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Chapter 1:
A Political Biography of Ivan Ilyin
Ivan Ilyin in 1909. Source: https://nbmgu.ru
Although this biographical sketch will not remedy the need for a thorough and critical biography of Ilyin, it attempts to put a special focus on his political activism: from storing bombs for the Social Revolutionary Party in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 and funneling money to the White military efforts after the October Revolution of 1917 to becoming a major propagandist for the White cause and an ardent fascist in the interwar period, initially willing to collaborate with the Nazis; and finally, to looking for American support in the postwar period.

This chapter draws, in part, on the vast and largely unexplored archive of Ilyin available online at Moscow State University , including letters, photos, notes, and bureaucratic papers,1 as well as police records and secret service files on Ilyin from Switzerland and Germany , both of which kept close track of his actions.2 Connecting the scattered pieces of information regarding Ilyin’s political activities throughout the years, a different picture emerges rather than that of the “religious philosopher” who escaped the Nazis — one that makes Ilyin a central player in the militant White emigration, deeply enmeshed in anti-Bolshevik plotting throughout his adult life, as well as a fascist propagandist and ultimately an enabler of Nazism in Germany.
The Ilyin family (from left to right): Alexander, Julius, Ekaterina Yulyevna, Alexei, Alexander Ivanovich, Igor (on his father’s lap), Ivan. Before 1900 (From the family archive of Irakli Andronikov). Source: Nasledie Iljina website
Early years in Russia

Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin was born in Moscow on March 28, 1883, as the son of the Russian lawyer Aleksandr Ilyin and his German wife, Ekaterina Schweickert (von Stadion). Both of his parents were descendants of noble families. Ilyin’s paternal great-grandfather, Ivan Ilyich Ilyin (1764–1832), served under Emperor Paul I as Collegiate Counsellor, and in 1796 he was bestowed the rank of nobility. Ilyin’s paternal grandfather, Ivan Ivanovich Ilyin (1799–1865), was a military man and civil engineer who built the Grand Kremlin Palace, then became its caretaker and commandant. His grandfather’s family lived in the Kremlin, where Ilyin’s father Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin (1851–1921) was born, whose godfather was none other than Emperor Alexander II. Alexander Ilyin was a provincial secretary and became an attorney of the District of the Moscow Court of Justice in 1885. He inherited the large estate of his mother, Lyubov Petrovna Ilyina (née Puzyreva) (1811–1885), in Bolshie Polyany, and was a follower of Leo Tolstoy’s teachings.

Ilyin’s mother, née Caroline Louise Schweickert von Stadion (1858–1942), came from an old German noble family. Originally from Wittenberg, her father, Julius Schweickert von Stadion (1807–1876), became a pioneer of homeopathy in Russia.3 She converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy after her wedding in 1880 to Ilyin’s father and adopted the name Ekaterina Yulyevna Ilyina. Ivan Alexandrovich was the third of the Ilyins’ five sons: his older brothers were Alexei (1880–1913) and Alexander (b. 1882), and his younger brothers were Julius (1889–1901) and Igor (1892–1937). Very little is known about their fate, apart from most of them studying law, as their father did. Alexei and Julius died young, while full dates of his older brother Alexander’s life are missing.4

Ilyin’s brother Igor is known to have stayed in the Soviet Union after the Russian Civil War where he worked as a legal advisor for the Industrial Cooperative Society “Chulochtriko-tazhremont.” He was shot on November 19, 1937 for “counter-revolutionary agitation” and rehabilitated on March 5, 1957.5
Education

Ivan Ilyin was brought up in Naryshkin Lane, in the center of Moscow, not far from the Kremlin. After obtaining his baccalaureate in 1901, following in his father’s footsteps, Ilyin enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Moscow, although he personally wanted to study philology.6 Having no passion for jurisprudence, he was drawn to the encyclopedia of law course by Pavel Novgorodtsev (1866–1924), which, according to Ilyin, provided “an obscure introduction to the philosophy of idealism.”7 Novgorodtsev was the figurehead of the so-called “Moscow School of Legal Philosophy,” with which also Ilyin’s later professor and mentor, Prince Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy (1863–1920), was associated.8

