The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

CHAPTER ONE INDIVIDUALISM OR TOTALITARIANISM (2011)

With law our land shall rise, but it will perish with lawlessness.

—NJAL’S SAGA, c. 1280

He who can make an exception is sovereign.

—CARL SCHMITT, 1922

The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that “there are no alternatives.” To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.

Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.

Russia reached the politics of eternity first, and Russian leaders protected themselves and their wealth by exporting it. The oligarch-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, chose the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin as a guide. The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that “only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate.” Some of the philosophy books that matter today were written by Ilyin, who died the year after Miłosz wrote those lines. Ivan Ilyin’s revival by official Russia in the 1990s and 2000s has given his work a second life as the fascism adapted to make oligarchy possible, as the specific ideas that have helped leaders shift from inevitability to eternity.

The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.

History always continues, and alternatives always present themselves. Ilyin represents one of these. He is not the only fascist thinker to have been revived in our century, but he is the most important. He is a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity. Learning of his ideas and influence, we can look down the road, seeking light and exits. This means thinking historically: asking how ideas from the past can matter in the present, comparing Ilyin’s era of globalization to our own, realizing that then as now the possibilities were real and more than two. The natural successor of the veil of inevitability is the shroud of eternity, but there are alternatives that must be found before the shroud drops. If we accept eternity, we sacrifice individuality, and will no longer see possibility. Eternity is another idea that says that there are no ideas.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American politicians of inevitability proclaimed the end of history, while some Russians sought new authorities in an imperial past. When founded in 1922, the Soviet Union inherited most of the territory of the Russian Empire. The tsar’s domain had been the largest in the world, stretching west to east from the middle of Europe to the shores of the Pacific, and north to south from the Arctic to Central Asia. Though largely a country of peasants and nomads, Russia’s middle classes and intellectuals considered, as the twentieth century began, how an empire ruled by an autocrat might become more modern and more just.

Ivan Ilyin, born to a noble family in 1883, was typical of his generation as a young man. In the early 1900s, he wanted Russia to become a state governed by laws. After the disaster of the First World War and the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Ilyin became a count­erre­volutionary, an advocate of violent methods against revolution, and with time the author of a Christian fascism meant to overcome Bolshevism. In 1922, a few months before the Soviet Union was founded, he was exiled from his homeland. Writing in Berlin, he offered a program to the opponents of the new Soviet Union, known as the Whites. These were men who had fought against the Bolsheviks’ Red Army in the long and bloody Russian Civil War, and then made their way, like Ilyin, into political emigration in Europe. Ilyin later formulated his writings as guidance for Russian leaders who would come to power after the end of the Soviet Union. He died in 1954.

After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers had found their way to Michigan State University; Putin sent an emissary to reclaim them in 2006. By then Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly of the Russian parliament. These were important speeches, composed by Putin himself. In the 2010s, Putin relied upon Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine. When asked to name a historian, Putin cited Ilyin as his authority on the past.

The Russian political class followed Putin’s example. His propaganda master Vladislav Surkov adapted Ilyin’s ideas to the world of modern media. Surkov orchestrated Putin’s rise to power and oversaw the consolidation of media that ensured Putin’s seemingly eternal rule. Dmitry Medvedev, the formal head of Putin’s political party, recommended Ilyin to Russian youth. Ilyin’s name was on the lips of the leaders of the fake opposition parties, the communists and (far-Right) Liberal Democrats, who played a part in creating the simulacrum of democracy that Ilyin had recommended. Ilyin was cited by the head of the constitutional court, even as his idea that law meant love for a leader ascended. He was mentioned by Russia’s regional governors as Russia became the centralized state that he had advocated. In early 2014, members of Russia’s ruling party and all of Russia’s civil servants received a collection of Ilyin’s political publications from the Kremlin. In 2017, Russian television commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a film that presented Ilyin as a moral authority.

Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin’s influence peaked. The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin the philosopher ignored or despised: individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.

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Ilyin first proposed his ideas to Russians a century ago, after the Russian Revolution. And yet he has become a philosopher for our time. No thinker of the twentieth century has been rehabilitated in such grand style in the twenty-first, nor enjoyed such influence on world politics. If this went unnoticed it was because we are in the thrall of inevitability: we believe that ideas do not matter. To think historically is to accept that the unfamiliar might be significant, and to work to make the unfamiliar the familiar.

