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Chapter 1:
Welcoming the Nazis
Ilyin certainly welcomed the arrival of Nazism in Germany. For example, on May 17, 1933, he published an article in Vozrozhdenie praising Hitler and the Nazis:
...I categorically refuse to assess the events of the last three months in Germany from the point of view of German Jews.... What is happening in Germany is a huge political and social upheaval.... What did Hitler do? He stopped the process of Bolshevization in Germany and thereby rendered the greatest service to the whole of Europe.... The liberal-democratic hypnosis of non-resistance was thrown off. While Mussolini is leading Italy, and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture is given a respite....1
Ilyin’s enthusiasm for the Nazi regime reverberated throughout his articles that appeared in the German press in 1933. From January to March 1933, he published a long article, “Crisis of Socialism,” spread over three issues in the newly founded Nazi journal Germany’s Renewal (Deutschlands Erneuerung) in Munich.2 In April 1933, Ilyin published the article “New Struggle and New Work” in the Nazi bimonthly Liga Notebook (Liga-Heft), the organ of the League for the Defense of Bolshevism (Liga zur Abwehr des Bolschewismus e.V.).3 To the July/August edition of Eckart: Magazine for Protestant Spiritual Culture, he contributed an article titled “Expectation and Purification—On Russian Emigration.”4

As of 1933, Ilyin was a member of several organizations collaborating with the Nazis. Ilyin was affiliated with the Russian-German Club (Russisch- Deutscher Klub), for which he held at least four speeches throughout 1933.5 Little is known about the Club, however, it must have played a considerable role among far-right Russian émigrés in Germany.6 In an introductory speech on March 8, 1933, Ilyin called the Club “the oldest and toughest anti-Bolshevik cell in Germany.” He stressed that although the Club had a long hiatus, it was time to “renew the work” now that “a powerful anti-Bolshevik national movement has emerged in Germany, led by Hitler and organized by Göring, which clearly sees the danger signaled by us, and fights it with determination and courage.”

He added that the Club members were “willing to share their insights, and, if desired, readily put [their] advice at the disposal of the leaders of that movement.”7 Also, Ilyin’s old benefactor, Prince Shcherbatov held a speech at the Russian-German Club that year, as did Adolf Ehrt. Furthermore, Ilyin became a member of the Nazi-aligned Committee of the United Russian National Organizations (Komitee der Vereinten Russischen Nationalen Organisationen), founded on May 2, 1933, alongside Alexei von Lampe and Sergei Botkin. According to von Lampe’s biographer, Laura Sophie Ritter, “This demonstrates that even after the onset of Nazi rule, a small circle of already well-known individuals represented the interests of the emigrants to the outside world.”8
Director of the Russian Scientific Institute (1933–1934)

In 1933, Ilyin took on an active role in bringing the Russian Scientific Institute under the control of the Nazis, when he briefly became its director. As a first step, the former Russian Colonel Armin von Reyher and Maximilian von Hamm were commissioned to review the institute by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, which was in charge of the RSI at the time.9 According to Peter, “This act meant in effect an expropriation of the institute and with it of the Russian colony in Berlin, for its most valuable possession, the library, whose holdings had come largely from donations by the emigrants, was transferred to the legal entity of the association.”10
Ilyin took over the leadership of the RSI after “Semyon Frank was forced to leave his position at the beginning of the summer of 1933 due to his Jewish origin.”11 Peter stated that:
.According to A. I. Ugrimov’s letter to Professor Max Zering, Reyer acted according to the plan developed by Ilyin, when he removed Jews from the institute and created an association as a new representative office, of which Ilyin became vice-president. When the institute was transferred in October 1933 to the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Adolf Ehrt began to lead it, only A. A. Bogolepov and V . P . Poletika were retained as its employees, along with Ilyin.12
This indicates that despite his ostentatious refusal of antisemitism, Ilyin did not hesitate to profit from the RSI’s antisemitic purge. Solovyeva quotes a former colleague of Ilyin’s as saying that “during the time of his rule [he] achieved to fire a part of his past colleagues, among whom was Yasinski, [who] ended up in extreme poverty and died soon.”13

