This was a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence.
It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.”
According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism. During the war against Nazi Germany, Russians could imagine that Soviet victory was part of a larger historical shift in which capitalism would disappear, and all men would become brothers. After the war, Stalin celebrated a national triumph, not so much of the Soviet Union as of Russia. This suggested that the “fascist” enemy was the outsider rather than the capitalist, and thus a more permanent conflict.
In the 1970s, Stalin’s heir, Brezhnev, located the meaning of Soviet (and Russian) history in the victory of the Red Army in the Second World War. In so doing, Brezhnev definitively changed the sense of the word “fascism.” It no longer suggested a stage of capitalism that might be overcome, since history was no longer expected to bring change.
“Fascism” meant the eternal threat from the West, of which the Second World War was an example. Thus Russians educated in the 1970s, including the leaders and war propagandists of the 2010s, were instructed that “fascist” meant “anti-Russian.”
In the Russian language it is practically a grammatical error to imagine that a Russian could be a fascist. In contemporary Russian discourse, it is easier for an actual Russian fascist to call a non-fascist a “fascist” than it is for a non-fascist to call a Russian fascist a “fascist.”
Thus a fascist like Dugin could celebrate the victory of fascism in fascist language while condemning as “fascist” his opponents.
— The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder), Loc. 2084–98