Marci Shore: “I don’t believe in genetic immunity to fascism”

Marci Shore is a historian of Eastern Europe and holder of a chair in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, among other works. In this conversation, she reflects on why this war carries unusual moral clarity, why democratic institutions are more fragile than we like to believe, and what the miracle of revolution actually requires.

The following is Marci Shore’s direct speech.

On Venezuela, revolutions, and interventionism

I have no sympathy for Nicolás Maduro, but the U.S. operation was clearly intended to take him out. It’s not clear that there’s been any real democratic change in Venezuela or that the people left in power are going to actually carry out any kind of democratic reforms. I am not an expert on this topic, but in the case of Venezuela, Trump did not even pretend this was about democracy. He made it quite clear it was about oil. He also wanted a photo op of himself on a Wikipedia page as acting president of Venezuela, because he is almost a self-parody of a Nero-like narcissism.

There is a genuine question of whether foreign intervention can ever help, even in the best circumstances, and if so, how. But there is another question in the case of the Trump administration in particular — is there even any intention to help anyone apart from himself? I think the answer is no.

In 2014, I was watching Russian propaganda claim that the revolution on the Maidan was a CIA-sponsored conspiracy, that these were American-backed Ukrainian Nazis intending to march east and massacre Russian speakers. Among the many painful things about that story was that I knew my friends on the Maidan were desperately hoping for more international support and solidarity, and what they received was very vague. The American ambassador was there and was genuinely involved and sympathetic. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Obama, but his attention was elsewhere. He wasn’t focused on Ukraine at all. I was in Vienna at the time, and for most Europeans, there was sympathy but not engagement. I felt that the world’s attention was elsewhere — people weren’t unsympathetic, but they didn’t see it as important.

And yet the Maidan revealed the extraordinary potential for self-organization. Civil society — something we had talked about when trying to understand dissident activity in the 1970s and 80s, and then forgotten about — suddenly showed what it could do. What does spontaneity mean? What does self-organization mean? What does it mean for a critical mass of people to cross to the other side of fear? The miracle of revolution is that you need enough people who are willing to do that at the same time, and that never, ever happens. It is a miracle.

On skepticism of the American left

The opposition to aiding Ukraine among the American — and international — left has been painful to me, because I consider myself a person of the left. In essence, it is a very self-absorbed way of looking at the situation. It essentially says: this is all about us, all about American identity.

Yes, the United States has done many despicable things as a country. It has certainly done nasty imperialistic things. But the argument — that, because we have done nasty imperialistic things and should be self-critical, we must therefore be indulgent of Putin’s neo-totalitarianism and his imperialist wars — makes no logical sense to me. It is a way of taking self-criticism to the point of pure self-absorption. It’s all about trying to understand ourselves and being critical about ourselves to the point that we have to be sympathetic to whoever is against us.

Americans should be self-critical, starting with domestic politics. Arguably, the first thing we should be thinking about is American racism and American violence. We have a lot of reason for self-criticism. But I don’t see the reason any of that should lead to being indulgent to some 21st-century dictator launching an invasion and carrying out mass atrocities on another country.

The fact that we have done bad things does not mean everyone should be excused from doing bad things. If one had to be perfect in order to make any moral argument about the world, we would all be silenced.

On the moral clarity of this war

I never thought Ukraine was a perfect country. I understood very well that it was a country struggling to rid itself of kleptocratic oligarchy, struggling with corruption, still confronting histories of collaboration, of pogroms, of anti-Semitism and violence. I understood all of that. But none of Ukraine’s imperfections possibly justified Russia, for absolutely no reason, launching a full-scale invasion and carrying out mass murder and mass torture.

There was no possible pretext, absolutely no real reason for this war. It’s unusual in its moral clarity. Putin says he must defend the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics; he must restore the lands of Peter the Great; there was a CIA-sponsored Nazi cabal installed in Kyiv; NATO was plotting an attack on Russia. He pulls something new out of the hat every day. None of that is a real reason.

