Post by pieter on Feb 20, 2024 10:08:27 GMT -7
Ivan Ilyin
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin also known as Il'in (1883 – 1954) was a multifaceted Russian figure, a jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and staunch conservative monarchist. His perception of historical events was distinctive: while he saw the February Revolution (1917) as a "temporary disorder", the October Revolution (1917), in his view, marked a "national catastrophe". This conviction propelled him into active opposition against the Bolshevik regime (of Lenin and Stalin -later-). He became a white émigré journalist, aligning himself with Slavophile beliefs and emerging as a key ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union. This organization firmly believed that force stood as the sole means through which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
All-Military Union
The Russian All-Military Union (Russian: Русский Обще-Воинский Союз, abbreviated РОВС, ROVS) is a White movement organization that was founded by White Army General Pyotr Wrangel in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 1 September 1924. It was initially headquartered in the town of Sremski Karlovci. The organization′s ostensible purpose was providing aid to the veterans of the Russian White movement (usually of the Imperial Russian Army as well), soldiers and officers alike, who had moved outside the Soviet Union.
The organization's undeclared aim was to maintain a Russian military organisation with a view to fighting the Bolsheviks. It and the more monarchist Russian Imperial Union-Order are the oldest organizations that represent the Russian White government-in-exile.
As an ardent anti-communist, Ilyin found himself initially sympathetic to Adolf Hitler but his staunch critique of totalitarianism was not embraced by the Nazi regime. In 1934, his refusal to comply with Nazi directives to spread propaganda led to his dismissal from the Russian Academic Institute, stripping him of employment opportunities. Financial support from Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1938 allowed Ilyin to remain in Switzerland albeit barred from work or political engagement. This phase of restriction led him to delve deeper into studies encompassing aesthetics, ethics, and psychology.
Despite battling chronic illness, Ilyin was remarkably prolific, authoring over 40 books and numerous articles in Russian and German. His works predominantly revolved around religion and Russia, although he diverged from Vladimir Solovyov's ideologies, advocating a global theocracy with whom the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the early 20th century is usually associated. Instead, Ilyin championed a patriarchal model of governance for Russia, rooted on Orthodoxy and unwavering faith in the autocratic tsar, distinguishing between autocracy and tyranny. His writings echoed calls for heroism and moral aristocracy, while cementing his role as a proponent of Western Russophobia.
Remaining true to Right Hegelianism throughout his life, Ilyin explored themes of statehood, law, and power in world history. He staunchly opposed federalism and neutrality, harboring a deep disdain for Western analytic philosophy. As an ultranationalist, Ilyin was a fervent critic of Western-style democracy, advocating instead for a robust government aligned with Russia's autocratic heritage. His prediction of the Soviet state's collapse remains a testament to his prescience.
Ilyin's views on Russia's social structure and world history held significant sway over post-Soviet intellectuals and politicians, including notable figures like Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mikhail Nesterov's portrait of Ivan Ilyin, 1921. (Russian Museum, St. Petersburg)
Early life
Ilyin in 1901
Ivan Ilyin was born in an aristocratic family claiming Rurikid descent. Ilyin's grandfather was a military man who moved to Moscow, where he became a civil engineer. His last job was as commandant of the Grand Kremlin Palace and gates. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin (1851-1921), was born and raised in the palace and a lawyer at the Moscow District Court. Ilyin's mother, Caroline Louise née Schweikert (1858-1942), was of German Russian descent and confessing Lutheran. To be able to marry Alexander Ilyin in 1880 she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Yekaterina Yulyevna.
Ivan Ilyin was brought up in the center of Moscow in Khamovniki District. He graduated on the 1st Moscow Gymnasium in 1901 and entered the Law faculty of the Moscow State University but would rather have studied history. Ilyin wrote as well in German as in Russian and mastered Church Slavic. He studied Plato's Ideal State and Kant's Thing-in-itself. Ilyin became a political radical during his student days and supported the freedom of assembly. In 1904, he took part in a student march, was arrested, and spent a month in prison. The events of the First Russian Revolution and the October Manifesto were reflected in his pamphlets "Freedom of Assembly and popular Representation" (a way of public participation in politics), "What is a Political Party", "From Russian Antiquity: The Revolt of Stenka Razin". Ilyin produced them under the pseudonym "Nikolai Ivanov".
Under influence of Pavel Novgorodtsev Ilyin became interested in the philosophy of law. In 1906, Ilyin graduated and married Natalia Nikolaevna Vocach (1882-1963) in Bykovo. She was a translator, art-historian and niece of Sergei Muromtsev, a Kadet and chairman of the First Duma. Ilyin worked with Natalia on a translation of "Anarchism" by Paul Eltzbacher and a treatise by J.J. Rousseau ("Idea of the General will") which were never published. From 1909 he began working as a privatdozent. (In the same year Lenin published his Materialism and Empirio-criticism under the pseudonym Vl. Ilyin).
Before the revolution
In January 1911, Knyaz Evgeny Trubetskoy, along with a large group of professors, left Moscow University as a sign of disagreement with the government's violation of the principles of university autonomy. Ilyin moved to Western Europe (Heidelberg, Freiburg, Berlin, Göttingen and Paris) studying the latest trends in European philosophy including: philosophy of life and phenomenology influenced by Husserl, who concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness; Scheler, who published "The Nature of Sympathy"; Fichte and Schelling on Absolute idealism. Meanwhile, Ilyin worked on his thesis "Crisis of rationalistic philosophy in Germany in the 19th century" which he never finished. In May 1912 he returned to work at the university and delivered a series of lectures called "Introduction to the Philosophy of Law". Novgorodtsev offered to have an Ilyin lecture on the theory of public law at the Moscow Commercial Institute.