Under the supervision of Adolf Ehrt, Ilyin helped transfer the RSI from the Prussian Ministry of Culture and Science to the Propaganda Ministry, a process which was completed by the spring of 1934. Renamed to Association for the Maintenance of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin (Verein zur Pflege des Russischen Wissenschaftlichen Instituts in Berlin e.V.) on November 16, 1933, the RSI became an important component of the Antikomintern department within the Propaganda Ministry.14

In late June/early July 1933, Ilyin sent a proposal to the Prussian Ministry for Science Art and Public Education to establish a college to teach about “the erroneous doctrine of modern communism, its origin and its overcoming.”15 This was followed by an RSI report at the end of July, “The Famine in Soviet Russia as a Consequence of the Communist Agrarian Policy.”16

According to Ilyin’s own statements, already between April and July 1933, “the secret police [Gestapo] started to put pressure on him,” and he was prompted to refrain from political agitation.17 Subsequently, Ilyin grew increasingly paranoid and became wary of what he wrote in letters for fear that they might be intercepted. Upon the completion of the transfer of the RSI to Antikomintern’s control in the summer of 1934, Ilyin, together with all of his Russian colleagues, was dismissed. Ilyin wrote:
In the beginning of July, I was fired, together with all my fellow countrymen, from the place which I attended for 12 years. Fired for being Russian. It is a big blow through and through, and I experience it quite responsibly, though it is burdensome. Financially, I will, probably, be able to make ends meet for a few months; but spiritually and patriotically, this is a heavy experience, a complete disaster.18
It should be noted that Ilyin was let go from the RSI just after the Night of the Long Knives (June 30 to July 2, 1934), when Hitler demanded the killing of hundreds of top Nazis and the demotion of many more whom he saw as potential competition. It could well be that Ilyin’s suspension was collateral of the purge; however, there are no indications that he was specifically targeted. The RSI continued to exist until 1939 under the name Institute for Scientific Research of the Soviet Union (Institut zur wissenschaftlichen Erforschung der Sowjetunion e. V.); however, details about its activities are unknown, as is the fate of its valuable repository.19

After Ilyin lost his job at the RSI, he had to find other sources of income. From that point onward, he notably intensified his contacts with church and business circles and increasingly called upon his networks abroad. He limited his German lecture activities to local church congregations and business associations. Despite the 1934 prompt to refrain from political agitation, he continued to publish under pseudonyms. For example, he contributed around 45 articles to the Berliner Tageblatt under the pseudonym “Karl von Brebisius” in 1936 and 1937. Under that name, he also published various articles for the German Press-Correspondence (Deutsche Presse-Korrespondenz).20 However, between 1934 and 1938, his contributions to the German press were limited overall.

Despite his setbacks in that period, Ilyin remained in contact with figures in the upper Nazi echelon. For example, Ilyin was in touch with the German law scholar Hans (Karl Ernst Ludwig) Keller (1908–1970), chairman of the Nationalist International, an organization founded in Zurich in 1934 with the aim of rallying international support for the Nazi movement.

In 1935, Ilyin was invited to its London congress. However, the organizers declined Ilyin’s offer to send a submission to be delivered in his name since he could not travel there in person.21
Contact with Keller continued after Ilyin’s exile to Switzerland in late 1938, when Ilyin was invited by the latter to contribute to a publication series of the Academy for the Rights of the People (Akademie für die Rechte der Völker), founded 1936 in Oslo and headquartered in Nazi Berlin. Keller asked Ilyin to write a few lines “about the order of peoples (Völker-Ordnung) demanded by the Academy” in which he “should specifically work out the Russian point of view.”22 According to historian Hans Werner Neulen, both institutions, the Nationalist International and the Academy, enjoyed the support of various Nazi organizations, including the Gestapo and Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, until 1940.23

In terms of high-ranking Nazi contacts, Johann von Leers (1902–1965) stands out; an SS-member who was among the most important ideologues of the Third Reich. Seemingly on his own initiative, Ilyin sent a book to Leers in 1937. Leers returned the favor by forwarding Ilyin two of his own publications about the “criminality of Judaism,” in which he speculated that the leaders of the “roaming ‘Baal crooks’ are the true forerunners of the red commissars.”24

