Sergei Lebedev
I am standing on the quay in the Polish city of Szczecin. The north wind from the Baltic Sea brings a thick gray drizzle that envelops the buildings and the port cranes, creating a sense of stagnant timelessness. A tugboat on the Oder River, almost hidden by the curtain of rain and turned into a fluid silhouette, gives a loud, long blast of its horn and vanishes in the fog. But the horn still sounds, an echo out of the past.
One hundred years ago this past fall, on September 30, 1922, a ship docked here. Szczecin was called Stettin then, and it belonged to Germany. The ship had come from Petrograd, the former St. Petersburg and future Leningrad: in terms of names, it came from a city that no longer exists to another city that no longer exists. The Oberbürgermeister Haken carried a group of scholars, public and political figures, and intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks; among them were the philosophers Nikolai Berdayev and Semyon Frank, Sergei Trubetskoi and Boris Vysheslavtsev. In mid-November another ship, the Preussen, arrived with a second group of deportees; others were sent out through Black Sea ports or by railroad, totaling around 250 people, including family members.
Expulsion: the strange grace of forced salvation, a gesture of absurd magnanimity on the part of the ogre. Those who remained were executed, such as the philosopher Gustav Shpet. Or they died in the Gulag, like the philosopher Lev Karsavin, a passenger on the Preussen who settled in Lithuania, which was later seized by the Soviets. But then, in the year of the Treaty of Rapallo, the Bolsheviks needed international recognition, needed a bit of a good reputation, and this gave the deportees a chance to survive.
During the 1980s, in the period of glasnost, this expulsion in two boatloads of an eminent if unwanted intelligentsia was known as the Philosophers’ Steamer, a pejorative name, a symbol of the Soviet battle against free thought, of an enforced brain drain, and the destruction of culture and intellectual power. Today history repeats itself: Russians with undesired minds are once more being forced to leave their country, essentially using the same routes — through the Baltic states or through Turkey. The term Philosophers’ Steamer is current again, used by those leaving as if to stress the continuity of their flight with the earlier one, and by state media, mockingly, as if to say that the Philosophers’ Steamer was a real loss, even though the Bolsheviks were right, while today there is no one to feel sorry about losing. Well, there is a bitter paradox in that irony. Russia’s war against Ukraine — an imperial and colonial war — has mercilessly exposed the fundamental flaw of Russian political culture. Russia has no intellectual tradition aimed at dismantling the imperial, chauvinist matrix of consciousness and its associated institutions. But the state, alas, easily adopts historical justifications for aggression, co-opting figures from seemingly opposing camps.
One figure whose words are now widely quoted to buttress the claim that Ukraine belongs to the “Russian world,” descended on September 30, 1922 onto the quay of Stettin from the Oberbürgermeister Haken. He was thirty-nine. His name was Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin.
Today he is Vladimir Putin’s favorite philosopher.
He was my grandmother’s uncle.
After a hundred years of exile, his remains rest in Russia, re-interred at Putin’s request in Moscow’s Donskoy Cemetery. I live in Berlin, where he lived in the 1920s and 1930s. He returned. I left.
He, who was once considered a dangerous criminal and a reactionary ideological foe by the Soviet state, is now posthumously recognized and honored. This comes from the people who grew up in the USSR, who were brought up to despise and hate the Whites — the imperialist defenders of Old Russia whom the communists despised. Their amazing omnivorousness — they now include even Ilyin in their pantheon — merely proves that today’s Russian regime opportunistically combines disparate elements of historical trajectories dating back a century ago: the totalitarian Red left and the authoritarian, and potentially fascist, White, related to Franco’s Spanish regime. How did that happen?
I will try to answer the question using Ilyin as the key — or as the guide into my family history in its conjunction with the history of my country.
