The past is another country, the old saying goes. The same might be said of the future. But which country? For Europeans and Americans today, the answer is Russia.
Today’s Russia is an oligarchy propped up by illusions and repression. But it also represents the fulfilment of tendencies already present in the West. And if Moscow’s drive to dissolve Western states and values succeeds, this could become our reality too.
In this visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how Russia works within the West to destroy the West; by supporting the far right in Europe, invading Ukraine in 2014, and waging a cyberwar during the 2016 presidential campaign and the EU referendum. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the creation of Donald Trump, an American failure deployed as a Russian weapon.
But this threat presents an opportunity to better understand the pillars of our freedoms, confront our own complacency and seek renewal. History never ends, and this new challenge forces us to face the choices that will determine the future: equality or oligarchy, individualism or totalitarianism, truth or lies.
The Road to Unfreedom helps us to see our world as if for the first time. It is necessary reading for any citizen of a democracy.
Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history. His most recent book, On Tyranny, was an international bestseller.
Previous books include Black Earth, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; and Bloodlands, which won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
For the reporters, the heroes of our time
MY SON WAS born in Vienna. It was a difficult delivery, and the first concern of the Austrian obstetrician and the Polish midwife was the baby. He breathed, his mother held him for a moment, and then she was wheeled to an operating room. The midwife, Ewa, handed him to me. My son and I were a bit lost in what happened next, but we stuck together. He was looking upward with unfocused violet eyes as the surgeons ran past us at a dead sprint, footfalls and snaps of masks, a blur of green scrubs.
The next day all seemed well. The nurses instructed me to depart the ward at the normal time, five o’clock in the afternoon, leaving mother and child in their care until the morning. I could now, a little belatedly, send out a birth announcement by email. Some friends read the good news at the same moment that they learned of a catastrophe that took the lives of others. One friend, a fellow scholar whom I had met in Vienna in a different century, had rushed to board an airplane in Warsaw. My message went out at the speed of light, but it never caught up to him.
THE YEAR 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.
I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.
In 2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American assumptions that capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable. Tony had written of the irresponsible intellectuals who aided totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized inequality.
As he and I spoke, I was writing a history of the political mass murders committed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. It began with people and their homes, in particular the Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Balts, and Poles who had experienced both regimes in the places where Nazi and Soviet power overlapped. Although the book’s chapters were grim—planned starvations, death pits, gas chambers—its premise was optimistic: the causes of mass murder could be ascertained, the words of the dead recalled. The truth could be told, and lessons could be learned.
A chapter of that book was devoted to a turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance that began the Second World War in Europe. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland, each with the goal of destroying the Polish state and the Polish political class. In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war, most of them educated reserve officers. The men (and one woman) were shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. For Poles, the Katyn massacre came to stand for Soviet repression generally.
After the Second World War, Poland was a communist regime and a Soviet satellite, so Katyn could not be discussed. Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify what had happened. Soviet documents left no doubt that the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation had been struggling to address the legacy of Stalinist terror. On February 3, 2010, as I was finishing my book, the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal to his Polish counterpart: a joint commemoration of Katyn that April, on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. At midnight on the first of April, the day my son was due to be born, I sent my book to the publisher. On the seventh of April a Polish governmental delegation, led by the Polish prime minister, arrived in Russia. The next day my wife gave birth.
Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out for Russia. It included the Polish president and his wife, commanders of the Polish armed forces, parliamentary deputies, civic activists, priests, and family members of those murdered at Katyn in 1940. One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta, an admired political theorist—and the vice minister of culture responsible for commemoration. Early in the morning of Saturday, April 10, 2010, Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed at 8:41 a.m., short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors. In a maternity ward in Vienna a cell phone rang, and a new mother shouted in Polish across the room.
The next evening, I read the responses to my birth announcement. One friend was concerned that I understand the tragedy amidst my own joy: “So that you don’t find yourself in a difficult situation, I have to tell you that Tomek Merta was killed.” Another friend, whose name was on the passenger list, wrote to say that he had changed his mind and stayed home. His wife was due to give birth a few weeks later.
He signed off: “Henceforth everything will be different.”
IN AUSTRIAN MATERNITY wards, mothers stay for four days, so that nurses can teach about feeding, bathing, and care. This is long enough for families to become acquainted, for parents to learn what languages they share, for conversations to begin. The following day in the maternity ward the talk in Polish was of conspiracy. Rumors had taken shape: the Russians had shot down the airplane; the Polish government had been in on the plot to kill the Polish president, who was of a different party than the prime minister. A new Polish mother asked me what I thought. I said that this was all very unlikely.