Kremlin Palace and churches, early 1920s
In 1913 it appears that the couple broke with their relatives and met with Leo Tolstoy, according to Konstantin Krylov. Ilyin was known as being extremely intolerant towards Andrei Bely, who called him "mentally insane". For six weeks in 1914 Ilyin and his wife paid visits to Sigmund Freud.
During the July Crisis, Ilyin was forced to leave and his writings were confiscated at the outbreak of the First World War. After returning from Vienna, Ilyin was obsessed with psychoanalysis, diagnosing everything and everyone in Freudian terms, reducing every personal problem to neurotic symptoms, and according to one observer, psychoanalyzing every little gesture of those around him. The two became pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia. He began to develop a career as a writer and public figure.
Mokhovaya Street with the old buildings of the Moscow State University
World War I and the Russian Revolution
After the breakout of World War I, Evgeny Trubetskoy, once a member of the Party of Peaceful Renovation, arranged a series of public lectures devoted to the "ideology of war". Ilyin contributed to this with several lectures, the first of which was called "The Spiritual Meaning of the War" (1915). He believed that since Russia had already been involved in the war, the duty of every Russian was to support his country to the end. During the April Crisis (1917) he agreed with the Kadet Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavel Milyukov who staunchly opposed Petrograd Soviet demands for peace at any cost. In the summer of 1917, he published the pamphlets "The Party program and maximalism", "On the term of convocation of the Constituent Assembly", "Order or disorder?", "Demagogy and provocation", and "Why not continue the war?"
Solovyov, Trubetskoy, Grot and Lopatin, the board of a magazine, photographed in 1893. In 1921 Ilyin replaced Lopatin as head of the Moscow Psychological Society.
At first, Ilyin perceived the February Revolution as the liberation of the people. Along with many other intellectuals, he generally approved of it and supported the Russian Provisional Government. However, he was gradually disappointed and by the time the October Revolution had completed, viewed it as a catastrophe. The Moscow State Conference convened by Kerensky's Second Government was attended by actual and former Duma members, representatives of all major political parties, commercial and industrial organizations, the unions, army and academic institutions. Ilyin warned the audience, about 2,600 people, "The revolution turned into self-interested plundering of the state". In the autumn, he wrote under the pseudonym Justus "Where is revolutionary democracy going?", "Mr. Kerensky's refusal", "What to expect?", "Nightmare", and "Who are they?"
In February 1918 Ilyin gave a public lecture on patriotism: the lack among the Russian people of a mature legal consciousness. In March the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. In April Ilyin was arrested and accused of financially supporting a voluntary army in Moscow and having visited Andrey Avinoff, supporting the Imperial Army. The case was initiated by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish Bolshevik revolutionary and politician, and the leader of the First two Soviet secret police organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU (predecessors of the later Soviet KGB). The money he had received, Ilyin said, was destined for publishing: "The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity". He was in the Butyrka prison dungeons for about a week but developed serious health problems; Ilyin seems to have developed bronchitis that needed treatment. He was released for lack of evidence and allowed to give lectures and defend his thesis. For three weeks Ilyin was bedridden; Novgorodtsev's apartment was searched on the eve of the defence.
On 19 May, Ilyin received two degrees. However, the publisher Lehman-Abrikosov made a generous gesture and offered to publish the two-volume book for free – so Ilyin returned the money to the sponsor Bary & Co. This two-volume dissertation (a provocative interpretation of Hegel) published in the revolutionary chaos of 1918, is considered one of the best commentaries on Hegel's philosophy, also by Vladimir Lenin. Even in the preface, Ilyin notes that Hegel is primarily an intuitionist (and not a logician or, even more so, a rationalist), and in the future, all of Ilyin's thought is based on this idea.
He was an opponent of the Russian spelling reform of 1918 and continued to use pre-reform spelling.
Ilyin became a professor of law in Moscow University. As was customary among Russian religious thinkers, he lectured at the Moscow higher women's courses. He was imprisoned between 11 and 24 August, but released with the help of Ivan Yakovlev's son. On 19 December, Ilyin received a summons to appear at a meeting of the Revolutionary Tribunal (non-recognition of Soviet power). In 1919 Ilyin wrote: "In Moscow, the winter is fierce, there is no firewood, we are hungry. They have already taken me to Cheka three times – and tried in a tribunal "for preparing an armed uprising".
Ilyin's ability to hate, despise, insult ideological opponents was particularly pronounced. Ilyin was again imprisoned in 1919, February 1920 and September 1922 for alleged anti-communist activity. He, along with many other "irreconcilable" anti-Bolshevik intellectuals, was condemned to execution, and then forcibly exiled. On 29 September some 160 prominent intellectuals and their families were expelled (at their own expense and not allowed to return without the permission of the Soviet authorities) on a so-called "philosophers' ship" from Petrograd to the back then German city Stettin, where they arrived on 2 October.
