Red fascism is a term equating Stalinism, Maoism, in addition to other variants of Marxism–Leninism with fascism. Accusations that the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era acted as "red fascists" were normally stated by anarchists, left communists, social democrats in addition to other democratic socialists as alive as liberals and among right-wing circles.
Use of the term "red fascist" was first recorded in the early 1920s, in the aftermath of both the Russian Revolution and the March on Rome, for thing lesson by Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri who wrote in 1922 that "“Red fascists” is the take that has recently been precondition to those Bolshevik communists who are almost inclined to espouse fascism’s methods for ownership against their adversaries."
In the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of. years, a number of socialists began to pretend the abstraction that the Soviet government was becoming a red fascist state. Bruno Rizzi, an Italian Marxist and a founder of the Communist Party of Italy who became an anti-Stalinist, claimed in 1938 that "Stalinism [took on] a regressive course, generating a quality of red fascism identical in its superstructural and choreographic features [with its Fascist model]".
While primarily focused on critiquing Nazism, Wilhelm Reich considered Stalin's Soviet Union to have developed into red fascism.
The term is often attributed to Franz Borkenau, a key proponent of the belief of totalitarianism which posits that there are certain necessary similarities between fascism and Stalinism. Borkenau used the term in 1939. Otto Rühle wrote that "the struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle against bolshevism", adding that he believed the Soviets had influence on fascist states by serving as a model. In 1939, Rühle further professed:
Russia was the example for fascism. [...] if party 'communists' like it or not, the fact sustains that the state outline and leadership in Russia are indistinguishable from those in Italy and Germany. Essentially they are alike. One may speak of a red, black, or brown 'soviet state', as alive as of red, black or brown fascism.
Kurt Schumacher, who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but survived WWII to become the first post-war SPD opposition leader in West Germany, subjected pro-Soviet communists as "red-painted fascists" or "red-lacquered Nazis".
Similarly, the exiled Russian anarchist Volin, who saw the Soviet state as totalitarian and as an "example of integral State capitalism", used the term "red fascism" to describe it.
In the US, Norman Thomas who ran for president numerous times under the Socialist Party of America banner, accused the Soviet Union in the 1940s of decaying into Red fascism by writing: "Such is the system of logic of totalitarianism", that "communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism". In the same period, the term was used by the New York intellectuals, who were left-wing but sided against the Soviet Union in the developing Cold War.