ENRU
Chapter 1:
Exile in Germany (1922–1938)
Ilyin had no difficulties settling into the new environment since he was already well-acquainted with the German language and culture. From October 1, 1922, until July 9, 1938, Ilyin lived in Berlin.1 When he arrived in the capital, there was already an established Russian émigré community. As of 1917, 360,000 out of the 400,000 Russians in Germany resided in Berlin.2 Until around 1924, Berlin remained the center of “Russia Abroad”; however, with the increasingly difficult economic situation in Germany and decreasing opportunities for foreigners, its rank was taken over by Paris. By 1930, a mere 90,000 Russians lived in Germany and only 45,000 in 1937. Ilyin was to stay among this crumbling community until his second exile in Switzerland in 1938.

lyin’s German years were extremely productive, and in that period, he ascended to a leading ideological role in the White movement and among Russian fascists. Leading up to his Swiss exile in 1938, he gave almost 200 lectures in Germany, Latvia, Switzerland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria.3 In those years, he also authored about 400 articles, pamphlets, and books, which were published in several European countries and even overseas.
A picture available in the Ilyin archive shows the 1923 teaching staff of the RSI, which is annotated as follows: 1923. Berlin. Seated (from right to left): L. P. Karsavin, historian; S. N. Prokopovich, economist; Y. I. Aichenvald, literary critic; N. A. Berdyaev, publicist; V. I. Yasinsky, technologist; S. L. Frank, philosopher; V. Vikt. Stratonov, astronomer; M. M. Novikov, zoologist; A. I. Kalinka, civil lawyer; standing (from right to left): unknown; B. D. Brutskus, economist; I. A. Ilyin, philosopher of law; A. I. Ugrimov, economy of agriculture; Gogel, criminologist; M. A. T aube, international specialist; Markov economist; S. I. Gessen, pedagogist; I. A. Stratonov; historian of Russian law; unknown; Aikhenwald, physicist; Vysheslavtsev, publicist; Sesemann, philosopher. Source: “1923 god. 17 fevralia Torzhestvennyy akt v chest' otkrytiia Russkogo nauchnogo instituta,” Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Russian Scientific Institute (1923–1934)

Initially things went well for Ilyin. German Russia experts took an avid interest in the passengers of the Philosophers’ Ships as people who had firsthand experience with the Soviet Union and, as evidenced by their expulsion, arrived with the badge of anti-Bolshevism. Otto Hoetzsch, president of the German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe (Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Studium Osteuropas, DGSO), one of the few research institutions in Germany dedicated to studying the Soviet Union, knew of the expellees’ plight.4 The Society took immediate action to accommodate them in Berlin. It might be that Ilyin’s old professor, Novgorodtsev, who until 1924 lived in Berlin and had reportedly co-hosted a Pushkin event at the Berlin Philharmonic in late November 1921 alongside Hoetzsch, had alerted the latter to the expellees.5

Hoetzsch organized a meeting with the stranded intellectuals on November 18, 1922, in which a committee was formed to develop a plan for their future, which on the Russian side included, besides Ilyin, the Moscow professors Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Vsevolod Ivanovich Yasinsky (1884–1933), and Alexander Ivanovich Ugrimov (1874–1957) — all passengers of the Philosophers’ Ships.6 Quickly, they agreed on the idea of forming an institute that would provide courses in Russian and German to Russian émigrés and the interested public to be taught by the expelled professors.

Thus, under the auspices of the DGSO and with Hoetzsch’s help, the Russian Scientific Institute (Russkii Nauchnyi Institut v Berline, RSI) opened its doors in February 1923, located in the facilities of the German Academy of Politics (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik). Ilyin remained attached to the RSI throughout most of its lifespan, until July 1934, first as head of the department of law from 1923 to 1924 and from 1933 to 1934 as head of the institute.7 It is known that from the RSI’s outset, the German Ministry of Culture and the Foreign Office were involved in backroom talks regarding the institute’s formation and operation; however, all contacts with the authorities went through the DGSO.8 In this way, they wanted to ensure the operation appeared apolitical on the surface. Overall, the German hosts had a profound interest in the fate of the Russian expellees. According to Hartmut Rüdiger Peter:
They wanted to harness the knowledge of the experts to evaluate economic, political and social processes in Russia and hoped to exert strategic influence in the post- Soviet era. Therefore, it seemed to the Foreign Office to be quite “desirable [...] to enable a limited number of Russians who had fled home to complete their studies,” which could then be used “as a bridge to the promising economic territory.”9
pressure from the German Foreign Ministry, the RSI transformed into a research center.10
Peter writes that, at its inception, “In the summer semester of 1923, 32 professors and lecturers taught at the institute; almost all of them were passengers of the ‘philosophers’ ships.’”11 Among the professors, many were already well known in the Russian intelligentsia, and some were, or would become, key figures among White émigrés: Nikolai Berdyaev, an Orthodox and anti-Bolshevik theologian whose endeavors in emigration were funded by the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA); Alexander A. Bogolepov (1885–1990), lawyer and former chief secretary in the First Department of the Holy Governing Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church; Alexander Aleksandrovich Kizevetter (1866–1933), historian and former publisher of
Russkaia mysl and former leader of the Cadet Party; Baron Mikhail Aleksandrovich Taube (1869–1961), a former member of the State Council in Imperial Russia and later a legal advisor to Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich; and last but not least, Ilyin’s friend Pyotr Struve.12

For most of its existence (1923–1931), the RSI was headed by Vsevolod Yasinsky, a fiercely anti-Soviet engineer. According to Makarov and Khristoforov, “Yasinsky belonged, undoubtedly, to a number of citizens absolutely averse to Soviet power.”13 From 1931 to 1933, the RSI was headed by the writer Semyon Frank, a close affiliate of Nikolai Berdyaev and Struve since the early 1900s. In exile, Frank became a member of the YMCA- funded Russian Student Christian Movement and was equally adversarial to socialism in any form. His opinion was that socialism “cannot lead to anything other than the unbridled tyranny of despotic power and the dumbed-down passivity or bestial rebellion of its subjects.”14
While the German government supported the RSI largely in order to exploit the expertise of the stranded professors, the Whites at the institute used its framework for their own ends: to train stranded White youths, a project in which Ilyin took on a central role. The idea came from none other than the White leader Pyotr Wrangel (1878–1928), who at the time resided in the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. Wrangel personally contacted Ilyin in March 1923 regarding the venture to take on around 300 Whites as students at the RSI, “to prepare [them as] future workers [...] for rebuilding our Fatherland.”15 This marked the beginning of a friendship with Wrangel, a personal hero of Ilyin’s, which lasted until Wrangel’s death in 1928.

Ever since late January 1923, Ilyin was also in touch with Wrangel’s representative in Germany and Hungary, General Alexei von Lampe (1885–1967), who had settled in Berlin in the spring of 1922 and begun to collaborate closely with Ilyin.16 By April 1923, the White training venture seems to have taken off, as indicated by a letter by Ilyin to Struve, with whom Ilyin was also in avid contact at that point:
The selected students have started arriving from the Balkans. Solidarity work hand in hand with the High Command [Glavnym Komandovaniem]. Funding is sufficient until September. The Council of Ambassadors [Sovet poslov] feared a German orientation from us at first, but then, having received evidence that we had one orientation only, a Russian-patriotic one, and that we did not take a penny from the Germans—did not ask for any, and are not going to take it—expressed their support and promised a little money.17
Unfortunately, no further details could be established about the fate of the White students sent by Wrangel, for example, whether they attended courses with the other students or whether they received separate training. If indeed hundreds of students arrived at the RSI, initially they must have made up the bulk. It is also unclear whether the German hosts were fully privy to Wrangel’s plans. All in all, the Russian side seemed more than wary about divulging any German support. For example, in the run-up to the RSI’s foundation, Yasinsky stated that, “the endeavor was fully independent from the Society [DGSO] except the provision of the localities,” and that, “There are already around 20 million Marks available, while more is expected from countries abroad with strong foreign currencies.”18 Ilyin’s comment that they would never take German money, be it a broken promise or a lie, indicates his desire to distance himself from any German influence.

Overall, the RSI received funding from multiple sources and served multiple interests and purposes. It has been established that money came from foreign donations, the League of Nations, the American Joint Distribution Committee, and the German Foreign Office.19

Young Men’s Christian Association

It has also been stated that the RSI received funds from American intelligence, funneled through the infrastructure of the YMCA, from which Ilyin also received support until the mid-1920s.20 Generally, the German side was wary of America’s influence, fearing that it could entice away the Russian experts. A German employee at the Ministry of Culture, Wilhelm Westphal, mentioned that “it is recommended to have a closer look at the latter organization [YMCA].... It is not unlikely that there is a cesspool of anti-German and anti-Soviet agitation developing.”21

That the YMCA provided startup funds for the RSI was confirmed by the White émigré Anton Kartashev, former Minister of Confessions during the Kerensky Government as well as one of the organizers of the YMCA- funded Russian Student Christian Movement and the YMCA-Press in exile. However, he specified that the funds were funneled through the (Russian) Religious-Philosophical Academy (Religiozno-Filosofskaia Akademiia v Berline, RPA) of Nikolai Berdyaev in Berlin—another educational initiative of White émigrés, which Ilyin helped found and where he gave numerous lectures in the years to come.22

In parallel to his teaching position at the RSI, where he taught the history of Russian philosophical thought and served as a member of the Institute’s scientific council, Berdyaev managed to rally enough support to start his own émigré enterprise, the Religious-Philosophical Academy.23 Located within the YMCA’s Berlin facilities at Reichstagsufer 6, the Academy opened its doors in November 1922. The RPA “was almost entirely supported by the Y[MCA], which provided 96 percent of the need; only 4 percent was covered by lecture entrance fees,” according to Matthew Lee Miller, author of a book on the YMCA’s Russian affairs.24 The historian Karl Schlögel records 14 events involving Ilyin at the RPA from November 1922 through December 1925, notably lectures on the “Philosophy of Religion” and the “Philosophy of the Religious Experience.”25 Besides Ilyin and Berdyaev, the RPA also employed other fellow expellees and RSI employees, such as Semyon Frank, Boris P. Vysheslavtsev, Yuri Aichenvald, Fedor A. Stepun, Lev P. Karsavin, and others.26

