Freedom — Paul Robinson

This is probably a "should-read" but I consider it a must-read — all the way to the end, including two short works on freedom by Ivan Ilyin that Paul Robinson has translated for this post.

Irrussianality
Freedom
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Ivan Ilyin — How to Destroy Hate, Foster Love

Ivan Ilyin was an influential nationalist political and Orthodox Christian philosopher active in the Russian Emigre movement in Europe after the revolution. He heavily influenced Solzhenitsyn. Putin, a great admirer, personally supported repatriating his remains to Russia in 2009, and attended the consecration of his grave.

For more articles on RI by or about Ilyin, click here.

For a selection of his Christian writings on the Russian Faith site, click here.

Ivan Ilyin is one of the foremost Russian philosophers along with Nikolai Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov (also transliterated as Soloviev), both of whom are better known in the West than Ilyin. Vladimir Putin cited these three thinkers as important reading for Russian leaders (which he has never done for Alexander Dugin).

Ilyin is now being depicted in the West as a fascist, which is complete nonsense. See Paul Robinson's takedown of Timothy Synder's hit piece on Ilyin, Book Review: The Road To Unfreedom

There are a couple of problems with all this. First, Snyder greatly exaggerates Ilyin’s influence. Second, his interpretation of Ilyin’s philosophy is decidedly odd.

Forget the Wikipedia article on Ilyin. It is completely biased.

Read the following excerpt from Ilyin and judge for yourself.

Russia Insider
How to Destroy Hate, Foster Love - Great 20th C. Russian Christian Philosopher (Ilyin)

Ivan Ilyin (excerpt from his book “Singing heart – a book of quiet contemplations)

Translated from the Russian by Edvin Buday

The Saker — Ivan Ilyin on contemplative love

Introduction by the Saker: Today I am starting a new feature of the Saker Blog – I will regularly publish various texts written by Russian philosophers and Orthodox Church Fathers. My goal here is to open a window, however small, in the real historical, social, political, spiritual, philosophical and cultural roots of what I often refer to as the “Russian civilizational realm”. I am very fortunate to have been contacted by Edvin Buday who has offered his superb translation skills to this blog and who also shares my fascination with this “other” world which is geographically so close to the West but which might as well be located on a different planet. I want to clarify here that this is in no way a substitute to the History of the Orthodox People project, but a complementary feature which, I hope, will present a much more down to earth view of a much misunderstood, and often misrepresented, civilization. Since any text is, by definition, a statement I have decided to include the “Russian civilizational realm series” in the “Speeches, Statements and Interviews” section of the blog.

Ilyin is one of the Russian philosophers that Putin spoke highly of, along with Solovyov and Berdyaev.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Ivan Ilyin on contemplative love
Translated by Edvin Buday

See also

Consortium News
Distorting Putin’s Favorite Philosophers

Paul Grenier

Paul Robinson — Quotations, quotations

Paul Robinson excoriates the New York Times for promoting blatant propaganda smearing Vladimir Putin with falsehoods.

I don’t like to keep returning to the same topic, but The New York Times leaves me little choice. A few months ago I wrote a piece denouncing a lecture by historian Timothy Snyder* which, roughly speaking, proposed the following thesis: Vladimir Putin has quoted philosopher Ivan Ilyin; Ilyin was a fascist; ergo Putin is a fascist. Today Snyder repeated his thesis in an op-ed entitled ‘How a Russian Fascist Is Meddling in America’s Election’. In this he argues that, with Ilyin as his philosophical guide, Putin is trying to ‘discredit both elections and their observation’ and thereby ‘bring down democracy everywhere’.

According to Snyder, ‘Mr Putin has relied on Ilyin’s authority at every turning point in Russian politics’. This is clearly an enormous exaggeration given that Putin has quoted Ilyin a grand total of four times in the 16 years that he has been in power.…

So, let us look at which of Ilyin’s sayings Putin has actually referred to. There are as follows:

25 April 2005:

The great Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin wrote that, ‘State power has its limits … The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness, and convictions. It cannot regulate scientific, religious, and artistic creation. … It musn’t interfere in moral, family, and everyday life, or except in extreme necessity restrict economic initiative.’

10 May 2006:

The well-known Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin said that the calling of soldier is a high and honourable title and that the soldier ‘represents the national unity of the people, the will of the Russian state, strength and honour’.

23 January 2012:

It is this special quality of Russian statehood that was outlined in Ivan Ilyin’s works: ‘Not to eliminate, not to suppress, not to enslave other people’s blood, not to stifle the life of different tribes and religions – but to give everyone breath and the great Russia…to honor all, to reconcile all, to allow everyone to pray in their own way, to work in their own way, and to engage the best in public and cultural development.’

12 December 2014:

I will cite here Ivan Ilyin: ‘Whoever loves Russia should desire freedom for it; first of all freedom for Russia itself, its international independence; freedom for Russia—as the unity of Russian and all other national cultures; and finally, freedom for Russian people, freedom for all of us; freedom of religion, the search for justice, creativity, labor, and property.

Irrussianality
Quotations, quotations
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

* Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969)[2] is an American historian, author, and academic specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. He is a professor at Yale University and is affiliated with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna[3] and the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw, Poland. Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

— Wikipedia

Misunderstanding Xi and China, and Putin and Russia

Good article. Those looking at China with Western neoliberal eyes misunderstand both China and Xi, and as a result the US likely to miss opportunities developing there that others will pick up instead.