***
In my Soviet childhood we often went cross-country skiing in winter, sometimes taking the train to the Ilyinskaya station, where in the midst of dachas on Kolkhoznaya Street stood a snow-covered church in the Russian Gothic style, the crosses knocked down from its dark cupolas. If someone had told me that this station had been named in honor of my distant relative, a colonel engineer named Nikolai Ilyin, who had built this railroad and had owned the nearby estate that was now a sanatorium, and that Ivan Ilyin (Nikolai’s nephew) had been married in this church in 1906, I would not have believed it. I would have been unable to assimilate something so enormous into my concept of our family history.
For in fact there was no history. The past was dangerous territory that one could visit only accompanied by adults; the doses of permitted chronicles were measured out scrupulously and cautiously; I was a child, lacking in experience, and I thought that this was how it had to be.
I did not question why the family narrative began in 1917, as if “before” was nonexistence, minus-time; my closest ancestors seemed to have been born in the year of the two revolutions. In the photos I was shown, for example, my great-grandfather Nikolai Lebedev appears already in uniform with a Red Army star on his cap. How had he lived before? Where had he served? I did not ask myself. I had mastered the skill of not asking. I learned that a part of the past had to remain opaque and that some people existed only nominally: all that was left of them was a name, perhaps a Photo, but we should take no interest in their fate.
Yet there was a place where the past came too close: the Vvedensky Cemetery in Moscow, locally known as the German cemetery, where my father’s family was buried. The old cemetery was intended for the non-Orthodox, with monuments speaking a dozen tongues, where death and the next life had diverse styles. The monuments were different, resembling sprouts of Gothic church spires, and the language of the symbols was different, too: Roman and Celtic crosses, olive branches, palm branches, and most importantly, angels. In the Orthodox tradition, angels are rarely depicted sculpturally; but here there were dozens — marble, bronze, a nesting site for angels, a sanctuary of otherworldliness.
I always asked my parents why we Russians, we Lebedevs, had a family plot in the German cemetery. Who was memorialized by these worn limestone headstones? All of my paternal grandmother’s brothers had died missing in action in the war and her sisters had starved to death in the blockade of Leningrad. But there, in the cemetery, nineteenth-century German graves faced those of wounded Soviet officers who had died at the nearby military hospital, creating the illusion that the dead were still fighting the war underground. My parents replied that my great-grandfather was a military surgeon and that the hospital had given him the plot. That was only a partial truth. In the 1980s, my grandmother had written her memoirs by hand: a heavy book in a homemade cover. I read it only in the 1990s, and discovered that the nameless, ostensibly unmarked limestone monuments on our plot were the graves of our ancestors. Our German ancestors. The feeling that I was German — just a tiny bit, a minuscule fraction — was almost unbearable.
Then, for the first time in probably seventy years, the monuments were washed, removing the protective crust of dirt, moss, and lichen, and revealing the letters: Julius Schweikert von Stadion. Dr. Julius Schweikert von Stadion, a homeopath, came to Russia from Germany in 1832 as an apostle of alternative medicine. His apostolic mission failed and he ended his days as a naturopath, a physician at a Moscow residence for the widows of state officials. The building survived and we passed it amid the fluttering of red flags when my mother would take me to the May Day demonstrations.
Dr. Schweikert was married to a Frenchwoman and left behind eight daughters. They became governesses and at least three of them married the sons of the families. The youngest, Sophia, my great-grandmother, became Orthodox and entered the noble Rtishchev family, provincial military men who found glory in the Napoleonic wars. Her older sister, Karolina, became Ekaterina Yulyevna Ilyina, a lady from a respected and wealthy family. Thus the genealogical tree that joined us to Ilyin grew out of the stone root of the old limestone monument. It was no accident that one of Ilyin’s pseudonyms was Julius Schweikert.
“As sometimes happens with Russian Germans, he had a jealous love for the Russian element. Unrequited love,” the insightful memoirist and poet Yevgenia Gertsyk wrote about Ilyin.
My grandmother was not a Party member, yet she worked her entire life at Politizdat, the Central Committee’s publishing house of political literature. She, whose relatives had been sent to the camps or killed by the Bolsheviks, had edited the complete works of Lenin. I still don’t know how she said it — a complete detachment from her feelings? Conformism? A readiness for martyrdom?