In his classes, Novgorodtsev emphasized philosophers such as Plato, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Ilyin was a keen student who absorbed his professor’s lessons. Novgorodtsev was impressed by Ilyin’s final essay from 1906 on “The Ideal State of Plato in Connection with His Philosophical Outlook.”9 Subsequently, Ilyin became a part of Novgorodtsev’s extracurricular discussion circle as well as his protégé.10

According to his contemporaries’ memoirs, during that period, Ilyin identified as a “Russian German.” He was mostly interested in German classical philosophy — the works of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Being half German, he was fluent in the language, and was able to read the original texts. In regard to Russian influences, Yuri Lisitsa mentions that among Ilyin’s “spiritual authorities from the past were Pushkin, Gogol, Tyutchev, Dostoevsky, A. K. Tolstoy, Theophanes the Recluse; as well as Professor V. I. Guerrier, Prince E. N. Trubetskoy, and his scientific supervisor P. I. Novgorodtsev from among contemporaries.”11

Both of Ilyin’s most influential teachers, Novgorodtsev and Trubetskoy, were heavily involved in Russian politics in the run-up to the Russian Revolution of 1905. Although there are no indications that Ilyin was involved in any of his professors’ early political endeavors, not long after the 1905 Revolution, he joined their cause.

Novgorodtsev was a member of the council of the Union of Liberation (Soiuz osvobozhdeniia), an illegal political movement rallying for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy in Russia. It included several figures that became prominent in White exile, such as Pyotr Struve (1870– 1944), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), Semyon Frank (1877–1950), and Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), all of whom Ilyin would eventually meet during his life.12

In 1905, alongside most members of the Union of Liberation, Novgorodtsev joined the Constitutional Democratic Party (“Cadets”) founded in October of that year, which strove for moderate reforms towards a constitutional monarchy while at the same time rallying against the left, and he also became a deputy of the First State Duma. After the dissolution of the Duma the following year, Novgorodtsev signed the Vyborg Appeal of July 1906, along with many other deputies, calling for passive resistance against the authorities; he was subsequently convicted and sentenced to three months in prison. After his release, he toned down his political activities for a few years in order to preserve his academic career.

Ilyin’s other professor at the Law Faculty, Evgeny Trubetskoy, was also heavily engaged in politics. Like Novgorodtsev, Trubetskoy was initially a member of the Cadet Party, but quickly switched to the short-lived Party of Peaceful Renovation, which he co-founded in June 1906 (dissolved 1907), whose constitutional monarchist and right-wing platform was only mildly different from the Cadets. Before being appointed professor of legal encyclopedia and history of legal philosophy at Moscow University in 1906, Trubetskoy had been a professor of law at Kiev University since 1897. In his twenties, he became a follower of the theologian Vladimir Solovyev (1853–1900), a figurehead of the so-called Russian Religious Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that found fertile ground among the Russian Empire’s reactionary elites. Since its inception in 1905/1906, Trubetskoy was a member of the Council of the Moscow Religious and Philosophical Society (in Memory of Vladimir Solovyov), which brought together a heterogeneous group of theists, including the aforementioned Semyon Frank, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergey Bulgakov, as well as symbolists, theosophists, and anthroposophists.

Trubetskoy, Solovyov, Frank, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov were all proponents of an intellectual current called the Russian Religious Philosophy (RRP) that emerged from within the Russian Religious Renaissance. By today’s standards, its output would be classified as a form of theology, (ab)using philosophical concepts to legitimize and promote Christian Orthodoxy. With atheism gaining ground in the bourgeoning Soviet Union, many RRP proponents were affiliated with the counter-revolutionary and anti- communist milieu, and many were exiled by the Soviet government on the so-called Philosopher Ships in 1922, including Ilyin. After that, the RRP current became prevalent among the Russian diaspora.