The day after that, my family was allowed to go home. With the baby sleeping in a basket, I wrote two articles about Tomek: one an obituary in Polish, the other an account of the disaster in English that concluded with a hopeful word about Russia. A Polish president had lost his life hastening to commemorate a crime committed on Russian soil. I expressed the hope that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, would use the occasion to consider the history of Stalinism more broadly. Perhaps that was a reasonable appeal amidst grief in April 2010; as a prediction, it could not have been more wrong.
Henceforth everything was different. Putin, who had already served two terms as president before becoming prime minister, announced in September 2011 that he wanted to be president again. His party did poorly in parliamentary elections that December, but was granted a majority in parliament regardless. Putin became president again in May 2012 after another election that seemed flawed. He then saw to it that discussions of the Soviet past, such as the one he himself had initiated about Katyn, would be treated as criminal offenses. In Poland, the Smolensk catastrophe united society for a day, and then polarized it for years. The obsession with the disaster of April 2010 grew with time, crowding out the Katyn massacre that its victims had meant to commemorate, indeed crowding out all historical episodes of Polish suffering. Poland and Russia had ceased to reflect on history. Times were changing. Or perhaps our sense of time was changing.
The European Union fell under a shadow. Our Vienna maternity ward, where inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the success of the European project. It exemplified services that were taken for granted in much of Europe but were unthinkable in the United States. The same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me to the hospital: normal in Europe, unattainable in America. In 2013, Russia turned against the European Union, condemning it as decadent and hostile. Its success might encourage Russians to think that former empires could become prosperous democracies, and so its existence was suddenly at risk.
As Russia’s neighbor Ukraine drew closer to the European Union, Russia invaded the country and annexed some of its territory in 2014. By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their president, an outcome Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, this new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate the Holocaust when the occasion arose, nor condemn Nazis in his own country.
The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.
I WROTE THOSE two articles about the Smolensk disaster after years of thinking about the politics of life and death, on a night when the membrane between them seemed thin. “Your happiness amidst unhappiness,” one of my friends had written, and the first seemed as undeserved as the second. Endings and beginnings were too close, or seemed to be in the wrong order, death before life, dying before living; time was out of joint.
On or about April 2010, human character changed. When I wrote the birth announcement of my first child, I had to go to my office and use a computer; smartphones were not yet widespread. I expected replies over the course of days or weeks, not at once. By the time my daughter was born two years later, this had all changed: to own a smartphone was the norm, and responses were either immediate or not forthcoming. Having two children is quite different than having one; and yet I think that, for all of us, time in the early 2010s became more fragmented and elusive.
The machines that were meant to create time were consuming it instead. As we lost our ability to concentrate and recall, everything seemed new. After Tony’s death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss the book we had written together, which he had entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century. I realized as I traveled around the United States that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.
Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.
The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.
The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.
In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.
PERHAPS MORE WAS happening in the 2010s than we grasped. Perhaps the tumbling succession of moments between the Smolensk crash and the Trump presidency was an era of transformation that we failed to experience as such. Perhaps we are slipping from one sense of time to another because we do not see how history makes us, and how we make history.
Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades as history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger. They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that they realize in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama.
Inevitability and eternity have specific propaganda styles. Inevitability politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. Eternity politicians suppress facts in order to dismiss the reality that people are freer and richer in other countries, and the idea that reforms could be formulated on the basis of knowledge. In the 2010s, much of what was happening was the deliberate creation of political fiction, outsized stories that commanded attention and colonized the space needed for contemplation. Yet whatever impression propaganda makes at the time, it is not history’s final verdict. There is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given; and history, the connections that we work to make—if we wish.
This book is an attempt to win back the present for historical time, and thus to win back historical time for politics. This means trying to understand one set of interconnected events in our own contemporary world history, from Russia to the United States, at a time when factuality itself was put into question. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was a reality test for the European Union and the United States. Many Europeans and Americans found it easier to follow Russia’s propaganda phantoms than to defend a legal order. Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited within the European Union and the United States.
History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders’ accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions. In our time, as rising inequality elevates political fiction, investigative journalism becomes the more precious. Its renaissance began during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as courageous reporters filed stories from dangerous locations. In Russia and Ukraine, journalistic initiatives clustered around the problems of kleptocracy and corruption, and then reporters trained in these subjects covered the war.
WHAT HAS ALREADY happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.
