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Chapter 3:
Ilyin’s New Postmortem Life in Russia
The 2005 double reburial demonstrated the pro-White lobby’s success at getting Ilyin officially recognized as the philosophical embodiment of the White emigration. But how has that recognition had a domino effect, both upward, toward the elites and the higher echelons of the political elites, and downward, toward public opinion?

At the Highest Echelons of the State

One way to explore the elite-level impact of Ilyin’s rehabilitation is to see how often and in which contexts Putin has quoted Ilyin. The Russian President mentioned him on several occasions: three times around 2005–2007, then in 2012 and 2014, and in a third phase in 2021 and 2022. It is interesting to see which excerpts from the works of the émigré philosopher have been selected by his team of advisors and ghost writers, and with what messaging.
In 2005, in his address to the Federal Assembly, Putin declared:
The great Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin wrote that “State power has its own limits defined by the fact that it is authority that reaches people from outside... State power cannot oversee and dictate the creative states of the soul and mind, the inner states of love, freedom, and goodwill. The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness, and conviction.... It cannot regulate scientific, religious, and artistic creation.1
In his address one year later, Putin declared, “Reflecting on the basic principles on which the Russian state should be built, the well-known Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin said that the calling of soldier is a high and honorable title and that the soldier ‘represents the national unity of the people, the will of the Russian state, strength and honor.’”2

In 2007, attending a session of the State Council, Putin quoted Ilyin’s sentence “Knowledge without educating heart and soul is one of the most dangerous social phenomena, dangerous for a healthy sense of justice.”3

In 2012, during his third presidential campaign, Putin published an article in Nezavisimaia gazeta devoted to the nationalities question in which he referred to Ilyin: “Do not eradicate, do not suppress, do not enslave other people's blood, do not strangle a foreign and heterodox life, but give everyone a breath and a great Motherland, keep everyone, reconcile everyone, let everyone pray in their own way to work in one's own way, and to involve the best from everywhere in state and cultural construction.”4

In December 2014, the Russian president once again quoted Ilyin’s Our Tasks during his address to the Federal Assembly: “He who loves Russia should wish freedom for it; above all, freedom for Russia as such, for its international independence and self-sufficiency; freedom for Russia as a unity of Russian and all other ethnic cultures; and finally, freedom for the Russian people, freedom for all of us: freedom of faith, of the search for truth, creativity, work, and property.”5

At the Valdai summit in October 2021, the President was asked by Piotr Dutkiewicz, Professor at Carleton University, “which Russian thinkers, scholars, anthropologists and writers do you regard as your closest soul- mates, helping you to define for yourself the values that will later become those of all Russians?” To which Putin replied:
You know, I would prefer not to say that this is Ivan Ilyin alone. I read Ilyin, I read him to this day. I have his book lying on my shelf, and I pick it up and read it from time totime. Ihave mentioned Berdyaev, there are other Russian thinkers. All ofthem are people who were thinking about Russia and its future. I am fascinated by the train of their thought, but, of course, I make allowances for the time when they were working, writing and formulating their ideas. The well-known idea about the passionarity of nations is a very interesting idea. It could be challenged—arguments around it continue to this day. But if there are debates over the ideas they formulated, these are obviously not idle ideas, to say the least.6
The fact that the President began with Ilyin as the central reference seems to confirm that the émigré ideologist occupies a privileged place in what Putin reads or claims to be reading. But Putin seems more personally engaged when it endorses theories of “passionarity,” which refer to Lev Gumilev,7 a name he has mentioned since the early 2000s.

Last but not least, Putin has referred to Ilyin twice in 2022 in the context of the war. First, in June, during a youth forum on ecology in Kamchatka, he mentioned “a citation from his friend,”8 in fact the above-mentioned sentence by Ilyin promoted by Nikita Mikhalkov on several occasions.9 Second, in his infamous speech of September 30, 2022, recognizing the pseudo-referendums organized in the four Ukrainian regions under occupation and their annexation by Russia, Putin once again referred to Ilyin, this time directly:
And I want to close with the words of a true patriot Ivan Ilyin: “If I consider Russia my Motherland, that means that I love as a Russian, contemplate and think, sing and speak as a Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my grief; and its prosperity is my joy.10
We can see from these excerpts that references to Ilyin are made in a very trivial manner: obviously the most problematic ideological components of Ilyin’s thought, namely his pro-fascist stances, as well as his White engagement and visceral anticommunism are ignored and not integrated into the pantheon of citations selected by the presidential administration. Instead, the chosen quotes focus on state power being limited, on military commitment and readiness to die for a cause, on morality, on patriotism and national unity, on Russia being free from international pressure, and on being a “true patriot”—nothing that is genuinely specific to Ilyin’s thinking and that could have been quoted from many other Russian thinkers.

One can therefore conclude that Ilyin’s officialization in Putin’s speeches has to be decoded as a two-layer strategy: first, promoting him at the highest levels with consensual and common-sensical quotations about Russia, and second, letting a circle of “the initiated” interpret Ilyin’s place in the state pantheon as a pro-émigré, anti-Soviet flagship.

