Ivan Ilyin, a favorite philosopher of Vladimir Putin

The historian Timothy Snyder has an informative article from last March about Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a philosopher that Vladimir Putin has been promoting since 2005 or so and who Putin occasionally quotes: Timothy Snyder, Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism NYBooks 03/16/2018. Much of the material also appears in Snyder's book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).

Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), Russian fascist philosopher

Ilyin's ideas seem to be especially suited for using to justify Russian hostility toward Ukraine. And Snyder seems to think that a lot of "Western observers" were distracted by that, though he doesn't really expand on the point. He writes:

Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. 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 [book] Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”

Ilyin's philosophy was a strange combination of Russian Oxthodox mysticism, extreme Russian nationalism, and fascist politics as it was known in the 1920s and 1930s, with some neo-Hegelianism and a bit of phenomenology thrown in to make things even more confusing. Snyder doesn't think Putin is modeling his approach to government on Ilyin's ideas. "Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined," Snyder writes.

But he also believes Ilyin's somewhat jumbled ideas provide an important insight into how Putin views governing and at least some of the ways he justifies Russian nationalism in official ideology. Snyder also talks in this article about how Putin sees weakening or destroying the European Union as a functioning entity to be an important foreign policy goal for Russia. Even though Ilyin was bitterly opposed to the Communist government of the Soviet Union, the Putinist version of his approach manages to portray the USSR as an example of Russia's mystical national mission to purify the world. Or something along those lines. And yet at the same time, the official observances in 2017 of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution pictured Ilyin "as its heroic opponent." The Putinist version is jumbled in its own way.

One surprising element in Snyder's account is Ilyin's interest in psychoanalysis:

In 1913, Ilyin worried that perversion was a national Russian syndrome, and proposed Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Russia’s savior. In Ilyin’s reading of Freud, civilization arose from a collective agreement to suppress basic drives. The individual paid a psychological price for sacrifice of his nature to culture. Only through long consultations on the couch of the psychoanalyst could unconscious experience surface into awareness. Psychoanalysis therefore offered a very different portrait of thought than did the Hegelian philosophy that Ilyin was then studying. Even as Ilyin was preparing his dissertation on Hegel, he offered himself as the pioneer of Russia’s national psychotherapy, travelling with Natalia to Vienna in May 1914 for sessions with Freud. [my emphasis]

I would be very curious to know how those sessions went!