In 1924, Berdyaev moved to Paris, and in that same year reopened a branch of the Religious-Philosophical Academy there while Ilyin continued to lecture at the RPA’s Berlin branch, which seems to have closed shortly thereafter.27 Besides the RPA, Berdyaev served as the editor of the still- printing Russian-language YMCA-Press from 1923 until the end of his life. YMCA-Press was another YMCA-sponsored project enlisting Orthodox, monarchist, and right-wing authors from the Russian émigré intelligentsia in the early anti-communist cultural war, many of whom ended up in the Russian literary canon.28 YMCA-Press produced a barrage of anti-Soviet tracts, targeting Russian émigrés as well as people living in the Soviet Union; the latter came in the form of tamizdat—literature published abroad and smuggled into the USSR. Ilyin published one text with YMCA-Press in the mid-1920s, The Religious Meaning of Philosophy: Three Speeches, 1914–1923.29 Following Ilyin’s scandalous publication of On Resistance to Evil by Force in 1925, Berdyaev became his staunch enemy. Thus it comes as no surprise that no more publications were to follow.30 However, Ilyin utilized his YMCA-Press contacts in the postwar period.

With the RSI and the RPA as catch basins for anti-Bolshevik Whites rather than academic institutions, it comes as no surprise that, after his arrival in Germany, Ilyin failed to establish himself in the academic community. Only one of Ilyin’s texts from his time at the RSI is recorded: “The Problem of Modern Legal Consciousness,” the speech he delivered at the opening of the Institute on February 17, 1923, which was published as a 32-page brochure in Berlin by the Society “Press” (Gesellschaft “Presse”), according to Lisitsa. There is a distinct possibility that the same publishing house was responsible for Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force two years later.31

In total, only two academic publications appeared after his arrival in Germany, both of which were also political in nature: an article for a German journal of philosophy of law in 1925–1926 entitled “Bolshevism and the Crisis of Modern Legal Consciousness”32 and the chapter “Legal Order and Legal Consciousness in Modern Russia,” published in the compendium Foreign Studies Russia.33 The latter was based on a lecture that Ilyin delivered to the Working Committee for the Promotion of Studying Abroad, organized by the Institute for the East German Economy (Institute für Ostdeutsche Wirtschaft) at the Albert Magnus University in Königsberg.

In Ilyin’s curriculum vitae from 1937, it mentions that in 1924, he “was elected Corresponding Member of the School of Slavonic Studies at the Royal University of London,” a role which, judging from the lack of references, did not lead to any noteworthy academic opportunities.34 That year, he apparently also wrote a letter to Edmund Husserl “to refresh the old connection,” in which he begged Husserl to publish his PhD thesis in Germany—to no avail.35

Thus, by the mid-1920s, Ilyin had practically abandoned his academic aspirations and gave over entirely to political propaganda and activism within the White movement.
Nikolaevichi vs. Kirillovichi

The foundation of the RSI and the RPA fell into the tumultuous period of the fledgling Weimar Republic, in whose political turmoil the Whites played a considerable role. Although Germany and Russia had been adversaries during WWI, in the course of the Russian Civil War (1917– 1923), some Whites collaborated with the German military against their common enemy—Bolshevik Russia and the Red Army. Consequently, a considerable number of White soldiers ended up in Germany, where they conspired with German enemies of the Weimar Republic, which was not only democratic but sought to make peace with the bourgeoning Soviet Union—an abomination in the eyes of both the Whites and the German aristocracy.

In 1920, a group of Whites was involved in the Kapp Putsch, which failed in Berlin, but brought a right-wing government into power in Bavaria—the cradle of the Nazi movement.36 Ilyin had arrived a few months after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922, in which Germany had de jure recognized the Soviet Union. This strengthened Ilyin’s existing belief that Weimar Germany was not to be counted on in the fight against the Bolsheviks. The RSI and the RPA emerged a year ahead of the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923, in which, once again, a group of Whites played a seminal role—leaving one wondering whether Ilyin’s efforts of training the Whites at the RSI had anything to do with the coup attempt.37

Two monarchist factions existed among the Whites in the interwar period: one that supported the bid for Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich (1856–1929), who predominantly sought support from the Entente powers for his anti-Bolshevik plotting, as future Tsar (Nikolaevichi). The other faction wanted to see Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich (1876–1938) on the throne, who had settled in Germany in the early 1920s and allied with German monarchists and the early Nazi movement in order to first topple the Weimar Republic and then the Soviet Union (Kirillovichi). However, among both camps were early supporters of fascism and Nazism.

Ilyin initially leaned towards the senior Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, a battle-hardened general married to Princess Anastasia of Montenegro, whose sister Elena of Montenegro was the wife of the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, who had put Mussolini in power. At the outset of WWI, Nicholas Nikolaevich was briefly commander-in-chief of the Russian Imperial Army, and later commander-in-chief in the Caucasus region. He escaped just ahead of the Red Army in April 1919 aboard the British Royal Navy battleship HMS Marlborough. After a stay in Genoa as a guest of Victor Emmanuel, Nicholas and his wife took up residence in a chateau at Choigny, near Paris, where they were granted protection by the French secret police.

From there, he directed his extensive White networks to terrorize, sabotage, and subvert the Soviet Union, whereby he deeply relied on the services of the White generals Alexander Kutepov (1882–1930) and Pyotr Wrangel. To fund their anti-Bolshevik endeavors, at the end of 1923, another fellow White general, Pyotr Krasnov (1869–1947), created a special fund for the Grand Duke, the “Treasury of the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich” (later renamed “Fund for the Salvation of the Homeland”).38 According to the historian Petr Bazanov:
The “Treasury of H. R. H. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich” (there were 73 branches in Bulgaria alone) collected money for political and publishing activities.... The treasury issued numerous appeals to the emigration...to donate as much as they can to the cause of the liberation of Russia.39
The Grand Duke’s competitor for the “throne in exile,” Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, was married to Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1876–1936). Both had left Russia in 1917, and from 1921 onward spent extensive periods of time in Coburg, Germany, where Victoria’s family had an estate—a safe haven for German Freikorps and one of the most important political bases of the early Nazi movement. Coburg was formerly a Duchy, whose last reigning Duke was Victoria’s cousin, Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1884–1954), a protégé of the last German emperor, Wilhelm II. Charles Edward provided financial and logistic support to the Freikorps Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, involved in the Kapp Putsch of 1920, as well as to the secret terrorist group Organization Consul, responsible for numerous political assassinations in the early 1920s.40

Kirill and Victoria maintained close relations with German monarchist circles, particularly with Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria and General Erich Ludendorff. They were openly supportive of the Nazi party, which appealed to them because of its anti-Bolshevism and the prospect that the Nazis might help restore the Russian monarchy.41 In 1922, the leader of the NSDAP and future Führer of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, came to Coburg to participate in the “German Day” celebrations hosted by Grand Duchess Victoria. The Duchess, in turn, attended several gatherings of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary arm of the Nazi party.42

Victoria was the couple’s driving force, pushing her husband to claim the throne in exile, which he ultimately did in August 1924, much to the chagrin of his contender Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. She also provided funds for the creation of the White pro-Nazi youth organization Mladorossy, which emerged following a congress in Munich in February 1923 and aimed to attract young people to the ranks of the Russian Legitimist movement, supporting her husband’s bid for “Tsar in Exile.”

An important interface for Kirill and Victoria’s collaboration with the bourgeoning Nazi movement was the obscure Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Union), which received financial support from the couple. Aufbau was a conspiratorial organization of White Russian and German aristocrats, military men, and industrialists intended to topple the Weimar Republic. It formed in October 1920, six months after the failed Kapp Putsch. Aufbau collaborated with Adolf Hitler throughout its short existence (1920–1923) and included the infamous WWI General Erich Ludendorff, who, after the war, became a prominent nationalist leader, just as the White-turned-Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg.

According to Michael Kellogg, “Along with other considerable funds that the couple had placed at Aufbau’s disposal,” Kirill and Victoria had lent 500,000 gold marks to General Erich von Ludendorff.43 Kellogg also suggested that the Nazi Party and Aufbau were financed with money from American industrialist Henry Ford, which was transferred through Kirill Vladimirovich’s representative in America and a member of Aufbau, Boris Brazol, and that “Brazol likely continued to act as a conduit between Ford and Kirill in the 1930s who transferred money from the former to the latter.”44 However, after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch failed, in which several prominent Kirillovichi were involved, and the Nazi Party was temporarily banned, Kirill and Victoria moved their major residence to France, which in the meantime had superseded Germany as the center of Russian emigration.

Although Ilyin was one of Wrangel’s top men in Berlin who had sworn allegiance to Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, his motivations were rather strategic: betting on the more powerful horse at a given point in time, all the while wooing German nationalists’ circles. After all, both monarchist factions had the common goal of toppling the Soviet Union, superordinate to any legitimist squabbles. Although the Nikolaevichi were initially more influential, Wrangel’s death in 1928, followed by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich’s in 1929, ultimately gave the advantage to Kirill’s camp, and Ilyin eventually lent his support to the latter.

