Ilyin’s Legacy in Emigration and in the Soviet Underground

The worship of Ilyin began among his closest circles of friends and disciples, such as his personal secretary Roman Zile. But it was the émigré professor and philosopher’s attorney executor, Nikolai Pavlovich Poltoratsky (1921-1990), who played the central role in keeping Ilyin’s memory alive. Poltoratsky, the son of a priest, was born in emigration in Constantinople in early 1921. He was educated in Bulgaria and in Germany at the Higher School of Theology and Philosophy of Rattensburg. He is said to have met Alexander Kazem-Bek in the 1930s,² when he would have been a teenager living in Germany—thus, the two may have been connected by his parents’ acquaintances during one of Kazem-Bek’s trips to Berlin. During his time in Sofia, Poltoratsky began publishing anti-Soviet articles. In 1954, he graduated from the Sorbonne with a PhD entitled “The Philosophy of Russia’s History in the Works of Berdyaev.” We have no record of Poltoratsky mentioning having met Ilyin in person.

Poltoratsky moved to the United States in 1955. He began working as a researcher at Brooklyn College, then taught in the Sovietology Department of Middlebury College, Vermont. He moved to Michigan State University in 1958, quickly becoming the director of the Russian program and then of the Slavic Studies program. He published in the main émigré journals, including Russkaia mysl’, Novoe russkoe slovo, Vestnik RSKhD, and Vozrozhdenie.³ He also authored several books on Ilyin.⁴ In 1956 Poltoransky became a member of the Society in the Name of Ivan Ilyin (Sodruzhestvo imeni professora Ivana Aleksandrovicha Il’ina), launched in Zurich by Ilyin’s widow, Natalia Ilyina, along with Zile, Konstantin Klimov, and Alexsei Kvartirov.⁵ Poltoratsky is said to have collaborated with anti-communist organizations,⁶ but the only evidence of this to have been found so far is his participation in the Association of Russian- American Scholars in the US.⁷

The first collection of Ilyin’s works was produced by his disciple and secretary Zile, who was based after the war in Morocco before settling in Germany. According to Petr Bazanov, Zile “participated in the work of the ROVS, and contributed to the transfer of the archive of I. A. Ilyin to the Library of the University of Michigan.”⁸ To that end, he notably compiled a list of pseudonyms that Ilyin had used throughout his career.⁹ But it was Poltoratsky who became the main centralizing figure, collecting Ilyin’s works from different sources and hosting them at the University of Michigan, while keeping in mind that Ilyin himself had bequeathed the works to Moscow State University—a wish that would be fulfilled a few decades later.

Among émigrés, Ilyin did not benefit from any special status except among NTS circles. He did inspire a large share of NTS pamphlets in the 1930s10 and during the Second World War, but his centrality to the movement diminished during the Cold War decades. Even today, Boris Pushkarev, the contemporary leader of the NTS, mentions Ilyin only in passing among other thinkers.¹¹

Outside NTS circles, Ilyin was not widely read compared to, for instance, Nikolai Berdyaev. Symptomatically, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quoted Ilyin only twice, and very late in his career: first in his famous Rebuilding Russia (1990), with a quote on the spiritual life of the people being more important than territorial conquest,¹² and second in one of his last political texts, “Byt li nam, russkim?” (Will we, Russians, exist?) (1998), on the fact that the renewal of Russia cannot happen without conscience and faith.¹³ It is therefore probable that Solzhenitsyn read or re-read Ilyin at the time the latter was already being republished in post-Soviet Russia, but Solzhenitsyn cannot be counted as one of his promoters during the Cold War decades.

Within the Soviet Union, Ilyin does not seem to have been widely read among the main nationalist/conservative circles, even those interested in the émigré legacy. He was not mentioned in the so-called village prose (a movement of right-wing writers within the Soviet establishment) nor published by the main nationalist or major intellectual conservative newspapers of the 1960s–1980s, such as Moskva, Nash sovremennik, and Molodaia Gvardiia. But he was known among two groups: the dissident circles inspired by NTS and the monarchist milieu of the “Russian Party,” the nationalist and conservative lobby within the Soviet state apparatus.¹⁴

Within dissident circles, the most attracted to Ilyin’s thinking was the All Russian Social-Christian Union of People’s Liberation (VSKhON), the main dissident organization of the 1960s. VSKhON was composed of many young intelligentsia figures, among them several so-called “former people” (byvshie, children of aristocratic descent) who had been socialized at Leningrad State University. The VSKhON sought to create a Social- Christian ideology based on a form of Orthodox fundamentalism, calling for the creation of an anti-communist movement that would lead a clandestine war against the godless regime.

The VSKhON took from Ilyin the idea of the inevitability of the collapse of the communist state and its replacement by a Christian system.¹⁵ References to him in the VSKhON journal Veche become commonplace in the 1980s: an overview of Ilyin’s philosophy was published in 1981; “On Resistance by Force to Evil” in 1984; “World Principles of the Russian Revolution: Crisis of the Idea of Property” across several issues in 1985; and “Crisis of Atheism” in 1986.¹⁶ References to Ilyin continued in the 1990s: Vladimir Ivoylov, for instance, referred to Ilyin’s article “The Creative Idea of Our Future” and his notion that Russia’s rescue would come through the creation of a “Russian national chivalry” (russkoe natsional’noe rytsarstvo) as providing a model for VSKhON members.¹⁷

In the Russian Party circles, Ilyin was rarely quoted. Indeed, mentions of him were mostly confined to the memoirs of the monarchist antisemitic painter Ilya Glazunov (1930-2017). The latter’s uncle Boris Glazunov (approx. 1890s–1963) worked for the Nazi “Zeppelin Operation” in Soviet- occupied territories with Nikolai Rutchenko-Rutych (1916–2013). Both Boris Glazunov and Nikolai Rutchenko-Rutych were active in spreading Ilyin’s works among collaborationist forces during the first years of the war.¹⁸

Ilya Glazunov said he was introduced to Ilyin’s writings by Rutchenko, whom he met in Leningrad in 1955. He explained that he was fascinated with Ilyin’s article “On Resistance to Evil by Force” and took detailed notes on it because he feared carrying it home would result in its confiscation. The discursive line of Glazunov’s memoir Russia Crucified almost entirely reproduces the NTS/Ilyin reading of history, including the most clichéd aspects: Lenin’s sealed train having been funded by Germany; the Bolshevik leadership as secret Jews supported by Americans and Germans who sought to destroy Russia; and a tribute to General Vlasov, who defected to the Nazis.¹⁹

As seen from this brief overview, Ilyin was known by some in the anticommunist Soviet underground, but was not widely referenced in nationalist circles. Things changed dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union.