Apparently, Ilyin also enjoyed the support of Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven (1878–1942), NSDAP Reichstag deputy and Prussian State Councilor from 1925 to 1942. In March 1938, Ilyin was contacted by the journal European Review (Europäische Revue) on the recommendation of von Freytagh-Loringhoven, inquiring whether Ilyin was available for potential commissions. However, there is no evidence that a collaboration with the journal ever came to pass.25
Activities abroad

While there were clear limits to his propaganda activities in Nazi Germany, Ilyin was still able to express his views in émigré publications abroad. He traveled around Europe, mainly for speaking engagements, most frequently visiting Latvia, Yugoslavia, and Switzerland. After 1933, Ilyin continued to write for the Parisian Vozrozhdenie, contributing about 60 articles between 1931 and 1936, while the newspaper’s editor was Y. F. Semyonov. In 1935, Vozrozhdeniye also published three of his short stories under the pseudonym “Pyotr Streshnev.”

After the Nazis’ seizure of power, Ilyin also continued to collaborate with his Swiss contacts, particularly with the Lodyzhensky brothers. In 1933, he wrote “The Spiritual Meaning of Our Work” for the Russian Christian Workers’ Movement’s New Way in Geneva.26 In 1937, Ilyin reportedly traveled to Geneva to participate in an RTKD congress.27 That year he also wrote a Companion of the Russian Christian Nationalist for the RTKD (2nd edition 1938), which, however, does not cite Ilyin’s name as author.28 Furthermore, in 1935, Ilyin published a long anti-Bolshevik tract in Switzerland under the pseudonym Dr. Alfred Normann, called Bolshevik Global Power Politics: The Plans of the Third International to Revolutionize the World, printed by Gotthelf-Verlag in Bern.29
Picture from Ilyin’s trip to Yugoslavia in November 1934, where he held a lecture.
Source: https://nbmgu.ru.
Ilyin could also count on his connections among Whites in Yugoslavia (until 1929 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes). After his dismissal from the RSI, he traveled to Bela Crkva in October–November 1934, where he gave a speech at an assembly commemorating the fortieth day of the death of Alexander I of Yugoslavia, which was subsequently printed in the publication In Blessed Memory of the Knight King Alexander I the Unifier in Belgrade.30

A picture available from that trip shows Ilyin with his wife alongside the White Lieutenant General Boris Viktorovich Adamovich (1870–1936), director of the First Russian Cadet Corps, a White military formation established in 1920, most of whose members fought on the side of the Nazis in WWII.31 In 1937, Ilyin’s book The Path of Spiritual Renewal was published in Belgrade, based on a series of lectures he had given to auditoriums of Protestant pastors.32
From left to right: Pavel Delle, Ivan Ilyin, Natalya Ilyina, Roman Zile, and another Delle (unidentified). Source: https://nbmgu.ru.
Another frequent destination for Ilyin in the early Nazi period was Latvia, which he visited in 1934, 1935, and 1937. As mentioned before, Ilyin’s trips to Latvia were largely facilitated by his close associate Roman Zile, who provided Ilyin with lecture opportunities in the name of the Russian Academic Society of Latvia.33 His first journey to Latvia after the Nazis’ seizure of power took place in 1934, which incidentally or not, coincided with the Latvian coup d’état by Kārlis Ulmanis, who on the night of May 15–16, 1934, took power with the help of the army and units of the national guard. It is evident from pictures that Ilyin was in Latvia from May 15–20, where he posed in pictures with Zile, alongside the military personnel Pavel Petrovich Delle (1907–1998) and another unidentified Delle, looking rather jolly.34

