pcr asks how well does russia understand; 

How Well Does Russia Understand the West?

Paul Craig Roberts.

I raise the question in the title because the Russian media looks askance at what it labels “a rise in the popularity of right-wing forces” in “recent elections in three EU countries.”  The Russian media describes as “right-wing” the awakened ethnic nationalities–the French of France, the Germans of Germany–as “right-wing.”  But President Putin of Russia describes Russia as Russian, even though the Federation is comprised of different nationalities.  Putin stresses that whatever the ethnicities of the Russian Federation, all are Russian.  This is likely the case as the non-Russian ethnicities have been part of Russia for a very long time, whereas in the West the newly-arriving immigrant-invaders are proving to be unassimilable hostiles.

Putin doesn’t regard Russian ethnicity, an ethnicity extended to the Muslim provinces of the Federation such as Chechnya, as right-wing. So why does Russia regard European ethnic nationality “right-wing?”

The answer, I think, is that the American, European and British left-wing have conflated an ethnic consciousness that constitutes a national state with Nazism.  The Nazis were a socialist party, not a right-wing one.  But they were National Socialists which the left-wing contrasted with approved international socialism associated with the Soviet Union. Right-wing became anything to the right  of  Trotskyist International Communism. Nationalism was seen as a barrier to the spread of Communism, and thus it was evil..........more........