For historians of the left even to raise the question of affinities between Soviet Communism and ‘Fascism’ is tantamount to conceding the possibility of a causal relationship. Since ‘Fascism’ for them is by definition the antithesis of socialism and Communism, no such affinities can be admitted and the sources of ‘Fascism’ must be sought exclusively in conservative ideas and capitalist practices. In the Soviet Union this trend went so far the under Lenin, Stalin and their immediate successor, it was forbidden to use the term “National Socialist.”

The fascist leaders’ antagonism to communism has been misinterpreted as an affinity for capitalism. In fact, fascists’ anticommunism was motivated by a belief that in the collectivist milieu of early-twentieth-century Europe, communism was its closest rival for people’s allegiance. As with communism, under fascism, every citizen was regarded as an employee and tenant of the totalitarian, party-dominated state.

Fascism and Communism... Polar opposites—no, polar the same!"

Moscow’s insistence that ‘fascism’ was the polar opposite of ‘communism’ found wide acceptance in socialist and liberal circles in the West.

To affix the poisonous label of ‘ fascism’ to Communism, depicting them under the same collective brotherhood, would have irrevocably damaged the status of socialism… To acknowledge a strong ideological and political link to Mussolini and Hitler would forever expose socialists and Marxists to their historical collaboration with fascist atrocities, racism, and genocide. Not only would socialists be seen as accomplices to some of the most horrific crimes in history, but also communists would also face similar scrutiny over their own atrocities, that racked up over 148 million citizens murdered in the 20th century.

The point communism and fascism have in common is the fundamental political deficit of modern democracy. The different types of totalitarian regimes that are established in their name share the will to put an end to this deficit by restoring the main role to political decisions and by integrating the masses into one party through the constant assertion of their ideological orthodoxy. The fact that the two ideologies proclaim themselves to be in a situation of radical conflict does not prevent them from reinforcing each other by this very hostility—the communist nourishes his faith with antifascism, and the fascist his with anticommunism. And both fight the same enemy, bourgeois democracy. The communist sees it as the breeding ground for fascism, while the fascist sees it as the antechamber of Bolshevism, but they both fight to destroy it.

The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism,” writes Peter Drucker, “has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”9 No less significant

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. And it has been proven as much of an illusion in Stalinist Russia as it proven an illusion in pre-Hitler Germany. Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP) after Lenin’s death.

To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.

It must be admitted that politically communism is the same [as fascism<nowiki>]</nowiki>.

The fascist movement fed on anticommunism, the communist movement on antifascism. But both shared a hatred for the bourgeois world, which allowed them to unite.

The third factor inhibiting inquiries into the influence of Bolshevism on Fascism and National Socialism was the insistence of Moscow on banishing from the vocabulary of ‘progressive’ thought the adjective ‘totalitarian’ in favor of ‘Fascist’ to describe all anti-Communist movements and regimes.

It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory - that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state - that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders - that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique - that fascism is not the product of the political "right," but of the "left" - that the basic issue is not "rich versus poor," but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government - which means: capitalism versus socialism.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against it. Since most of the anti-Fascists’ opponents made a point of defining their own politics as above all anti-Communist (this was part of Nazism’s wartime appeal to conservative elites in countries as far apart as Denmark and Romania), this tidy symmetry worked to the Communists’ polemical advantage. Philo-Communism, or at least anti-anti-Communism, was the logical essence of anti-Fascism.