Our politics of inevitability echo those of Ilyin’s years. Like the period from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, so the period from the late 1880s to the early 1910s was one of globalization. The conventional wisdom of both eras held that export-led growth would bring enlightened politics and end fanaticism. This optimism broke during the First World War and the revolutions and counterrevolutions that followed. Ilyin was himself an early example of this trend. A youthful supporter of the rule of law, he shifted to the extreme Right while admiring tactics he had observed on the extreme Left. The former leftist Benito Mussolini led his fascists in the March on Rome soon after Ilyin was expelled from Russia; the philosopher saw in the Duce hope for a corrupted world.

Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come. In exile in the 1920s, he was troubled that Italians had arrived at fascism before Russians. He consoled himself with the idea that the Russian Whites were the inspiration for Mussolini’s coup: “the White movement as such is deeper and broader than [Italian] fascism.” The depth and breadth, Ilyin explained, came from an embrace of the sort of Christianity that demanded the blood sacrifice of God’s enemies. Believing in the 1920s that Russia’s White exiles could still win power, Ilyin addressed them as “my White brothers, fascists.”

Ilyin was similarly impressed by Adolf Hitler. Although he visited Italy and vacationed in Switzerland, Ilyin’s home between 1922 and 1938 was Berlin, where he worked for a government-sponsored scholarly institute. Ilyin’s mother was German, he undertook psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in German, he studied German philosophy, and he wrote in German as well and as often as he did in Russian. In his day job he edited and wrote critical studies of Soviet politics (A World at the Abyss in German and The Poison of Bolshevism in Russian, for example, just in the year 1931). Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism: the Führer, he wrote, had “performed an enormous service for all of Europe” by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model. Ilyin noted with approval that Hitler’s antisemitism was derivative of the ideology of Russian Whites. He bemoaned that “Europe does not understand the National Socialist movement.” Nazism was above all a “Spirit” of which Russians must partake.

In 1938, Ilyin left Germany for Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1954. He was supported financially in Switzerland by the wife of a German-American businessman, and also earned some money by giving public lectures in German. The essence of these lectures, as a Swiss scholar noted, was that Russia should be understood not as present communist danger but as future Christian salvation. According to Ilyin, communism had been inflicted upon innocent Russia by the decadent West. One day Russia would liberate itself and others with the help of Christian fascism. A Swiss reviewer characterized his books as “national in the sense of opposing the entire West.”

Ilyin’s political views did not change as the Second World War began. His contacts in Switzerland were men of the far Right: Rudolf Grob believed that Switzerland should imitate Nazi Germany; Theophil Spoerri belonged to a group that banned Jews and Masons; Albert Riedweg was a right-wing lawyer whose brother Franz was the most prominent Swiss citizen in the Nazi extermination apparatus. Franz Riedweg married the daughter of the German minister of war and joined the Nazi SS. He took part in the German invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, the last of which Ilyin saw as a trial of Bolshevism in which Nazis might liberate Russians.

When the Soviet Union won the war and extended its empire westward in 1945, Ilyin began to write for future generations of Russians. He characterized his work as shining a small lantern in a great darkness. With that small flame, Russian leaders of the 2010s have begun a conflagration.

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Ilyin was consistent. His first major work of philosophy, in Russian (1916), was also his last major work of philosophy, in its edited German translation (1946).

The one good in the universe, Ilyin maintained, had been God’s totality before creation. When God created the world, he shattered the single and total Truth that was himself. Ilyin divided the world into the “categorical,” the lost realm of that single perfect concept; and the “historical,” human life with its facts and passions. For him, the tragedy of existence was that facts could not be reassembled into God’s totality, nor passions into God’s purpose. The Romanian thinker E. M. Cioran, himself once an advocate of Christian fascism, explained the concept: before history, God is perfect and eternal; once he begins history, God seems “frenetic, committing error upon error.” As Ilyin put it: “When God sank into empirical existence he was deprived of his harmonious unity, logical reason, and organizational purpose.”

For Ilyin, our human world of facts and passions is senseless. Ilyin found it immoral that a fact might be grasped in its historical setting: “the world of empirical existence cannot be theologically justified.” Passions are evil. God erred in his creation by releasing “the evil nature of the sensual.” God yielded to a “romantic” impulse by making beings, ourselves, who are moved by sex. And so “the romantic content of the world overcomes the rational form of thought, and thought cedes its place to unthinking purpose,” physical love. God left us amidst “spiritual and moral relativism.”