We are watching people be massacred and children buried under rubble, day after day, for nothing. For no conceivable pretext. That kind of moral clarity is historically unusual. There is just absolutely no excuse.

From the very beginning in 2014, the first moments of the illegal annexation of Crimea felt to me like the Anschluss, like 1938, and Nazi Germany taking over Austria. I kept hearing, as a historian, the voice of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich and telling the British people how horrible it would be to dig trenches on behalf of a quarrel in a faraway country between people about whom we know nothing.

I thought: the Donbas is going to be that quarrel in a faraway country between people about who we know nothing, that’s going to be the beginning of the Third World War. I never really felt Putin would stop. This neo-fascist, or neo-totalitarian, or postmodern fascist, or whatever we want to call it, we’ve let this thing grow. We’ve failed to cut it off.

I don’t see any way we come out on the other side until the Russian regime is completely, utterly brought down, totally defeated. I don’t think we’re in a negotiation situation. I don’t think that in 1943 we could have been negotiating with Hitler in such a way that some part of Europe remained under Nazi occupation. I don’t think that was viable. And I think that is the situation we are in now. I do think there should be more American involvement, more European involvement.

The United States is a lost cause at the moment. This regime cannot be trusted. The Europeans have to step up.

On the politics of gangsters

For whatever reason, Trump has long been in Putin’s pocket. We can speculate about whether there is kompromat, or whether it is simply some kind of affinity that one gangster-style leader has for another, or whether it is a debt owed from assistance during the 2016 elections. I don’t know why. But for whatever reason, this has long been true, and I don’t see much hope of it changing.

This is the politics of gangsters, the politics of the mob. This is what Hannah Arendt¹Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American historian and political theorist. Her works examining the structures of totalitarian regimes shaped the Western intellectual discourse around the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. describes in the third part of Origins of Totalitarianism. She talks about Nazism as the politics of the mob mobilizing the masses. Everything is transactional. There are no real relationships. He lives in a world in which everything can be bought or sold, and he operates on that principle openly, without shame. This is what the anthropologist Natalia Rudakova described as cynical disinhibition: you shamelessly throw out the cruelty and the ugliness as a matter of public display. You are not hiding that you can be bought and sold. You are not hiding that it is all transactional.

That is what disempowered the opposition during the first Trump administration. People kept waiting for the hidden thing to be revealed that would shock everyone into bringing it all down. But the problem wasn’t what was hidden. The problem was what we had normalized, step by step, until people simply accepted the situation.

On Paul Manafort

One of the most insightful and terrifying moments — before most Americans, including myself, really thought that Trump could come to power — was an article published by the American journalist Franklin Foer. Frank was in Kyiv in 2014, watching the Maidan and publishing about it. He was interested in how Yanukovych had come back to power and stayed there. And he followed the story of Paul Manafort.

In the United States, it turns out, we have a small boutique industry of PR specialists for gangsters with presidential ambitions. Yanukovych hired this man from Washington who didn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian, but knew how to play golf and had expensive taste in wine. He flew to Kyiv, dressed Yanukovych in new suits, gave him telegenic coaching, and somehow this was effective. Then, after the sniper massacre on the Maidan and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, Manafort was out of a job. We know what he did next: he came home and went to work getting Donald Trump elected.

The headline of Foer’s article was, “If You Don’t Think Paul Manafort Can Get Trump Elected, You Don’t Know Paul Manafort” (later updated to “The Quiet American” — ed.) And he was right. I was an early panicker — very nervous about Trump by the end of September 2015. Not because I was smarter than my American colleagues, but because I had been watching Russia and Ukraine. I felt that there were things Trump was picking up from Putin: something about post-truth, about this kind of shameless lying that, as a Slavicist, I would describe as what Rudakova called cynical disinhibition.

Because I’d seen it working in Russia, I got scared sooner than most Americans.

On the fragility of institutions

I was never that confident in checks and balances. I work on intellectual history — I write about philosophy and literature, about individuals. I have always been a little skeptical about institutions.

From my perspective, institutions are only as strong as the individual people working in them.