Social Revolutionary Party

It was during his last years of undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Law that the first Russian Revolution of 1905 broke out, which politicized the young Ilyin. In that period, he briefly dabbled with anarchism and was involved in the terrorist activities perpetrated by the Social Revolutionary Party (SR).

The SR’s history goes back to a conspiratorial organization from the late 1870s called Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will), from which the SR inherited its terrorist traits. Until about 1909, the SR relied heavily on assassinations of public officials to pressure the Tsarist government into political concessions. Agents of the party’s terrorist branch, the SR Combat Organization, assassinated two Interior Ministers, Dmitry Sipyagin and Vyacheslav von Plehve; the Emperor’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich; and other high-ranking officials.

A high school friend and fellow revolutionary traveler, Mark Vishnyak, claimed that as early as December 1904, Ilyin took part in student demonstrations and was once detained by the police. Vishnyak remarked that he passed on the opportunity to chair the SR student organization in favor of Ilyin.13 Another acquaintance from Ilyin’s student years, Nikolai Nikolaevich Alekseev, recounted a story from 1905 when he visited Ilyin at his small house on Molchanovka street. During his visit, another man unknown to Alekseev handed a basket full of bombs to Ilyin, an incident confirmed by Ilyin’s cousin, the writer Liubov Gurevich (1866–1940).14

In the year that Ilyin was facilitating SR terrorism, the party split into two camps after Emperor Nicholas II’s October Manifesto, which gave way to the first Duma. The majority was represented by Yevno Azef (1869–1918) — a double agent and employee of the Tsarist Security Department — who spoke out in favor of ending the terror and dissolving the Combat Organization. The minority, led by Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), was for intensifying terror in order to finish off Tsarism.

Although it remains unclear how Ilyin positioned himself following the split, his experience with the SR kicked off his first attempts at writing political propaganda. In 1906, he published three political pamphlets with the Moscow publishing house Labor and Will (Trud i Volia) under the pseudonym N.Ivanov (“From Russian Antiquity: Stenka Razin’s Rebellion”; “What Is a Political Party”; and “Freedom of Assembly and Popular Representation”).15

Ilyin’s affiliation with the SR was brief. In 1906, when he married and embarked on an academic career, he notably toned down his political activities and focused on his academic writings, alongside numerous articles and book reviews which appeared in Moscow journals and newspapers. According to his cousin Gurevich, in the decade to come, Ilyin’s “revolutionary allures in the student years, storing bombs for the SRs in his house,” shifted to “an extreme right attitude,” when Ilyin increasingly leaned towards the Cadets.16
Liubov Gurevich (1866–1940). Source: Wiki Commons
Liubov Gurevich

Liubov Gurevich (1866–1940). Source: Wiki Commons
Gurevich, who had an important influence on Ilyin in those years, has been called “Russia’s most important woman literary journalist” in the early twentieth century.17 Ilyin had a very close relationship with his cousin, to whom he confided intimate details about his life in their extensive exchange of letters.18 Starting in 1905, Gurevich worked for thirty years as an advisor and editor to the famous Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938). It was likely due to Gurevich’s inspiration that Ilyin became a theater buff in his student years. He regularly frequented the Moscow Art Theater and, according to Lisitsa, “sought to become the spiritual leader and ideological mentor of Stanislavski’s troupe.”19

From 1891 to 1899, Gurevich was the publisher and chief editor of the monthly journal Severnyi Vestnik, a leading publication of Russian symbolism.20 In 1909, Gurevich started writing for Pyotr Struve’s Russkaia mysl, the same year that Ilyin began contributing to the magazine. From 1912 until WWI, she served as the head of Russkaia mysl’s literary department.21
Natalia Nikolaevna Vokach (1882– 1963). Source: Wiki Commons
Natalia Vokach

Ilyin graduated on May 25, 1906, with top grades and, on the recommendation of Prince Trubetskoy, was presented the opportunity to continue his Master’s degree at Moscow University with the prospect of a future teaching position. Before returning to university, on August 27, 1906, Ilyin married Natalia Nikolaevna Vokach (1882–1963), a graduate of the Moscow Higher Women’s School, where Novgorodtsev had taught since 1900.