By condemning God, Ilyin empowered philosophy, or at least one philosopher: himself. He preserved the vision of a divine “totality” that existed before the creation of the world, but left it to himself to reveal how it might be regained. Having removed God from the scene, Ilyin himself could issue judgments about what is and what ought to be. There is a Godly world and it must be somehow redeemed, and this sacred work will fall to men who understand their predicament—thanks to Ilyin and his books.

The vision was a totalitarian one. We should long for a condition in which we think and feel as one, which means not to think and feel at all. We must cease to exist as individual human beings. “Evil begins,” Ilyin wrote, “where the person begins.” Our very individuality only proves that the world is flawed: “the empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.” Ilyin despised the middle classes, whose civil society and private life, he thought, kept the world broken and God at bay. To belong to a layer of society that offered individuals social advancement was to be the worst kind of human being: “this estate constitutes the very lowest level of social existence.”

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Like all immorality, eternity politics begins by making an exception for itself. All else in creation might be evil, but I and my group are good, because I am myself and my group is mine. Others might be confused and bewitched by the facts and passions of history, but my nation and myself have maintained a prehistorical innocence. Since the only good is this invisible quality that resides in us, the only policy is one that safeguards our innocence, regardless of the costs. Those who accept eternity politics do not expect to live longer, happier, or more fruitful lives. They accept suffering as a mark of righteousness if they think that guilty others are suffering more. Life is nasty, brutish, and short; the pleasure of life is that it can be made nastier, more brutish, and shorter for others.

Ilyin made an exception for Russia and for Russians. The Russian innocence he proclaimed was not observable in the world. It was Ilyin’s act of faith directed at his own people: salvation required seeing Russia as it was not. Since the facts of the world are just the corrupt detritus of God’s failed creation, true seeing was the contemplation of the invisible. Corneliu Codreanu, the founder of a kindred Romanian fascism, saw the Archangel Michael in prison and recorded his vision in a few lines. Although Ilyin dressed up his idea of contemplation in several books, it really was no more than that: he saw his own nation as righteous, and the purity of that vision was more important than anything Russians actually did. The nation, “pure and objective,” was what the philosopher saw when he blinded himself.

Innocence took a specific biological form. What Ilyin saw was a virginal Russian body. Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine.

Ilyin thought that Soviet power concentrated all of the Satanic energy of factuality and passion in one place. And yet he argued that the triumph of communism showed that Russia was more rather than less innocent. Communism, he maintained, was a seduction by foreigners and deracinated Russians whom Ilyin called “Tarzans.” They lusted to violate immaculate Russia precisely because it was guileless and defenseless. In 1917, Russians had simply been too good to resist the cargo of sin arriving from the West. Despite the depredations of Soviet leaders, Russians retained an imperceptible goodness. Unlike Europe and America, which accepted facts and passions as life, Russia retained an underlying “Spirit” that recalled God’s totality. “The nation is not God,” wrote Ilyin, “but the strength of its soul is from God.”

When God created the world, Russia had somehow escaped history and remained in eternity. Ilyin’s homeland, he thought, was therefore free from the forward flow of time and the accumulation of accident and choice that he found so intolerable. Russia instead experienced repeating cycles of threat and defense. Everything that happened must be an attack from the outside world on Russian innocence, or a justified Russian response to such a threat. In such a scheme it was easy for Ilyin, who knew little of actual Russian history, to grasp centuries in simple phrases. What a historian might see as the spread of power from Moscow across northern Asia and half of Europe was for Ilyin nothing more than “self-defense.” According to Ilyin, every single battle ever fought by Russians was defensive. Russia was always the victim of a “continental blockade” by Europe. As Ilyin saw matters, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.

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Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Ilyin was a student of law and a believer in progress. After 1917, everything seemed possible and all permitted. Lawlessness from the far Left, Ilyin thought, would have to be exceeded by a still greater lawlessness from the far Right. In his mature work, Ilyin thus portrayed Russian lawlessness as patriotic virtue. “The fact of the matter,” he wrote, “is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” The Russian word proizvol, arbitrariness, has always been the bête noire of Russian reformers. In portraying proizvol as patriotic, Ilyin was turning against legal reform and announcing that politics must instead follow the caprice of a single ruler.