She wrote memoirs of her life as an editor, or more accurately, as a censor. It was only when I became a journalist and an editor myself that I could fully appreciate her artistry in dropping a line of thought or using omissions that did not look like omissions. She recounted so many impossibly new things about her former life that it was hard to catch that the most important thing was often not said, or was hidden in the details. She wrote her text not knowing that the Soviet Union would soon collapse and the archives would be partially opened; she wrote it for publication in the USSR, desperately trying to maintain the elusive balance between permitted and unpermitted.
Actually, I could only read her memoirs properly when electronic databases appeared with histories of people arrested and killed in the war. With their help I was able to decipher the omissions, and learn the fate of characters that she had hidden or had not known. I began working in the archives, reading investigations of the 1920s and 1930s that created a second layer for my grandmother’s memoir, an expanded commentary that turned into an independent text. One of the cases was that of Igor Ilyin, Ivan’s brother.
Here is what my grandmother had written about Ivan Ilyin and his brothers:
In the Ilyin family, Karolina’s sons had differing views. Ivan, an idealist philosopher, emigrated before the war of 1914 to Italy, settling somewhere near the Vatican. Alexander and Igor were average, apolitical, and honest working lawyers. Alexei was a Bolshevik. He died before the revolution in a clash with police. Consequently, when people came to Karolina from the GPU state police to question her about her son the émigré, or to make them move into smaller quarters, or to requisition something, she would show them some letter of protection given to her as Alexei’s mother. The visits usually ended in apologies, and Lina peacefully lived out her life in the family of her son Igor, his wife Nina, and his grandson Svyatoslav.
Almost everything in that passage is either mistaken or misleading. Ivan, as we know, was expelled in 1922 on the Philosophers’ Steamer. Alexei did not die in a skirmish with the police, but after returning from exile in Siberia in 1913. Lina did not live out her life peacefully in Igor’s family.
The real stories of these three brothers — Alexei, Ivan, and Igor — reflect the essence of the historic crossroads that Russia faced on the eve of the 1917 revolution.
***
If not for the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, Ivan Ilyin would probably have been a theoretical philosopher, a teacher specializing in Hegel. Roman Gul, the future émigré, journalist, and publisher, and a harsh critic of Ilyin, had been his student starting in 1914 in the law school of Moscow State University. “Tall, very thin, handsome in a Mephistophelian way (even though he was blond), I. A. was a brilliant lecturer and a brilliant scholar,” Gul wrote in his memoirs.
Ilyin’s father had an estate in the village of Bolshiye Polyany in Ryazan Province, a wealthy homestead with a dairy farm. The local peasants who were questioned in 1937 about Igor remembered his brother Ivan as well: he taught in Moscow at the university. After the revolution the estate was confiscated and Ilyin’s mother and aunt were briefly arrested.
According to Yevgenia Gertsyk, in his youth Ilyin paid tribute to leftist ideas and even attended the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in Finland in 1905. (It Ias there that Lenin and Stalin first met.) Subsequently he withdrew from revolutionary ideas and studied Hegel. He was radicalized by the Civil War and the Red terror. He was arrested three times between 1917 and 1922 on suspicion of anti-Soviet activity. Once abroad, he grew close to the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), the organization of the defeated White Army, and became its de facto chief ideologue.
The Whites had lost in part because they could not present a clear alternative to the Soviet project. Ilyin tried to replay the lost war, building an alternative in case there was a historical opportunity for revenge. In fact, in the 1920s and 1930s the confrontation between conditional “reds” and “whites” played out not only in Russia: in his programmatic article “On Russian Fascism” in 1927, Ilyin refers to the experience of Hungary, Germany, and Italy. Spain, of course, was to come later.
It seems as if Ilyin had been hypnotized by the success of those various European “whites.” The Civil War left him with a visceral contempt for democracy, which had been unable to defend itself in Russia. (The Bolsheviks had easily routed the Provisional Government, Russia’s transitional parliament.) He acquired an exalted, mystical love for rightwing dictatorships as a practical and effective measure against communism. Ilyin regarded the tyrants from Mussolini to Hitler as a natural and necessary phenomenon: a kind of protective reflex of European civilization against communist barbarism.