Emigration
The Treaty of Rapallo (1922) between the German Republic and Soviet Russia opened friendly diplomatic relations. In February 1923, the Russian Scientific Institute (RSI) was founded in Berlin; funded by the YMCA. Ilyin delivered a topical speech "Problems of Modern Legal Consciousness". The RSI wasn't an educational institute; there were occasional lectures on Russian history, literature, law and other areas of Russian culture in Schinkel's Bauakademie. In 1923 Wrangel contacted Ilyin in the hope of arranging enrolment in the Institution for "about 300 of young Russian men ...". In July he lost his Russian citizenship for anti-Soviet activities abroad. It was the notorious year of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in October and the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November. The institute was going through a severe financial crisis. Due to invitations from the Czech government and offers from American universities, the number of employees soon thinned significantly. Ilyin briefly cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance but the philosopher of love, moved to Paris and Novgorodtsev moved to Prague.
In 1924, the Russian All-Military Union was founded; Ilyin met Pyotr Wrangel at Seeon Abbey, a center of anti-Bolshevik activities. Wrangel was told to abandon his (military) adventures. Ilyin became part of Wrangel's inner circle; not every Russian was charmed by Wrangel's personality.
In July 1924 Ilyin visited Italy for his health; his portrait of Benito Mussolini was sympathetic but not uncritical.
Schinkel's Bauakademie in Berlin, demolished in 1961
"... his policy is plastic, prominent: it consists of personal actions, bright, complete, original and often unexpected from the outside; but these personal actions are always at the same time the actions of the masses led by him, and, moreover, organized, and in the course of still being organized, actions. Mussolini has the gift of a political sculptor, the original, completing daring of the Michelangelo tradition.
In his book On resisting evil by force (1925) Ilyin advocated the use of violence in the struggle against Bolshevism, which he regarded as despotism or "left totalitarianism". Ilyin argued that war was sometimes necessary, but never 'just'. Far from supporting holy war, Ilyin in fact wrote that "all my research proves that the sword is not 'holy' and not 'just'." He criticized the anarchist ideology of Tolstoy and pacifist tolstoyism. Ilyin called for the courage to "arrest, condemn, and shoot", which Maxim Gorky called a "gospel of revenge" and Berdyaev compared to a "Cheka of God" and "legalism devoid of grace". For Zinaida Gippius his book was "military field theology"; according to her "this is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes feuilletons: it's a man possessed running amok." The book divided the Russian émigrés with its dedication to veterans of the White movement. In 1926 he bitterly wrote about the loss of the Motherland. Ilyin became the unofficial ideologue of the White émigrés who gathered in Paris.
Between 1927 and 1930 Ilyin was a publisher and editor of the journal Russkiy Kolokol. He actively published in right-wing conservative newspapers.
During the 1920s more than 300,000 Russians lived in Berlin. There were three daily newspapers and five weeklies. Seventeen Russian publishing houses had sprung up within a single year. Ilyin lectured in Germany and other European countries and would give 200 speeches. In 1930 the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists was founded in Belgrade and became popular in France. It rejected both Bolshevism and liberal capitalism and embraced Russian patriotism.
In 1932 only about 60,000 Russian emigrants were living in Germany and in Berlin the number of émigrés was 8,320. The activity of the RSI gradually slowed down due to a decrease in the number of Russian-speaking students. There were difficulties in maintaining this large institution, and it was liquidated. It became impossible to be employed as either a writer or a lecturer.
In "Welt vor dem Abgrund" (1931) Ivan Ilyin describes the growing bureaucracy, the terror, and worsening labor conditions in Soviet Russia.
1933 Hitler's first year in office
On 27 February, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Göring blamed a communist plot. The Reichstag Fire Decree on the next day restricted the rights of personal freedom, and freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Shortly after the fire, a wave of arrests began about 1500 people – Communists, in particular, were affected.
Beginning on 7 April the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service required an Aryan certificate from all employees and officials in the public sector, including education. According to Hannah Arendt, in an interview with Günter Gaus, having Jewish people in your inner circle became a problem. On 11 April, Ilyin handed the Ministry of Internal Affairs a voluminous work entitled "Directives of the Comintern for the Bolshevisation of Germany," consisting of hundreds of excerpts from Comintern documents that had been published in the press. It looked like an attempt to bow to the authorities, according to A.F. Kiselyov. Ilyin confessed that he literally forced himself to read Lenin's works, the materials of party congresses and plenums, the Comintern, and the Soviet press. In April Ilyin had a short, lukewarm communication with young Russian National Socialists. On 2 May, a committee was founded with Ilyin on its presidium, though cooperation never took off since Ilyin scorned the Russian radicals. On 17 May Ilyin published in "Vozrojdénie" his infamous article "National Socialism. A New Spirit". In June, Ilyin took over the head of the Russian Scientific Institute. His friend Werner von Alvensleben was reputedly involved in a putsch, which ended in the Night of the Long Knives.
Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Alvensleben
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
On 13 July, all German public employees were required to use the Hitler salute. On 14 July, the Nazi Party was declared the only legal political party in Germany. Russian emigrants feared that Hitler, who on various occasions had spoken out strongly against foreigners, would begin persecuting them.
On 5 August, Ilyin's house was searched, his letters were examined, and he himself was taken away for interrogation, where he was asked about his source of income and for details of the people abroad with whom he corresponded. After the questioning, he was released, although required to sign a declaration. In September the Reichskulturkammer was created with additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. The Russian institute was placed under the Reich Ministry of Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Ehrt who headed the organization Anti-Komintern, recruited Ilyin, Vonsiatsky and Kazembek, the leader of the Mladorossi, to work with him.
