Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism

“The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1927

“Politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” — Ivan Ilyin, 1948

Ivan Ilyin, ~1920

This was written by historian Timothy Snyder, a well-known expert on democracy and tyranny. This is pretty creepy stuff with some close parallels to American radical right thinking, morality and propaganda tactics.  

Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. Today, his ideas have been revived and celebrated by Vladimir Putin.

And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became. Modern society, with its pluralism and its civil society, deepened the flaws of the world and kept God in his exile. God’s one hope was that a righteous nation would follow a Leader into political totality [wholeness], and thereby begin a repair of the world that might in turn redeem the divine. Because the unifying principle of the Word was the only good in the universe, any means that might bring about its return were justified.

Thus this Russian philosopher, whose name was Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a “Russian Christian fascism”. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the “1940s and 1950s [he wrote] for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power.”

A tireless worker, Ilyin produced about twenty books in Russian, and another twenty in German. Some of his work has a rambling and commonsensical character, and it is easy to find tensions and contradictions. One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. A crucial concept was “law” or “legal consciousness” (“pravosoznanie” [compound word pravo=law & soznanie=consciousness]). For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.

Marxists such as Lenin were atheists. They thought that by Spirit, Hegel meant God or some other theological notion, and replaced Spirit with society. Ilyin was not a typical Christian, but he believed in God. Ilyin agreed with Marxists that Hegel meant God, and argued that Hegel’s God had created a ruined world. For Marxists, private property served the function of an original sin, and its dissolution would release the good in man. For Ilyin, God’s act of creation was itself the original sin. There was never a good moment in history, and no intrinsic good in humans.The Marxists were right to hate the middle classes, and indeed did not hate them enough. Middle-class “civil society” entrenches plural interests that confound hopes for an “overpowering national organization” that God needs. Because the middle classes block God, they must be swept away by a classless national community. But there is no historical tendency, no historical group, that will perform this labor. The grand transformation from Satanic individuality to divine totality must begin somewhere beyond history.

According to Ilyin, liberation would arise not from understanding history, but from eliminating it. Since the earthly was corrupt and the divine unattainable, political rescue would come from the realm of fiction. (my emphasis) In 1917, Ilyin was still hopeful that Russia might become a state ruled by law. Lenin’s revolution ensured that Ilyin henceforth regarded his own philosophical ideas as political. Bolshevism had proven that God’s world was as flawed as Ilyin had maintained. What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new [Soviet] regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of the world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.

After he departed Russia, Ilyin would maintain that humanity needed heroes, outsized characters from beyond history, capable of willing themselves to power. In his dissertation, this politics was implicit in the longing for a missing totality [wholeness] and the suggestion that the nation might begin its restoration. It was an ideology awaiting a form and a name.

Although Ilyin was inspired by fascist Italy, his home as a political refugee between 1922 and 1938 was Germany. As an employee of the Russian Scholarly Institute (Russisches Wissenschaftliches Institut), he was an academic civil servant. It was from Berlin that he observed the succession struggle after Lenin’s death that brought Joseph Stalin to power. He then followed Stalin’s attempt to transform the political victory of the Bolsheviks into a social revolution. In 1933, Ilyin published a long book, in German, on the famine brought by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share.

According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis.

The article is long. Those are some selected parts.

Germaine’s fraught descent into mindreading and clinical diagnosis

What baffles the hell out of me are the recurring thoughts and behaviors among authoritarians, including the ones ruining American society today. They include morally noxious and ridiculous beliefs that (i) inconvenient truth is nothing at all, literally nothing, and (ii) they know how fix all problems and save humanity, which they are happy to do by force. Those minds reek of deep, cold sociopathy. They will kill if they have to, and probably enjoy it. There is no room for logic, morality or empathy in that black place. Unquestioning self-delusion of perfection manifests as dumb, cold arrogance. 

Presumably Ilyin really believed what Snyder finds from his published works. But the idea that people like Putin sincerely relies on the same reasoning feels wrong. Putin very well could point to Ilyin as moral justification for his brutal tyranny, but does he really buy all that crap about flawed God, national restoration and whatnot? I doubt it. It’s a buttload of garbage, useful only as an smoke screen.

In my opinion, Putin is a sociopath with intelligence, viciousness and a good work ethic, not someone concerned with God’s mistakes or any other high-minded reasoning. He does not care about dense philosophical argument. That is just a foil to elevate his joy of brutality and mega-scale theft to a learned excuse to be a cruel, rotten tyrant-kleptocrat. He likes wealth and power. That’s it. 

Well, maybe he also likes killing people.

Question: Is Germaine off the rez, out of his depth and/or just shooting blanks, or are Putin and radical right American authoritarians really drinking Kool-Aid and blither cocktail?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to fuster for citing this article.