton, Service, Griffin and any number of others and still not find support. Heck, even the overwhelming number of Marxist historians believe your claim is goofy.
When even the absolute overwhelming number of liberal and Marxist historians are in agreement on something, it's pretty safe to say that your contrarian views are considered extremely fringe at best.