On the opening of the reorganized institute Ilyin reported on the plans of the Communist International to conquer the world; he held a lecture on the work of Ivan Bunin who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In an anonymous pamphlet Ilyin was accused of being a Freemason. He spoke on "The World Crisis of Democracy" and lectured on the works of Remizov and Merezhkovsky. On 9 July he was fired when Ehrt demanded that the professors of the Russian Scientific Institute join in Nazi propaganda. Ilyin denounced the racial policy of Nazi Germany and replied in a letter he had long wanted to retire and devote himself to science. Ilyin was paid for the work he had done but from August he was without salary. Many artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.
In 1935, Ilyin spent much of the summer at a large dacha in rural Latvia that the artist Evgeny Klimov had rented. Under the (German-sounding) pseudonym Alfred Norman, he published "The Bolshevik Policy of World Domination." This is more or less Ilyin's last active political statement. He went on to publish essays in the Berliner Kurier. Vasily Shulgin, a nationalist, showed him his manuscript "The Orion Belt" on an alliance between Russia and Germany but Ilyin wasn't impressed. In 1936, Hitler put Vasily Biskupsky in charge of the Russische Vertrauensstelle, a government body dealing with the Russian émigré community. Ilyin actively criticized in the press Alexander Lvovich Kazembek, a fascist or self-styled neo-monarchist. In his speech in Riga in February 1937, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death, Ilyin praised Pushkin's genius and defined his work as "the main entrance to Russian culture".[80] He applied for membership of the Reich Chamber of literature but he had a problem with obtaining an Aryan certificate because he did not know the identity of all his great-grandparents. Ehrt interfered and Ilyin received his membership.
In his pamphlet "An attack on the Orthodox church" (December 1937) he accused Nietzsche of fuelling Bolshevism, and Stalinism. The Gestapo confiscated this work and banned him from the Reichskulturkammer and independent political activity. In May, Ilyin decided it was the time to leave but the Berlin police forbade his departure. "On June 17, 1938, [he declared] I am ready to testify under oath that I and my wife are the purest Aryans and that I have never belonged to Masonic or affiliated organizations anywhere." In early July, he was permitted to visit Karlovy Vary for a treatment of his migraine. Instead he went to Münich with all his manuscripts. In August he asked the Swiss authorities to allow him to settle as a scientist, as a philosopher, and to promote his theory on art. (With a Nansen passport he visited a congress in Locarno.) With financial help from Sergei Rachmaninoff, he was able to pay the bail, but he was not allowed to work or to interfere in any way with Swiss politics. On 17 September he wrote to Ivan Shmelev that his furniture and library arrived.
Switzerland
From 1940 Ilyin resided stateless in the village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich and corresponded with the composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner. He published in local newspapers and lectured Russian literature at folk high schools, which was not considered paid work. There was no danger from Ilyin's lectures, according to an expert opinion issued by the Swiss Army Command in 1942. They were "national in the sense that it is directed against the whole of the West". In November 1943 he refused to cooperate with the Russian Liberation Army. In 1946 Ilyin stated he was never a Hegelian, as he himself expressed in the introduction to the German translation of his theses, a revised version of "Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre". In 1949 he and his wife received permanent citizenship. In his 1950 essay, "What Dismemberment of Russia Entails for the World", Ilyin predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and gave instructions on how to save Russia from the evils of the Western world.
The village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich in Switzerland
At the end of his life, Ivan Alexandrovich managed to finish and publish a work on which he worked for more than 33 years Axioms of Religious Experience, and three volumes of philosophical and literary prose, originally written in German.
He died in a hospital on 21 December 1954. In 1956, his postwar articles were compiled into a two-volume anthology called Our Tasks. These short political essays (in a verbose and pious style) were not only very profound, but also truly prophetic.[89] It is about the future of Russia and its State, once freed of Communism.[90] He did not describe this future very clearly, it is something bright, good, but blurry, according to the literary critic Alexander N. Arkhangelsky.
Ilyin lived at Alte Landstrasse 12 and Zollikerstrasse 33 in the village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich in Switzerland.
Family
Ivan Ilyin's parents. His father Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin (1851-1921) a lawyer at the Moscow District Court and his mother Caroline Louise née Schweikert (1858-1942), of German Russian descent and confessing Lutheran. His mother Caroline died on the estate "Ilyinka".
The Ilyin family owned a dairy farm 260 km from Moscow in Bolshye Polyany (Ryazan Governorate), where they spent the summers. Ilyin had four brothers: Alexey, Alexander, Julius, and Igor. In 1905 Alexey joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party but died in 1913. Alexander was a zemstvo warden but moved to America before the revolution. Igor, a lawyer, was arrested on charges of "counter-revolutionary agitation" by Stalin's NKVD in the Moscow region. He was executed and buried at Butovo firing range. In 1938/1955 Ilyin's wife, N.N. Ilyina, published "The Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history". Her father was Julius Schweikert (1807-1876) a German physician and pioneer of homeopathy, who moved from Wittenberg to Moscow in 1832 and appointed in the Table of Ranks. Ilyin's cousin Mikhail Ilyin was an art historian, involved in the design of Dobryninskaya, a Moscow metro station.
Zemstvo
A zemstvo (Russian: земство, IPA: [ˈzʲɛmstvə], pl. земства, zemstva) was an institution of local government set up during the great emancipation reform of 1861 carried out in Imperial Russia by Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Nikolay Milyutin elaborated the idea of the zemstva, and the first zemstvo laws went into effect in 1864. After the October Revolution the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced with a multilevel system of workers' and peasants' councils ("soviets").