Ilyin quickly became a fashionable rhetorical device for the Russian political landscape for all those wanting to showcase some vague intellectual-history knowledge and demonstrate ideological loyalty . Reference to Ilyin’s works has spread among members of the presidential administration and United Russia. In his official capacity as Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff, Vladislav Surkov has referenced Ilyin three times. In 2006, during a speech at the United Russia cadres’ school, he quoted Ilyin: “When the collapse of the communist system becomes
a fait accompli and true Russia starts to revive, the Russian people will realize who they are without a governing stratum. Of course, this stratum will be temporarily occupied by sedentary and transient people, but their presence will not resolve the issue.”11 And then one year later, during another lecture on Russian political culture, he cited Ilyin’s abstract formula: “Russian culture is the contemplation of the whole.”12

As studied by Mikhail Suslov,13 in the mid-2000s Ilyin was quoted broadly by United Russia Chair Boris Gryzlov,14 by Prime Minister Dmityr Medvedev,15 by Attorney General Vladimir Ustinov,16 and by Ivan Demidov, then a key figure in the party, trying to promote a “Russian project” (in the ethnonationalist sense of Russian, russkii) as the new ideological foundation of the regime.17 Yet one cannot speak of a long-term, recurrent strategy of promoting Ilyin to Russian political and bureaucratic cadres at the time Surkov was deputy chief of the Presidential Administration (1999–2011). Surkov has been the most innovative éminence grise
of Putin’s reign, funding myriad ideological projects and supporting any form of pro-state framing, including popular art and art house, so it is doubtful Ilyin has any specific importance for him. Following this first outburst connected to the reburial, Ilyin has remained a point of reference for some political figures referring to Russian conservatism such as Gryzlov, who stated in 2010 that Ilyin’s precepts were central to United Russia’s ideology, or Iurii Shuvalov, then first deputy prime minister, who coedited a book on Russian conservatism in which references to Ilyin came in second only to those to Struve.18
Vladimir Medinsky. Source: Wiki Commons
Under Viachesvav Volodin, it seems the Presidential Administration distributed Ilyin’s main work, Our Tasks, as well as Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Inequality and Vladimir Soloviev’s Justification of the Good, to regional governors and senior members of United Russia in early 2014.19 But more constant supporters of Ilyin have been Vladimir Medinsky, Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2022, and his entourage.

Between 2015 and 2018, the publication of Ilyin’s complete works by Lisitsa was funded directly by the Ministry of Culture, before being moved to the Likhachev Institute (see below). In 2019 Medinsky participated in the presentation of a new collection of Ilyin’s unpublished works, The New National Russia. Essays, 1924-1952 (Novaia natsional’naia Rossiia. Publitsistika 1924-1952), edited by Lisitsa and his son Andrei.20 Medinsky also re-quoted Ilyin’s sentence about loving Russia and wishing it freedom that Putin had quoted in 2014.21 In 2021, at another book launch, this time of Ilyin’s On Russia’s Revival and Renewal (O vozrozhdenii i obnovlenii Rossii), Medinsky, then advisor to the president and director of the Russian Military-Historical Society, quoted the philosopher as saying, “The matter of preservation requires, above all, a heightened and inexorable sense of responsibility.”22
Patriarch Kirill. Source: Wiki Commons
Medinsky’s former Deputy Minister, Vladimir Aristarkhov (1969), is also a fervent proponent of Ilyin. Aristarkhov graduated from the University of Marxism-Leninism before making his career inside the presidential party United Russia, becoming a member first of its political council and then of its presidium. He also headed the Moscow branch of the Young Guard, the presidential party’s youth movement.23 Aristarkhov defends a White reading of Russian history. He is a member of the Presidential Council for Cossack Affairs24 and joined (with Medinsky) the Renaissance (Vozrozhdenie) Foundation, which aims to restore prerevolutionary place names, including by installing plaques to White Generals.25

As Medinsky’s deputy, Aristarkhov was a central architect of the increasing ideological limits imposed on Russian culture. He coauthored the 2013 “Fundaments of Russian Culture Policy” (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki), which celebrates Russia’s “special path” as a unique civilization and calls for cutting funding to works that espouse “anti- Christian, anti-Russian (anti-russkie) and anti-Rossian (anti-rossiiskie) ideas.”26 Yet like Medinsky, Aristarkhov was careful not to embrace a radical Orthodox reading of Russian culture, refusing, for instance, to boycott the film “Matilda,” denounced by Orthodox radicals as blasphemy (the film depicts a love affair between Nicholas II and a ballerina). He also opposed the demands of both Tikhon and Malofeev’s St. Basil Foundation to explicitly mention the ROC as playing a special role in Russian culture, replying that Russia is a secular state.27