Ilyin’s use of the Russian word for “redemptive,” spasitelnii, released a profound religious meaning into politics. Like other fascists, such as Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, he turned Christian ideas of sacrifice and redemption towards new purposes. Hitler claimed that he would redeem the world for a distant God by ridding it of Jews. “And so I believe that I am acting as the almighty creator would want,” wrote Hitler. “Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord.” The Russian word spasitelnii would usually be applied, by an Orthodox Christian, to the deliverance of believers by Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. What Ilyin meant was that Russia needed a redeemer who would make the “chivalrous sacrifice” of shedding the blood of others to take power. A fascist coup was an “act of salvation,” the first step towards the return of totality to the universe.

The men who redeemed God’s flawed world had to ignore what God said about love. Jesus instructed his disciples that, after loving God, the most important law was to love one’s neighbor. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus refers to Leviticus 19:33–34: “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” For Ilyin there were no neighbors. Individuality is corrupt and transient, and the only meaningful connection is the lost divine totality. So long as the world is fractured, loving God means a constant struggle “against the enemies of divine order on earth.” To do anything but to join this war was to enact evil: “He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.” Faith meant war: “May your prayer be a sword and your sword be a prayer!”

Because the world was sinful and God was absent, his champion must emerge from some uncorrupted realm beyond history. “Power,” Ilyin imagined, “comes all by itself to the strong man.” A man would appear from nowhere, and Russians would recognize their redeemer: “We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.” Emerging from fiction, the redeemer disregards the facts of the world and creates a myth around himself. By taking on the burden of Russians’ passions, he channels “the evil nature of the sensual” into a grand unity. The leader will be “sufficiently manly,” like Mussolini. He “hardens himself in just and manly service. He is inspired by the spirit of totality rather than by a particular personal or party motivation. He stands alone and goes alone because he sees the future of politics and knows what must be done.” Russians will kneel before “the living organ of Russia, the instrument of self-redemption.”

The redeemer suppresses factuality, directs passion, and generates myth by ordering a violent attack upon a chosen enemy. A fascist scorns any politics rooted in society (its preferences, its interests, its visions of the future, the rights of its members, and so on). Fascism begins not with an assessment of what is within, but from a rejection of what is without. The outside world is the literary source material for an enemy image composed by a dictator. Following the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, Ilyin defined politics as “the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” Ilyin thus began his article “On Russian Nationalism” with the simple claim that “National Russia has enemies.” The flawed world had to oppose Russia because Russia was the only source of divine totality.

The redeemer had the obligation to make war and the right to choose which one. Ilyin believed that war was justified when “the spiritual attainments of the nation are threatened,” which they always will be until individuality is brought to an end. To make war against the enemies of God was to express innocence. Making war (not love) was the proper release of passion, because it did not endanger but protected the virginity of the national body. In the 1930s, Romanian fascists sang of “iron-clad breasts and lily-white souls.” By guiding others to bloodshed, Russia’s redeemer would draw all of Russia’s sexual energy to himself, and guide its release. War was the only “excess” that Ilyin endorsed, a mystical communion of virginal organism and otherworldly redeemer. True “passion” was fascist violence, the rising sword that was also a kneeling prayer.

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“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” as the poet Charles Péguy reminds us. Ilyin’s thought began with a contemplation of God, sex, and truth in 1916, and ended a century later as the orthodoxy of the Kremlin and the justification for war against Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States.

Destruction is always easier than creation. Ilyin found it difficult to specify the institutional form a redeemed Russia would take—and his unsolved problems haunt Russia’s leaders today. The chief of these is the durability of the Russian state. Legal institutions that permit the succession of power allow citizens to envision a future where leaders change but states remain. Fascism, however, is about a sacred and eternal connection between the redeemer and his people. A fascist presents institutions and laws as the corrupt barriers between leader and folk that must be circumvented or destroyed.

Ilyin tried to design a Russian political system, but in his sketches could never get beyond this conundrum. He attempted to solve the problem semantically by treating the personality of the redeemer as an institution. The redeemer should be regarded as “leader” (gosudar´), “head of state,” “democratic dictator,” and “national dictator,” an assemblage of titles that recalled the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 1930s. The redeemer would be responsible for all executive, legislative, and judiciary functions, and command the armed forces. Russia would be a centralized state with no federal units. Russia should not be a one-party state as the fascist regimes of the 1930s had been. That was one party too many. Russia should be a zero-party state, redeemed only by a man. Parties should exist, according to Ilyin, only to help ritualize elections.