For more info about Ivan Ilyin read this Wikpedia page on Ivan Ilyin, the source and link to the story here above.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin also known as Il'in (1883 – 1954) was a multifaceted Russian figure, a jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and staunch conservative monarchist. His perception of historical events was distinctive: while he saw the February Revolution (1917) as a "temporary disorder", the October Revolution (1917), in his view, marked a "national catastrophe". This conviction propelled him into active opposition against the Bolshevik regime (of Lenin and Stalin -later-). He became a white émigré journalist, aligning himself with Slavophile beliefs and emerging as a key ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union. This organization firmly believed that force stood as the sole means through which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
All-Military Union
The Russian All-Military Union (Russian: Русский Обще-Воинский Союз, abbreviated РОВС, ROVS) is a White movement organization that was founded by White Army General Pyotr Wrangel in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 1 September 1924. It was initially headquartered in the town of Sremski Karlovci. The organization′s ostensible purpose was providing aid to the veterans of the Russian White movement (usually of the Imperial Russian Army as well), soldiers and officers alike, who had moved outside the Soviet Union.
The organization's undeclared aim was to maintain a Russian military organisation with a view to fighting the Bolsheviks. It and the more monarchist Russian Imperial Union-Order are the oldest organizations that represent the Russian White government-in-exile.
As an ardent anti-communist, Ilyin found himself initially sympathetic to Adolf Hitler but his staunch critique of totalitarianism was not embraced by the Nazi regime. In 1934, his refusal to comply with Nazi directives to spread propaganda led to his dismissal from the Russian Academic Institute, stripping him of employment opportunities. Financial support from Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1938 allowed Ilyin to remain in Switzerland albeit barred from work or political engagement. This phase of restriction led him to delve deeper into studies encompassing aesthetics, ethics, and psychology.
Despite battling chronic illness, Ilyin was remarkably prolific, authoring over 40 books and numerous articles in Russian and German. His works predominantly revolved around religion and Russia, although he diverged from Vladimir Solovyov's ideologies, advocating a global theocracy with whom the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the early 20th century is usually associated. Instead, Ilyin championed a patriarchal model of governance for Russia, rooted on Orthodoxy and unwavering faith in the autocratic tsar, distinguishing between autocracy and tyranny. His writings echoed calls for heroism and moral aristocracy, while cementing his role as a proponent of Western Russophobia.
Remaining true to Right Hegelianism throughout his life, Ilyin explored themes of statehood, law, and power in world history. He staunchly opposed federalism and neutrality, harboring a deep disdain for Western analytic philosophy. As an ultranationalist, Ilyin was a fervent critic of Western-style democracy, advocating instead for a robust government aligned with Russia's autocratic heritage. His prediction of the Soviet state's collapse remains a testament to his prescience.
Ilyin's views on Russia's social structure and world history held significant sway over post-Soviet intellectuals and politicians, including notable figures like Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mikhail Nesterov's portrait of Ivan Ilyin, 1921. (Russian Museum, St. Petersburg)
Early life
Ilyin in 1901
Ivan Ilyin was born in an aristocratic family claiming Rurikid descent. Ilyin's grandfather was a military man who moved to Moscow, where he became a civil engineer. His last job was as commandant of the Grand Kremlin Palace and gates. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin (1851-1921), was born and raised in the palace and a lawyer at the Moscow District Court. Ilyin's mother, Caroline Louise née Schweikert (1858-1942), was of German Russian descent and confessing Lutheran. To be able to marry Alexander Ilyin in 1880 she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Yekaterina Yulyevna.
Ivan Ilyin was brought up in the center of Moscow in Khamovniki District. He graduated on the 1st Moscow Gymnasium in 1901 and entered the Law faculty of the Moscow State University but would rather have studied history. Ilyin wrote as well in German as in Russian and mastered Church Slavic. He studied Plato's Ideal State and Kant's Thing-in-itself. Ilyin became a political radical during his student days and supported the freedom of assembly. In 1904, he took part in a student march, was arrested, and spent a month in prison. The events of the First Russian Revolution and the October Manifesto were reflected in his pamphlets "Freedom of Assembly and popular Representation" (a way of public participation in politics), "What is a Political Party", "From Russian Antiquity: The Revolt of Stenka Razin". Ilyin produced them under the pseudonym "Nikolai Ivanov".
Under influence of Pavel Novgorodtsev Ilyin became interested in the philosophy of law. In 1906, Ilyin graduated and married Natalia Nikolaevna Vocach (1882-1963) in Bykovo. She was a translator, art-historian and niece of Sergei Muromtsev, a Kadet and chairman of the First Duma. Ilyin worked with Natalia on a translation of "Anarchism" by Paul Eltzbacher and a treatise by J.J. Rousseau ("Idea of the General will") which were never published. From 1909 he began working as a privatdozent. (In the same year Lenin published his Materialism and Empirio-criticism under the pseudonym Vl. Ilyin).
Before the revolution
In January 1911, Knyaz Evgeny Trubetskoy, along with a large group of professors, left Moscow University as a sign of disagreement with the government's violation of the principles of university autonomy. Ilyin moved to Western Europe (Heidelberg, Freiburg, Berlin, Göttingen and Paris) studying the latest trends in European philosophy including: philosophy of life and phenomenology influenced by Husserl, who concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness; Scheler, who published "The Nature of Sympathy"; Fichte and Schelling on Absolute idealism. Meanwhile, Ilyin worked on his thesis "Crisis of rationalistic philosophy in Germany in the 19th century" which he never finished. In May 1912 he returned to work at the university and delivered a series of lectures called "Introduction to the Philosophy of Law". Novgorodtsev offered to have an Ilyin lecture on the theory of public law at the Moscow Commercial Institute.
