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Chapter 1:
Postwar period
Following WWII, Ilyin remained a fervent supporter of the White cause, including the violent overthrow of the Soviet Union—this time looking towards the US as the most promising ally. Seeing a Third World War looming, Ilyin noted in the 1947 article “Again, News from the East” that liberating Russia from the Bolsheviks is primarily a Russian task, but Russian patriots should side with the US if war breaks out with the Soviet Union—a stance that he reiterated in the years to come, even after the Soviets had developed the atomic bomb.1

Nashi Zadachi (1948–1954)

Intent on resuming his role as ideological figurehead among the Whites, Ilyin got back in touch with several of his compatriots, some of whom had stayed in Nazi Germany throughout the war. Among the first was his former ROVS collaborator Alexei von Lampe. During WWII, von Lampe had coordinated the distribution of Soviet POWs in Germany and German- occupied territories. In 1944, he became a member of the Nazi-collaborationist KONR, the governing body of Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. Ilyin helped von Lampe and his family escape from Germany to Paris in 1946, and after that, they resumed their close collaboration.2

In 1948, Ilyin started contributing to the ROVS newsletter conceived by the ROVS chairman General A. P. Arkhangelsky; his deputy, von Lampe; and the historian Sergei Petrovich Melgunov as editor.3 According to Izergina, the weekly newsletter provided ROVS members “with political and ideological ‘considerations’ about the ‘most important topics’ with the purpose of ‘The formation of a single, clear White opinion.’”4 Copies of the newsletter, which appeared until 1954, were sent to ROVS members and sympathizers confidentially. A collection of the 216 articles that were contributed to the effort were published in two volumes under the title Nashi zadachi (Our Tasks) by some of Ilyin’s followers in 1956 in Paris.

Ilyin’s contribution to the newsletter concentrated on “the ‘fundamental foundations’ of the state structure of the future Russia,” a sort of Christofascist monarchy, which according to Izergina should be:
Christian and national in spirit (calling for the implementation of a “law of truth” to rule the lives of Russians); legal (“all are subject to the law, without exception”); unified (unified territory , unified state power, etc.); sacred (“serving the cause of God on earth”), based on historical succession (founded by our ancestors, approved by nationwide sacrifices, cannot be ended by temporary “troubles, uprisings, invasions and dominance”); binding people into a fraternal union...by a single patriotic solidarity....5
That Ilyin remained a fascist apologist until the end of his life is evidenced by other submissions to Nashi zadachi. A prime example is certainly his pamphlet “On Fascism” from 1948, published a year and a half after the Nuremberg trial, giving counsel to a new generation of fascists on how to avoid Hitler’s mistakes.6 According to Peter, Ilyin “criticized only the ‘mistakes’ of German fascism, for example, its hostility to religion (and very softly, racism and the holocaust not being mentioned at all), and strongly praised the new fascist regimes on the Iberian peninsula.”7

In 1948, Ilyin published an anonymous pamphlet in German, “The Soviet State Is Not Russia—Theses Pro Memoria.”8 That year, he also contributed the article “On Power” to a collection of articles “In Honor of Metropolitan Anastasius on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of His Ministry and the 75th Anniversary of His Life”—in praise of the First Hierarch of the ROCOR who had been an avid Nazi-collaborator.9

Contact with Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich (1948–1954)

From December 1948 onward, Ilyin frequently exchanged letters with Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich (1917–1992), the son of Kirill Vladimirovich, who had proclaimed himself Tsar in exile in the early interwar period. There exist eleven letters from Ilyin to Vladimir Kirillovich, and over twenty letters and postcards from the Grand Duke and his consort Leonida Bagration of Mukhrani to Ilyin.10 To one of his letters from December 30, 1950, Ilyin attached a memorandum laying out a strategy for toppling the Soviet Union, probably for the Grand Duke to double-check. Beginning with the sentence “The United States, in its struggle with the Soviet communist state, has a powerful ally,” the memorandum reiterated Ilyin’s stance about siding with the US in overthrowing the Soviet Union. All the while it advertised Kirill Vladimirovich as the right fit for heading such a struggle, as well as a potential monarch in a post-Soviet state.
The ten-point memorandum that Ilyin sent to the Grand Duke can be summed up as follows:11

(1) In the emerging world conflict, it is necessary to overthrow the communists—quickly and with little bloodshed.