Vokach descended from an upper-class family as well. Her father, Nikolai Antonovich Vokach (1857–1905), was a Doctor of Law and academic secretary distantly related to the noble de Witte family. Her mother, Maria Andreevna Muromtseva (b. 1856), was the sister of Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev (1850–1910), Chairman of the First State Duma, as well as of Nikolai Andreevich Muromtsev (1852–1933), a member of the Moscow City Council. Ilyin’s wife was a writer in her own right, who authored several works on philosophy, art criticism, and history.22 Their relationship has been described as very close throughout their childless marriage.23

In September 1906, Ilyin started his Master’s degree in the Department of Legal Encyclopedia and History of Legal Philosophy headed by Trubetskoy since that year.24 Between 1906 and 1909, Ilyin handed in six essays addressing specific aspects of the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Rousseau, and Aristotle, among other subjects.25

Starting in 1906, at times with the help of his wife, Ilyin translated several books, including Georg Simmel’s On Social Differentiation (1890) and two books on anarchism: Rudolf Stammler’s The Theory of Anarchism (1894) and Paul Eltzbacher’s Anarchism (1900). In that context, in 1906, Ilyin met the 78-year-old Leo Tolstoy, whom he asked to write a preface for his translation of Eltzbacher’s tract. Tolstoy, however, declined the offer upon laying out his arguments against anarchism.26

It is not evident how these translation opportunities arose, i.e., whether Ilyin chose the titles out of personal interest and then pitched them to publishers, or whether his professors were involved in any way. It is known that in the case of the legal philosopher Rudolf Stammler, Trubetskoy recommended Ilyin read his works in 1907 in order to learn more about the different directions of neo-Kantianism.27 That year, Ilyin wrote a review of Rudolf Stammler’s Economy and Law According to the Materialist Conception of History for the journal Kriticheskoe obozrenie.28 A few years later, Novgorodtsev recommended that Ilyin should attend some of Stammler’s lectures in Germany.29 The Ilyins also translated two books by Rousseau in 1908, one of Novgorodtsev’s favorite philosophers, but they were never published.30

Besides translations, between 1907 and 1909, Ilyin wrote numerous book reviews for journals and newspapers, such as Kriticheskoe obozrenie, Russkaia mysl, and Russkie Vedomosti. The works reviewed included authors that Ilyin academically focused on, such as Fichte, Schelling, Stammler, and Max Stirner, but also authors he despised, such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.31 In those three years, Ilyin published none of his own writing.

After finishing his Master’s degree in the Philosophy of Law at Moscow University in May 1909, Ilyin began teaching the history of legal philosophy at the private Moscow Women’s Law College. In November 1909, Ilyin gave two trial lectures at the Imperial University in Moscow in order to qualify as an adjunct lecturer (Privatdozent). The subjects were: “The idea of personality in the doctrine of Stirner,” prescribed by the university, and “The question about force and law as a legal problem,” a topic chosen by Ilyin. His performance was deemed excellent, and in 1910 Ilyin started teaching at the Faculty of Law while simultaneously preparing for a PhD.32

That year, he joined the Moscow Psychological Society (1885–1922, reestablished 1957), presumably on the advice of Novgorodtsev, who was an active member.33 Unlike its name suggests, rather than psychology, the Society focused on discussions about religion, “religious philosophy,” and mysticism. Ilyin published excerpts of his first major article, “The Concepts of Law and Force,” in the Society’s journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, to which he contributed frequently between 1910 and 1917.34