Kremlin Palace and churches, early 1920s
In 1913 it appears that the couple broke with their relatives and met with Leo Tolstoy, according to Konstantin Krylov. Ilyin was known as being extremely intolerant towards Andrei Bely, who called him "mentally insane". For six weeks in 1914 Ilyin and his wife paid visits to Sigmund Freud.
During the July Crisis, Ilyin was forced to leave and his writings were confiscated at the outbreak of the First World War. After returning from Vienna, Ilyin was obsessed with psychoanalysis, diagnosing everything and everyone in Freudian terms, reducing every personal problem to neurotic symptoms, and according to one observer, psychoanalyzing every little gesture of those around him. The two became pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia. He began to develop a career as a writer and public figure.
Mokhovaya Street with the old buildings of the Moscow State University
World War I and the Russian Revolution
After the breakout of World War I, Evgeny Trubetskoy, once a member of the Party of Peaceful Renovation, arranged a series of public lectures devoted to the "ideology of war". Ilyin contributed to this with several lectures, the first of which was called "The Spiritual Meaning of the War" (1915). He believed that since Russia had already been involved in the war, the duty of every Russian was to support his country to the end. During the April Crisis (1917) he agreed with the Kadet Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavel Milyukov who staunchly opposed Petrograd Soviet demands for peace at any cost. In the summer of 1917, he published the pamphlets "The Party program and maximalism", "On the term of convocation of the Constituent Assembly", "Order or disorder?", "Demagogy and provocation", and "Why not continue the war?"
Solovyov, Trubetskoy, Grot and Lopatin, the board of a magazine, photographed in 1893. In 1921 Ilyin replaced Lopatin as head of the Moscow Psychological Society.
At first, Ilyin perceived the February Revolution as the liberation of the people. Along with many other intellectuals, he generally approved of it and supported the Russian Provisional Government. However, he was gradually disappointed and by the time the October Revolution had completed, viewed it as a catastrophe. The Moscow State Conference convened by Kerensky's Second Government was attended by actual and former Duma members, representatives of all major political parties, commercial and industrial organizations, the unions, army and academic institutions. Ilyin warned the audience, about 2,600 people, "The revolution turned into self-interested plundering of the state". In the autumn, he wrote under the pseudonym Justus "Where is revolutionary democracy going?", "Mr. Kerensky's refusal", "What to expect?", "Nightmare", and "Who are they?"
In February 1918 Ilyin gave a public lecture on patriotism: the lack among the Russian people of a mature legal consciousness. In March the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. In April Ilyin was arrested and accused of financially supporting a voluntary army in Moscow and having visited Andrey Avinoff, supporting the Imperial Army. The case was initiated by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish Bolshevik revolutionary and politician, and the leader of the First two Soviet secret police organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU (predecessors of the later Soviet KGB). The money he had received, Ilyin said, was destined for publishing: "The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity". He was in the Butyrka prison dungeons for about a week but developed serious health problems; Ilyin seems to have developed bronchitis that needed treatment. He was released for lack of evidence and allowed to give lectures and defend his thesis. For three weeks Ilyin was bedridden; Novgorodtsev's apartment was searched on the eve of the defence.
On 19 May, Ilyin received two degrees. However, the publisher Lehman-Abrikosov made a generous gesture and offered to publish the two-volume book for free – so Ilyin returned the money to the sponsor Bary & Co. This two-volume dissertation (a provocative interpretation of Hegel) published in the revolutionary chaos of 1918, is considered one of the best commentaries on Hegel's philosophy, also by Vladimir Lenin. Even in the preface, Ilyin notes that Hegel is primarily an intuitionist (and not a logician or, even more so, a rationalist), and in the future, all of Ilyin's thought is based on this idea.
He was an opponent of the Russian spelling reform of 1918 and continued to use pre-reform spelling.
Ilyin became a professor of law in Moscow University. As was customary among Russian religious thinkers, he lectured at the Moscow higher women's courses. He was imprisoned between 11 and 24 August, but released with the help of Ivan Yakovlev's son. On 19 December, Ilyin received a summons to appear at a meeting of the Revolutionary Tribunal (non-recognition of Soviet power). In 1919 Ilyin wrote: "In Moscow, the winter is fierce, there is no firewood, we are hungry. They have already taken me to Cheka three times – and tried in a tribunal "for preparing an armed uprising".
Ilyin's ability to hate, despise, insult ideological opponents was particularly pronounced. Ilyin was again imprisoned in 1919, February 1920 and September 1922 for alleged anti-communist activity. He, along with many other "irreconcilable" anti-Bolshevik intellectuals, was condemned to execution, and then forcibly exiled. On 29 September some 160 prominent intellectuals and their families were expelled (at their own expense and not allowed to return without the permission of the Soviet authorities) on a so-called "philosophers' ship" from Petrograd to the back then German city Stettin, where they arrived on 2 October.
Emigration
The Treaty of Rapallo (1922) between the German Republic and Soviet Russia opened friendly diplomatic relations. In February 1923, the Russian Scientific Institute (RSI) was founded in Berlin; funded by the YMCA. Ilyin delivered a topical speech "Problems of Modern Legal Consciousness". The RSI wasn't an educational institute; there were occasional lectures on Russian history, literature, law and other areas of Russian culture in Schinkel's Bauakademie. In 1923 Wrangel contacted Ilyin in the hope of arranging enrolment in the Institution for "about 300 of young Russian men ...". In July he lost his Russian citizenship for anti-Soviet activities abroad. It was the notorious year of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in October and the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November. The institute was going through a severe financial crisis. Due to invitations from the Czech government and offers from American universities, the number of employees soon thinned significantly. Ilyin briefly cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance but the philosopher of love, moved to Paris and Novgorodtsev moved to Prague.
