The Russian leader often mentions Ivan Ilin, a philosopher who praised Mussolini and Hitler, but analysts are divided on the ideology of Putin himself, writes Al Jazeera.

The master of the Kremlin ended one of his most fateful speeches with a quote from a philosopher little known outside of Russia.

“I want to end my speech with the words of a true Russian patriot Ivan Oleksandrovich Ilyich Ilyin: “If I consider Russia my homeland, then I love, contemplate and think in Russian, sing and speak in Russian.” Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this to politicians on September 30.

The quote seemed to fit the occasion – Putin announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in an attempt to save his image with Russians after his army’s confusion in Urain.

Over the years, Putin has quoted, praised and promoted Ilin, who was born in Tsarist Russia in 1883 and died in Switzerland after World War II in 1954.

But he did not mention Ilyin’s political preferences and ideological trajectory.

Some scholars point out that Ilyin’s work influenced Putin’s desire to transform Russia’s imperfect but functioning post-perestroika democracy into the belligerent belligerent neoconservatism that sparked Europe’s bloodiest war this century.

“There is quite a lot of evidence that Putin admires Ilin’s work and ideas,” Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied Ilin’s work and its influence on the Kremlin’s current narrative, told Al Jazeera.

“There are various aspects of Ilyin’s work that could be attractive to Putin, namely the emphasis on a strong state, autocracy and Russian nationalism,” she said.

And Ilyin’s rejection of the very idea of ​​Ukrainian statehood and independence, whether political or cultural, helps Putin justify the continuation of the war.

“Ilyin’s anti-Ukrainian vision has been relevant in the last few years… because the denial of the Ukrainian nation and sovereignty is the key idea of ​​Putin’s war against Ukraine,” she said.

“Healthy” fascism

A century ago, in 1922, the Bolshevik trial condemned Ilyin, an ardent anti-communist scholar of German philosophy, to death.

The sentence followed six arrests, but was overturned by the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, who was familiar with Ilyin’s book about the philosopher Hegel, which is still considered revolutionary.

Ilyin was on board the “ship of philosophers”, which left Russia with 140 exiled intellectuals. Like tens of thousands of Russian emigrants, he settled in Berlin.

He became an outspoken ideologist of the white monarchist movement – a group of anti-communist forces, whose main mouthpiece, the Klopotul magazine, he edited.

After a trip to Italy in 1925, Ilyin supported Benito Mussolini’s fascist ideology, which he called “a healthy phenomenon during the promotion of leftist chaos.”

Ilyin even envied the fact that the Italians, not the Russians, had invented fascism, which would soon inspire the German Nazis.

“Ilyin was absolutely dismayed that the ideas of fascism were not born in Russia or among Belarusian emigrants, where he considered them natural,” author Serhiy Tarshevsky wrote in a column for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in July.

In 1933, Ilyin welcomed the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who prevented the transformation of Germany into a pro-Soviet communist state.

“What did Hitler do? He stopped the process of Bolshevization of Germany and did a great service to all of Europe,” Ilyin wrote.

And although Ilyin quarreled with the Nazis and moved to Switzerland, his faith in fascism remained unshakable. (full on Al Jazeera)

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