May 28, 2018 The Nation. 27S
nyder devotes an entire section of
The Road to Unfreedom to the work
of Russian philosopher and theo-
rist Ivan Ilyin, whom he presents as
the single most important influence
on contemporary Russian policy. Born
in 1883, Ilyin advocated at an early age
for the rule of law in Russia and then
for violent resistance to the Bolsheviks.
He left Russia for Germany in 1922 and
eventually conceived what Snyder calls a
“Christian fascism” as an antidote to Bol-
shevism. Believing that communism had
been inflicted on innocent Russia by the
West, Ilyin was convinced that, according
to Snyder, his brand of “fascism” would
liberate Russia and turn it into the world’s
hope for Christian salvation. For a time,
this led Ilyin to view Mussolini and Hitler
as bulwarks against civilization-destroying
communism, but his refusal to disseminate
Nazi propaganda caused the Nazis to ban
him from employment. In 1938, he left
Germany for Switzerland, where he died
in obscurity in 1954.
Ilyin does have significance for Putin,
who in 2005, at the behest of an Orthodox/
monarchist faction of the Russian elite,
ordered the transfer of his remains from
Switzerland to Moscow and the repatria-
tion of his papers from Michigan State
University. Putin has quoted Ilyin in several
important speeches, as have Russian For-
eign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former
deputy prime minister and Putin adviser
Vladislav Surkov. In 2014, the Kremlin
even sent a collection of Ilyin’s political
publications—along with books by two
much more famous Russian philosophers,
Nikolai Berdiaev and Vladimir Soloviev—
to members of the ruling party and to civil
servants. But for Snyder, Ilyin is not just
one of many Russian thinkers revived by
Russia’s current political players; instead,
he insists that “no thinker of the twenti-
eth century has been rehabilitated in such
grand style in the twenty-first, nor enjoyed
such influence on world politics.”
This is an overstatement, to put it mild-
ly. As Marlene Laruelle, a leading expert
on Russian nationalism, notes, Putin has
cited many other Russian thinkers far more
often, and by her count has only quot-
ed Ilyin five times. His Ilyin quotes are,
moreover, hardly the radical statements of
Christian fascism that Snyder would have
us expect—for instance, “our country is
still sick, but we did not flee from the bed
of our sick mother.” Snyder comments that
this remark “suggested that Putin had been
reading rather deeply in the Ilyin corpus,”oh your finger mulatto
where did you leave it
entangled in which propeller in whose maw
who preserves it as a keepsake in a small crystal vase
who uses it for shark bait
who keeps it as a chinrest while watching pelicans and
ramparts.
maybe, mulatto
it was food for someone dying of fear on a
raft
wading through some river
scaling some fence
crossing some desert
to change identity.
maybe it lies with a moribund little boy who wanted to
breathe through your skin
as he fell to the deep
—manta ray of salt
waters run alive through your finger.
waters ablaze with imprints
mulatto
who kissed and curdled your finger
who severed it gently...
you had almost drowned when the coastguard lifted you
and placed you in a pen
your finger’s missing passport betrays you
mislaid
who traces your footprint now mulatto
ah?MAYRA SANTOS-FEBRES
(translated by VANESSA PÉREZ-ROSARIO)but it might also suggest that some assis-
tant selected this rather generic thought
for inclusion in speeches that needed the
imprimatur of Russian philosophy, or a
dog whistle to nationalists. Likewise, some
of the aspects of Putin’s rhetoric that Sny-der ascribes to Ilyin’s influence are in fact
manifestations of longer-running themes
in Russian political thought. In a 2012
article on the national question, Putin
quoted Ilyin in reference to Russia’s sup-
posed ability to bring peace and harmony