In 1924, the Russian All-Military Union was founded; Ilyin met Pyotr Wrangel at Seeon Abbey, a center of anti-Bolshevik activities. Wrangel was told to abandon his (military) adventures. Ilyin became part of Wrangel's inner circle; not every Russian was charmed by Wrangel's personality.
In July 1924 Ilyin visited Italy for his health; his portrait of Benito Mussolini was sympathetic but not uncritical.
Schinkel's Bauakademie in Berlin, demolished in 1961
"... his policy is plastic, prominent: it consists of personal actions, bright, complete, original and often unexpected from the outside; but these personal actions are always at the same time the actions of the masses led by him, and, moreover, organized, and in the course of still being organized, actions. Mussolini has the gift of a political sculptor, the original, completing daring of the Michelangelo tradition.
In his book On resisting evil by force (1925) Ilyin advocated the use of violence in the struggle against Bolshevism, which he regarded as despotism or "left totalitarianism". Ilyin argued that war was sometimes necessary, but never 'just'. Far from supporting holy war, Ilyin in fact wrote that "all my research proves that the sword is not 'holy' and not 'just'." He criticized the anarchist ideology of Tolstoy and pacifist tolstoyism. Ilyin called for the courage to "arrest, condemn, and shoot", which Maxim Gorky called a "gospel of revenge" and Berdyaev compared to a "Cheka of God" and "legalism devoid of grace". For Zinaida Gippius his book was "military field theology"; according to her "this is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes feuilletons: it's a man possessed running amok." The book divided the Russian émigrés with its dedication to veterans of the White movement. In 1926 he bitterly wrote about the loss of the Motherland. Ilyin became the unofficial ideologue of the White émigrés who gathered in Paris.
Between 1927 and 1930 Ilyin was a publisher and editor of the journal Russkiy Kolokol. He actively published in right-wing conservative newspapers.
During the 1920s more than 300,000 Russians lived in Berlin. There were three daily newspapers and five weeklies. Seventeen Russian publishing houses had sprung up within a single year. Ilyin lectured in Germany and other European countries and would give 200 speeches. In 1930 the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists was founded in Belgrade and became popular in France. It rejected both Bolshevism and liberal capitalism and embraced Russian patriotism.
In 1932 only about 60,000 Russian emigrants were living in Germany and in Berlin the number of émigrés was 8,320. The activity of the RSI gradually slowed down due to a decrease in the number of Russian-speaking students. There were difficulties in maintaining this large institution, and it was liquidated. It became impossible to be employed as either a writer or a lecturer.
In "Welt vor dem Abgrund" (1931) Ivan Ilyin describes the growing bureaucracy, the terror, and worsening labor conditions in Soviet Russia.
1933 Hitler's first year in office
On 27 February, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Göring blamed a communist plot. The Reichstag Fire Decree on the next day restricted the rights of personal freedom, and freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Shortly after the fire, a wave of arrests began about 1500 people – Communists, in particular, were affected.
Beginning on 7 April the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service required an Aryan certificate from all employees and officials in the public sector, including education. According to Hannah Arendt, in an interview with Günter Gaus, having Jewish people in your inner circle became a problem. On 11 April, Ilyin handed the Ministry of Internal Affairs a voluminous work entitled "Directives of the Comintern for the Bolshevisation of Germany," consisting of hundreds of excerpts from Comintern documents that had been published in the press. It looked like an attempt to bow to the authorities, according to A.F. Kiselyov. Ilyin confessed that he literally forced himself to read Lenin's works, the materials of party congresses and plenums, the Comintern, and the Soviet press. In April Ilyin had a short, lukewarm communication with young Russian National Socialists. On 2 May, a committee was founded with Ilyin on its presidium, though cooperation never took off since Ilyin scorned the Russian radicals. On 17 May Ilyin published in "Vozrojdénie" his infamous article "National Socialism. A New Spirit". In June, Ilyin took over the head of the Russian Scientific Institute. His friend Werner von Alvensleben was reputedly involved in a putsch, which ended in the Night of the Long Knives.
Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Alvensleben
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
On 13 July, all German public employees were required to use the Hitler salute. On 14 July, the Nazi Party was declared the only legal political party in Germany. Russian emigrants feared that Hitler, who on various occasions had spoken out strongly against foreigners, would begin persecuting them.
On 5 August, Ilyin's house was searched, his letters were examined, and he himself was taken away for interrogation, where he was asked about his source of income and for details of the people abroad with whom he corresponded. After the questioning, he was released, although required to sign a declaration. In September the Reichskulturkammer was created with additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. The Russian institute was placed under the Reich Ministry of Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Ehrt who headed the organization Anti-Komintern, recruited Ilyin, Vonsiatsky and Kazembek, the leader of the Mladorossi, to work with him.
