The first voice to propose the repatriation of Denikin’s remains was his daughter, Marina Denikina-Gray (1919–2005), who made this suggestion as early as 2001, just after Putin’s arrival in power. She was then offered Russian citizenship by the president himself.⁴

Denikina-Gray was a key figure connecting White Russian circles based in France with the French far right: her husband, Jean- François Chiappe, the scion of a collaborationist family, was one of the cofounders of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, a writer for the antisemitic newspaper Rivarol, and in charge of the French Association for Monarchist and Catholic Media.

Denikina-Gray’s voice was rapidly joined by that of Viktor Ivanovich Denikin (1952), at that time Deputy Plenipotentiary Representative of the President in the Central Federal District. Viktor Denikin presents himself as General Denikin’s great-grandson, but the genealogy of the part of the Denikin family that remained in the Soviet Union is obscure and we could not verify this claim. According to Viktor Denikin, he is descended from Ivan E. Denikin, the father of the White General.⁵

Viktor’s father, Ivan I. Denikin, was a member of the Bolshevik Party and spent his entire career in the Soviet security services.

Viktor Denikin and Marina Denikina- Grey are said to have met in Paris; he would be the one who would have asked her to write a letter to Putin with a request to transfer the remains of her father to his homeland.⁶ Viktor Denikin is a member of the Russian Nobility Assembly but has not publicly expressed any pro-White inclinations, presenting himself simply and uncontroversially as “a Russian officer serving the Fatherland.”⁷

The reburial initiative was supported by the Moscow Nobility Assembly, headed by Prince Andrei Golitsyn, which joined the call for the reburial of White Generals Wrangel and Denikin under the Kremlin walls.⁸

In 2003, during his trip to New York (accompanied by Igor Schegolev and Bishop Tikhon, see below), Vladimir Putin began negotiating the return of Denikin’s remains with Metropolitan Laurus, the main ROCOR prelate. Other participants in the meeting included Archbishop Mark of Berlin, Bishop Kirill of San Francisco and Western America, and Bishop Gabriel of Manhattan. The main part of the meeting was held behind closed doors.⁹ As Denikin was buried in St. Vladimir's Cemetery in Jackson, New Jersey, the reburial required the approval of ROCOR; this was part of the canonical reconciliation between ROCOR and ROC that would be officialized in 2007.

Putin’s meeting with ROCOR was advocated for and prepared by key figures within Russia’s reactionary and monarchist Orthodox movement: Konstantin Malofeev, Igor Shchegolev, and Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov).

The “Orthodox oligarch” Malofeev has used his wealth to build the influential St. Basil Foundation and the channel Tsargrad, and has gradually become the main funder of a large segment of the nationalist/ultraconservative ecosystem in Russia, from the Novorossiya ideologists and warlords to tsarist nostalgists and the anti-abortion lobby.¹⁰ Malofeev referred to Ilyin in his book Empire: Present and Future, echoing the philosopher’s call for military patriotism. He wrote:

Malofeev’s patron, former Minister of Telecommunications Igor Shchegolev, was one of the initiators of the League for a Safe Internet, the precursor of Roskomnadzor, the state agency in charge of the censorship of Russian mass media, and a convinced monarchist. Metropolitan Tikhon leads the most ideological wing of the Moscow Patriarchate, which hopes to penetrate state institutions and innervate them with nationalist and reactionary content.

While the pro-White lobby was particularly active in advocating for the return of Denikin’s remains, the question of Ilyin’s remains was never forgotten by its supporters. Tamara Poltoratskaia first raised the issue of Ilyin’s reburial back in 1995, stating, “As long as we are alive, we must rebury Ivan Alexandrovich at home.”¹²

In 2002 she asked Lisitsa to obtain the support of the Russian state and the ROC for the return of Ilyin’s remains, as the lease on the land at the cemetery in Zollikon where he had been buried would end in 2005.¹³ Lisitsa appealed to Georgy Poltavchenko, at that time presidential envoy to the Central Federal District, to lobby for Ilyin’s remains to be included in the Denikin reburial project.