At the Ministry, Aristarkhov was in charge of the Department of Cultural Heritage, in which role he supervised the digitization of Ilyin’s archives, which are now available on the culture.rf portal.28 In 2016, he was among those who rejoiced at Donald Trump’s election.29 In 2018, Medinsky appointed Aristarkhov (who had got himself in trouble over some financial scandals and conflicts of interest30) director of the prestigious D.S. Likhachev Russian Research Institute of Cultural and Natural Heritage. In that role, Aristarkhov has been supervising the republication of Ilyin’s entire work in 44 volumes coordinated by Yuri Lisitsa.31
Vladimir Aristarkhov. Source: vk.com
Last but not least, Patriarch Kirill has referred to Ilyin on several occasions, often in conjunction with excerpts from the Bible and mostly to insist on Russia’s religious mission. In 2013 at the 17th World Russian People's Council, he mentioned, for instance, Ilyin’s definition of the nation as “an organized unity of spiritually solidary people” after having quoted the Book of John.32 In 2018, to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of the Baptism of the Rus’, Kirill explained Russia’s identity as “fidelity to the Gospel. [Russia] strove to arrange its life by what the thinker Ivan Ilyin called ‘kissing the Cross,’ that is, ardent love for the Lord and reverence for the Redeeming Sacrifice made by Him. Despite the complex vicissitudes of history, despite all the mistakes, deviations and even falls, the main thing for our people has always been the service of Divine truth and standing in the truth.”33

And in 2022, for the 1,160th anniversary of Russian statehood in Velikii Novgorod, Kirill declared, “The outstanding Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin correctly wrote that a healthy statehood is impossible without a sense of one's own spiritual dignity. The spiritual dignity of our people is inextricably linked with the Orthodox faith, in which the ancestors drew inspiration and courage to overcome difficulties, to go forward in spite of all trials.”34

We can therefore see that references to Ivan Ilyin have indeed penetrated some state circles, with the Russian philosopher being quoted by Putin himself, Patriarch Kirill, and a group of high-level figures such as Medinsky and its entourage. Yet Ilyin’s outreach to broader circles has remained limited.

What Public Reception for Ilyin in Today’s Russia?

Looking beyond Russia’s political and cultural elite, does Ilyin’s legacy resonate with the broader public? Without a doubt, Russian public opinion has no knowledge of the ideological intricacies and debates between intellectuals and receives state propaganda through other means, mostly television. The Integrum database, which encompasses the whole of the Russian media landscape, shows that Ilyin has not been mentioned once by the main political talk-show hosts, like Vladimir Soloviev and Olga Skabeeva.

Likely, the only project led by the pro-Ilyin movement to speak to a broad audience has been the historical park “Russia, My History”. It opened in 2013 at Manezhnaia exhibition hall, near Red Square, before finding a home at the trade show and amusement park VDNKh. The park has been a commercial success: as of 2022, about 20 versions of the original one located in Moscow have opened in major cities across Russia. The state agency for tourism, Rosturism, has included the exhibition in its program for tourist groups—and since 2016, the Ministry of Education and Science has recommended a visit to the exhibition for school pupils as part of their history classes, for students in higher education institutions, and for future teachers of history enrolled in pedagogical institutes.35
Figure 1. Mentions of Ivan Ilyin in Russian media and academic publications,
2008-2022.
Source: Compiled by author based on Integrum, Russian State Library and PhD databases.
The success of the project lies in its unique combination of a reactionary reading of Russian history, on the one hand, and an ultra-modern medium for its transmission, on the other. At the Moscow park, the Romanov section—the most ideological—takes an openly monarchist stance, systematically presenting the Russian tsars as wise heads of state. Any attempt to question their autocratic power is condemned as a plot concocted by Russia’s enemies, external and internal. Ilyin features prominently in the banners that are displayed in each exhibition rooms.

Yet, with the exception of the historical park, Ilyin’s works do not reach a broad audience. If we look at the Integrum database that gathers all Russian media, we see that mentions of Ilyin remain minimal, at a few hundred a year, and have even decreased since his reburial. The flare for Ilyin touches mostly academic circles, with an increase in PhD dissertations either fully or partially related to his work, and a major increase in academic publications (Figure 1 below).

Conclusion

As we can see from this overview of Ilyin’s rediscovery during the Cold War decades and in today’s Russia, his rehabilitation is led by a group of enthusiastic supporters who see Ilyin as the philosopher of the White movement. This group of supporters is closely connected to émigré networks and to the NTS legacy, as well as to Soviet-era religious dissidents, as evidenced by Lisitsa’s trajectory. For this group, Ilyin’s main contributions to Russian philosophy are his hardline anti-Communist stance, his Christian theology, and the inspiration he drew from a fascist tradition reinterpreted through an Orthodox lens.

Yet at the state level, the embrace of Ilyin has been more common-sensical, taking from him citations that could have come from more or less any other Russian philosopher. The presidential administration, as well as Putin himself, have built a much more plural pantheon of ideological references in which Ilyin is a central but not exclusive figure. This spreading of Ilyin’s works by his supporters is undoubtedly oriented “upward” to the inner circles of elites around Putin, with very little time and energy spent trying to promote it “downward” to a broader audience. While Ilyin remains unknown and unpromoted to the Russian general public, he has been officialized as the flagship of a hardline anti-Soviet and reactionary segment of the Russian elite.
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