In late 1910, Ilyin went on a two-year study trip to Germany, Italy, Austria, and France with his wife to work on his doctoral thesis about the “Crisis of the Rationalist Philosophy of Law.” However, in the course of his trip, Ilyin decided to change the subject to “Hegel’s Philosophy as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Man.”35

Novgorodtsev recommended a strict itinerary for Ilyin’s trip:
Mr. Ilyin is advised to study at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Halle, Göttingen, Marburg and Paris. ...he is advised to pay attention, on the one hand, to the general courses of the history of philosophy and epistemology, and, on the other hand, to the courses devoted especially to the philosophy of law and the logic of the social sciences. Mainly he must attend lectures by Simmel and Münstenberg in Berlin, Windelband and Lask in Heidelberg, Stammler in Halle, Cohen and Natorp in Marburg, Butroux and Bougle in Paris. Considering his future professorship, Mr. Ilyin should pay attention to teaching methods and especially to the way courses are taught in practice. For this purpose, he is especially advised to attend the practice classes of Windelband and Jellinek in Heidelberg, Rickert in Freiburg, Stammler in Halle, Cohen and Natorp in Marburg.36
In mid-1911, Ilyin was in touch with the German philosopher Edmund Husserl since he wanted to better understand his phenomenological method.37 He attended some of Husserl’s lectures, alongside the French– Russian philosopher Alexander Koyré (1892–1964). During his study trip, he also got to know the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), with whom he later corresponded.38 In 1911, Ilyin met Sigmund Freud in Vienna, and he subsequently familiarized himself with the fundamentals of psychoanalysis.39

During the course of his travels, Ilyin only published a few articles, notably “The Idea of Personality in the Teachings of Stirner—Experience in the History of Individualism” in 1911, and in 1912, his Russian article “The Concepts of Law and Force” appeared in a German translation.40
Upon his return to Moscow in 1912, Ilyin continued teaching at the Department of Legal Encyclopedia and History of Legal Philosophy as a private lecturer and taught in other higher education institutions in Moscow. From 1912 onwards, he focused strongly on Hegel and wrote numerous articles on aspects of Hegel’s writings as a basis for his future dissertation, most of which were published in the journal of the Moscow Psychological Society, Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii. One of his first lectures in February 1914 was titled “Hegel’s Teaching on the Nature of the Speculative Way of Thinking.”41

In 1912, Ilyin’s collaboration with Pyotr Struve’s Russkaia mysl intensified, and he contributed numerous articles until the magazine’s temporary closure in 1927. Although it is not known when Struve and Ilyin first crossed paths, Richard Pipes mentions that by 1913 they were friends.42 The two would come to collaborate closely in exile throughout the interwar period and into the Nazi era. In 1905, Struve became a member of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party and stood at the head of its right wing. In 1907, Struve started to co-edit Russkaia mysl alongside Alexander Kizevetter, and in 1911, he became the magazine’s sole publisher and editor.43 Russkaia mysl was often called the organ of the Cadet Party, although Struve himself denied this.44

The First World War caused a patriotic, as well as religious, upsurge in Ilyin, and he addressed the subject in various articles and pamphlets, such as “The Basic Moral Contradiction of War” (1914) and “The Spiritual Meaning of War” (1915).45 In those texts, Ilyin developed convictions that he would later elaborate in greater detail: that it is not only patriotic and a right, but also a religious duty to “resist to evil by force,” i.e., to support the military efforts of the Tsarist empire. The tendency to fold his religious and political beliefs into philosophical arguments also found expression in his articles, such as “Philosophy as Spiritual Activity” published in 1915 in Russkaia mysl.46
While political and religious propaganda dominated his literary output, in the years preceding the October Revolution, Ilyin published only a few texts and reviews in his academic field. Most notably in 1915, alongside three other Russian jurists, Ilyin contributed to a legal textbook, General Doctrine of Law and State / Fundamentals of Jurisprudence, outlining “the basic concepts of Russian state, civil and criminal law.”47

