A lot of people have spent years trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. How much is explained by his KGB past? How much by the scars of the collapse of the USSR? How much by a sense of Russian history, the future of Russia and how he sees himself in forming that future.

I saw one of these attempts the other day, where some bright young scholar talks about the possible influence of one Alexander Dugin, leader of the National Bolshevik Party:

Dugin is a relativist who claims that concepts of liberalism, freedom and democracy are alien to Russian culture, and that the exact sciences of chemistry and physics are demonic Western influences. He believes that Russia is culturally closer to Asia than to Europe, and espouses an ultranationalist, neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of Neo-Eurasianism.

A good synopsis of his thoughts:

That discussion is from 2014, but it reminded me of this essay published in NY Books in 2018 about another Russian philosopher from the early and mid-20th century, who appears to have had much the same thoughts, but who does not appear on Dugin’s Wiki page. The article is long but worth your time, Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism. Here are some excerpts, following this precise synopsis:

The article draws quite the contrast between Lenin’s atheist take on a war of social classes, The Masses and forth – and Ilyin’s take:

What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new [Soviet] regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of the world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.

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

But if you think Ilyin was “godly” you should be prepared for his very strange take on God. The article uses the example of Jesus’s saying,  “Judge not, that ye not be judged.”:

For Ilyin, these were the words of a failed God with a doomed Son. In fact, a righteous man did not reflect upon his own deeds or attempt to see the perspective of another; he contemplated, recognized absolute good and evil, and named the enemies to be destroyed. The proper interpretation of the “judge not” passage [by Ilyin] was that every day was judgment day, and that men would be judged for not killing God’s enemies when they had the chance. In God’s absence, Ilyin determined who those enemies were.

Obviously you can also forget about the central Christian tenet of loving your enemies.

Ilyin died in Switzerland in 1954 and was forgotten to history. Then Putin arrived and in 2005 began quoting him, as well as reinterring his remains to Russia, a huge symbolic move. Other Russian politicians, even in the Opposition parties, followed, as did patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

But Putin took it further:

In late 2011 and early 2012, Putin made public a new ideology, based in Ilyin, defining Russia in opposition to [the EU] model of Europe. In an article in Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced a rival Eurasian Union that would unite states that had failed to establish the rule of law. In Nezavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin, citing Ilyin, presented integration among states as a matter of virtue rather than achievement. The rule of law was not a universal aspiration, but part of an alien Western civilization; Russian culture, meanwhile, united Russia with post-Soviet states such as Ukraine.

The rule of law is an alien Western concept! Yes, well there have been more than a few civilisations that thought the same, but I thought the last 200 years had put that to bed – or a thousand if you want to go back to Magna Carta where the first chinks were made in the armour of Kingly authority.

But you can see the common path from those articles and speeches of Putin and today’s invasion of Ukraine, together with the propaganda / belief that Ukraine has never been a seperate nation from Mother Russia and never will be considered so.

As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. 

Ilyin’s ideas on sexual decadence and the “decadence” of democracy also lead directly to Russian attacks on those features of the West.

First, Ilyin called Russia homosexual, then underwent therapy with his girlfriend, then blamed God. Putin first submitted to years of shirtless fur-and-feather photoshoots, then divorced his wife, then blamed the European Union for Russian homosexuality. Ilyin sexualized what he experienced as foreign threats. Jazz, for example, was a plot to induce premature ejaculation. When Ukrainians began in late 2013 to assemble in favor of a European future for their country, the Russian media raised the specter of a “homodictatorship.”

As opposed to kneeling to Russian kleptocracy, of which Putin is the supreme example.