The word, new, spread in Ukraine after the Russian invasion of February 24: “rachism”. contraction of “Russia” and “fascism”, this neologism immediately enjoyed great success. Omnipresent on social networks, where the Russians are renamed “rachistes”, it was quickly taken up by the Ukrainian media, before being adopted to the highest summit of the State.
Volodymyr Zelensky said he was convinced that the term will go down in history. “For the past eighty years, there has not been such barbarism on our continentdeclared the Ukrainian president, on April 23. “Rachism” is a concept that will appear in history books, on Wikipedia, and will be taught in the classroom. »
Anxious to see the term spread massively, the head of the Defense and National Security Council of Ukraine, Oleksi Danilov, called on journalists to use it, believing that it corresponds to a “new phenomenon in world history”. “Modern rachists are not very different from the Nazishe argued in March. They have even exceeded them, because today the capacities [militaires] are completely different, and they use them like monsters”he said, quoting “the tragedy of Mariupol, Kharkiv and other cities of Ukraine”.
The origins of the word are still unclear. According to some experts, it was Dzhokhar Dudayev, then president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, who used it for the first time in the 1990s. He then described “rachism” as an extreme right ideology based on hatred, chauvinism, lack of spirituality and extreme cruelty. Others date the appearance of the word later, during the war between Russia and Georgia, in the summer of 2008. All nevertheless agree that it spread after the start of the invasion in Ukraine, in February.
A Wikipedia page in thirty languages
The term now has its Wikipedia page in more than thirty languages. The Russian version was the subject of a battle: in April alone the page was deleted and restored several times. We read there that “’Rachism’ is interpreted as a synonym of ‘Russian fascism’ or ‘fascist methods’ used by the Russian military in Ukraine” and “Russian soldiers and all Russians supporting the war are called ‘rachists'”.
The Ukrainian version defines rickets as“totalitarian fascist ideology” of the Russian regime, the pillars of which would notably be the idea of a “special civilizational mission”, “intolerance to the cultural elements of other nations”, “the use of Russian orthodoxy as a moral doctrine” and military strength. American historian Timothy Snyder, who dissected the term in a column published on April 22 in the New York Times, describes him as “a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview”. ” [Les Ukrainiens] noticed Russia’s fascist bias over the past decade much earlier than Western analysts”adds the author of Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin.
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