A fierce monarchist and with close ties to the NTS, Pavel Delle voluntarily joined Nazi punitive units in 1941 and became the head of the SD’s Sonderkommando in Gatchina.35 After WWII, Delle was never punished for his war crimes and found refuge in the US.
Standing (left to right): Roman Zile, Georgy Klimov, Maykapar (not identified), Erna Arturovna, and Renata Rudzit. Sitting (left to right): Tina Zile, Berkholz (not identified), Helena Zile (née Rahr), Ivan Ilyin, Zhenya Delle. Early November 1935. Source: https://nbmgu.ru.
Other pictures from the 1934 trip to Latvia show Ilyin together with members of the Klimov family, famous for hosting literary events at their dacha in Koknese, close to Riga. A picture from Ilyin’s visit to Latvia from the following year shows that a close-knit group had formed which included the Ilyins, Klimovs, Ziles, and Delles. It shows Zile and his wife Helena (née Rahr), Georgy Klimov, the wife of Pavel Delle, and several of their friends at Klimov’s dacha.36 Ilyin traveled to Latvia once more in February 1937, where he gave a lecture tour on “Pushkin’s prophetic vocation,” prepared for the Russian Academic Society.37 Although after that there are no more recorded visits by Ilyin to Latvia, his relation to Zile and the Klimovs would last until the end of his life.

NTS publications (1934–1938)

In the post-1933 period, between 1934 and 1938, Ilyin started to publish several pamphlets with the NTS, of which Roman Zile was a notable leading member. At that point, the organization was called the National Union of the New Generation (NSNP, 1931–1936), and in 1936, it was renamed once more to the National Labor Union of the New Generation (NTSNP, 1936–1943).

Starting in 1934, Ilyin published three pamphlets with the NSNP and the NTSNP, “the center of which was in Berlin, and branches in many countries of Europe and America, particularly in Bulgaria.”38 The texts were published by the NSNP/NTSNP publishing house Za Rossiiu (For Russia). The first one, “Three Speeches on Russia” (1934), was published in Sofia. “The Creative Idea of Our Future—On the Foundations of a Spiritual Character—A Public Speech Delivered in 1934 in Riga, Berlin, Belgrade and Prague” (1937) was based on articles that had originally appeared in Vozrozhdenie and were published by Za Rossiiu as an extended brochure (printing house of M. N. Minis).39 “The Fundamentals of the Struggle for a National Russia” (1938), published in Narva (Estonia), was a longer version of a separate brochure from 1937, titled “Companion of the Russian Christian Nationalist,” originally published by the RTKD.40
In the years that Ilyin supplied propaganda for the organization, it was headed by Victor Baidalakov (1900–1967), who served as chairman from 1934 to 1954. As noted before, by 1930 the NTS had taken on a largely pro- German and pro-Nazi stance, a direction which continued under Baidalakov. Under his leadership, the NTS started to use the word “solidarism” as a designation for its political ideology; and “Neither communism nor fascism, but national labor solidarism”41 became its rallying cry. That “national labor solidarism” was just a blurry disguise of Nazism became clear with proclamations, such as in March 1936, when Mikhail Georgievsky wrote in the organization’s mouthpiece Za Novuiu Rossiiu: “Even without having read his [Hitler’s] Mein Kampf, we had reached the same thought in our hearts.”42 Another article from that time went so far as to equate Nazism with solidarism: “nationalism and social truth.... The new movements bear different names, but their essence may best be expressed in our word: Solidarism.”43
Ilyin (second from left) noted on the reverse side: “May 1–10, 1937. Lemgo. Conference of the Russian Brother Aid.” Source: http://www .nasledie-iljina.srcc.msu.ru/NIVC- site%20Iljina-FOTOALBOMY/fotoalbomy-okruzhenie.html.
Russian Brother Aid

In the period leading up to his second exile in Switzerland, Ilyin also kept afloat through the support of Protestant church circles in Germany. Among them was the Russian Brother Aid (Russische Bruderhilfe, RBA), founded by the Protestant White émigré priest Nikolai S. Orlov, and headquartered in Lemgo. Orlov came to lead a Cossack Choir in Germany, which was touring the country during the Third Reich, and after WWII, he had a second life in the US. Before Ilyin enjoyed the organization’s support, the RBA had collaborated closely with Semyon Frank, Ilyin’s former colleague at the RSI, who made lecture trips to German villages from 1930 to 1932 under the auspices of the RBA.44