In Germany, Ilyin worked at the Russian Scholarly Institute in Berlin. In 1933, he welcomed the Nazi government and for a brief period headed the institute, until he was fired in 1934, because the Nazis were not impressed by his praise. With the composer Rachmaninoff’s help, he emigrated in 1938 to Switzerland, where he died in 1954.
“I still have clippings of your pro-Hitler articles, where you tell Russians not to look at Hitlerism ‘with the eyes of Jews’ and sing the praises of the movement!” Roman Gul wrote to him in a postwar letter. Ilyin never reexamined or criticized his pro-fascist views publicly. This was in part owed to the political instability of the post-revolutionary Russian community abroad. Emigrés frequently became collaborators. Some secretly worked for the Soviet political police, furnishing information or helping to organize kidnappings and political murders (two chairmen of ROVS, General Kutepov and General Miller, were kidnapped and killed by Kremlin agents in Paris in 1930 and 1937). Others preferred the embraces of the Gestapo, out of ideological or practical considerations; the collaboration of some of the Whites with Nazi Germany during World War II is an especially shameful chapter in the history of the movement.
With a German grandfather and French grandmother, Ilyin could have chosen a conditional European identity, but in the sixteen years that he lived in Germany he never met with his Schweikert relatives. He conspicuously cultivated his Russianness.
***
Ivan Ilyin never mentioned his older brother, Alexei: not in articles, not in correspondence. He buried him in silence. It was probably because Alexei Alexandrovich Ilyin, a successful graduate of the legal and historical-philological departments of Moscow State University, was a Bolshevik. He had not been a newspaper-writing theorist or a brief fellow traveler like Ivan in his youth; he was a man of action, an agitator and a fighter.
In 1925, when Ivan was living in exile in Berlin, his mother Ekaterina (Karolina) was petitioning for a pension in Moscow, on the grounds that she was the mother of the Soviet hero Alexei. She appended references to her petition from “Old Bolsheviks” who had joined the party before the first Russian revolution, before 1905, and who had known him personally under his party pseudonym Ermil Ivanovich.
In 1905, on orders from the Moscow Committee of Bolsheviks, Alexei Ilyin organized a militant brigade, around sixty men, on the Moscow-Kazan railroad (this is the line that includes Ilyinskaya station and the Bykovo Estate that had belonged to the family then), which took part in an armed uprising in December. The brigade fought and killed police and gendarmes; Alexei was wounded on the night of December 2. He had to live illegally, hiding out, but with the assistance of lawyers he managed to help the escape of members of his brigade who had been arrested. He was himself arrested in 1907 and exiled to Siberia.
Released in 1910, Alexei returned to his underground work, providing money and documents to people fleeing police surveillance (they could get passport booklets at his father’s estate in Bolshiye Polyany, in Ryazan), and died, probably of typhus, in 1913, when Ivan Ilyin returned from two years studying in European universities to begin teaching at Moscow State University. In 1925, Fedor Konurovsky, one of the members of the railroad military brigade who obtained fake documents from Ilyin, wrote: “I ask the commission to give Ekaterina Ilyina an appropriate personal pension as the mother of a true ideological revolutionary who bore all the hardships of the first revolution.”
This is the classic plot of socialist realist writing: brother against brother, one for the old, one for the new. Ivan crossed Alexei out of his life but he could not have forgotten him, which made his crusade against Bolshevism something very personal: one recognizes that level of passion that is reserved for fighting estranged family, not strangers.
The brigade members apparently felt obliged to their late patron who laid the foundation for their political biographies. Not many survived the 1920s and 1930s. The highest-ranking member, Petr Kameron, a fighter in 1905 and Alexei’s secretary in the 1910s when he returned to legal work, subsequently became chairman of revolutionary tribunals that executed the surrendered leaders of anti-Soviet rebels in Central Asia, a member of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and chairman of the legal collegium on criminal cases of the Supreme Court (in 1938!) — a man who by virtue of the positions he held had blood up to his elbows, and visited Ekaterina Ilyina until her death in 1942.
