Ilyin published On Resistance to Evil by Force in 1925, just three years after arriving in Germany on the so-called philosophers’ ship in 1922. Yet the events of the intervening years clearly influenced the work. In 1923, the Bolshevik Red Army defeated the last hold-out of the monarchist White Army in Yakutia in eastern Siberia, and in 1924, White Army General Pyotr Wrangle founded the Russian All-Military Union (Russkiy Obshche-Voinskiy Soyuz: ROVS) for the purpose of maintaining a military organization for future offensives against the Bolshevik Army. That same year, Ilyin met with Wrangle at the center of anti-Bolshevik activity in Germany, Seeon Abbey in Bavaria, and became involved with ROVS initiatives. By the time Ilyin published On Resistance to Evil by Force in 1925, he was already acting as a ROVS ideologue, and the text was thus not so much a philosophical dialog with the late Tolstoy or a rumination on the misguidedness of pacifism as it was the articulation of a reactionary ideology. Ilyin wrote On Resistance to Evil by Force for a readership of anti-Bolshevik exiles and émigrés to unite them in their hatred of Bolshevism under a banner of Orthodoxy and autocracy.

It has been observed that On Resistance to Evil by Force represents a continuation of Ilyin’s earlier philosophical preoccupations. This is no doubt the case. His first scholarly article, published in the Journal of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1910, was titled “The Concepts of Law and Force.”¹ Yet Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force of 15 years later is not only a reactionary turn, but also utilitarian and markedly theological. For this reason, it is not only the continuity of Ilyin’s thought in On Resistance to Evil by Force that is of interest, but also its evolution. The transformation from a theoretical to a theological and ideological presentation of his ideas is sometimes overlooked or goes unremarked. For example, a recent and relatively benign assessment of Ilyin’s thought by Paul Valliere recognizes the continuation of Ilyin’s earlier ideas about coercive force in On Resistance to Evil by Force and even notes that in that text “his rhetoric was at times extreme.”² However, Valliere fails to acknowledge the historical context or Ilyin’s role as a ROVS ideologue at the time of its writing.³ What Valliere and others miss is precisely the evolution and instrumentality of Ilyin’s ideas of authority and coercive force, incorporating them into a theological doctrine of just war as part of his collaboration with Wrangle and ROVS.

Not only is Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force an especially bellicose contribution to Russian thought, but it is also insidious because its influence cannot reliably be traced through direct references to the text nor even to Ilyin himself. As a formulation of a just war theology, On Resistance to Evil by Force is a free-standing theological argument—portable, populist in its Orthodox diction, and not dependent on the entirety of Ilyin’s philosophical corpus for context.
In focusing on the dangers of Ilyin’s philosophy, as well as on Ilyin as “Putin’s philosopher,”⁴ some recent scholars and political analysts risk missing the crucial point that the concept of just war neither begins nor ends with Ilyin. However, were it to be approached as a doctrine of just war, Ilyin’s argument might be fruitfully compared to similar ideological projects both in and outside of Russia. This includes important antecedents and analogs in the West. In addition to the early paradigmatic example worked out by the late antique Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430), which is widely acknowledged as the first fully articulated Christian doctrine of just war, it would encompass the rationale behind Pope Urban II’s 1095 “Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”) call to the First Crusade (1096–1099) and Martin Luther’s vicious theological justification of the suppression of the 1524–1525 German Peasants’ Revolt in his tract, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525).⁵

One might also compare On Resistance to Evil by Force to other interwar ideological projects such as the Metaphysics of War, by Italian occultist and fascist ideologue Julius Evola (1898–1974),⁶ and the Romanian fascist manifesto known as The Legionary Phenomenon, by Legionary ideologue Nae Ionescu (1890–1940).⁷ Finally, such comparison would be a practical means of identifying overlap with contemporary Russian far-right and fascist ideological projects like Aleksandr Dugin’s Philosophy of War, as well as patterns of co-belligerence in the positions of Patriarch Kirill of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church.⁸

Despite Ilyin’s recent gaining attention as “Putin’s philosopher,” then, I argue that what is most interesting—and most disconcerting—about Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force has neither to do with Putin nor, particularly, with Ilyin himself. Rather, it concerns the emergence of a mix of just war and holy-war theology in popular—if not (yet) canonical—Russian Orthodox thinking. Indeed, with little or no alteration, Ilyin’s call to arms in defense of what he presents as spirituality lends itself to virtually any stripe of Christian nationalism. This understanding of On Resistance to Evil by Force as a justification of religious violence also helps to account for the resurgent popularity of the text, with multiple recent editions in Russian, full translations in Serbian, English, and German,⁹ as well as partial online translations in at least French, Romanian, and Georgian.¹⁰

In the section that follows, I compare Ilyin’s argument in On Resistance to Evil by Force to the aforementioned paradigmatic example of just war theology, that of Augustine of Hippo. Following that, I demonstrate that Ilyin’s particular conception of the doctrine combines a notion of just warfare with holy war and spiritual warfare. Simply revealing the heterodoxy (or would-be heresy) of Ilyin’s argument relative to teachings and practices of Catholicism, Protestantism, or even canonical Eastern Orthodoxy, is not the ultimate goal of my analysis. Nevertheless, a comparative approach not only reveals how Ilyin weaponizes religion (or at least religiosity), but it also has the coeffect of refuting any claims of a Russian particularism to his argument, which is neither novel nor, as it turns out, especially Russian.

The last part of the chapter recapitulates recent discussions of Ilyin’s influence in contemporary Russian politics. Little of the recent discussion of Ilyin’s political influence addresses On Resistance to Evil by Force, despite its being his most popular work. Moreover, few of the scholars of Ilyin’s thought have considered the text as an example of a Western theological doctrine of just war, nor have they explored the implications of such a reading. Public and international affairs scholar Paul Robinson offers a notable early exception.¹¹ However, Robinson's intervention suffers from the fatal flaw that it compares Ilyin's On Resistance to Evil by Force to the just war theory of Thomas Aquinas,¹² apparently failing to recognize how much Aquinas departs from Augustine on the subject. In demonstrating that Ilyin differs significantly from Aquinas, Robinson erroneously concludes that Ilyin's approach is uniquely Russian rather than simply not Thomist.¹³ Notwithstanding, the larger analytical framework of just-war theology in Russian political thought reveals gaps both in recent political punditry and existing scholarship on Ilyin’s text. In other words, I contend that most interested parties have been asking the wrong questions. For this reason, I have placed the literature review after the initial analysis.