Georgy Poltavchenko has been a central figure of the monarchist lobby. As part of the Ozero circles, Putin’s first financial and political “cooperative” in St. Petersburg,¹⁴ Poltavchenko has been close to Vladimir Yakunin, dubbed the “Orthodox Chekist” and long the director of the state railway company, for years. The two men have gone on several Orthodox pilgrimages together and have collaborated on a number of infrastructure projects in the St. Petersburg municipality; Poltavchenko is also a member of Yakunin’s Andrey the First Foundation. Poltavchenko has accumulated many honorifics in the rich network of Orthodox associations: he is a member of the Honorary Council of the Valaam monastery and head of the Honorific Council of the Russian Athos Society and of the Orthodox endowment fund Istoki.¹⁵ Over the years, Poltavchenko has also become close to Konstantin Malofeev, who has now superseded Yakunin as the “Orthodox oligarch”¹⁶ and is rumored to be very close to Metropolitan Tikhon.¹⁷

The central institution driving the return of Ilyin home has been Mikhalkov’s Russian Cultural Fund. Originally launched by Raisa Gorbacheva in 1986 as the Soviet Fund of Culture and then led by famous specialist in Russian medieval literature Dmitri Likhachev, the Fund was transformed in 2016 into the Russian Cultural Fund led by Mikhalkov. With the goal of “preserving and promoting Russian culture,” it has become one of the central tools for funneling state funds to patriotic cultural projects. A whole section of the Fund focuses on the nation’s legacy, contributing to returning thousands of items, letters, archives, and paintings to the motherland, with an emphasis on the emigration legacy.¹⁸ Mikhalkov himself is a member of the Presidium of the monarchist Russian National Council and published the Manifesto of Enlightened Conservatism (2010) to advocate for his conservative vision of Russia.¹⁹ He is said to be quite close to Putin and to be able to meet with him regularly.²⁰

In parallel with the presidential decree on the reburials, the Fund launched an “Action of National Reconciliation” (Aktsiia natsional’nogo primereniia) that emphasized the need to reintegrate the White past into the national pantheon to secure national reconciliation with the dominant Red memory. The Fund also released a film (“Denikin. Ilyin. Shmelev. The Long Road Home”) devoted to the reburials, as well as a two-part documentary series, “The Russian Choice” and “Russians without Russia” (which received a state prize in 2010), on the fate of Russian emigration.

The director of presidential programs at the Russian Culture Fund, Elena Chavchavadze (1947), has herself produced several television series that have sought to restore the image of the White émigrés and the Romanov emperors.²¹ Her husband, Zurab Chavchavadze, is a central figure of the monarchist movement in today’s Russia and a protégé of Konstantin Malofeev. Of Georgian aristocratic descent, several of his family members were active members of the White movement and collaborated with Nazi Germany.²² Zurab Chavchavadze has been working to promote connections with the European far right and the aristocratic realm and was long in charge of Malofeev’s St. Basil lyceum, which trains a supposed “Russian new elite” in tsarist nostalgia.

Having gradually coopted all the key institutions in charge of distributing state funding for cultural production, in particular movies, Mikhalkov has produced several films devoted to Ilyin and the White cause. In 2011 he released a film presenting him as a major philosopher who should inspire today’s Russia.²³ Since then, he has regularly invoked the image of Ilyin to bolster Putin’s legitimacy—including in his 150-minute television documentary that aired in 2015 to celebrate Putin reaching fifteen years as Russia’s leader.²⁴ On several occasions, Mikhalkov quoted Ilyin’s sentence “One should live in the name of what one can die for,” taken from Ilyin’s 1915 essay “The Spiritual Sense of the War,” which celebrates the sensemaking process of war. Mikhalkov quoted it in 2011 during an interview on the release of his film on Ilyin; and most recently during the war in Ukraine, to celebrate former criminals and prisoners who agree to fight on the Ukrainian battlefront.²⁵