He visited and probably helped her; he certainly supported the petition for a pension in 1925. But his loyalty was strictly bounded and extended only to Alexei’s mother, not to his brothers.
***
There was Ivan, there was Alexei, and there was Igor.
I obtained the case file on Igor Ilyin at the archives in Moscow when the Covid pandemic began in Russia. The guard at the door put a thermometer gun to my forehead; the number 37 flashed in the frame. History is filled with black humor: Igor Ilyin was shot to death in 1937 in Butovo, outside Moscow.
“The equipment is acting up,” said the guard, and let me in.
Opening the file, I was certain that I would find that Igor was arrested and executed for being Ivan’s brother, accused of kinship with an expelled enemy of the Soviet state. The reality was simpler and more horrifying. The NKVD did not bother making up a connection between the brothers, even though Igor honestly stated at his first interrogation that his brother had been expelled by the secret police in 1922. Igor was killed by “the apartment issue,” which had “ruined Muscovites,” as Bulgakov wrote in The Master and Margarita. A lawyer like his brothers, Igor found a loophole in Soviet legislation and managed to save the Ilyin apartment in Moscow from so-called “compaction,” that is, having the authorities move in strangers and turn it into a communal flat. He arranged for official recognition that there were three family units, not one, in the apartment: he and his wife, his mother-in-law, and his mother Ekaterina Yulyevna. Juridically, that is, they were all strangers and not a family, and therefore they required three norms of living space. The equation was almost perfect, but there was just one little room of five square meters left over, and to keep strangers from moving in Igor and his wife found a distant relative who needed housing.
The relative found a boyfriend, and the two of them sued the Ilyins, demanding an entire full-fledged room. The court refused, but it also denied Igor’s countersuit to evict the lodgers. In 1937, the lodgers got their revenge, denouncing Igor for alleged anti-Soviet agitation. To prove that Igor hid his “class nature,” a witness stated, “Ilyin was two-faced. He was not short of money, at parties in his house he wore a tailcoat and patent leather slippers, while he went to work in torn shoes.”
Igor was arrested on September 20, 1937, and after several interrogations in which the investigator scrupulously detailed how many cows, seeders, and hired workers there were at the Bolshiye Polyany estate in order to establish Ilyin’s landowning background, he was shot on November 19.
Stalin died in the spring of 1953, Ivan Ilyin died in Zollikon, Switzerland, on December 21, 1954, and in the summer of 1956, after Khruschev’s “thaw” began, Igor’s wife Nina Ilyin applied to the USSR Prosecutor’s Office for Igor’s rehabilitation. The KGB, established two years earlier, issued her a false certificate that Igor had perished from pneumonia on March 10, 1943 in a camp; such certificates were common practice, because despite the thaw, it was strictly forbidden to disclose the true cause of death — execution by firing squad, decreed by military field “troikas” according to a list. The KGB falsified death certificates on a mass scale, assigning arbitrary dates, usually belonging to the war period, so as to hide one death in the mass of others, and inventing “natural causes” of death — pneumonia, typhoid, heart attack.
In Nina’s correspondence with the USSR Prosecutor’s Office and the KGB, she referred to Alexei’s revolutionary past as evidence of the family’s trustworthiness and, naturally, never mentioned the exiled Ivan. The KGB itself did establish this connection: it dug out the archive files on his arrests by the Cheka during the Civil War and the operational materials regarding the emigré ROVS, whose ideologist Ivan was. But it left this information without consequences.
In the same correspondence, a striking detail emerges, an ominous metaphor for the entire era. Nina wrote that shortly after Igor’s arrest in 1937, an NKVD officer, one of those who arrested him, moved into his room, embezzling all his belongings. And, as she testified, in 1956 he was still living there: whenever the door to the room opened, she saw their belongings and furniture, appropriated by the murderer. Twenty years of living in the same apartment with the person who led your husband to his death, not being able to move out, and seeing the murderer sitting on the murdered man’s chairs, covering himself with his blanket — is there a stronger image of helplessness, of forced humiliation before evil, which was the school that the whole country went through in those years? It was the school of cohabitation with executioners. And today the heirs of those Chekists who destroyed Igor are praising and promoting his brother Ivan.