The RBA arranged public lectures for Ilyin in various German towns dealing with the persecution of the church in Russia and printed some of them as brochures. In 1936, the RBA published Ilyin’s “What Has the Martyrdom of the Church in Soviet Russia to Say to the Churches of the Other World?” a lecture held before pastors in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, and Berlin.45 In April–May 1937, Ilyin appeared at a congress organized by the RBA in Lemgo.46 In 1937–1938, he wrote the manuscript “About Christian Disobedience to Communist Rule,” which notes that the publication was written for “superintendent [Kasimir] Ewerbeck in Lemgo,” with whom Ilyin kept in touch until after the war.47

In 1937, Ilyin published “Christianity and Bolshevism. What Are the Origins of the Christian Persecutions of the 20th century? A Factual Word” with the help of the RBA.48 In the same year, the RBA printed “The Attack on the Eastern Christian Church: A Lecture Delivered to the Pastors of the Düsseldorf District Congregation on Nov. 1, 1937.”49 Between 1936 and 1938, Ilyin also published various articles in the Monthly Journal of the Russian Brother Aid (Monatsblatt der Russischen Bruderhilfe).

Although clerical fascist tendencies had been present in Ilyin’s work during the 1930s, in the RBA publications they became glaringly evident. According to Peter:
His fight against godlessness...increasingly lost any theological or scientific ground, for example when he condemned the Bolshevik Communists as “Satan in human form” and declared the “satanic man” as a product of a development of nihilism since Voltaire, the French encyclopedists and Friedrich Nietzsche, the “teachers and prophets of Bolshevik Satanism.”50
In 1938, before Ilyin left Germany, he published only two other texts. An article in the aforementioned RBA journal, and I Look to Life: A Book of Contemplation, released in Berlin by the publisher Furche-Verlag.51 The latter was largely composed of articles previously published in the Berliner Tageblatt.

Expulsion from Germany (1938)

The year of his exile to Switzerland, 1938, started rather well for Ilyin, since he managed to get a spot as a guest lecturer at the University of Hamburg.52 But on February 2, 1938, he “received a gag order by the Secret State Police [Gestapo]...without naming a reason,” according to Ilyin’s affidavit from 1938. Therein he stated that he “had to acknowledge certain allusions that had been made from various sides...that put me [Ilyin] in connection with the suspicious content of a Russian-language diatribe that appeared anonymously in Berlin in 1934.”53 Which diatribe that could be is unclear.

There are varying accounts of why the Gestapo started to go after Ilyin. Yuri Lisitsa mentions that in that period, Ilyin strongly rallied against the Nazi-sympathizing Mladorossy movement, attached to Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, and led by Alexander Kazem-Bek, which caused the “suspicious discontent” of the Gestapo.54 Roulin mentions that, “under the false accusation of being a Freemason, an agent of the Bolsheviks, the Gestapo proscribed his writings and forbade him any activity.”55 According to Tsygankov, “In early 1938, the Gestapo confiscated Ilyin’s works and prohibited him to appear in public,” whereupon “Ilyin decided to move to Switzerland, but the Berlin police forbade him to leave the country.”56

But Ilyin’s trouble with the Nazi authorities did not stop after the Gestapo’s gag order. He also had drawn the wrath of Alfred Rosenberg toward him, since he was unwilling to propagandistically support the planned invasion of Ukraine.57 The same issue arose when the German War Ministry showed an interest in harnessing the NTS in the upcoming Eastern campaign. According to M. V. Nazarov:
With the advisory participation of Ilyin in 1938, the NTS negotiated with representatives of the German War Ministry. (The initiative came from the Germans, the NTS used it to induce Germany to abandon the then developed racist policy in the East. As a result of this unsuccessful attempt, all known members of the NTS had to leave Germany soon to avoid arrest.)58
In July 1938, the NTS (at the time NTSNP) dissolved voluntarily in order to evade control by the Nazi government, but continued its activities informally. Johannes Baur reported that in 1938 the NTSNP dissolved itself to avert coming under the control of Vasily Biskupsky (1878–1945), who served as the Gestapo’s main Russian liaison.59 However, three years later, several NTSNP adherents were able to return to Germany through the mediation by the Nazi-collaborationist publisher Vladimir Despotuli, and to resume their activities, since their services were required by Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and by the Propaganda Department of the Wehrmacht.
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