In this period, Ilyin became a prominent orator and polemicist who went ferociously after his enemies. His wife’s cousin, Evgeniya Gerzyk, noted: “The ability to hate, despise, insult ideological opponents was particularly pronounced in Ilyin, and he was known for those traits by Muscovites in those years....”48 His wrath was particularly directed against proponents of the so-called Silver Age of Russian Poetry (ca. 1890–1917), a literary current represented by figures such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Maximilian Voloshin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Bely.49 He rallied against the movement’s “sick” interest in sexuality, which he deemed at the heart of Russian intellectual decay and as one of the factors that gave way to Bolshevism.50

In the mid-1910s, Ilyin became a close friend of Nikolai K. Medtner (1880– 1951), the “composer and clairvoyant,” as Ilyin dubbed him, and his wife Anna M. Medtner (1877–1965). Ilyin corresponded frequently with both of them between 1915 and 1953.51 Ilyin was also acquainted with the composer’s older brother Emil K. Medtner (1872–1936), to whom Anna Medtner was first married, and who later became a point of contact for Ilyin in Switzerland. According to Magnus Ljunggren, Emil Medtner, a “theorist of symbolism,” was “a patient and friend of Carl Gustav Jung and one of the first Russian supporters of psychoanalysis,” whose “love triangles” were discussed by Freud and Jung.52 It had been Ilyin who in 1913 recommended Medtner consult Freud in Vienna.53 In 1914, Medtner moved to Zurich and, with money from the Rockefeller Foundation, helped translate Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious into Russian.54 Jung may also have been influenced by Medtner’s racial, antisemitic, and fascist ideas and his enthusiasm for Mussolini and Hitler.
Revolutionary Years

Ilyin initially welcomed the February Revolution of 1917, and he supported the short-lived Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. Ilyin became chairman of a district committee organizing elections to the Constituent Assembly in the Moscow region and was elected chairman of the Lecturer Association of Moscow University.55

In 1917, the number of Ilyin’s publications rose considerably. In several small pamphlets issued by the publishing house Biblioteka Narodnoy Svobody (Library of People’s Freedom), Ilyin addressed the political events at the time and sharply criticized the Bolsheviks, particularly their anti-war stance.56 In the wake of the October Revolution, under the pseudonym Justus (“justice”), which he came to use frequently, Ilyin published a series of rabidly anti-Bolshevik propaganda pieces in the newspaper Utro Rossii.57

After the October Revolution, Ilyin remained a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks. He welcomed the resistance of the Moscow Junkers and anti- Bolshevik students against the military Red Guard in November 1917. In late 1917, he wrote a homage to the killed “White comrades” as the true winners of the revolution (“To the Departed Winners”).58 Therein, Ilyin picked up on his thoughts from WWI, ascribing the right to “resistance to evil by force” to the White counterrevolutionaries. In lectures and speeches, he tried to rally for a continued Russian military engagement, notably in a speech “On Patriotism” delivered in February 1918 at a public meeting of the Society of Junior Teachers of Moscow University.59

Amidst the revolutionary upheaval, on May 19, 1918, Ilyin defended his dissertation in front of Novgorodtsev and Trubetskoy, and received his doctorate.60 According to historian and Ilyin specialist Daniel Tsygankov:
Ilyin’s dissertation interpreted the earthly existence as having two aspects: the first one being the absolute solitude of man; and the second, the absolute spiritual unity of man. The law represents the individual’s inclination towards this unity. The world is an embodiment of the God-being; but God, once creating the world, could not overcome evil. Only man as a higher embodiment of the divine being can fight and defeat evil. Therefore, people bear the absolute responsibility for good and evil in this world.61
After the publication of the dissertation in 1918 and until Ilyin’s forced exile in 1922, only one other work is recorded: The Doctrine of Legal Consciousness, which was composed in 1919 but only published after his death.62 This considerable gap in productivity indicates that Ilyin, although still teaching philosophy of law at Moscow University, largely abandoned his academic trajectory after the October Revolution. Nonetheless, in 1921, he was elected a member of the presidium of the Philosophy of Law Association.63 Some of his time went into maintaining the Moscow Psychological Society, of which he was elected chairman in May 1920 after the previous director had died. However, he failed to resurrect the almost defunct Society.64