***
In the 1990s, when the culture of the Russian emigré world was undergoing a revival and previously banned books were being published in enormous quantities, Ivan Ilyin was overshadowed by the other passengers on the Philosophers’ Steamer, such as Berdayev, Trubetskoy, and Lossky. At the same time, the White Movement underwent a renaissance of its own with the publication of memoirs of military leaders, a fashion for “white” songs, and an idealization of the Whites as heroes to counterbalance the instant devaluation of the pantheon of Soviet heroes. And Ivan Ilyin appeared stage front in Russian history for a second time, with the ascendance of Vladimir Putin. The philosopher was forcibly “resurrected.”
They say that Putin was chosen to be Yeltsin’s successor through an interesting bit of casting — that several candidates were considered. We can imagine that Ilyin was selected for state-sponsored rehabilitation in a similar way. We must bear in mind that the surveillance of Russian anti-Soviet emigrés, of the ROVS, was a specific field of professional activity inside the KGB. The secret police was a loyal reader of their works and kept track of them — the case file on Igor Ilyin, for example, shows that a manhunt was begun in 1950 to determine Ivan Ilyin`s location. The Chekists in Putin’s circle could choose easily among the subjects of their operational interests.
In 2005, on Putin’s orders, the remains of two Russian emigrés were reburied at the Donskoy cemetery in Moscow: Ivan Ilyin, whose grave had been in Switzerland, and General Anton Denikin, the commander-in-chief of the White Army, whose remains were in the United States. The selection of these figures, these silent cadavers, as the foundation of the new state ideology was highly symbolic. Denikin embodied the Whites’ main slogan, “Russia United and Inseparable,” which opposed the Bolshevik policies that accepted secession of former Russian Empire territories, such as Finland or Poland. The White slogan became the official name of Putin’s governing party, United Russia, in December 2003.
And Ilyin was selected for the role of ideologist and prophet. Putinism does not have a holy text, a main book: it is enormously eclectic and malleable, wherein lies its strength. But Putin’s regime needed a higher genealogy and a conservative political language with pretensions to being a “philosophy” and a “historical tradition.” Ilyin’s lofty chauvinism did the trick. Yet Ilyin did not set the course of Russian history; on the contrary, Russian history moved in the direction of his ideas. After an extreme swing to the left, the pendulum swung to the right.
After 1991, whether its residents were aware of it or not, Russia faced the question of what it was, whether the Russian Federation would have real or merely nominal content. The answer came in 1994 with the First Chechen War, and the absolute rejection of the possibility of any declaration of independence by Chechnya from Russian control. The greatest fear of the 1990s was the fear that the country would come apart at the seams and devolve into an anarchy of national republics. Yeltsin exploited those fears to justify the war in Chechnya and the strengthening of the secret services.
If we summarize Ilyin’s views on the post-Bolshevik future of Russia, and he was one of the few emigré minds who made such forecasts, the following picture emerges: there will be chaos, an imaginary triumph of “freedom” and “democracy,” which will be used by Russia’s enemies to try to dismember it, to play the separatist card. The only salvation will lie in a strong leader, a dictator surrounded by an entourage of supporters capable of “patriotic arbitrariness” and of curbing the centrifugal tendencies at the price of civil liberties.
No wonder that for Putin and his Chekist gang Ilyin’s writings looked like prophecy. After all, from the very beginning they created an image of Putin as the savior of Russia from the chaos of “democracy,” using the old Soviet myth of the security services as the knights of the revolution with a shield and a sword on their emblem, a formidable echelon of selfless guardians of the state. It was no coincidence that Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service, described the security services as the “new nobility,” while Viktor Cherkesov, a former KGB officer who used to harass dissidents and was now chief of the Federal Drug Control Service, wrote a sensational article in 2007 about the “Chekist hook” that snagged Russia as it was falling into the abyss, and presented the security services as a warrior caste inspired by Chekism.