On the opening of the reorganized institute Ilyin reported on the plans of the Communist International to conquer the world; he held a lecture on the work of Ivan Bunin who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In an anonymous pamphlet Ilyin was accused of being a Freemason. He spoke on "The World Crisis of Democracy" and lectured on the works of Remizov and Merezhkovsky. On 9 July he was fired when Ehrt demanded that the professors of the Russian Scientific Institute join in Nazi propaganda. Ilyin denounced the racial policy of Nazi Germany and replied in a letter he had long wanted to retire and devote himself to science. Ilyin was paid for the work he had done but from August he was without salary. Many artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.
In 1935, Ilyin spent much of the summer at a large dacha in rural Latvia that the artist Evgeny Klimov had rented. Under the (German-sounding) pseudonym Alfred Norman, he published "The Bolshevik Policy of World Domination." This is more or less Ilyin's last active political statement. He went on to publish essays in the Berliner Kurier. Vasily Shulgin, a nationalist, showed him his manuscript "The Orion Belt" on an alliance between Russia and Germany but Ilyin wasn't impressed. In 1936, Hitler put Vasily Biskupsky in charge of the Russische Vertrauensstelle, a government body dealing with the Russian émigré community. Ilyin actively criticized in the press Alexander Lvovich Kazembek, a fascist or self-styled neo-monarchist. In his speech in Riga in February 1937, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death, Ilyin praised Pushkin's genius and defined his work as "the main entrance to Russian culture".[80] He applied for membership of the Reich Chamber of literature but he had a problem with obtaining an Aryan certificate because he did not know the identity of all his great-grandparents. Ehrt interfered and Ilyin received his membership.
In his pamphlet "An attack on the Orthodox church" (December 1937) he accused Nietzsche of fuelling Bolshevism, and Stalinism. The Gestapo confiscated this work and banned him from the Reichskulturkammer and independent political activity. In May, Ilyin decided it was the time to leave but the Berlin police forbade his departure. "On June 17, 1938, [he declared] I am ready to testify under oath that I and my wife are the purest Aryans and that I have never belonged to Masonic or affiliated organizations anywhere." In early July, he was permitted to visit Karlovy Vary for a treatment of his migraine. Instead he went to Münich with all his manuscripts. In August he asked the Swiss authorities to allow him to settle as a scientist, as a philosopher, and to promote his theory on art. (With a Nansen passport he visited a congress in Locarno.) With financial help from Sergei Rachmaninoff, he was able to pay the bail, but he was not allowed to work or to interfere in any way with Swiss politics. On 17 September he wrote to Ivan Shmelev that his furniture and library arrived.
Switzerland
From 1940 Ilyin resided stateless in the village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich and corresponded with the composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner. He published in local newspapers and lectured Russian literature at folk high schools, which was not considered paid work. There was no danger from Ilyin's lectures, according to an expert opinion issued by the Swiss Army Command in 1942. They were "national in the sense that it is directed against the whole of the West". In November 1943 he refused to cooperate with the Russian Liberation Army. In 1946 Ilyin stated he was never a Hegelian, as he himself expressed in the introduction to the German translation of his theses, a revised version of "Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre". In 1949 he and his wife received permanent citizenship. In his 1950 essay, "What Dismemberment of Russia Entails for the World", Ilyin predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and gave instructions on how to save Russia from the evils of the Western world.
The village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich in Switzerland
At the end of his life, Ivan Alexandrovich managed to finish and publish a work on which he worked for more than 33 years Axioms of Religious Experience, and three volumes of philosophical and literary prose, originally written in German.
He died in a hospital on 21 December 1954. In 1956, his postwar articles were compiled into a two-volume anthology called Our Tasks. These short political essays (in a verbose and pious style) were not only very profound, but also truly prophetic.[89] It is about the future of Russia and its State, once freed of Communism.[90] He did not describe this future very clearly, it is something bright, good, but blurry, according to the literary critic Alexander N. Arkhangelsky.
Ilyin lived at Alte Landstrasse 12 and Zollikerstrasse 33 in the village of Zollikon near Lake Zürich in Switzerland.
Family
Ivan Ilyin's parents. His father Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin (1851-1921) a lawyer at the Moscow District Court and his mother Caroline Louise née Schweikert (1858-1942), of German Russian descent and confessing Lutheran. His mother Caroline died on the estate "Ilyinka".
The Ilyin family owned a dairy farm 260 km from Moscow in Bolshye Polyany (Ryazan Governorate), where they spent the summers. Ilyin had four brothers: Alexey, Alexander, Julius, and Igor. In 1905 Alexey joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party but died in 1913. Alexander was a zemstvo warden but moved to America before the revolution. Igor, a lawyer, was arrested on charges of "counter-revolutionary agitation" by Stalin's NKVD in the Moscow region. He was executed and buried at Butovo firing range. In 1938/1955 Ilyin's wife, N.N. Ilyina, published "The Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history". Her father was Julius Schweikert (1807-1876) a German physician and pioneer of homeopathy, who moved from Wittenberg to Moscow in 1832 and appointed in the Table of Ranks. Ilyin's cousin Mikhail Ilyin was an art historian, involved in the design of Dobryninskaya, a Moscow metro station.
Zemstvo
A zemstvo (Russian: земство, IPA: [ˈzʲɛmstvə], pl. земства, zemstva) was an institution of local government set up during the great emancipation reform of 1861 carried out in Imperial Russia by Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Nikolay Milyutin elaborated the idea of the zemstva, and the first zemstvo laws went into effect in 1864. After the October Revolution the zemstvo system was shut down by the Bolsheviks and replaced with a multilevel system of workers' and peasants' councils ("soviets").
For more info about Ivan Ilyin read this Wikpedia page on Ivan Ilyin, the source and link to the story here above.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin