Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' — the Marxists of revolutionar… - A. James Gregor

Given these evolving notions, it would seem that communism, like fascism—however counterintuitive the idea might be—was a right-wing revolutionary movement. As a consequence, we are now counselled that ‘perhaps we have tended to misjudge the communist elites of yesterday and failed to notice their latent nationalism all along.’ And perhaps we never really appreciated the hierarchical character of communist systems, or the role played in the various regimes by the Vozhd or the Chairman, the Dear Leader or the Lider Massimo.

There was pervasive recognition that Stalinism, as a system, had ‘dialectically thrown overboard the principles in whose name’ the Bolshevisk Revolution had been undertaken, and that ‘Marxist-Leninist principles’ had been transformed into their ‘contraries,’ that is to say, the ideas that provide body and substance to the Fascism of Mussolini. Fascist theoreticians pointed out that organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification, all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded, in form, to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.

The first Fascists were almost all Marxists—serious theorists who had long been identified with Italy’s intelligentsia of the Left.