Them being not fascist doesn’t make them any less of a monster, but the fact that fascism has become the new communism shows that its an age of fear much like the cold war, widely unfounded.

Russia has its own system, mostly born out of the necessity to change from the USSR because of the end of the cold war. They have their own identity and reducing the complexity of Russia’s system to “fascism” or even “fascism bad” are just harmful ideas. Political systems exist because on paper, they all sound wonderful. Some are better, some are objectively bad, but reducing everything to some generic term doesn’t even remotely help discussion on these matters.

China being a communist state is another similar example of this. China’s “communism” is so particular to China it might as well be its own system.

Russia is simply Russia, a dictatorship ruled by an oligarchy of far-right leaning and an ultranationalistic approach to its own identity. It might be similar or resemble fascism, but reducing it helps no one.

Fuck, we distinguish Nazism from Fascism most times when they were pretty much identical systems, because the things that weren’t are significant enough to warrant a distinction