Putin and his cronies, in other words, have recognized themselves in Ilyin’s texts: in their own eyes, he had given them, the gray men from the secret services, people with a professional habit of anonymity and conspiracy, the desired historical respectability, and enhanced it with a touch of mysticism. Ilyin was their authority that justified their innate hostility to democracy through the narrative of the messianic inevitability of dictatorship. It — that is, Putinism — is not so much a detailed ideology as a mythological frame, a hallowed image that creates a sacralized identity.
***
Yet how did people from the Soviet security services, for whom Ilyin in particular and White emigres in general were bitter enemies, accept these views and ideas?
As a Soviet child I had a book called Reds and Whites. It was a collection of illustrated stories built on a deliberate and extreme dichotomy: the Reds were always heroes, the Whites were always villains and cowards. As a child I believed in this Manichean opposition completely. When I was a teenager, however, the picture was reversed; I can’t remember exactly when the transition happened; it was as if the inversion occurred all by itself. Now the Whites were noble knights and the Reds were lowly brigands. I think I breathed in the new version from the air of the age.
There is a historical misunderstanding in the overarching opposition between Reds and Whites that was caused by the savage and irreconcilable Civil War. It may be said that the division into Reds and Whites was, in a sense, conventional. The Red Army included as many former tsarist officers as the White Army. This shared collaboration, this common element, proves that the Reds and the Whites — not as a matter of ideology but of historical fact — were not at all as distinct from each other as the myths insist. The old imperial elite found a place on both sides, for the simple reason that both sides were imperialists — only of different varieties.
Still, there were significant doctrinal differences that bear upon events of the present day. White views on the national question were more conservative than those of the Reds, whereas the Soviets used the discourse of internationalism and opposed, at least rhetorically, the old imperial chauvinism. The Whites, with their idea of “one and indivisible Russia,” with their physiological metaphor for empire as (in the words of Ilyin) a “natural organism,” emphatically denied emancipation for the nationalities that made up the country. This is much closer to Vladimir Putin’s views, and to the practical needs of his regime: it was not for nothing that in a recent speech he reproached Lenin for “creating Ukraine,” that is, allowing it to appear on the map as a political entity, albeit within the Soviet system.
It is therefore not surprising that Putin, who for propaganda purposes has declared the “denazification” of Ukraine to be the goal of the war, at the same time quotes Ilyin, an apologist for fascist dictatorships, who occasionally wrote words of praise for Hitler. It is a kind of involuntary confession. It exposes the nature of the Putin regime, built on the cult of the leader and on the racist idea of the national superiority of Russians.
In the village of Bolshiye Polyany, the ancestral home of the Ilyins, neither the farmstead nor the church remains. The farmstead was looted after a series of requisitions and finally destroyed; the church was closed, used as a warehouse, and demolished in the 1930s. The last priest, Father Nikolai Sokolov, was arrested in 1937 and shot in Butovo a month before Igor Ilyin.
Ruins and oblivion are always regrettable. Yet the history of the posthumous resuscitation of Ivan Ilyin’s texts and thoughts suggests that some crypts need to be opened carefully, or not at all. It is necessary to reexamine the lost heritage critically, with ethical and historical awareness — otherwise one can end up reviving something like a virus from the past against which we have lost all immunity.
Sergei Lebedev – was born in Moscow in 1981. Both of his parents were geologists. Following their path at the age of fifteen, Lebedev spent eight seasons as a field worker in geological expeditions. Beginning in 2010, Lebedev wrote five novels dedicated to the theme of the hidden Soviet past, the impact of Stalin`s repressions and persecutions and their repercussions in modern Russian life. His fifth novel, Untraceable, is an intellectual thriller exploring the shadowy world of the Russian secret services. Lebedev`s books are translated into 22 languages and were shortlisted for major book prizes. He has lived in Germany since 2018. He unequivocally and openly speaks out against Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Reprint of an article from the journal: Liberties – A Journal of Culture and Politics, volume 3, number 2, winter 2023