Ilyin’s close conduct with Wrangel and his deputy Alexei von Lampe from 1923 onwards indicates that he was fully initiated in their anti-Bolshevik schemes from an early stage. After all, they had put him in the powerful position of training Whites at the RSI. Although Wrangel had been thoroughly defeated in the course of the Russian Civil War, even while his troops were evacuated from Crimea to Istanbul in November 1920, the idea of another intervention against the Bolsheviks emerged: the so-called “Spring Intervention” (Vesennyi pokhod), which became an idée fixe of the White Movement. Hoping for support from the Entente powers, it was planned that on May 1, 1921, the White Army would disembark at the Black Sea and start a new offensive against the Bolsheviks. This Spring Intervention was never realized. Nonetheless, the plan was maintained, with the date continuously postponed to further and further into the future, and ultimately became a purely symbolic and ideological rallying point for the White movement personified by Wrangel.45
ROVS

In 1922, Wrangel settled in the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (Kingdom of SCS), and there, in September 1924, founded the Russian All-Military Union (Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz, ROVS), with whose activities Ilyin became intimately involved.46 The purpose of the ROVS was to keep the White Army alive by uniting all White troops who had fled abroad to foment a guerrilla war in the USSR. It served as an umbrella organization for various smaller military unions and coordinated secret sabotage and reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union.47 The ROVS became the largest and best-known White émigré organization with an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 members.48

In 1924/1925, with the blessings of Wrangel, a youth branch of the ROVS, the National Youth Union (National’nyi Soiuz Molodezhi, NSM), was established by the White infantry general Alexander Kutepov, alongside Prince Anton Turkul and other White officers. According to a CIA memo “Kutepov...at this time was attached to the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich and...led the underground battle against the Soviets.”49 The British intelligence specialist Stephen Dorril stated that the NSM “enjoyed the support of several European intelligence services, in particular MI6.”50 MI6’s de facto control of the NSM was facilitated via the Inner Line (Vnutrennaia Liniia), the secret counter-intelligence unit of the ROVS and the NSM, headed by Kutepov and Claudius Voss, MI6 agent and head of the ROVS Balkan section at the time.51 Kutepov also ran his own combat group, the Combat organization of General Kutepov (Boevaia Organizatsiya Generala Kutepova), a secret organization within the ROVS created in 1922 for reconnaissance and sabotage activities on Soviet territory.

Although Ilyin was never identified as a member of the ROVS, he became a prominent ideologue of the organization and remained affiliated with the ROVS throughout his life. At a later point, he would come to work with one of the NSM’s successor organizations, the earliest precursor of the infamous Russian émigré group National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS).

As early as 1924, the ROVS-affiliated Obshchestvo Gallipoliitsev (Society of Gallipoli, which Wrangel and Kutepov had founded in November 1921) in Belgrade published texts by Ilyin. He also contributed an article to the Society’s journal Vestnik Gallipoliitsev, entitled “Our Political Image,” followed by the brochure “The Homeland and Us” in 1926 and an article in the Gallipoliyets titled “We Need to Get Ready” a year later.52

Presumably through his ROVS-connections, Ilyin’s articles also appeared in another Belgrade-based publication, Novoe vremia, to which he contributed numerous articles between 1925 and 1928, mostly polemics defending the White cause against its political enemies.
Pyotr Struve

Most of the articles that Ilyin wrote in the interwar period appeared in White publications that had sprung up in the centers of Russian emigration across Europe, particularly in France. A considerable number of them were published by Ilyin’s old colleague, Pyotr Struve, with whom Ilyin closely collaborated in those years and with whom he corresponded frequently, at least until 1940.53 Just like Ilyin, Struve had been deeply enmeshed in anti- Bolshevik plotting during the revolutionary years, which makes one wonder whether the two had previously worked together.

Struve had joined the anti-Bolshevik Right Center (Pravyi tsentr), a British-supported underground organization which emerged in November 1917 in Moscow that brought together right-wing interest groups from monarchist, military, and business circles. Struve sat on the “special council” of the Volunteer Army, which notably included the former SR terrorist Boris Savinkov. Although only short-lived, the Right Center had raised funds for the Volunteer Army. Some of its former members, including Struve, joined the quasi-successor organization National Center, which is said to have “received 500,000 rubles a month from British intelligence alone.54 The National Center would eventually join the Tactical Center’s efforts, in which Ilyin was suspected to have partaken.

During the Russian Civil War, Struve joined the Volunteer Army’s Council and, in 1919, he served as a representative of the White government of General Anton Denikin.55 When in early 1920 General Pyotr Wrangel took over as leader, Struve became Director of Foreign Affairs in Wrangel’s government.56 After the Whites’ defeat in November 1920, Struve eventually ended up in Paris where he stayed the rest of his life. A staunch supporter of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich’s bid for “Tsar in Exile,” Struve continued his anti-Bolshevik intrigues and joined various White émigré organizations in the interwar period. He was majorly involved in the refoundation of the National Center in Paris 1921 as the Russian National Committee (Russkii Natsional’nyi Komitet), committed to the armed struggle against Soviet Russia.57 Struve was also a member of the Brotherhood of St. Sophia, a quasi-chivalric Christian Orthodox organization which comprised some of the who’s who in White exile, including Ilyin’s former professor Novgorodtsev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, and Sergey Bulgakov.58

Struve became a well-known figure of the exiled White intelligentsia as the editor of two of their most important mouthpieces: the journal Russkaia mysl and the newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance), to both of which Ilyin contributed in the interwar period. Russkaia mysl had been reestablished by Struve in 1921 in Sofia and was then published in Prague (1922–1923), Berlin (1923–1926), and finally Paris (1927–1940). Between 1922 and 1927, Ilyin published several articles in Russkaia mysl, notably obituaries of his professors Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy, deceased in 1920, and Novgorodtsev, who died four years later, as well as other White apologia, such as “The National Significance of the White Army” in 1923/1924.59

In 1925 and 1926, Ilyin contributed about fifty articles to the Parisian newspaper Vozrozhdenie, while Struve was the editor (1925–1927). The Russian-language Vozrozhdenie existed from 1925 to 1940 and served as a mouthpiece for various currents of the White emigration.60 Ilyin wrote notably a series of nine “Letters About Fascism,” which were published between 1925 and 1926 under the pseudonym “Iver.”61 The first one, titled “Letters from Italy. Pages of Struggle,” was subtitled “from our correspondent,” presuming that Ilyin was inter alia working for Vozrozhdenie while visiting Italy in 1925/1926.

Besides France and the Kingdom of SCS, Ilyin could also count on publishing contacts in Latvia— another known hub of White activity. Ilyin contributed around ten articles to the Latvia-based journal Slovo between 1925 and 1928, and a few articles to Perezvony in 1926 and 1927, both located in Riga.
Flirting with the Eurasianists

While Ilyin’s contacts to Whites certainly prevailed after his arrival in Berlin, he was initially considering the possibility of joining forces with émigré circles that had considerably different ideological leanings, as his brief liaison with the Eurasianists shows. From 1922 to early 1925, Ilyin was in touch with representatives of the Eurasian movement, among whose founders and main leaders were Nikolai S. Trubetskoy (1890−1938), Pyotr N. Savitsky (1895−1968), and Pyotr Suvchinsky (1892−1985)—a rather motley crew of exiled Russian intellectuals who in the 1920s tried to kickstart a new school of thinking in the émigré community. Eurasianists believed that Russia was a civilization on its own and did not belong to Europe. In many respects, they accepted the Bolshevik revolution as a necessary step to swiftly modernize Russia. And thus, some of its proponents opposed the Whites’ anti-Bolshevik activities, including organizations such as the ROVS. Nonetheless, the Eurasianists’ strong adherence to Russian Orthodoxy put them at odds with the Bolsheviks’ militant atheism.

Trubetskoy, a longtime professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938) and considered the most pre-eminent Eurasianist figure, was in touch with Suvchinsky in Berlin, who kept him abreast of the development of the ambivalent relationship with Ilyin. Suvchinsky “later became their [the Eurasianists’] political representative in relations with the GPU and the leadership of the Bolsheviks,” according to Modest Kolerov.62 It seemed that initially both Ilyin and his Eurasianist contacts were keen to gain exposure through each others’ platforms and thought they could set aside some of their fundamental disagreements, not least of which was the Eurasianists’ rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the liaison between Ilyin and Eurasianist circles was cut short after one of Ilyin’s texts was rejected by one of their publications in early 1925—a chapter that made its way into Resistance to Evil by Force later that year—which apparently irrevocably hurt Ilyin’s pride.63

On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925)

It was in the mid-1920s that Ilyin notably started to sympathize with fascism, in which he saw a distinct parallel to the White movement. According to Tsygankov:
When Ilyin was in Italy in 1925–26 and wrote the book On Resistance to Evil by Force, he observed the fascist movement there. He hailed it as humanity’s response to the call of internationalism, to impiety, dishonor, and greed, and as a natural reaction to the lack of will to power and to state disorder. In Russia, Ilyin noted, this phenomenon had emerged as the White Movement.64
On Resistance to Evil by Force, originally written in Russian, expands on Ilyin’s Christofascist axiom that it is one’s religious duty to fight against the Bolsheviks. The book caused a major controversy and divided the Russian emigrants. However, it catapulted Ilyin into the limelight, and he subsequently became a rallying point for Whites who sympathized with fascism.

In June 1925, Ilyin promoted the release of the book in an article for Vozrozhdenie, which outlined the book’s main ideas, giving rise to the controversy.65 According to Tsygankov:
The minority supported Ilyin’s defense of the White movement and uncompromising struggle against the Bolsheviks: e.g., Peter Struve, Ivan Bunin, Ivan Shmelev, and the Executive Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky). However, it had more opponents: Berdyaev, Zinaida Gippius, many left-wing and liberal intellectuals who criticized the use of the Bible for justifying war and fighting.66
Struve had nothing but praise for Ilyin’s rhetorical skills: “...Russian academic rhetoric lost its luster to awaken to new life in the incomparable talent of I. A. Ilyin.”67 On Resistance to Evil by Force was first published in June 1925 in a private Berlin publishing house, Society “Press” (Gesellschaft “Presse”), which might have published Ilyin’s 1923 RSI brochure.68 The book was financed by Baron Boris Gustavovich von Koeppen, a member of the Supreme Monarchical Union (Vysshii Monarkhicheskii Soiuz), with whom Ilyin stayed in touch into the Nazi era.