Volunteer Army

Ilyin’s limited academic engagement left him plenty of time for his counterrevolutionary activities. Following the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, Ilyin reached out to one of the generals of the Volunteer Army in Southern Russia, Mikhail Alekseyev (1857–1918), and secretly collected money for the Whites in Moscow. In 1918, he was arrested three times for his work for the Volunteer Army, however, he was acquitted each time for a lack of evidence.65 According to Lisitsa:
In fact, Ilyin had indeed received a large sum of money from the American Vladimir Bari—8,000 rubles for the needs of the underground organization “Volunteer Army,” as evidenced by his own handwritten note on Bari’s payment slip. During the investigation Ilyin explained that money was given to him in order to publish a book on Hegel’s philosophy, but when the publisher G. A. Lehmann offered him to print the two-volume book free of charge, he (allegedly) returned the money to Bari. The scientific community in Moscow took sides with Ilyin, and the Cheka had to free him.66
The source of the funds, the Russian–American Vladimir Alexandrovich Bari (1887–1979),67 was able to escape from prison and leave the country for the United States due to the intervention of the American consul in Moscow, most likely the US spy chief in revolutionary Russia, DeWitt Clinton Poole.68 The connection to Bari may have been the key to Ilyin’s acquaintance with Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972), the world-famous Russian aviator who emigrated to the United States in 1919, with whom Ilyin later corresponded. Bari became vice president of the I. I. Sikorsky Corporation, which designed and manufactured various military aircrafts and subsequently supported one of Ilyin’s publication ventures, possibly with money from Sikorsky.69

In August 1919, another arrest warrant was issued, followed by a search of Ilyin’s apartment. He was accused of participating in counterrevolutionary activities alongside other members of the Cadet Party. The counterrevolutionaries were hoping for the arrival of White forces from the South, where General Konstantin K. Mamontov was still fighting against the Red Army. Lisitsa states, quoting Ivan Alexeyev, that “Ilyin and his brother Igor...were participating in these events, even carried out specific combat missions, such as damaging telegraph lines, etc.”70

Tactical Center

Subsequently, Ilyin was once again arrested in February 1920 for involvement in the counterrevolutionary activities of the Tactical Center (Takticheskii tsentr), but was released after two days, possibly due to Lenin’s intervention, according to Lisitsa.71

The Tactical Center, established in Moscow in April 1919, was an alliance of underground anti-Bolshevik organizations that set out to coordinate the activities of the groups involved. It included the Union for the Revival of Russia (Soiuz Vozrozhdeniia Rossii), the (All-Russian) National Center (Vserossiiskii natsional’nyi tsentr), and the Council of Public Figures (Sovet obshchestvennykh deiatelei) and liaised with British intelligence.72 The Tactical Center was in communication with underground military organizations operating inside Bolshevik Russia as well as with the White forces of Admiral Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin. It foresaw a dictatorship as a transitional form of government and recognized Kolchak’s authority.

Upon being arrested for the sixth time on September 6, 1922, Ilyin was once more interrogated and brought before the revolutionary tribunal. The latter sentenced Ilyin to a life in exile, and the verdict also called for a death sentence in case he ever returned to Russia.73 On September 26, 1922, Ilyin boarded the Oberbürgermeister Haken, one of the Philosophers’ Ships, which brought around 200 unwanted academics and intellectuals to Stettin, Germany .
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