(2) The only way to achieve this is by depriving the Bolsheviks of their armies, i.e., by “turning the Communist troops into Russian- nationalist troops, to join the side of the freedom fighters.”

(3) Russia has never been a republic, and a “republican legal consciousness” is alien to its people. While leaving open the question of a future state form, the memorandum argues that a “transition to a democratic government is not possible at once” while at the same time praising the monarchy for having “served the national, religious, and national-patriotic cause.”

(4) Russian people have never truly sympathized with communism; 80% of Russians are peasants who want to live on their own land. That is why Red Army soldiers surrendered en masse during the “Winter War” and the Great Patriotic War.

(5) “For a thousand years the Russian people’s moral conscience has been based on religious faith and on the trust in the monarch.” Thus, no one “will have the same authority as the rightful heir to the throne [Vladimir Kirillovich], who thinks only of the national rebirth of his beloved people.”

(6) “Russian soldiers must be told that no one threatens national Russia with conquest, revenge, or dismemberment”; and “that soldiers and officers escaping from the Communists are safeguarded and protected from military intervention.”

(7) Territories that never belonged to “national Russia” and were arbitrarily occupied by the Soviets must be returned.

(8) Not a communist and revolutionary Soviet state is needed, but a “peaceful and loyal national Russia.”

(9) The specific forms of how the points in the memorandum should be implemented are subject to further oral discussion.

In Point 10, Ilyin clearly denotes Vladimir Kirillovich as the legitimate heir to the “throne in exile” and that the memorandum had the Grand Duke’s approval:
The content of this memorandum is known to the Grand Duke, head of the dynasties, and approved by him. Throughout the Second World War, he, having a moral aversion to any totalitarian despotism, and clearly seeing the conquest plans of the German aggressor, categorically refused to make such a call to the Soviet army. Now, however, he has a very different view of the forthcoming struggle, and especially of the intentions of the American people.
This was, of course, a blatant lie. After Kirill Vladimirovich died in October 1938, his son Vladimir Kirillovich assumed the title of Head of the Imperial Family of Russia, a position which he claimed from 1938 to his death. In 1938, he also took on the leadership of the Russian Legitimist Movement, and kept up the contact with the pro-Nazi Mladorossy.12 As late as 1944, the Grand Duke moved from France to Amorbach in Nazi Germany.13 Then, Vladimir Kirillovich went to fascist Spain, where he was received by Generalissimo Franco and subsequently alternated between Spain and France.14 It was notably Ilyin’s old colleague, Yuri Lodyzhensky, who became the secretary of the Grand Duke in Madrid before he joined his family in Sao Paulo, Brazil. There, he became a “Representative of the Kulaevsky Foundation and longtime president of the Literary and Historical Circle of São Paulo” and contributed to Russian émigré journals.15

Resuming old ties

As evidenced by a series of photos from 1950, after the war, Ilyin met with his old friend Roman Zile, who came to play a preeminent role in the preservation and commemoration of Ilyin’s work after his death.16 In the immediate postwar period, Zile found his way to the Mönchehof POW camp in Germany where NTS members regrouped, and where he headed the NTS publishing house. Sometime in the early 1950s, Zile moved to Morocco, where, according to Bazanov, “he participated in the work of the ROVS.”17 In the early 1960s, Zile finally settled in Germany where he worked as an announcer and translator at the broadcaster Deutsche Welle in Cologne.
Georgy Nikolaevich and Irina Georgievna Ben-Chavchavadze visiting the Ilyins in Zollikon. Late 1950 / early 1951.
After the war, Ilyin also resumed his ties to members of the Klimov family. There is a picture of Ilyin alongside Georgy Nikolaevich (Ben-) Chavchavadze (1921–1997) and his wife Irina (née Klimova), who visited the Ilyins in late 1950/early 1951 in Zollikon—both of whom had collaborated with the Nazis.18 Irina and Ilyin’s correspondence reveals that they had always maintained warm personal relations.19 During WWII, Irina Chavchavadze had worked as a typist at the headquarters of the 1st infantry division of the Armed Forces in Münsingen (Germany) in 1944–1945.20 Although difficult to ascertain, it has been stated that for some time Irina even served as the secretary of Andrey Vlasov, which is how she had allegedly met her future husband, a Nazi officer named Georgy Ben-Chavchavadze.21

Georgy Ben-Chavchavadzewas born in Kharkov in 1921. Ben- Chavchavadze described himself as a son of Nikolai Chavchavadze, a White officer, who was executed by the Bolsheviks in the basement of their family’s house, when his wife was still pregnant with Georgy. According to Georgy, his family was relocated to Germany in 1933 as part of an exchange for Austrian Communists.22 Research in the Kyiv SBU archive has revealed that Georgy’s father was a ChK-GPU officer executed for looting in 1926.23

After this death, his mother dated Hermann Strecker, a Nazi diplomat and, as the Soviet KGB documents argue, a spy. Ukrainian NKVD had requested Soviet People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Nikolai Ezhov to arrest Strekker and his partner Luidmila (Georgy’s mother) at least three times based on growing evidence of Strekker’s espionage activities.24 Moscow declined these requests and the Ukrainian NKVD started to take active measures, such as public threats to household workers, to push the Strekkers and some other German Nazi civil servants out of the USSR.25 This operation was successful: Hermann Strekker, Luidmila, and Georgy left for Germany in 1938.

During the Nazi era, Georgy became commander of the reconnaissance squadron of the Wehrmacht’s 56th Panzer Corps which was deployed at the Eastern Front. Subsequently, he joined Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army and became publisher of the KONR journal
Union. He also joined the NTS, for which he distributed leaflets in the Soviet zone. After the dissolution of his division in May 1945, he went east with a group of subordinates, and until August participated in partisan anti-communist resistance in Slovakia and Galicia. After the war, he emigrated to Canada and worked at the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Ottawa.26 One of his neighbors in Canada revealed in a private interview that in 1945 Georgy surrendered to the French, worked in the Allies’ filtration camps for Nazi soldiers, and then was recruited by Canadian intelligence and facilitated its contacts with the KGB.27

At their 1951 last meeting with Irina and Georgy, Ilyin could not assess that the Chavachavdze-Klimov family will play an important role in the revival of memory of him in Putin’s Russia, which is discussed in detail in the third chapter.
Axioms of Religious Experience (1953)

One year before his death, in 1953, Ilyin published his magnum opus, Axioms of Religious Experience, printed in two volumes in Paris, which he had been working on since 1919. Drafts, notes, book excerpts, and communication with other people regarding the publication comprise thousands of pages.28 In the publication of Axioms, Ilyin received support from Vladimir Pavlovich Ryabushinsky (1873–1955), from whom Ilyin received over 600 letters in the period between 1948 and 1954. Ryabushinsky, a banker and businessman from an eponymous dynasty of merchants and Old Believers, was a White of the first hour who had served as an advisor to Wrangel on economic matters during the Russian Civil War. Exiled in France, Ryabushinsky founded and headed the Icon Society (Obshchestvo “Ikona”), of which he was honorary chairman from 1951 until his death in 1955. In 1954, Ilyin helped Ryabushinsky in his efforts to emigrate to the US with the help of the TF.