For many Europeans and Americans, events in the 2010s—the rise of antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn against Europe and invasion of Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election—came as a surprise. Americans tend to react to surprise in two ways: either by imagining that the unexpected event is not really happening, or by claiming that it is totally new and hence not amenable to historical understanding. Either all will somehow be well, or all is so ill that nothing can be done. The first response is a defense mechanism of the politics of inevitability. The second is the creaking sound that inevitability makes just before it breaks and gives way to eternity. The politics of inevitability first erodes civic responsibility, and then collapses into the politics of eternity when it meets a serious challenge. Americans reacted in these ways when Russia’s candidate became president of the United States.
In the 1990s and in the 2000s, influence flowed from west to east, in the transplant of economic and political models, the spread of the English language, and the enlargement of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Meanwhile, unregulated spaces of American and European capitalism summoned wealthy Russians into a realm without an east-west geography, that of offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and anonymous deals, where wealth stolen from the Russian people was laundered clean. Partly for this reason, in the 2010s influence flowed from east to west, as the offshore exception became the rule, as Russian political fiction penetrated beyond Russia. In The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides defined “oligarchy” as rule by the few, and opposed it to “democracy.” For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few; the word in this sense was revived in the Russian language in the 1990s, and then, with good reason, in English in the 2010s.
Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.” This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real. The Russian campaign to fill the international public sphere with fiction began in Ukraine in 2014, and then spread to the United States in 2015, where it helped to elect a president in 2016. The techniques were everywhere the same, although they grew more sophisticated over time.
Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the politics of eternity: to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States. This is well seen from Ukraine, where Russia fought a regular war while it amplified campaigns to undo the European Union and the United States. The advisor of the first pro-Russian American presidential candidate had been the advisor of the last pro-Russian Ukrainian president. Russian tactics that failed in Ukraine succeeded in the United States. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs hid their money in a way that sustained the career of an American presidential candidate. This is all one history, the history of our moment and our choices.
CAN HISTORY BE so contemporary? We think of the Peloponnesian Wars as ancient history, since the Athenians fought the Spartans more than two thousand years ago. Yet their historian Thucydides was describing events that he experienced. He included discussions of the past insofar as this was necessary to clarify the stakes in the present. This work humbly follows that approach.
The Road to Unfreedom delves into Russian, Ukrainian, European, and American history as necessary to define the political problems of the present, and to dispel some of the myths that enshroud them. It draws on primary sources from the countries concerned, and seeks patterns and concepts that can help us make sense of our own time. The languages of the sources—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German, French, and English—are tools of scholarship but also fonts of experience. I read and watched media from Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States during these years, traveled to many of the places concerned, and could sometimes compare accounts of events with my own experiences or those of people I knew. Each chapter focuses upon a particular event and a particular year—the return of totalitarian thought (2011); the collapse of democratic politics in Russia (2012); the Russian assault upon the European Union (2013); the revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent Russian invasion (2014); the spread of political fiction in Russia, Europe, and America (2015); and the election of Donald Trump (2016).
By suggesting that political foundations cannot really change, the politics of inevitability spread uncertainty as to what those foundations really are. If we think the future is an automatic extension of good political order, we need not ask what that order is, why it is good, how it is sustained, and how it might be improved. History is and must be political thought, in the sense that it opens an aperture between inevitability and eternity, preventing us from drifting from the one to the other, helping us see the moment when we might make a difference.
As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived. Because understanding is empowerment, this book’s chapter titles are framed as alternatives: Individualism or Totalitarianism; Succession or Failure; Integration or Empire; Novelty or Eternity; Truth or Lies; Equality or Oligarchy. Thus individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty, and justice figure as political virtues. These qualities are not mere platitudes or preferences, but facts of history, no less than material forces might be. Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.
An institution might cultivate certain ideas of the good, and it also depends upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they need virtues; if virtues are to be cultivated, they need institutions. The moral question of what is good and evil in public life can never be separated from the historical investigation of structure. It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by promising that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, eternity by assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent victims.
If we wish to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.
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 arises1 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 politics2 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 1920s3 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 noble4 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 Federation5 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 class6 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 politician7 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.
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 inevitability8 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 fascism9 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 impressed10 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 left11 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 views12 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 rightwing 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 Union13 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.
ILYIN WAS CONSISTENT14. 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 good15 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 world16 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 God17, 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 was18 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.”
LIKE ALL IMMORALITY19, 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 exception20 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 specific21 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 thought22 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 world23, 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.
BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIK24 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 Russian25 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 redeemed26Butam