Allowing Russians to vote in free elections, thought Ilyin, was like allowing embryos to choose their species. Voting with a secret ballot allowed citizens to think of themselves as individuals, and thereby confirmed the evil character of the world. “The principle of democracy is the irresponsible human atom,” and so individuality must be overcome by political habits that excite and sustain Russians’ collective love for their redeemer. Thus “we must reject the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics” as well as “blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.” Voting should unite the nation in a gesture of subjugation. Elections should be public, and ballots signed.

Ilyin imagined society as a corporate structure, where every person and every group would hold a defined place. There would be no distinction between the state and the population, but rather “the organic-spiritual unity of the government with the people, and the people with the government.” The redeemer would stand alone at the heights, and the middle classes would lie crushed at the bottom, under the weight of everyone else. In normal parlance, middle classes are in the middle because people rise (and fall) through them. Placing the middle classes at the bottom was to assert the righteousness of inequality. Social mobility was excluded from the outset.

An idea that Ilyin intended as fascist thus permits and justifies oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few—as in Russia in the 2010s. If the purpose of the state is to preserve the wealth of the redeemer and his friends, then the rule of law is impossible. Without the rule of law, it is difficult to earn the money that will allow for better lives. Without social advancement, no story of the future seems plausible. The weakness of state policy is then recast as the mystical connection of a leader with his people. Rather than governing, the leader produces crisis and spectacle. Law ceases to signify neutral norms that allow social advance, and comes to mean subordination to the status quo: the right to watch, the duty to be entertained.

Ilyin used the word “law,” but he did not endorse the rule of law. By “law” he meant the relationship between the caprice of the redeemer and the obedience of everyone else. Again, a fascist idea proved to be convenient for an emerging oligarchy. The loving duty of the Russian masses was to translate the redeemer’s every whim into a sense of legal obligation on their part. The obligation, of course, was not reciprocal. Russians had a “special arrangement of the soul” that allowed them to suppress their own reason and accept “the law in our hearts.” By this Ilyin understood the suppression of individual reason in favor of national submission. With the redeemer in command of such a system, Russia would exhibit “the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.”

The Russian nation, summoned to instant war against spiritual threats, was a creature rendered divine by its submission to an arbitrary leader who emerged from fiction. The redeemer would take upon himself the burden of dissolving all facts and passions, thereby rendering senseless any aspiration of any individual Russian to see or feel or change the world. Each Russian’s place in the corporate structure would be fixed like a cell in a body, and each Russian would experience this immobility as freedom. Unified by their redeemer, their sins washed away in the blood of others, Russians would welcome God back to his creation. Christian fascist totalitarianism is an invitation to God to return to the world and help Russia bring an end to history everywhere.

Ilyin placed a human being in the role of the true Christ, required to break the laws of love in the name of God. In doing so, he blurred the line between what is human and what is not, and between what is possible and what is not. The fantasy of an eternally innocent Russia includes the fantasy of an eternally innocent redeemer, who does no wrong and therefore will not die. Ilyin could not answer the question of who might succeed the redeemer, since doing so would make of the redeemer a human subject to aging and death, no less part of the flawed universe than the rest of us. Ilyin had no earthly idea, in other words, of how a Russian state could endure.

The very dread of what comes next generates a sense of threat that can be projected upon others as foreign policy. Totalitarianism is its own true enemy, and that is the secret it keeps from itself by attacking others.

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In the 2010s, Ilyin’s ideas served post-Soviet billionaires, and post-Soviet billionaires served them. Putin and his friends and allies accumulated vast wealth beyond the law, and then remade the state to preserve their own gains. Having achieved this, Russian leaders had to define politics as being rather than doing. An ideology such as Ilyin’s purports to explain why certain men have wealth and power in terms other than greed and ambition. What robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer?

To men raised in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, Ilyin’s ideas were comfortable for a second reason. To the Russian kleptocrats of that generation, the men in power in the 2010s, his entire style of thinking was familiar. Although Ilyin opposed Soviet power, the shape of his argument was eerily similar to that of the Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism in which all Soviet citizens were educated. Although Russian kleptocrats are by no means philosophers, the instruction of their youth led them surprisingly close to the justifications they would need in their maturity. Ilyin and the Marxism he opposed shared a philosophical origin and language: that of Hegelianism.

