Comparisons of Russia’s illegitimate president, Vladimir Putin, with the Nazi Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, have become increasingly common since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. As Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe puts it, “There are plenty of differences between then [the 1930s] and now, but one shouldn’t overlook the striking similarities.”

Indeed one shouldn’t. The question of whether comparisons with Nazi Germany are merited or not is therefore worth pursuing more systematically, especially as Putin has consistently accused the “Kyiv regime” of being Nazi.

We know better than to accept Putin’s absurd standards of what constitutes Nazism, but since he’s the one who opened this particular can of worms, we are fully justified in asking whether Putin’s regime merits the Nazi label. And that means isolating the defining characteristics of the system Hitler built and asking whether, and to what degree, Putin’s system resembles Hitler’s.

Nazi Germany had the following essential features. It was authoritarian (and possibly totalitarian), patriarchal and illiberal; it was led by a self-chosen charismatic leader who claimed to be omniscient, infallible, enjoyed a personality cult and was adored by his many followers, who truly believed that he was Germany’s messiah; it supported state intervention in an otherwise capitalist economy; it mobilized the population; it employed violence against its real and perceived domestic enemies and interred them in a network of concentration camps and prisons; it subordinated the army to the party and secret police; it was revisionist; it glorified and waged imperialist war.

In turn, Nazi ideology........

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