It is quite a feat that the publisher of Axioms is never identified in the literature and, still today, is unknown. It is known, however, that the work was printed by the still existing Imprimerie de Navarre, which did printing jobs for various foreign language publications from France and abroad.29

The Imprimerie started in the early 1920s with printing Russian-language publications and apparently had turned into a hub of White activity in Paris. Axioms was among the first publications of the Imprimerie when it restarted its business in 1953. That year, it also performed print jobs for English-language journals, such as the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the American Historical Review, and others; however, it returned to strictly publishing Russian-language books by 1954. Notably, the Imprimerie did printing jobs for the YMCA-Press, which in 1945 restarted publishing Russian-language books.30

It could well be that the YMCA-Press was behind the publication of Axioms, particularly since it is known that Ilyin contacted its director Donald Lowrie in May 1951, inquiring whether there was any interest in publishing the work. Lowrie had succeeded Paul B. Anderson as director of the publishing house in 1947, with whom Ilyin had been in touch in the mid-1920s, and, in the postwar period, the YMCA-Press continued to be controlled by US intelligence.31 Ilyin mentioned that “A year and a half ago in Munich you had a conversation with Metropolitan Anastasius about the possibility of publishing my new work on the philosophy of religion. His eminence Anastasius wrote to me about this, notifying me that, in principle, the door of the publishing house led by you (Partnership of United Publishers) was open to me.”32

While the provenance of Axioms could not be sufficiently established, it is apparent that, besides the YMCA-Press, in the postwar years Ilyin engaged with several American anticommunist intelligence projects that involved White émigrés, whose éminence grise was George F. Kennan. After Kennan was booted off the CIA’s covert action branch (Office of Policy Coordination), in the early 1950s he was able to impel the Ford Foundation to fund some of his anti-communist pet projects.

To that end, Kennan, George Fischer, and others devised the East European Fund, incorporated by the State Department on March 15, 1951, which was among the first grantees awarded by the Ford Foundation. In the early 1950s, the East European Fund sponsored several projects involving White émigrés, including the TF, the YMCA-Press, the Chekhov Publishing House, and the Research Program on the USSR at Columbia University—of which Ilyin was in contact with the first three.33

In March 1953, Ilyin sent two manuscripts to the New York-based Chekhov publishing house (1951–1958) in order for them to consider publishing On Darkness and Enlightenment: A Book of Literary Criticism and The Singing Heart: Book of Quiet Contemplation. Apparently, he did not hear back from them, and fifteen months later requested that the manuscripts be returned to his “trusted liaison,” Grigory Alexandrovich Alexeev in Sea Cliff, New York.34 As with the Paris-based YMCA-Press, the Chekhov publishing house had the double purpose of employing Russian émigrés for anti- communist propaganda, as well as keeping anti-Bolshevik Russian networks alive that could be exploited in adjacent intelligence projects. Besides receiving support from Kennan’s East European Fund, the YMCA- Press and Chekhov were connected through the North American YMCA.35

There is yet another indicator that Ilyin was well aware of US-funded support structures employing Russian émigrés. In his archive, there are numerous articles related to the Coordinating Center of the Anti-Bolshevik Struggle (KTAB), a CIA-sponsored effort to bring the most important postwar Russian émigré organizations under one umbrella.36 The KTAB was established on November 7, 1951, “at a conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, where representatives of Russian and non-Russian émigré political organizations promulgated their goals for the ‘liberation of all their peoples from the Bolshevist dictatorship.’”37 During its brief existence, the KTAB was controlled by the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, a CIA front handling contacts with Russian émigrés. However, the effort failed due to irreconcilable internal discord among the émigré groups involved.

Ultimately, Ilyin’s endeavor to find new supporters and platforms for his anticommunist struggle were cut short when he died on December 21, 1954 at the age of 71 in Zollikon. As will be shown in the next chapter on Ilyin’s rehabilitation, there was an avid interest among Whites, as well as American benefactors, to preserve and disseminate Ilyin’s work after his death. Without anticipating too much, this called into action some of Ilyin’s murkiest contacts, including Roman Zile, who “contributed to the transfer of the archive of I. A. Ilyin to the Library of the University of Michigan.”38 To that end, he notably compiled a list of pseudonyms that Ilyin had used throughout his career.39

Some of Ilyin’s most fervent supporters, including Zile and a member of the Klimov family, came together in the creation of the Professor Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin Society, established on December 21, 1956. The Society became instrumental in preserving Ilyin’s vast archives, kickstarting his rehabilitation as victim of the Nazis and his elevation to the highest Russian intellectual echelon.40
To Chapter №2


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