The initial press commentary in Moscow on the formation of the first Mussolini government was not overwhelmingly anti-Fascist, despite the Duce’s tal… - Stanley George Payne

The new mass Fascism had not been created by Mussolini so much as it had sprung up round him in the rural areas of the north.

The communist peasant-nationalist regimes of Asia, relying on the Führerprinzip, extreme nationalism, and racism (and the ultimately grotesque in antimodernism in the case of the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge) seem to some to represent the fascistization of communism. There is no doubt that, as discussed earlier, fascism and communism share many fundamental characteristics, and Russian spokesmen delight in applying the same words to China as to Nazi Germany: ‘petit bourgeois’ policy, ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ ‘military-bureaucratic degeneration,’ ‘subservient obedience’ of the masses, ‘anti-intellectualism,’ ‘voluntarism,’ ‘subjectivism,’ ‘autarchic’ policies that try to place ‘surplus population’ on ‘foreign territories,’ concluding that ‘the Maoist approach in no way differs from fascism.’

Not only was [Fascist] Italy the first Western country to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924, but the new Soviet art first appeared in the West that year at the Venice Biennale, Italy's premiere art show.