Film director Nikita Mikhalkov claims the paternity of the rediscovery of Ilyin. A member of the family that led the Russian Party during the Soviet era and intimately connected with émigré culture,² Mikhalkov has been the engine of the cultural rediscovery of the White past through its cinematographic production. In 1991, his small publishing house Trite released a brochure by Ilyin, which he presented to Aleksandr Rutskoi, then vice-president of Russia.³ After the reading, Rutskoi began
quoting Ilyin regularly, especially in his political manifesto, “Political Credo of a Vice-President,”⁴, and was followed by Communist Party leader Gennadi Ziuganov. The fashion for Ilyin in conservative, or, as they were called in Russia, “red brown patriot” circles was launched.

Another central political figure of Ilyin’s rehabilitation at that time was Boris Mironov (1951), cofounder of Rossiiskaia gazeta, then president of the Media Committee of the Russian Federation. Known for his nationalist and antisemitic views, Mironov led the Soviet Russia publishing house, which republished Ivan Ilyin, as well as 19th century conservative thinker Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontiev, and Vasily Shulgin, one of the central figures of Russia’s White emigration.⁵ Mironov would later co-lead the extremist, National Great-Power Party of Russia (NDPR) along with Alexander Sevastyanov and Sergei Terekhov.

In more intellectual circles, Ilyin’s first early popularizer outside conservative and nationalist circles was the theater critic Boris Nikolaevich Lyubimov (1947). It was he who, for the first time in the Soviet Union, published fragments of Ilyin’s works outside of the samizdat world: these appeared in the journal Teatral’naia zhizn’ (Theatrical Life) in 1989.⁵ Lyubimov, who is now the rector of the Higher Theater School named after M. C. Shchepkin, is also a member of the Board of Nikita Mikhalkov’s Fund for Russian Culture (see below). The Lyubimov and Mikhalkov families have been friends for years; some unconfirmed rumors suggest that Mikhalkov is the godfather of Lyubimov’s daughter, Olga Borisovna Lyubimova, who has been serving as Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation since January 2020.⁶ Olga Lyubimova has been publicly critical of her years at an Orthodox collegium and presents herself as liberal Orthodox.⁷ She has produced several films on Orthodox culture and worked for years in the Movies Department of the Ministry of Culture, allowing her to maintain a relationship with Mikhalkov.

After Lyubimov’s republication of Ilyin in 1989, the rehabilitation became massive. Several articles devoted to his political philosophy were published by 1991; a ten-volume collection of his works was printed by 1993. These were followed by several conferences and a documentary film.

This rapid rehabilitation was made possible by the merging of émigré supporters of the philosopher with ideological figures in search of a new political language. This merging is embodied by the figure of Yuri Lisitsa (1947).

Yuri Lisitsa was born in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine and graduated from Patrice Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University (now Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) with a degree in Mathematics.⁸ Having achieved his Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, he began studying forbidden religious philosophy in 1965 as part of the Pan-Russian Artistic and Scientific Restoration Center (Vserossiiskii khudozhestvenno-nauchnyi restavratsionnyi tsentr, VKhNRTs), a club around the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Kadashi, one of the central neighborhoods of Moscow.⁹

The Club was led by Pavel Korin, a leading restorator who was fascinated by icons and painted nostalgic landscapes of traditional Russia. Korin would later become one of the founders of the Russian Society for the Protection of History and Culture (VOOPIIK), an institution central to the attempt to fuse Soviet ideology and Russian nationalism and which would become the cradle of the future Pamiat, the school for Russian nationalist cadres.¹⁰

In the Kadashi circle, one could also find Vladimir Vorobiev (1941). Vorobiev’s father, Nikolai V. Vorobiev, was one of Ilyin’s students at Moscow State University . Vladimir was raised in a religious atmosphere and, after a first degree in mathematics and physics, decided in the 1970s to study at the Moscow Spiritual Academy to become a priest. During the perestroika years and the early 1990s, he was very active in Orthodox associative life. In 1992, he became the first rector of the newly created Orthodox St. Tikhon Humanities University—where Lisitsa would later teach.¹¹

Since then, Vorobiev has been one of the main engines behind the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) lobbying efforts to penetrate state institutions. He has worked, for instance, in the Coordination Council between the ROC and the Ministry of Education to get religious institutions accredited. He has also been an active member of the Synodal Commission for canonization.¹² The Commission launched the ROC’s central memory policy of New Martyrs and Confessors (novomucheniki i ispovedniki), i.e., clerics persecuted for their faith by the Soviet repressions and whom the ROC had canonized.¹³ The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors was a prerequisite for ROC reunification with ROCOR, which has glorified them since the early 1980s.

It is possible Lisitsa met in the same religious circle Sergei S. Khoruzhii (1941–2020), a fellow mathematician and specialist in hesychasm who would become one of the main names of contemporary Russian philosophy. Lisitsa discovered Ilyin in 1985 through Khoruzhii, who first gave him the second volume of Our Missions, which contains Ilyin’s more moderate texts, before giving him the first volume, Ilyin’s more politically engaged pamphlets.¹⁴

Lisitsa also met in this religious circle Viktor N. Trostnikov (1928–2017), a student of Khoruzhii and an apologetic of Ilyin, who would have a huge influence on Lisitsa. Likewise a mathematician by training, Trostnikov defended a PhD in philosophy and began publishing in dissident circles. One of his books, Thoughts before Dawn (Mysli pered rassvetom), was published in Paris in 1980, which caused him to lose his academic position in the Soviet Union. In 1983 he began participating in the restoration of the Danilov monastery, found a technician job there, and then moved in 1986 to the Sergiev Possad monastery to work as chief fireman. In 1988, the ROC invited Trosnikov and priest Dmitri Dudko (the latter could not make the trip) to travel to the US to attend a celebration of a millennium since the baptism of the Rus’ organized by ROCOR. We do not have information on whom he met there, but he mentioned support from the ROCOR Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, and during a second trip in 1990 established contact with ROCOR New York Metropolitan Vitalii (Ustinov).¹⁵

The celebration of Russia’s Christianization was a turning point in the state- church relationship: originally intended to be purely a Church affair, the celebration was transformed into a national event when Mikhail Gorbachev gave it state backing. In 1992, Trostnikov began working for the St Ioann Bogoslov Russian Orthodox University and became a professor of philosophy there.¹⁶

In 1990, taking advantage of the perestroika context, which was favorable for rediscovering émigré culture, the professor Aleksandr L. Dobrokhotov (1950)¹⁷ invited Nikolai Poltoratsky to the MGU Philosophy Department for a series of conferences. The latter died of a heart attack soon after his lectures in Moscow — but his legacy would be a long-lasting one. Indeed, at that conference, Poltoratsky met the whole circle of Russia-based Ilyin disciples: Lisitsa, Khoruzhii, and a young Aleksandr Iu. Kazakov (1965), who would later serve as a Latvian representative of Dmitri Rogozin’s Congress of Russian Communities.¹⁸ The Congress of Russian Communities was the first organization to develop a political program based on Solzhenitsyn’s vision for Russia and to articulate the idea of Russians as a “divided nation” across the new post-Soviet borders that needed to be reunified.¹⁹ Kazakov would go on to supervise several pro-presidential youth movements, become the director of the Center for liberal- conservative politics named after Petr Stolypin and Petr Struve, and serve as a member of the public council of the ROC Department for Church-Society Interaction.²⁰