Article by the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE:On the International Anti-Fascist Forum in Moscow

The 1st IAF was held 2 years ago in Minsk and then as now, the subject matter was the “anti-fascist struggle”. This is also evident from the title of the Forum, but also from the statements of the Chairman of the CPRF, Gennady Zyuganov, who noted that the 2nd IAF aims to unite all “left-wing” parties, “progressive” and ‘patriotic’ forces of the world against the danger of fascism and in defense of the so-called “Russian world”, which is one of the main “doctrines” of Russia's current foreign policy in order to justify its interventionist actions abroad.

In practice, therefore, we see that in the name of positive intentions, in the fight against fascism preference is being given to the proven dead end of the formation of "anti-fascist fronts" in alliance with bourgeois powers and governments, which openly participate in the dispossession of the peoples and the re-divvying up of the world, carried out by political and military means.A policy of alliances that splinters the CPs’ strategy for the revolutionary change of society and furthermore whitewashes the responsibilities of bourgeois forces that in practice support capitalism and through such “fronts”, present themselves as “progressive”, ‘patriotic’ and “anti-fascist”.

Let us recall that Brecht wrote that "Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.How, then, can an opponent of fascism now tell the truth about fascism when he doesn’t want to say anything about the capitalism that causes it?”

The Appeal, which was the final document of the IAF highlights the responsibilities of the USA, NATO, the EU, which supported fascist forces to promote their plans both in Ukraine and in the Baltic countries.

This correct point, however, remains incomplete and one-sided when it glosses over the responsibilities of the Russian bourgeoisie in the development of fascist ideas. In the text of the Appeal there will be nothing about the fact that:

• in Russia, school children are routinely “fed” the poison of anti-communism, e.g., of the well-known anti-Soviet Solzhenitsyn who excusedRussian collaborators of the Nazis, was an admirer of Franco and supported Pinochet.
• the Russian public and private media is full of anti-communism and the USSR's victory over fascist Germany is presented as an achievement that occurred, without, and sometimes despite, the action of the Bolshevik Party.
• the Russian leadership publicly promotes to the youth the works of Ivan Ilyin, the Russian ideologist of fascism, while a School in his honor has been opened at a central public university in Moscow, headed by the nationalist and fascist philosopher, Al. Dugin.
• one of the Russian government's main pretexts at the start of the war was to correct the distortions of Lenin's and the USSR's policy on Ukraine and achieve real ‘decommunisation’, thereby giving more ammunition for anti-communists everywhere.
• the revival of fascist ideas in Ukraine, which was not a one-off, but lasted for years with the cultivation of Goebbels' views on “genocide”, had the “material support” of the Russian bourgeoisie, since in the period 1991-2013 (i.e. the period when fascist ideas took root there) the Ukrainian budget benefited to the tune of about 250 billion dollars thanks to Russia's preferential loans and special prices for Russian energy

On the contrary, in the documents of the IAF one will find an attempt to revive what we consider to be incorrect elaborations of the Comintern, which divides bourgeois states into ‘fascist’ and “democratic”, as well as the problematic definition of fascism given by G. Dimitrov's at the 7th Comintern Congress as “(...) an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialist elements of finance capital”. On this basis, erroneous views about the ‘export’ of fascism to other countries by fascist or fascist-leaning countries are reintroduced and in practice, the support of bourgeois powers and even capitalist states that invoke anti-fascism is promoted.

The KKE has assessed that: “The 7th Congress absolutely separated the “power” of finance capital from the interests of industrial capital. In the same way, it also completely separated the capitalist states into fascist and democratic states. As a consequence of this separation, the alliance of the workers' and communist movement with a section of the bourgeois powers and states was ideologized, and class readiness against the opposing class was weakened."

Today, when some people refer to that definition of fascism selectively, they ignore the fact that the Communist International, before this definition of fascism, had given another definition in its Program (1928), in which, among other things, it noted that "under certain specific historical conditions, the course of bourgeois, imperialist, reactionary aggression takes the form of fascism", while the features of fascism were presented in detail in the Resolution on the International Situation at the 6th Congress of the Communist International (1928).

It is also ignored that Dimitrov's well-known definition in 1935 was given under different historical circumstances, when the imperialist powers were planning the disappearance of the only socialist state in the world, while the USSR, for its part, sought to cause a rift between the imperialist powers and to take advantage of their contradictions. This definition is therefore far removed from the historical conditions that “gave rise” to it and seeks to transfer it mechanistically and unscientifically to today's conditions, where the USSR does not exist and the situation that has developed in both Russia and China is in no way consistent with the principles of socialism. China is a capitalist superpower competing with the USA for primacy in the world imperialist system.

Finally, we cannot but comment that this particular IAF took place while imperialist war is being waged in Ukraine and in Moscow, the capital of a capitalist country, whose leadership is openly involved in the war and invokes anti-fascism to hide from the people the real causes of the war, which lie in how to divvy up fertile land, rare earths, energy, pipelines, ports, Black Sea EEZs, market shares, etc.

The President of Russia, V. Putin, who these days is exchanging pleasantries and dividing up Ukraine with the supposed “fascists” of the US government, warmly welcomed the proceedings of this Forum, signaling the alignment of the IAForganizers behind the imperialist aims of the Russian bourgeoisie, dispelling any final doubts one might have about the real aims of the IAF in the name of the anti-fascist struggle.

And let us not forget that if on the Ukrainian side the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, which is presented by the EU leaders more or less as the defender of freedom and democracy, fighting on the Russian side, among others, are neo-Nazi groups such as the “Rusich Group”, the “Russian Imperial Legion”, which present themselves as defenders of the values of the “Russian world”.

As we approach May 9th, when we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the crushing of Nazism by the USSR, the Red Army and the armed resistance movements, communists will defend the historical truth both from the bourgeois powers, which suppress or rewrite it, and from those who distort or seek to misrepresent it.

We will defend the necessity of the autonomous organizational, political and ideological identity of the communist movement, repelling attempts to assimilate it into the imperialist projects of one side or the other of the intra-imperialist conflict. Whether this is done under the pretext of anti-fascism, which is favored by the Russian leadership, or under the pretext of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, which is favored by the Euro-Atlantic side.

The way out for the people lies in the anti-capitalist alliance, which will struggle against anti-people policies and put an end to the barbarity of capitalism, to wars, crises, imperialist alliances and exploitation, poverty, unemployment, oppression, to vindicate the struggles and sacrifices of the past generations, to open the way and fulfill the dreams and contemporary needs of the people with workers' - people's power, socialism - communism!

06.05.2025