As we will see here, Ilyin has been far from a philosopher shut up in an academic ivory tower; on the contrary, he was a very active member of the White (anti-Bolshevist) movement’s émigré circles, participating in almost all its major political organizations, especially close to the Russian All-Military Union (Russkii obshchevoinskii soiuz: ROVS) and the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (Narodno-trudovoi soiuz rossiiskikh solidaristov: NTS). Ilyin failed at securing a university position and instead specialized in ideological production: from 1921 to 1938, he gave almost 200 lectures in Germany, Latvia, Switzerland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria, and authored about 400 articles, pamphlets, and books.

One of the critical points of tension in analyzing Ilyin’s legacy relates to his relationship to fascism and Nazism. Ilyin’s hagiographers have been working hard at hiding his not-so-ambivalent attitudes. In 1925–1926, the Russian philosopher wrote a series of nine “Letters About Fascism,” which were sympathetic to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s experience. Ilyin saw fascism as a spiritually imperfect form of White ideology. In 1928, he wrote that “fascism is an Italian secular variation of the White movement. The Russian White movement is more perfect than Italian fascism because it has a religious ethos.”⁵ Ilyin had consistently supported this idea and by 1933 he argued that fascism and the White movement had a “common and united enemy, patriotism, sense of honor, voluntary-sacrificial service, an attraction to dictatorial discipline, to spiritual renewal and the revival of their country, and the search for a new social justice.”⁶ He also welcomed the arrival of Nazism in Germany. On May 17, 1933, he published an article praising Hitler and the Nazis:

Ilyin would renew this analysis in his pamphlet “On Fascism” from 1948, criticizing the “mistakes” of Nazism such as hostility to religion and obsession with race, but celebrating the political project, its antisemitic elements, and praising the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal.⁸

Contrary to what his hagiographers assert, Ilyin worked well in a Nazi environment. In the 1920s he gave lectures at numerous völkisch associations affiliated with the early Nazi movement, such as the National Club (Nationaler Klub) or the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei). He collaborated with key figures of the intellectual Nazi realm such as Adolf Ehrt and the Eckart-Verlag publishing house. Ehrt joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and from 1933 to 1936 he was the managing director of Eberhard Taubert’s Antikomintern—a department in Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry which, albeit briefly, employed Ilyin. In 1933, Ilyin gave lectures at the Russian-German Club (Russisch-Deutscher Klub) and took an active role in bringing the Russian Scientific Institute under the control of the Nazis. He even participated in purging it of its Jewish figures during his short directorship of it (1933–1934) before being laid-off from it.

Contrary to another widespread assertion, Ilyin did not leave Germany in 1938 as a sign of protest against the radicalization of the Nazi regime, but was expelled by the German authorities themselves, who were worried about the loyalty of White émigrés close to the NTS. Once in his second exile, in Switzerland, Ilyin continued to work with collaborationist figures such as Samuel Haas (1889–1952), a right-wing publicist and Nazi sympathizer and one of the co-founders of the Union for the People and the Homeland (Bund für Volk und Heimat, one of the leading political organizations of the Swiss fascist movement).

Ilyin took myriad initiatives to sell his skills to different authorities as long as they were anti-Soviet and, like many other members of the White émigré community, he also sought American support for his cause. Beginning in the 1920s, Ilyin developed ties to the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and at the end of the war he collaborated with the Coordinating Center of the Anti-Bolshevik Struggle, a CIA-sponsored effort to bring the most important postwar Russian émigré organizations under one umbrella. Ilyin never hid that defeating Communism at all costs was his supreme goal: in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, he even declared that Russian patriots should side with the US if war were to break out between it and the Soviet Union.⁹ He also very vehemently argued that the Soviet Union was not Russia and that there cannot be, per essence, any “Soviet patriotism.”¹⁰

Ilyin is often celebrated in today’s Russia as a philosopher of impressive depth, on par with the most famous names in German philosophy, but he was in fact a pretty average thinker, whose thought in emigration was mostly motivated by political purposes more than by philosophical ones. Ilyin’s central text, On Resistance to Evil by Force, while presenting itself as an answer to Leo Tolstoy’s pacificism, should be read as an extra-canonical Russian Orthodox doctrine of just war. Translating in Russian terms the medieval Catholic theology that was used to justify the Crusades, Ilyin looks for a divine authorization for coercive violence: those representing an eschaton and fighting on the side of God — in this precise case, the Whites representing the old, anti-Soviet Russia, even if tsarism had by then disappeared — have not only the right, but the duty, to use violence against an atheist regime.

It is precisely this theological justification of violence that has seduced Russian political figures who have been rehabilitating Ilyin in today’s Russia. A cluster of both political and cultural actors, often of monarchist sensibility, have been acting to rehabilitate the White movement’s main ideologist even before Putin took office in 2000. The monarchist coloring of many of the pro-Ilyin memory entrepreneurs should not be read literally: while some may wish for the return of the Romanov dynasty, the majority of them use the White émigré thinker as a code for an autocratic and imperial regime, an Orthodox state religion, an essentialized opposition to the West, and the right to use violence against enemies both foreign and domestic.

How is it that such a figure — who praised Mussolini, worked with Nazi institutions, advocated a strict lustration of former members of the Soviet security services, approached American and British intelligence-related organizations, and preferred to side with the US rather than with the Soviet Union - can be erected as a part of today’s Russia’s national pantheon? This directly contradicts the cult of the memory of the Second World War (known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia), now an almost sacred component of state language, as well as the legal continuity between the Soviet Union and Russia—to say nothing of Putin’s judgment that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. It also creates strong dissonance with the regime’s current obsession with denouncing its opponents as siding with Western actors who plot against Russia’s strategic national interests.

The reintegration of the Russian émigré community into post-Soviet Russia’s national pantheon belongs to a normal process of nation-building, which requires recreating the state’s historical continuity and offering a plurality of interpretations of the tumultuous past of the early 20th century. Yet, the reclamation of the White political legacy, especially in its most anti-Soviet forms, sympathetic to fascism, is not about historical reconciliation between Whites and Reds. It is about advancing a political agenda that is largely inspired by Russified versions of fascist principles, and which has become a rhetorical device for some Russian elites to express their political views.

This “Ilyinist” faction does not dominate the whole state structure, which, when it refers to Ilyin, does it in a very commonsensical manner with hazy quotes on Russianness. Neither has it been able to promote Ilyin to a broader audience, nor to make his works part of the new indoctrination mechanisms put in place since February 24, 2022. Rather, it is aimed mostly at speaking to the elites and the Kremlin, not to the Russian population at large. But it has succeeded at making a Russian fascist sympathizer calling for a just war against enemies of the White cause a central figure of the Russian state pantheon.