It was distributed by the bookstore and publishing house Grad Kitezh in Berlin, which existed between 1920 and 1942 and was controlled by Duke George Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg (1872–1929).69 This is evidenced by a contract between Ilyin and Grad Kitezh to take over the book’s distribution.70 In all likelihood, it was Ilyin’s connection to the bookstore that kicked off his collaboration with the Duke.

Leuchtenberg, who was “a descendant of Nicholas I, Napoleon I’s stepson Eugene Beauharnais, and closely related to the Bavarian royal dynasty of the Wittelsbachs,” had been deeply entrenched in anti-Bolshevik plotting since the days of the October Revolution.71 Leuchtenberg, who was also related to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and supported his cause, had cofounded the monarchist union Our Homeland (Nasha Rodina), which in 1918 coordinated the formation of the short-lived White-German Southern Army in Kiev.72
Leuchtenberg was a leading figure of the Brotherhood of Russian Truth (Bratstvo Russkoy Pravdy) in the early 1920s and funded its publishing house Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik).

According to Bazanov, a chronicler of the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, “The bookstore [Grad Kitezh] was the main representative of the monarchical publishing houses Detinets, Mednyi Vsadnik, Kremlin, Styag, Dvuhlavy Orel, Aufbau, and many others.”73 It should be noted that Aufbau was associated with the aforementioned Aufbau Vereinigung, which was among the first organizations involving White Russians to conspire with the bourgeoning Nazi movement.

Besides his publishing activities, Ilyin kept afloat with lecture tours in Germany and abroad. It should be noted that shortly upon his arrival, Ilyin started giving lectures at numerous folkish and nationalist associations and clubs, some of them affiliated with the early Nazi movement. On April 16, 1923, he spoke at the National Club (Nationaler Klub) in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler had given a speech a year earlier.74 On March 16, 1926, he was invited to an invitation-only event of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei), a nationalist, folkish, and antisemitic party that eventually merged with the Nazi Party.75

At the beginning of the draft speech, Ilyin pointed out that he was “born with a national and patriotic mindset,” and that he fully agreed with the “open, truthful, and truly German words” of the previous speaker (although Ilyin had not yet heard what the latter had to say). He noted that the friends of a national Russia abroad do not come from the war’s winners but from its losers (i.e., Germany), and that they should awaken to the “world danger” of the communist revolution.6 It should be noted that the Nazi Party had made a comeback at that point. Although banned after the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, it continued to operate under the name “German Party” (Deutsche Partei).76 Barely two months after Adolf Hitler was released from prison in December 1924, he pressed the Bavarian authorities to lift the ban on the Nazi party, which led to the refoundation of the NSDAP on February 26, 1925, with Hitler at the helm.

On March 26, 1926, Ilyin gave a speech at the Prussian Mansion (Preussisches Herrenhaus) about the “New National Russia.”77 In late 1927, he spoke at the United Fatherland Associations (Vereinte Vaterländische Verbände) in Munich. The lecture had apparently “created a sensation” so that the management forwarded Ilyin’s address to the Bavarian Industrial Association (Bayerischer Industriellenverband).78 This may have given way to Ilyin’s numerous contacts with those in German industrialist circles, which became particularly frequent during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1925, Ilyin also began to appear in the orbit of nationalist émigré organizations, notably the Russian National Student Association (Russkii Natsional’nyi Studentechskii Soiuz, RNSS). In November of that year, he gave a speech at an invitation-only event organized by the RNSS, alongside Alexei von Lampe, celebrating the eighth year of the founding of the Volunteer Army and its leader, the “black baron,” Pyotr Wrangel.79
Russian Foreign Congress (1926)

Ilyin’s important ideological role within the ROVS became evident during the Russian Foreign Congress (Rossiiskii Zarubezhnyi S”ezd), which took place from April 4–11, 1926, at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, bringing together over 400 representatives of Russian diasporas from 26 countries.80 In September of the previous year, Struve had been elected chairman of the 72-strong Organizing Committee at a preliminary conference, which was comprised of delegates from “some one hundred émigré organizations.”81 Alongside N. E. Markov II and Pyotr N. Krasnov, Ilyin had been elected in December 1925 as a delegate for the Parisian organizational committee, at a meeting of 25 right-wing organizations in Berlin.82

Although boycotted by followers of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich and rattled by various political squabbles, the 1926 congress managed to unite the majority of participants in calling on Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to head the Russian monarchists in emigration—a feat notably accomplished by Struve.83 This happened more than two years after Kirill Vladimirovich had arbitrarily assumed the title of “Emperor of All Russia” in exile.

According to Tsygankov:
In the spring of 1926 Ilyin took part in the Russian Congress of Foreigners in Paris, where members of the conservative and monarchist wings of the emigration dominated, and delivered his speech on a “non-party monarchist ideal.” Since then, Ilyin became known as an ideologist of the White Movement and its foreign military organization ROVS...throughout the Russian diaspora.84
Ilyin’s speech was printed in the Belgrade newspaper Novoe vremia and in Struve’s Vozrozhdenie.85 The congress brought Ilyin in touch with numerous White dignitaries. Among them was Prince Nikolai B. Shcherbatov (1868– 1943), a staunch supporter of the Nikolaevichi, whose subsequent promotion of Ilyin led to several business opportunities. From one of the oldest Russian noble families, Shcherbatov had held several high ministerial posts in Imperial Russia from 1895 until the October Revolution, when he moved to Bavaria.
Entente Internationale Anticommuniste

At the Russian Foreign Congress, Ilyin also became acquainted with Yury Lodyzhensky (1888–1977), and, subsequently, his brother Alexander Ilyich Lodyzhensky (1891–1954), whose contacts to powerful White circles provided new opportunities for Ilyin.86 The brothers were Whites of the first hour, and both became fiercely anti-communist activists in exile. Yuri Lodyzhensky had settled in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1921, where he headed the Russian Red Cross Society and, in 1924, co-founded the International Anticommunist Alliance (Entente Internationale Anticommuniste, EIA, a.k.a. Aubert League), which his brother also joined.87 The EIA was a quasi- intelligence organization founded in explicit opposition to the Communist Third International (Comintern), with funds raised by the Swiss lawyer Théodore Aubert. Active from 1924 to 1950, the EIA was conceived as an umbrella group of anti-communist organizations from all around the world and included German Nazi-affiliated groups.

In 1924, a “Russian Section” of the EIA emerged, headed by Yuri Lodyzhensky, which liaised
inter alia with the Bavaria-based Duke George Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg of the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, who became a strong supporter of Ilyin.88 Lodyzhensky also brought the Latvian Prince Anatoly Lieven (1872–1937) on board, who doubled as head of the ROVS and the Brotherhood of Russian Truth in Latvia with which Ilyin came to develop special ties.89 According to historian Stéphanie Roulin, Ilyin subsequently “became the EIA’s main Russian correspondent in Germany and provided a point of contact with national circles in Germany.”90 Ilyin stayed in touch with the Lodyzhenskys until the end of his life, who became an important point of contact following Ilyin’s second exile in Switzerland.91
From left to right: Bottom row: Elena Georgievna Tribinskaya (née Duchess of Leuchtenberg), Pyotr Wrangel, Arkady Konstantinovich Tribinsky. Standing: Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Leuchtenberg, Nikolai Mikhailovich Kotlyarevsky (secretary of General Wrangel), Natalia Nikolaevna Ilyina, Sergei Alekseevich Sokolov, Ivan Ilyin, Alexei Alexandrovich von Lampe. At Leuchtenberg’s castle in Seeon, Bavaria. July 2, 1926. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Beloe Delo (1926)

Following the 1926 congress, Ilyin consolidated his intimate collaboration with the ROVS commander Pyotr Wrangel and his deputy Alexei von Lampe, who from 1924 onwards headed the second department of the ROVS in Berlin. Ilyin joined their cause to establish an anti-Soviet intelligence project in conjunction with the Brotherhood of Russian Truth (BRT), another White organization that had Wrangel’s blessing. Although independent from the ROVS, BRT members were often connected to the former organization as well, including von Lampe.92 Ilyin himself has never been identified as a member of the BRT; however, he aided in its covert efforts and created propaganda for the organization.

Just as the ROVS, the BRT was actively involved in the subversion of the young Soviet Union by means of terrorism and White propaganda.93 The organization emerged after Sergey Sokolov-Krechetov (1878–1936) became “an unofficial trusted political correspondent” of Wrangel in Paris, where in 1921 he founded the newspaper Russkaia pravda with funds provided by the “black baron.”

According to Bazanov, Russkaia pravda was “under the supervision of a special political department of the Main Command...led by General A. P. Kutepov,” which in June 1922 transformed “into a military-political organization, the Brotherhood of Russian Truth.”94 The BRT existed until 1934, and some of its organizations survived until 1940.95

When, in 1926, the ROVS and the BRT embarked on their joint intelligence project, as a cover they opted for a publishing endeavor headed by von Lampe, which sought to collect texts by the White emigration addressing the revolutionary years. To that end, from 1926 until 1933, von Lampe edited a series of six books—the almanac The White Cause: A Chronicle of the White Struggle—printed by the BRT’s publishing house Bronze Horseman.96 The project, which had been discussed since 1923, originated with von Lampe and, according to Lisitsa, was “supported by A. P. Lieven, Duke G. N. Leuchtenberg and P. N. Wrangel.”97 Ilyin subsequently provided the introduction to Beloe Delo under the title “The White Idea.”98

A credible case has been made that the Bronze Horseman served as a front organization for the BRT and its subversive operations; and the endeavor of collecting submissions for Beloe Delo was just a cover for the ROVS and the BRT to keep in touch with White dignitaries scattered around Europe. Bazanov, referencing the Russian historian V. G. Bortnevsky, states “that the editorial office of the almanac Beloie Delo...became the organizational center of the second department of the ROVS, headed by von Lampe, who relied on the money he received from the distribution of the almanac.”99

According to Bazanov, the initial “coordination of the publication of the collection [Beloe Delo] and discussion of political issues took place at Seeon Castle of G. N. Leuchtenberg in early July 1926.”100 A photo from this high- level meeting shows Ilyin together with the ROVS leaders, Wrangel and von Lampe, at Seeon Castle in Bavaria, alongside several other important White figures, including Sergey Sokolov-Krechetov, founder of the BRT and director of the Bronze Horseman.101

Ilyin was possibly already acquainted with the castle’s owner, Duke George Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg, since as discussed above, the latter’s bookstore and publishing house, Grad Kitezh, had taken on the distribution of Ilyin’s book, On Resistance to Evil by Force, a year earlier. Besides funding various publishing endeavors, including the Bronze Horseman, Leuchtenberg was also involved in the militant White underground.