G. W. F. Hegel’s ambition was to resolve the difference between what is and what should be. His claim was that something called Spirit, a unity of all thoughts and minds, was emerging over time, through the conflicts that defined epochs. Hegel’s was an appealing way of seeing our fractious world, since it suggested that catastrophe was an indication of progress. History was a “slaughter bench,” but the bloodshed had a purpose. This idea allowed philosophers to pose as prophets, seers of hidden patterns that would resolve themselves into a better world, judges of who had to suffer now so that all would benefit later. If Spirit was the only good, than any means that History chose for its realization was also good.

Karl Marx was critical of Hegel’s idea of Spirit. He and other Left Hegelians claimed that Hegel had smuggled God into his system under the heading of Spirit. The absolute good, suggested Marx, was not God but humanity’s lost essence. History was a struggle, but its sense was man’s overcoming of circumstance to regain his own nature. The emergence of technology, argued Marx, allowed some men to dominate others, forming social classes. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, oppressing the mass of workers. This very oppression instructed workers about the character of history and made them revolutionaries. The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie, seize the means of production, and thereby restore man to himself. Once there was no property, thought Marx, human beings would live in happy cooperation.

Ilyin was a Right Hegelian. In a typically sharp phrase, he wrote that Marx never got out of the “waiting room” of Hegelian philosophy. Ilyin nevertheless agreed that by “Spirit” Hegel meant God. Like Marx, Ilyin thought that history had begun with an original sin that doomed humanity to suffering. It was perpetrated not by man upon man through property, as the Marxists thought, but by God upon man through the creation of the world. Rather than killing God, as the Left Hegelians had done, Ilyin left him wounded and lonely. Life was poor and chaotic, as the Marxists thought, but not because of technology and class conflict. People suffered because God’s creation was irresolvably conflictual. Facts and passions could not be aligned through revolution, only through redemption. The only totality was God’s, which a chosen nation would restore thanks to a miracle performed by a redeemer.

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) was the most important Marxist, since he led a revolution in the name of the philosophy. As an activist of a small and illegal party in the Russian Empire, Lenin believed that a disciplined elite had the right to push history forward. If the only good in the world was the restoration of man to his essence, then it was reasonable for those who understood the process to hasten it. This reasoning enabled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Soviet Union was ruled by a small group of people who claimed legitimacy from this specific politics of inevitability. Lenin and Ilyin did not know each other, but were uncannily close: Lenin’s patronymic was “Ilyich” and he used “Ilyin” as a pen name; the real Ilyin read and reviewed some of that work. When Ilyin was arrested by the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, Lenin intervened on his behalf in order to express his admiration of Ilyin’s philosophy.

Ilyin despised Lenin’s revolution, but he endorsed its violence and its voluntarism. Like Lenin, he thought that Russia needed a philosophical elite (himself) to define ends and means. Like the Marxist socialist utopia, Ilyin’s “divine totality” required violent revolution—or rather violent counterrevolution. Other Russian philosophers saw the resemblance. Nikolai Berdyaev found in Ilyin’s work “the nightmare of evil good.” Reviewing a book that Ilyin published in 1925, Berdyaev wrote that “a Cheka in the name of God is more horrifying than a Cheka in the name of the devil.” His judgment was prophetic: “The Bolsheviks would have no fundamental problem accepting Ivan Ilyin’s book. They consider themselves the bearers of absolute good and oppose those whom they regard as evil with force.”

Lenin (left) and Ilyin (right)

As Ilyin aged in Germany and Switzerland, his positions tracked those of Lenin’s successors. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated power. Ilyin shared Stalinist judgments about the contagious perversity of Western culture down to the smallest detail. He believed, for instance, that jazz was a deliberate plot to reduce European listeners to mindless dancers incapable of normal sexual intercourse. The communist party newspaper Pravda offered a strikingly similar description of the experience of listening to African American music: “some centaur must be conducting with his gigantic phallus.” Though Ilyin wrote books chronicling terror under Stalin, his attitude to the law was essentially similar to that of its perpetrators. Andrei Vyshynskii, the notorious prosecutor at the show trials, believed that “formal law is subordinate to the law of the revolution.” This was precisely Ilyin’s attitude with respect to his planned counterrevolution.

