Gee, the Russians hosted Hamas yet again. Russian state media always praises Hamas and trashes Israel. So FR’s resident Neo-Stalinists are anti-Israel too.
The Putinistas so often praised Russia’s “flat tax” but that is out-the-window too as Putin has made it more progressive and in his words, “more fair”. They are back to nationalizing businesses too while most defense industries are state-owned corporations.
How many new Stalin monuments will have to be built before we stop hearing that Russia is not the Soviet Union? Solzhenitsyn received an eight-year sentence under Stalin while under Putin longer prison terms are being handed out for questioning the Ukraine invasion. The gulag camps are back.
By historical definitions, "fascism" is a mixed socialist/capitalist economy but directed by government industrial policies and ruled by an authoritarian dictator.
That's exactly what Russia is today.
The slide from fascism into Old Soviet communism is simply a matter of government nationalizing more and more private industries until, for practical purposes, there is no more capitalism -- voila, communism in all but name, until they change the name.