Together with Nikolai Poznyakov, Leuchtenberg had set up the Banque Slave du Midi around 1923, “to financially support [Alexander] Kutepov’s combat group—clandestine activities in the USSR,” according to a White comrade-in-arms, Arkady Petrovich Stolypin (1903–1990).102 Stolypin is most likely referring to the Combat organization of General Kutepov, the secret organization created within the ROVS in 1922 for reconnaissance and sabotage activities in the territory of the USSR.

That Ilyin must have been intimately familiar with these developments is indicated by a trip he and his wife took in August 1927 to South Tyrol, Italy, alongside two people involved in the Banque Slave du Midi through which funds for Alexander Kutepov’s “clandestine activities” were funneled: Arkady Stolypin and his brother-in-law, Vadim Grigorievich Volkonsky (1895–1973).103 When the Banque Slave du Midi was close to bankruptcy in 1926, Volkonsky replenished the funds and appointed Stolypin as secretary of the bank.104 Stolypin later became the head of the French NTS section between 1941 and 1948. Ilyin possibly knew the wealthy Volkonskys since 1923, since a picture of him and his wife was found as part of Ilyin’s estate with a dedication dated to that year.105

Although no details are known about the 1927 meeting, it must have had something to do with Alexander Kutepov, since that year, when the Inner Line expanded its efforts, Ilyin was apparently instructed by Wrangel to help organize an anti-Bolshevik organization that aimed to remedy Kutepov’s shortcomings. Lisitsa described the plans as follows:
...in 1927, General Wrangel and his most trusted associates, including Ilyin, were collaborating to create a secret organization for the active anti-Bolshevik struggle in Soviet Russia (as a counter-weight to Kutepov’s, which continued to operate despite its failures and public exposure). The editors of Beloe Delo were to be moved to Paris to establish “a front for the conspiratorial center,” while the combined roles of editor and director of the “work inside Russia” should be taken over by A. A. von Lampe. It was planned to organize editorial offices in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Romania, which in fact were to be engaged in intelligence activities; and the provision of one or more lines of communication from the border to one of the Russian centers, “to ensure the acquisition of firearms and, if possible, handheld explosive projectiles.”106
From left to right: Arkady Stolypin, Natalia Ilyina, Vadim Volkonsky, Elena Volkonskaya, Ivan Ilyin. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
The decision to go around Kutepov might be rooted in the fact that the latter’s operations were notoriously infiltrated by OGPU agents, and his ideas about the course of anti-Bolshevik efforts differed considerably from those of Wrangel’s. According to a CIA study, “In Paris, General Kutepov, with neither the patience or foresight of Wrangel, decided to follow an independent course.... Terrorism on a large scale was needed. This would confuse the Bolsheviks, force them to commit blunders, and ultimately bring about the collapse of their regime.”107

Although little is known about Beloe Delo’s secret efforts, they must have been severely hampered shortly after they began. In 1928, General Wrangel died; his master, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, followed suit a year later, who since 1925 had struggled with cancer. After Wrangel’s death, Kutepov became commander of the ROVS and took charge of Beloe Delo, which caused considerable internal discontent among those involved. Ilyin’s close friend Ivan Shmelev, who presumably engaged in the secret Beloe Delo endeavors, wrote to Ilyin from Paris in May 1928, barely a month after Wrangel died, that “our rooms were handed over to the Kutepovs.”108 However, Kutepov’s leadership was also cut short, when he was kidnapped in January 1930 by Soviet intelligence agents and died in the process, allegedly of a heart attack.

Russian Bell (1927–1930)

Although details about Ilyin’s role in the “secret organization for the active anti-Bolshevik struggle” under the cover of Beloe Delo are unavailable, in the summer of 1927, the year that the organization was devised, Ilyin became the publisher and editor of a White journal called Russkii kolokol.109 This leaves room to speculate whether the Russian Bell was Ilyin’s cover for working with Wrangel’s “secret organization.” According to Lisitsa, “Ilyin conceived his journal after he terminated his cooperation with the newspaper Vozrozhdenie in protest against the dismissal of its editor-in- chief, P. B. Struve.”110

In the Russkii kolokol, printed in Berlin, Ilyin made openly pro-Nazi propaganda. Peter states that in the journal, Ilyin “praised Russian fascism (along with Italian, German, and Hungarian) as part of a new world chivalry, with which humanity responds to the attack of godlessness, dishonor and greed.”111 The Russkii kolokol was well received among Whites and fascists alike.

According to Lisitsa:
Positive reviews were sent to Ilyin by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky); Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky); Archbishop Anastasy (Gribanovsky); Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich; the White generals A. P. Kutepov, A. M. Dragomirov, and H. F. Ern; the head of the Government Commissioner for Russian refugees in Serbia, S. N. Paleolog; Lieutenant-General, Ataman of the Kuban Cossack Troops, A. P. Filimonov; the White Army officer K. K. Smirnov; the writer I. S. Shmelev; the businessman N. Gromov; a figure of the Aubert League, Y. I. Lodyzhensky; directress of the Mariinsky Female Institute in Serbia N. N. Lukonina; and others. Positive reviews were published by the Paris newspapers Vozrozhdenie (I. S. Shmelev, N. N. Chebyshev, V. L.), Rossiia i slavianstvo (Sol) and Rossiua (P. B. Struve, K. Zaitsev), the Belgrade newspaper Novoe vremia (M. A. Suvorin, V. Davatz, N. Rybinsky, Starozhil, V. K.), the Riga newspaper Slovo (N. Kedrov, N. Rusin, S., R. Zile), the Harbin newspaper Russkoe slovo (A. A. Gryzov), and the Tianjin newspaper Nash Putʹ.112
The Russkii kolokol brought together a group of notorious White militants and propagandists favorable to the rise of fascism and the Nazi movement, many of whom would collaborate with the Nazis during WWII (and with Western intelligence after the war). How pertinent these tendencies were is illustrated by some of their biographies:

  • Pyotr Nikolaevich Krasnov (1869–1947) had already collaborated with the Germans during the Russian Civil War. In June 1918, he wrote a letter to Wilhelm II offering the vassalage of the Don Cossacks to the Germans. During WWII, Krasnov headed the Cossack Central Office of Alfred Rosenberg’s Ostministerium, and helped to mobilize Cossacks for the Wehrmacht.113

  • Boris Alexandrovich Shteifon (1881–1945), was a lieutenant general who, in the summer of 1918, headed the underground volunteer center in Kharkov together with General von Lampe and was involved in the transfer of officers to the Volunteer Army during the German occupation of Ukraine under Simon Petliura’s puppet regime.3 He was the last commander of the collaborationist Russian Security Corps in the Balkans, which swore allegiance to Hitler and reported to SS- Gruppenführer F. Neuhausen, head of the occupation administration in Yugoslavia. In January 1945, Shteifon came under the command of the traitor General Vlasov, and finally killed himself at the end of the war.114

  • Nikolai Nikolayevich Golovin (1875–1944) was a White general who emigrated to France in the course of the Russian Civil War. On the instruction of Pyotr Wrangel in 1921, Golovin started to draw up a curriculum for a military academy that could prepare White émigré officers for the future war against the USSR. His coursework was used among exiles in numerous countries, and the efforts culminated in the creation of the Foreign Higher Military Science Courses in 1927, designated as a successor to the Imperial Nikolaev Military Academy.115 According to the military historian Ofer Fridman, “From 1926 to 1940, Golovin was the official representative of the Hoover Military Library in Paris,” and after that “was engaged in sending Russian volunteers to work in Germany and restaffing the Russian Liberation Army with officers.”116

  • Nikolai Sergeyevich Arsenyev (1888–1977) was a prominent White émigré writer, who served in the Political Department of the Volunteer Army during the Russian Civil War. A Nazi-collaborator, from 1941 to 1942 Arsenyev served at the Eastern front as a Russian translator for the Wehrmacht with the rank of Sonderführer, who was also consulted by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce.117 Until 1944, he taught at the theological department of the University of Königsberg under the supervision of the Nazi Ministry of Science, Education and Culture. From 1945 to 1947 he lived in Paris and lectured at Sorbonne and the Catholic University. In 1947, he settled in the US with the help of the Tolstoy Foundation (thus avoiding extradition to the USSR), taught at the St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary in New York, and lectured at the University of Montreal.118 He was chairman of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the USA from 1971 to 1977, which included several of Ilyin’s former beneficiaries and admirers.