If you purge enough people, fire them, intimidate them, buy them off, or chase them away, the institution collapses. They are not a kind of magic pill.

Americans have this delusion, I think, that we have some kind of genetic immunity to fascism. I don’t believe in genetic immunity — not on the part of Americans, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles or Russians. I am very much an Arendtian in this sense. What leads to tyranny, to what we can call fascism or neo-fascism or various kinds of totalitarianism, is the exploitation of vulnerabilities that are inherent in the human condition. Nobody gets some kind of magical immunity.

Our institutions had been eroding, arguably, at least since the 2010 Citizens United³Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was a landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled that laws designed to limit political spending by corporations were unconstitutional. As a result, money in American elections has increased dramatically: the non-profit Open Secrets estimates $5 billion was spent in the 2008 federal election cycle, while candidates and special interest groups spent around $15 billion in both the 2020 and 2024 federal elections. Supreme Court decision, which essentially created structures by which anyone could donate as much money as they wanted to political campaigns, and in effect allowed campaigns to be bought. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s⁴Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) was an American Supreme Court Justice from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was known as a liberal and feminist voice on the court. Ginsburg was the first tenured woman professor at Columbia Law School and founded the Women’s Rights Project under the American Civil Liberties Union and served as its general council. death during the first Trump administration was tragic on so many levels: it allowed him to stack the Supreme Court with his own appointees. The 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity was deadly. The Supreme Court is supposed to be your last line of defense, and it broke down on us.

On what prevents revolution in Russia

[For a revolution to be successful,] you need a lot of people willing to be very brave at the same time. And that’s extraordinary. Revolution requires solving a collective action problem in a way that almost never happens. I remember speaking to a Ukrainian colleague in 2022 and asking. “What would it take to bring down Putin’s regime?” He said, “Two million people in the streets of Moscow, and it’s over tomorrow.” But everyone, individually, acting rationally, has a reason to stay home, it’s too risky. So, 500 people come out, and then nothing.

The Maidan won, in some sense, because of a specific kind of miracle. November 21st, 22nd, none of those people on the Maidan were thinking, “I am going to die here.” People were listening to music, holding hands, saying, “Ukraine is Europe.” But by the second half of January, even from a distance, you could feel almost palpably that a critical mass of people had decided that they were willing to die there if need be. That was an extraordinary thing to witness. You can only watch that with awe. How it happens historically, what pushes people to that place, where it comes from. That is part of the miracle of revolution.

Tanya Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko wrote a piece for an English-language journal in Ireland, Irish Pages, a year or so ago, called “Crime Without Punishment and Punishment Without Crime.” And they said that there are two kinds of people in Russia. You know, there are these untouchable Übermenschen, these oligarchs, these gangsters who can commit any horrible crime with absolute impunity and are never accountable. And then there are these masses of ordinary people who can be punished for anything at any time, regardless of whether or not it’s real or they’ve done anything, who are just kind of at the mercy of proizvol [arbitrary will]⁷“Proizvol” literally translates to “arbitrariness” and is used to describe lawless, arbitrary decisions that serve as abuses of power in Russian political spheres. The term usually refers to the arbitrary application of criminal or civil codes and can apply to politically motivated arrests based on the corruption schemes, and police or military actions., at this kind of arbitrariness of the powers that be.

And in both of those cases, you have a crisis of subjectivity. In both of those cases, there is no responsible agent taking responsibility for specific actions. My sense is that this is at the root of something that has gone very, very wrong, you know, in Russia.

I think we need a kind of Stunde Null⁹“Stunde Null,” also known as “zero hour,” refers to the moment of total capitulation of the Nazi regime in 1945. “Stunde Null” offered a new beginning for Germans after a total break with its Nazi past.. I think that regime has to totally, utterly fall. There has to be a total reset. A lot of my colleagues, including in the Russian opposition, think the country has to be broken up. It’s too big, that the scale of it doesn’t work, that you need a smaller scale in order for there to be any hope of any kind of real democratic participation. I have no expertise on that, but clearly something needs to be radically, radically different.