By Matija Šerić
The State as a Corporation
Ivan Ilyin held conservative monarchist beliefs rooted in Slavophile thought. Beginning with his 1918 thesis on Hegel’s philosophy, he published numerous works on political, social, and religious topics concerning Russia’s historical mission. He sought to answer the question of what drove Russians to launch and carry out the October Revolution. He found the answer in the weakened and declining self-respect of the Russian people. As a result, mutual mistrust and suspicion emerged between the state and the people. The authorities constantly abused their powers, thereby undermining the unity of the nation.
Ilyin believed that the state should be organized like a corporation in which citizens are members with specific rights and obligations. He felt that Russians had a wrong attitude toward private property and estates because they believed these were not acquired through hard and honest work, but through theft, bribery, and corruption by influential officials. Therefore, Russians viewed private ownership negatively. These factors, according to Ilyin, led to revolution and egalitarianism.
A Supporter of Tradition and the Church
An alternative path for Russia, Ilyin argued, was the concept of the individual’s “legal conscience,” based on morality and religiosity. As a monarchist, he believed that a monarchist legal conscience corresponded to values such as religious humility and family. His ideal was a monarch or “tsar” who would serve the good of the state, belong to no political party, and unite the entire nation regardless of its beliefs. Yet Ilyin was critical of the monarchy in Russia, including the last tsar, Nicholas II. Interestingly, in many of his writings, Ilyin expressed admiration for fascism—even after 1945—although he firmly opposed Nazism due to its xenophobia. As an opponent of Soviet communism and Western democracy, Ilyin envisioned a special path for Russia grounded in the promotion of the Russian Orthodox Church and traditional values that would bring about a spiritual renewal of the Russian people.
Ilyin influence on Putin explained
Ilyin Inspires Putin’s Attitude Toward Ukraine
It is intriguing that due to Ilyin’s strong influence on Putin and his inner circle, the CIA even hurried to prepare an analysis examining Ilyin’s role in Putin’s thinking and what it might mean for the Russian leader’s future actions. From the perspective of 2025, it appears that American politicians did not devote enough attention to what their intelligence services had discovered. It is well known, for example, that Ilyin held a very negative attitude toward Ukraine—more precisely, an imperial and dismissive one. He believed that Ukrainians were not a separate people but merely a “branch” of the Russian nation, and he described Ukrainian identity as an artificial political project allegedly encouraged by Russia’s enemies. He completely rejected Ukrainian statehood, claiming that an independent Ukraine would pose a mortal danger to Russia and its historical order. For this reason, he advocated a strong integration of Ukraine into a “unified Russian state organism.”
Putin Sees Himself in Ilyin’s Prophetic Writings
Ilyin especially emphasized Orthodoxy, patriotism, law, and private property as the fundamental foundations of the Russian state. Writing from exile during Stalin’s rule and the Great Patriotic War (Second World War), he glorified the heroes of the civil war with deep respect and romanticism—a sentiment that once again resonates in modern Russia.
Putin could find much that appealed to him in Ilyin’s words:
“The hero takes upon himself the burden of his nation, the burden of its misfortunes, its struggle, its quests, and after accepting this burden, he triumphs—he triumphs simply by doing so, marking the entire path toward salvation. And his victory becomes a prototype and beacon, an achievement and a calling, a source of victory and the beginning of victory for all united with him in one whole by patriotic love. That is why he remains for his people a living source of joy and happiness, and his name sounds like victory.”
Ilyin wrote texts that could be called prophetic, and Putin saw himself in them—as the hero of Russia.
2011: Putin Widely Promotes Ilyin’s Ideas
When anti-government protests broke out in Russia in the autumn of 2011—fueled by the Arab Spring and Putin’s announced return to the presidency—Putin began openly using nationalist rhetoric and advocating traditional conservative values as the pillars upon which modern Russia rests. Thus, in February 2012, he received support from the Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill, who had initially shown sympathy for the protests. The Church’s shift in attitude toward Putin was striking, but it marked the emergence of the central narrative of Putin’s return to the presidency.
This narrative was not rooted in nostalgia for Soviet times but in a more distant tsarist past—and in the ideas of thinkers such as Ilyin.
Confronted with protests, Putin aimed to present himself not just as the guarantor of Soviet-era stability, but as the nation’s leader in a deeper sense: the protector of the social and cultural values of traditional Russia. In a series of seven declarations published in major media outlets during the 2012 election campaign, Putin emphasized an entirely conservative vision of the country, referring to the “Russian civilizational model” (the so-called Third Rome), diametrically opposed to the “decadent” values of the West represented by the protesters. Putin chose a strategy that yielded results, gradually quieting the protests and winning the support of broad segments of ordinary Russians. Ilyin’s role in this was essential.
Putin’s famous Munich Speech 2007
Eurasian Policy
Even the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union in 2014 can be linked to Ilyin. Eurasianism in Russia is a deeply conservative philosophy driven by political émigrés and by the interventionist policies of the USSR. It resurfaced in the 1990s, combining the religious and monarchist ideas of émigrés such as Ilyin with the work of geopolitical strategists like Sir Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, and others—and in more recent times, Aleksandr Dugin.
Ilyin Posthumously Shapes Russian State Policy
All in all, Ilyin’s influence on Putin’s vision of modern Russia is immense. His ideas are not only found in the president’s speeches—they are felt in the shaping of state ideology, cultural policy, and even the military narrative through which the Kremlin justifies its foreign-policy ambitions. Ilyin provided Putin with a theoretical foundation for the concept of Russia as a distinct civilization with its own values, goals, and historical mission—a concept clearly reflected in Russian foreign policy over the past fifteen years.
In this context, the modern Russian Federation is not merely a state defending itself from external influences but a project of national identity renewal and a return to the Christian-Orthodox foundations on which, according to Putin and Ilyin, Russia’s historical greatness rests.
For this reason, Ilyin’s spirit still hovers over Russian politics—serving as an intellectual justification for authoritarianism, traditionalism, and the increasingly strong emphasis on Russia’s “special path.”
References:
Myers, S. L. (2016.) The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, New York: Vintage Books
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2015-09-20/putins-philosopher