  • Nikolai A .Tsurikov (1886–1957) (literary aliases Ivan Belenikhin,Z) was a prominent White émigré figure and writer, whose father, General Tsurikov, remained a military specialist in the service of the Red Army. Tsurikov had studied at the Moscow University Faculty of Law while Ilyin was teaching there. During the Russian Civil War, he joined the Armed Forces of the South of Russia, then the Russian Army. In 1923, Tsurikov settled in Prague where he became an eminent anti-Bolshevik journalist and public figure. A close collaborator of Struve, Tsurikov was a member of the editorial board of Rossiia i slavianstvo and contributed to various Russian émigré periodicals, including Russkaia mysl and Vozrozhdenie.119 As a ROVS member, he cooperated closely with Alexander Kutepov and was an active proponent of terrorism against the Soviet Union. During WWII, Tsurikov joined the efforts of the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army. After the war, he headed the German section of the US-supported anti-communist Union of Struggle for the Freedom of Russia (SBSR).120 Residing in Munich, he participated in the creation of ratlines that helped Russian collaborators elude denazification and repatriation to the Soviet Union.

  • And last but not least, theRusskii kolokol included Ekaterina Mironovna. Mironova, who wrote under the pseudonym “E. M. Gaug,” whom Yuri Lisitsa describes as “a follower of the ideas (‘Aryanism’) of H. S. Chamberlain and Emil Medtner,” the older brother of Ilyin’s close friend Nikolai Medtner.121
Igor Sikorsky with his family near his home from 1936. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
The first few issues of the Russkii kolokol were financed by the Moscow merchant Nikolai Gromov, who had left Russia shortly before.122 Other sponsors included the famous composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, with whom Ilyin was frequently in contact between 1927 and 1946.123 The contact with Rachmaninoff may have been established by Ilyin’s friend Nikolai Medtner, whom Rachmaninoff had helped in leaving the Soviet Union in 1924 by securing him a tour in the United States and Canada. The former Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Karel Petrovich Kramář, and his Russian wife, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Kramář, also supported the Russkii kolokol.124

Furthermore, the journal received funds from Vladimir Bari, the vice president of the I. I. Sikorsky Corporation of Igor Sikorsky, whom Lisitsa suspects to be the actual sponsor.125 Ilyin remained in touch with Sikorsky and his wife, and they both sporadically exchanged letters from 1936 to 1947.126 It should be noted that in the year the Russkii kolokol was established, Sikorsky was involved in a never realized plot in the vein of the mythical “Spring Intervention.” To that end, Colonel Dementiev of the Union of Russian Sovereign People (Soiuz Russkikh Gosudarevykh Liudei), a White organization under the patronage of Grand Duke Kirill’s daughter, Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna, devised a plan to land 3,000 troops with airplanes to the Don region provided by the Sikorsky Corporation and then raise local Cossack forces to march on Moscow.127

Sikorsky also appears in the orbit of the Brotherhood of Russian Truth. He chaired the American section of the Russian Liberation Treasury in memory of the Tsar Martyr Nicholas II (Russkaia Osvoboditelʹnaia Kazna v Pamiatʹ Tsaria-Muchenika Nikolaia II, ROK), which financed the activities of the BRT from 1930 onwards; he was succeeded by the infamous Nazi-sympathizer and fellow White émigré, Anastasy Vonsiatsky (1898–1965).128 It is known that as of 1929, Vonsiatsky was involved in the BRT, and financed several of its publications in the US and abroad.129 Subsequently, he traveled to Europe and, according to Bazanov, delivered “gas bombs and special rubber sticks with tear gas to members of the BRT, as well as police rubber batons from the US police arsenal.”130

As mentioned above, the years in which the Russian Bell was published were characterized by considerable upheavals within the White movement. The deaths of Wrangel and of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich were heavy blows to the Nikolaevichi and brought back questions of alignment. This concerned firstly the matter of the “legitimate” heir to the throne in exile. Since Nicholas Nikolaevich had died without offspring, there was no contender in his line to rally behind. This vacuum gave his Nazi-aligned competitor, Grand Duke Kirill Kirillovich, a natural advantage, with the Kirillovichi clearly winning the upper hand.

Consequently, the divide deepened between those Whites who sought support from the former Entente powers and those who rallied behind the bourgeoning Nazi movement in Germany. This found expression in a growing divide between the major factions of the Russian Orthodox Church in exile, with the Paris-based Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe leaning towards the former Entente, and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR) siding with Germany, and subsequently the Nazis.

Amidst these heavy upheavals, Ilyin was involved in the planning of at least two events intended to nudge the Nikolaevichi towards supporting Kirill: the bourgeoning Nazi movement and the ROCOR. After Wrangel’s death in 1928, it was most likely “Ilyin [who] planned a requiem for Wrangel that should also be open for German sympathizers,” according to Schlögel; however, “the plan failed over disunity, whether Tikhon [Lyaschenko, ROCOR Bishop of Berlin and Germany] or Eulogius [head of the Paris-based Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe] should lead the mess.”131 And in May 1928, Ilyin and von Lampe appeared among the speakers at an event in Berlin commemorating Wrangel’s death, organized in collaboration with the Russian National Student Association, as well as “non-party, national and militaristic associations.”132

In that period Ilyin occupied several powerful positions in the Russian emigration. In January 1929, he was elected to the board of the Russian-German School Society (Russko-Nemetskoe Shkol’noe Obshchestvo), alongside von Lampe and others.133 As of April 1930, Ilyin was the chairman of the influential Union of Russian Journalists and Writers in Germany (Soiuz Russkikh Zhurnalistov i Literatorov v Germanii, SRZL) in Berlin, whose secretary at the time was Vladimir M. Despotuli.134 After the Nazis’ seizure of power, Despotuli became the longtime editor-in-chief of the regime-approved Russian-language newspaper Novoe slovo, which existed throughout the Nazi era.135
First connections to the NTS

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ilyin notably intensified his collaboration with White organizations sympathizing with the Nazis. The most important of them was arguably the Russian émigré group National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). (In the literature, the organization is often simply denoted as NTS. However, it has gone through various organizational and name changes throughout its existence.)

Its first iteration, the National Youth Union (National’nyi Soiuz Molodezhi, NSM), was comprised of young ROVS cadres, which until 1930 were organized in various national chapters under the overall leadership of Alexander Kutepov. Although there are no indications that Ilyin had worked with the NSM, Russkii kolokol was very popular among its cadres, according to Yuri Lisitsa. M. V. Nazarov states in a 1980 article by the NTS-affiliated Posev journal: “Even after its publication was discontinued, the Russkii kolokol, according to the testimony of senior NTS members, was for a long time still something of a textbook for them. It was believed that everyone should read it.”136

Ilyin appeared in the organization’s orbit latest after Kutepov’s death in 1930. At that point, the NSM underwent some substantial changes and took a decisively pro-German and pro-Nazi course. When the MI6-controlled Inner Line’s existence had become widely known among ROVS youths, “the collaborators in the ‘Inner Line’ were removed from the ranks,”137 and the remnants regrouped in the framework of the umbrella organization National Union of Russian Youth Abroad (Natsionalʹnyi Soiuz Russkoi Molodezhi za Rubezhom; NSRM). The NSRM came under the direction of Sergei Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg (1903–1966), the nephew of the aforementioned Georges Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg. He chaired the NSRM from 1930 to 1934, renamed in 1931 as the National Union of the New Generation (NSNP, 1931–1936).138

Leuchtenberg stayed in Germany during the entire Nazi period and was active in Nazi-affiliated White Russian circles. Under Leuchtenberg, the organization started welcoming Nazism, as evidenced by articles of the NSNP’s newspaper Za Rossiiu. An article from a February 1933 issue reads: “The great event of recent times was Adolph Hitler’s accession to power. The leader of the German National Socialists, the leader of the national revolution, and the harbinger of social reforms has come to power....”139 The NSNP positioned itself clearly with a dictatorship as the most suitable form of government for a future Russia.140
A group photo of Ilyin’s associates at the 1930 St. Julien Congress of the Aubert League. They include Yury Lodyzhensky with his wife (4th and 5th from the left), Alexander Lodyzhensky (2nd from the right), B. Nikolsky with his wife, and Roman M. Zile (3rd from the right). Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Russian Section of the EIA

In restructuring the ROVS youth wing after Kutepov’s death in 1930, the Russian Section of the International Anti-Communist League (EIA) played an eminent role, with which Ilyin was closely associated. From June 25–27, 1930, the Russian Section of the EIA organized a congress in Saint-Julien- en-Genevois with the aim of uniting all the existing sections of the ROVS youth wing scattered throughout Europe.

The congress was conceived as a preliminary gathering of representatives from various national NSM chapters with the aim of merging them into a common umbrella organization (NSRM). Among the delegates were notably a Volkonsky Prince, Baron Boris Koeppen, who had financed the 1925 edition of Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force, and two Dukes of Leuchtenberg, including the future chairman of the NSRM Sergey Nikolaevich of Leuchtenberg.141

It can be presumed that Ilyin was part of this seminal meeting, since a picture from 1930 exists that depicts him in Saint-Julien alongside one of the congress’s participants, Roman Zile; another one shows Zile alongside other congress attendees, including Alexander Lodyzhensky, Yury Lodyzhensky with his wife, and a certain B. A. Nikolsky with his wife.142

A year after the congress, in 1931, the Lodyzhensky brothers created the Russian Christian Workers’ Movement (Russkoe Trudovoe Khristianskoe Dvizhenie, RTKD) from the Russian Section of the EIA, with which Ilyin also closely collaborated in the years to come.143 Based in Saint-Julien-en- Genevois, the RTKD was presided over by Alexander Lodyzhensky and notably included the White General Nikolai Golovin, a contributor to Ilyin’s Russkii kolokol. The RTKD had strong ties to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, including Archpriest Sergei Ivanovich Orlov (1864–1944), who had established several ROCOR parishes in Switzerland and France.144 Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovskii) (1873– 1965), second First Hierarch of ROCOR, sponsored “spiritual development and Christian morality courses” for children organized by the RTKD.145 In 1932 and 1933, two of Ilyin’s articles appeared in the RTKD journal Novyi putʹ published in Geneva, titled “Take care of your family” and “The spiritual meaning of our work.”146