Although Ilyin had initially hoped that the Second World War would destroy Stalin’s Soviet Union, in its aftermath he presented Russia much as Stalin did. Stalin called the USSR the homeland of socialism. If the Soviet Union were destroyed, went his argument, communism would have no future, and humanity’s only hope would be lost. Thus any action to defend the Soviet Union was justified. Ilyin saw Russia as a homeland of God to be preserved at all costs, since it was the only territory from which divine totality could be restored. After the war, Stalin gave priority to the Russian nation (as opposed to Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the dozens of peoples of the Soviet Union). Russia, Stalin claimed, had saved the world from fascism. Ilyin’s view was that Russia would save the world not from but with fascism. In both cases the only receptacle of absolute good was Russia, and the permanent enemy the decadent West.

Soviet communism was a politics of inevitability that yielded to a politics of eternity. Over the decades, the idea of Russia as a beacon for the world gave way to the image of Russia as a victim of mindless hostility. In the beginning Bolshevism was not a state but a revolution, the hope that others around the world would follow the Russian example. Then it was a state with a task: to build socialism by imitating capitalism and then overcoming it. Stalinism was a vision of the future that justified millions of deaths by starvation and another million or so by execution in the 1930s. The Second World War changed the story. Stalin and his supporters and successors all claimed after 1945 that the self-inflicted carnage of the 1930s had been necessary to defeat the Germans in the 1940s. If the 1930s were about the 1940s, then they were not about a distant future of socialism. The aftermath of the Second World War was the beginning of the end of the Soviet politics of inevitability, and thus the opening gesture towards a Russian politics of eternity.

Stalin’s economic policy, forced industrialization funded by collectivized agriculture, created social mobility for two generations but not for three. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet leaders agreed not to kill one another, which removed dynamism from politics. In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev took a logical step towards a politics of eternity, portraying the Second World War as the apogee of Soviet history. Soviet citizens were instructed to look not forward but backward, to the triumph of their parents or grandparents in the Second World War. The West was no longer the enemy because it represented a capitalism that would be surpassed; the West was the enemy because the Soviet Union had been invaded from the west in 1941. Soviet citizens born in the 1960s and 1970s were raised in a cult of the past that defined the West as a perpetual threat. The last decades of Soviet communism prepared Soviet citizens for Ilyin’s view of the world.

The oligarchy that emerged in the Russian Federation after 1991 had a great deal to do with the centralization of production under communism, the ideas of Russian economists thereafter, and the greed of Russia’s leaders. American conventional wisdom contributed to the disaster by suggesting that markets would create institutions, rather than stressing that institutions were needed for markets.

In the twenty-first century, it proved easier to blame the West than to take stock of Russian choices. The Russian leaders who did the blaming in the 2010s were the very individuals who stole the national wealth. Those who proclaimed Ilyin’s ideas from the heights of the Russian state were the beneficiaries rather than the victims of capitalism’s career in Russia. The men of Putin’s entourage ensured that the rule of law had no chance in Russia, since they themselves created and profited from a state monopoly on corruption. Ilyin’s ideas sanctified radical inequality at home, changed the subject of politics from reform to innocence, while defining the West as a permanent source of a spiritual threat.

No Russian state could be built on Ilyin’s concepts. But they did help robbers to present themselves as redeemers. They enabled new leaders to choose enemies and thus create fictional problems that could not be solved, such as the permanent hostility of a decadent West. The notion that Europe and America were eternal foes because they envied pristine Russian culture was pure fiction that generated real policy: the attempt to destroy the attainments abroad that Russia’s leaders could not manage at home.

The politics of eternity cannot make Putin or any other man immortal. But it can make other ideas unthinkable. And that is what eternity means: the same thing over and over again, a tedium exciting to believers because of the illusion that it is particularly theirs. Of course, this sense of “us and them,” or, as fascists prefer, “friends and enemies,” is the least specific human experience of them all; to live within it is to sacrifice individuality.

The only thing that stands between inevitability and eternity is history, as considered and lived by individuals. If we grasp eternity and inevitability as ideas within our own history, we might see what has happened to us and what we might do about it. We understand totalitarianism as a threat to institutions, but also to selves.

In the fury of their assault, Ilyin’s ideas clarify individualism as a political virtue, the one that enables all the others. Are we individuals who see that there are many good things, and that politics involves responsible consideration and choice rather than a vision of totality? Do we see that there are other individuals in the world who might be at work on the same project? Do we understand that being an individual requires a constant consideration of endless factuality, a constant selection among many irreducible passions?

The virtue of individualism becomes visible in the throes of our moment, but it will abide only if we see history and ourselves within it, and accept our share of responsibility.