Activities in Switzerland, France, and Latvia

Ilyin’s connections to Switzerland generally intensified in the late interwar period. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin traveled there several times, and he would ultimately end up in the country in 1938. Ilyin elaborated on some of those visits in his 1938 application for Swiss residency:
I have spoken several times in Switzerland by invitation. For example, in 1925 I gave several lectures at the Zurich Psychological Club on religious-philosophical problems. In 1927, I spoke at the Basel Sample Fair (Mustermesse) about the possible investment of the Swiss economy in my fatherland, and at the Basel Liberal District Association about the sociological causes of Bolshevism. In 1932, I gave two lectures in Zurich—one...on “Spirit as Need and Problem of the Present” and the second on a problem of art criticism.147
The 1927 lecture was given to the Economic Council of the Basel National Economy Association, titled “On the Failure of Communism in Russia Regarding the Basic Economic Laws.”148 In 1931, Ilyin also appeared as a speaker at the Rotary Club in Bern, organized with the help of Dr. Hans Trüb, who subsequently became Ilyin’s supporter.149 That year in Geneva, the publishing house Struggle for Culture published the Russian-language brochure “The Poison of Bolshevism,” which was translated into German and Swedish in 1932 and 1933, respectively.150

In the late 1920s, Ilyin was able to extend his publishing activity in France. Between 1928 and 1932, a few of Ilyin’s articles appeared in the Parisian newspaper Rossiya i Slavyanstvo, edited by the Russian Bell contributor Nikolai Tsurikov, including a poem in the memory of the deceased Duke George of Leuchtenberg titled “Seeon Castle.”151 Ilyin also contributed two articles to the magazine Russkii Invalid between 1928 and 1929, also published in Paris.

Furthermore, in the early 1930s, Ilyin consolidated his discernible Latvian ties. He particularly intensified his collaboration with the Latvia-based White Roman Martinovich (Erich) Zile (1900–1971), who subsequently became a “student and friend” of Ilyin and eventually his secretary. In the period between 1931 and 1937, Zile invited Ilyin several times to lectures in Latvia on behalf of the Russian Academic Society (Russkoe Akademicheskoe Obshchestvo) in Riga, where Zile served as long-term chairman.152
Ivan Ilyin and Roman M. Zile at Saint-Julien in 1930. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Ilyin got acquainted with Zile in 1928, according to O. V. Lisitsa, most likely in the context of Wrangel’s endeavor to build up a joint secret organization with the Brotherhood of Russian Truth in the context of Beloe Delo.153 The two reportedly met in 1930 in Saint-Julien, presumably in the context of the EIA congress that year. The Odessa-born Zile had served in the White Army during the Russian Civil War. In 1922, he moved to Latvia, where he became a member of several White émigré organizations, most notably the BRT, of which he was the youth leader (pseudonym “Podgorny”).154

Zile had been a longtime associate of General Alexander Kutepov, the quasi-head of the ROVS youth and terrorist branches until 1930. Between 1924 and 1926, on the instructions of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Kutepov, Captain F. F. Zeyberlich created a network of underground cells in Latvia, one of which Zile headed. According to the historian Maxim Solovyov, “The organization’s tasks included training personnel to transport groups to the USSR in the
event of peasant uprisings and transporting propaganda literature to the USSR.”155 Zile was also a member of the ROVS and became the general representative of the NSNP and NTSNP in Latvia.156 This is not surprising given that “A distinctive feature of the activities of the BRT in...Latvia was the almost complete organizational unity with the ROVS and the monarchist Nikolaevichi,” according to Bazanov.157

Ilyin’s first invitations to Latvia came when Zile worked as an official at the Latvian Joint Stock Bank (1929–1932), all the while controlling the BRT’s intelligence operations, which increasingly resorted to terrorism.158 This development has been attributed to Prince Anatoly Lieven, head of the BRT in Latvia and affiliated to the Russian Section of the EIA, who in 1931 decided to restructure the BRT’s counterintelligence apparatus toward a terrorist direction, with Zile at the helm. To that end, Zile and his fellow combatants established an underground explosives workshop in Riga to facilitate terror attacks against Soviet targets. For example, in 1931, they planted a bomb on a Soviet train, but the explosives were spotted and the attack thwarted.159

It seems hard to conceive that Ilyin was not privy to Zile’s subversive activities and may have even supported them, given that Ilyin himself had done intelligence work for the BRT and the ROVS in the past under the cover of Beloe Delo; and he must have been fully aware of the eminent role that Lieven played given that they both belonged to the inner circle of the Russian Section of the EIA. The Latvian authorities were aware of Ilyin’s appearances from early on. According to Bazanov “in 1932, I. A. Ilyin arrived in Riga once again with the intention of giving a lecture on Stalin, which the Latvian authorities prohibited.”160 Shortly thereafter, in October 1932, Zile was expelled from Latvia when Soviet-Latvian trade negotiations were underway, and Soviet intelligence leaked details about Zile’s terrorist ventures to the liberal émigré press. Zile temporarily found refuge in Germany; however, in September 1933, he was granted permission to return to Latvia, where he continued to organize lecture tours for Ilyin.161
Anti-communist and pro-Nazi activities in Germany (1927–1933)

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ilyin markedly deepened his ties to German anti-communist agitators from business, political, and church circles, many of whom sympathized with the Nazis. In that period, Ilyin began to frequently contribute articles to the German press, for the most part fiercely anti-communist and religious propaganda. Most notably, from 1928 to 1932, Ilyin wrote about twenty articles for the Berlin newspaper, Tag, carrying titles such as “What Is Cultural Bolshevism” and “Bolshevism as Psychosis.”162 Furthermore, a few articles for the Munich Latest News (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten) are recorded, including “The Coming Russia: Cooperation with Germany—The Great Process of Clarification” and one article in memory of Pyotr Wrangel.163

Ilyin also provided anticommunist propaganda to various business associations. In 1928, he delivered a speech on the “Expropriation in Russia and Its Significance for the World” to the German Association of Home and Estate Owners (Zentralverband Deutscher Haus- und Grundbesitzervereine), printed as a chapter in the association’s annual report.164 In 1928, he wrote an article titled “World Crisis of Property Consciousness” for the German Mining Newspaper (Deutsche Bergwerkszeitung).165 In 1929, he published “Communism or Private Property” with the association’s publishing house.166 From 1930 to 1932, he contributed to the weekly of the Brandenburg section of the Agrarian Federation (Landbund), for which he also held lectures, for example, about “The Sufferings of the Russian Peasant.”167 In February 1930, Ilyin gave a lecture to the Reich Economic Council (Reichswirtschaftsrat) on “The Decay of the Family Order in Russia.”168 Throughout 1931, he was in touch with the Federation of German Employer Associations (Vereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände e.V
.), which printed a review of Ilyin’s “Communism or Private Property.”169 Some of these contacts carried into the Nazi period.

At the same time, church dignitaries started to knock on Ilyin’s door. In 1930, the head of the Catholic Apprentice Federation inquired whether Ilyin could do a series of lectures as an “antidote...against communist influences.”170 In 1931, he was invited by the Parochial Association of Protestant Congregations (Parochialverband Evangelischer Kirchengemeinden) in Berlin to give a speech about “The Intellectual Foundations of Bolshevism.”171 In early 1932, the president of the State Ecclesiastical Office of Hesse (Landeskirchenamt) contacted Ilyin to organize a personal meeting with the German Protestant pastor Otto Eckert (1891–1940) and invited him to lecture at an “Eckert evening.”172

An ardent Nazi and NSDAP member, Eckert supported violent measures against communists and social democrats in the spring of 1933 and became a member of the Reich leadership of the German Christians. However, Ilyin was ill at that time and was apparently unable to accommodate the requests. Nonetheless, he sent over “valuable material” to the Hesse Ecclesiastical Office, which notified Ilyin in April 1930 that the Church Councilor, a certain D. Eisenberg, had written a review on Ilyin’s The Unleashing of the Underworld, which would be published in the Office’s gazette. D. Eisenberg was also a representative of the Protestant Press Association for Hesse-Kassel, who requested to meet Ilyin personally in February 1932.173 In April 1932, Ilyin received an invitation from the Protestant Parish Church Council in Berlin-Tegel to speak at a parish meeting about the “disintegrating effects of Bolshevism, particularly on marriage and family.”174

As of 1930, Ilyin had arrived at the highest echelons of German politics. That year, he gave a series of incendiary speeches which catapulted him into the limelight and led to manifold new contacts and business opportunities. However, they caused some discontent at the German Foreign Office, possibly due to pressure from its Soviet counterpart. A series of letters from the German Foreign Office to the DGSO indicate that Ilyin’s political rallies “contradict[ed] the policy of the imperial government towards the Soviet Union” and asked the DGSO to reprimand Ilyin and his RSI colleague, the economist Boris Davydovich Brutskus (1874–1938).175

In those letters, the Foreign Office took note of several events, starting with a mass rally organized by the Luther Ring (Lutherring) on February 2, 1930, where Ilyin appeared as a speaker “to call for the joint struggle of the entire Christian world against Bolshevism.”176 The Luther Ring was founded by the German Lutheran pastor Bruno Doehring (1879–1961), who at that time was affiliated with the German National People’s Party, which had co- operated with the Nazi Party since 1929. The audience of the February rally at Berlin’s Wintergarten included, notably, members of the Hohenzollern family. The speech, “The Persecution of Christians in the Soviet State,” was printed in a special issue of the bimonthly Lutherring in February.177

In addition, the Foreign Office referred to two more events, which Tsygankov described as follows:
On March 14, 1930, at a meeting of the Gentlemen’s Club (Herrenclub), in the presence of almost 80 notable people from the circles of German politics, economy and the church, measures were discussed to coordinate efforts against Bolshevism. Participants included the future Imperial Chancellors Franz von Papen (Center Party) and Kurt von Schleicher (Department of Defense); retired Minister of the Interior von Keidel (German National people’s party); the industrialists Abraham Frowein, Georg Solmssen, Hans von Raumer; from church circles - Berlin Bishop Christian Schreiber and superintendent Otto Dibelius. Ilyin delivered a keynote speech, “The Communist World Attack,” after which a general discussion began, which resulted in the formation of a preparatory Action Committee. In May 1930, this Committee decided to create two anti- Bolshevik organizations - the Union for the Protection of European Culture (headed by Werner von Alvensleben from the leaders of the Gentlemen’s Club) and European Action (headed by the chairman of the central committee of German Catholics, Prince Alois zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg).178
Little is known about Ilyin’s involvement in those organizations. In February 1931, Ilyin was contacted by the politician and businessman Werner von Alvensleben (1875–1947) of the Union for the Protection of European Culture (Deutscher Bund zum Schutz der abendländischen Kultur, DBSAK), founded in June 1930. During WWI, Alvensleben had been a personal aide-de-camp of Emperor Wilhelm II to Pavlo Skoropadskyi (1873–1945), the Hetman of Ukraine. Alvensleben was part of the inner circle around the future German Reich Defense Minister and Reich Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. He had been a go-between for von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler before the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, after which Alvensleben was demoted. Alvensleben wrote to Ilyin on February 24, 1931, that he had forwarded Ilyin’s book World at the Abyss to Prelate Ludwig Kaas of the Center Party, so that the latter “draw the necessary foreign policy consequences against the murderers in Moscow.”178 It was none other than Kaas who swore the Center Party to agree to the Enabling Act of March 5, 1933, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Kaas then went to Rome and was involved in drawing up the concordat of the German Reich with the Holy See.

On February 26, 1931, another representative of the DBSAK contacted Ilyin to call upon his expertise about a certain Lenin quote that had become the center of a controversy in the press.179 Starting in December 1931, Ilyin received similar requests about specific Lenin quotes by the Editorial of the Grail: Literary Monthly (Schriftleitung des Gral: Literarische Monatsschrift), signed by a certain Baron W. von Blumenthal.180 In another letter from 1932, Blumenthal states that he had “received the manuscript [not identified] and immediately handed it over to the press”; furthermore “we also intend to make the manuscript available to the ‘Germania’ [fraternity].”181 Presumably, the latter is the still-existing right-wing extremist fraternity of the same name, founded in 1919.

Hoetzsch, as patron of the RSI, came under pressure due to his protégés’ anti-Soviet agitation at the institute, and in 1931, when confronted with realizing a new programmatic outline of the RSI, dropped out as the institute’s executive vice president. According to Voigt:
Contrary to its own academic direction, the Russian Scientific Institute received a new orientation from a third party: “At the suggestion of a higher German Reich authority, the Russian Scientific Institute shall take on the task of collecting and compiling authentic material from Russian communist sources about the Bolshevization of Germany,” it said in a piece of writing. “The guidelines of the communist headquarters in this matter as well as the party decisions, the resolutions of the Third International, the statements of individual leaders and especially the methods of Bolshevization must be determined and examined on the base of authentic sources.”183
Hoetzsch, who frequently traveled to Russia throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, and was keen on maintaining contacts with Russian scientific circles, saw his aspirations thwarted by both sides: the political agitation of some RSI members and the sudden demand to focus on anticommunist espionage inside Germany.184 With Hoetzsch dropping out, the institute’s fate was on the line. After 1932, the RSI’s funding from the German government practically ceased, and with it the institute’s activity.185

While the RSI went through this rough patch, Ilyin apparently kept the wolf from the door by writing contract work for the Interior Ministry. A batch of letters exist to Ilyin from a certain Dr. Max Sering, director of the German Research Institute for Agriculture and Settlements (Deutsches Forschungsinstitut für Agrar- und Siedlungswesen). In January 1932, Ilyin was pressured by Sering that he should hurry up with the analysis of the “material” that he had sent to the “Minister.”186 In follow-up messages, it becomes clear that Sering was an intermediary between Ilyin and the former Interior Minister Joseph Wirth (1879–1956), who had requested that Ilyin write a report on the “Directives of the Comintern for the Bolshevization of Germany.”187 In a message from March 1932, Sering mentions that “the Reich Ministry of the Interior is formally not able to support the Russian Scientific Institute, however, it is able to pay a writer’s fee.”188 Also the Reich Chancellery, then headed by Heinrich Brüning, thanked Ilyin for the material on the Comintern in May 1932.189
A picture of Adolf Ehrt from 1931 from Ilyin’s archive. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Eckart publishing house (1930–1934)

Another stream of revenue opened up through his contacts in Protestant pro-Nazi circles, when Ilyin began collaborating with the German Eckart publishing house (Eckart-Verlag, EV). The connection may have come through the Luther Ring, since EV republished the speech Ilyin had given at the organization’s 1930 mass rally as part of a brochure. Also, the name of Prince Shcherbatov appears early in the communication with EV. Apparently, EV sent a copy of Ilyin’s World at the Abyss to Adolf von Schwarzenberg “on behalf of his Serene Highness.”190

EV grew around a monthly periodical called Eckart, established in 1924, which during the interwar period was edited by August Hermann Hinderer, longtime president of the Protestant Journalist League (Evangelischer Presseverband) in Berlin.191 The historian Simon Unger-Alvi states that the Eckart was “a theological forum in which supporters and opponents of the Nazi movement came into direct contact,” that it “helped stabilize the Nazi regime,” and that its “authors perpetuated nationalist ideas in West Germany after 1945.”192

While in its early years the publishing house focused on Protestant literature, in the period between 1930 to 1934, EV commissioned decisively anti-Soviet titles, some of which Ilyin wrote. An undated, “strictly confidential” memorandum by Ilyin titled “On the further expansion of the work begun at Eckart’s publishing house,” indicates that Ilyin helped conceptualize this reorientation of EV towards anti-communist propaganda.193

Ilyin’s communication with EV dates back to at least October 1930.194 That year, he contributed a chapter to the compendium The Chronicle of the Plight of Russian Christianity.195 This was followed by several full-length books, starting in 1931 with The World at the Abyss: Politics, Economy and Culture in the Communist State and Against Godlessness; followed by a brochure “The Poison, Thought and Nature of Bolshevism” in 1932, first published in Switzerland a year earlier; and finally, in 1932, The Unleashing of the Underworld, written in collaboration with Adolf Ehrt (1902–1975) for which Ilyin used the pseudonym “Julius Schweickert”—the name of his maternal grandfather.196 Ilyin also gave several speeches at so-called “Eckart evenings” in 1932 and 1933, with titles such as “Principles for combating Bolshevism.” 197

The collaboration with Adolf Ehrt, which started at the latest in 1931, proved to be consequential for Ilyin, particularly after the Nazis’ seizure of power.198 Ehrt was a German born in Russia, who from 1931 to 1933 headed the German Evangelical Church’s Defense Agency Against the Marxist- Bolshevik Godless Movement (Abwehrstelle der deutsch-evangelischen Kirche gegen die marxistisch-bolschewistische Gottlosenbewegung) within the Protestant Journalist League.199 Ehrt joined the NSDAP in 1931, and from 1933 to 1936, was the managing director of Eberhard Taubert’s Antikomintern—a department in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry which, albeit briefly, employed Ilyin.200

Antikomintern

According to Yuri Lodyzhensky, the Eckart-Verlag “was the nucleus from which the German Antikomintern emerged,” at the very time that Ilyin was behind some of EV’s key anti-Bolshevik publications—which situates Ilyin right at the genesis of the powerful Nazi organization.201 Short for Anticommunist International, the Antikomintern was founded in 1932 as the General Federation of German Anti-Communist Associations (Gesamtverband Deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen) by Eberhard Taubert (1907–1976), an SA-Sturmführer, NSDAP member and close affiliate of Joseph Goebbels.202 Its name was conceived as the antithesis to the Communist International (Comintern).

After the Nazis seized power, in October 1933, the Gesamtverband was incorporated into the newly founded Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda; however, it maintained the form of an association as a disguise, with Taubert pulling the strings. Nicknamed “Dr. Anti,” Taubert quickly rose ranks to become one of the most important anti- communist and antisemitic Nazi propagandists in the Reich. The Antikomintern’s activities were rather broad. Bernd Engelmann states that Taubert’s initial responsibilities comprised “general domestic politics, opposing world views, church affairs, [and] bolshevism at home and abroad.”203

From 1933 to 1934, Eckart-Verlag came under the control of the Antikomintern, and the latter also absorbed the Russian Scientific Institute, with Ilyin aiding the effort. It should be noted that Ilyin introduced Adolf Ehrt to Yuri Lodyzhensky of the Entente Internationale Anticommuniste, which started a collaboration between the EIA and the Antikomintern.204 The Antikomintern also closely collaborated with the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage), founded in 1934 by Taubert, with the Central office for the Study of Freemasonry (Zentralstelle zur Erforschung der Freimaurerei), and the Reich Association of German Returnees from the Soviet Union (Reichsverband der deutschen Rückkehrer aus der Sowjetunion).205

When the Nazis came to power, EV’s director became Kurt Ihlenfeld (1901– 1972), a longtime associate of the Protestant Journalist League (as was his colleague August Hinderer). However, in 1934, EV was dropped by the Antikomintern in favor of the newly founded publishing house Nibelungen-Verlag (NV), directed by Taubert.206 This matches one of the letters from EV to Ilyin from August 1934, which says that all the remaining anti-Bolshevist literature will be sold to NV, which “in the future will handle this genre [anti-Bolshevism] in collaboration with the responsible departments [Antikomintern].”207

NV published a mix of anti-Soviet, antisemitic, and religious propaganda, often resorting to accounts of Soviet dissidents, and became an extremely important propaganda vehicle during the Nazi era. NV continued to work with the Nazi successor to the Russian Scientific Institute and with Taubert’s antisemitic Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. Ilyin published just one book with NV, Against Godlessness in 1934, which had already been published by Eckart-Verlag in 1931.208
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