Economy Watch
Is America at Risk of Not Participating in a Changing China?
Dan Steinbock

Russian expert Paul Robinson corrects recently published misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of Putin and Russia, base on the writings of Ivan Ilyin, whom Putin as acknowledged as an influence.

Incidentally, Putin recommended Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev, and Ivan Ilyin to other leaders, and not only Ilyin or even Ilyin in particular. This mix reveals the distortion involved in selecting isolated quote from Ilyin alone and representing them as Putin's views.

In the comments Paul Grenier, the foremost Western expert on Ilyin, agrees with Robinson.

Irrussianality

More on Putin's Philosopher

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Paul Grenier — “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

The US is caught in one of the many paradoxes and contradictions of liberalism. Forcing others to be liberal is illiberal.

The West, and specifically the United States, has before it a fateful choice: should it seek a ‘live and let live’ co-existence of the liberal and non-liberal nations of the world, or should it try to make the rest of the world liberal at gunpoint, and in that way prove that history really has finally ended? Should we make the world safe for diversity, or should we make the world uniform for the safety of the United States?....

... is the United States willing to countenance the existence, on a permanent basis, of other great powers that do not accept liberal civilizational values as America defines them? I say other ‘great powers’ because in the long run only a great power, or a protectorate of a great power, can assure its own continued existence.....

Western civilization, which is now characterized by American liberalism, is not the only great civilization, and the other great civilizations do not have traditions of liberalism. They tend to be conservative instead. While Western liberalism is traced to Athenian democracy and the Roman republic, those were exceptions rather than the rule. Even much Western liberalism is liberal (Burkean) conservatism.

Johnson's Russia List
Paul Grenier: “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

Paul Grenier

See also

Paul Grenier, The Varieties of Russian Conservatism. at The American Conservative

First Principles
Burkean Conservatism
Peter J. Stanlis | Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Rockford College.

The author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, which appeared in 1955 and revolutionized the way Burke was viewed by scholars, Professor Stanlis promised Frost in 1944 that he would someday write the best book about Frost's art and thought that he had it in him to write. Stanlis's previous monograph on Frost is titled Robert Frost: The Individual and Society. 

Weekend Reading

Covers a lot of historical ground.

Consortium News
Neocons: the Echo of German Fascism
Todd E. Pierce

What Berdyaev, Solovyev, and Ilyin actually said.

Distorting Putin’s Favorite Philosophers
Paul R. Grenier

Gordon M. Hahn — Putin Myths And Putin Ideology

Putin may be no angel (which world leader is?). But he is not the devil he is made out to be in propaganda, either.

As the Ukrainian crisis and civil war continue to fester on, alarmist assessments of ‘Putin’s Russia’ continue to monopolize Western media space. Such assessments begin with distortions about the nature of Russia’s history and culture and end with dire predictions about Russia’s future domestic and international behavior. These assessments are often embedded into the now fully demonized figure of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is portrayed alternatively as a new Stalin, Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, or mafia don. 

For example, much has been made recently about the supposedly sinister ideological influences permeating Putin’s mind and Russian discourse. These influences are held up as indicators of Russia’s ultra-nationalist, dictatorial, and imperialistic future against which the West must mobilize in a new cold war. However, the representation of these influences are replete with mischaracterizations and falsehoods. Putin’s ideological influences and orientation are more moderate, eclectic, and ambivalent than the many overwrought accounts suggest. Hence, the resulting predictions regarding Russia’s future development typify the process ‘garbage in, garbage out.’….

Russia: Other Points of View

Putin Myths And Putin Ideology

Gordon M. Hahn | American Russian scholar and analyst

Analyst, Rus Strategic Ltd., Prague, Czech Rep.

Analyst and Advisory Board Member, Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Ill.,www.geostrategicforecasting.com.

Analyst and Consultant, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com
Dr. Hahn is author of the well-received books Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002), the just published book The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014), various think tank reports, and numerous articles in academic journals and other English and Russian language media. He has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.

Paul Robinson — Against Russia by Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher

By far the most popular blog post that I have so far written was Putin’s Philosopher, about Ivan Ilyin. Some readers asked for more on the same subject, so here is a translation of an essay he wrote in 1948 entitled ‘Against Russia’. My aim is not to endorse what Ilyin writes, merely to illustrate a mode of thinking which probably resonates strongly among some Russians today. The translation is mine.

Against Russia by Ivan Ilyin, 1948.….

Irrusssianality — Russia, the West, and the world
Against Russia

Paul Robinson | Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Iben Thranholm — Putin's Christian Vision

Monasteries and churches formerly inside the Kremlin walls and destroyed by the Bolsheviks, are being rebuilt. Governors instructed to read Christian philosophers of the 19th-20th century.…

The Kremlin is both the political and historic center not just of Moscow but of Russia. By calling for the restoration of these Christian buildings Putin repudiates the Soviet legacy with its atheist ideology and its record of anti-Christianity and reaffirms Orthodoxy as the heart of Russian culture. In his own words

"Here is the idea ... to restore the historic appearance of the place with two monasteries and a church, but giving them, considering today's realities, an exclusively cultural character."

A key element of Putin’s world view is not just his commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution, but also his admiration for three 19th and 20th century Russian Christian philosophers—Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin, all of whom he often quotes in his speeches. Russia’s regional governors were even instructed to read the works of these philosophers during their 2014 winter holidays.

The social and political importance of this about-facecannot be overestimated. It is a sea change that cements Putin as one of the historically great Russian leaders.

Vladimir Solovyov is the most significant of the three philosophers that have gained Putin's sponsorship. From Wikipedia:

Sophiolology

Solovyov compiled a philosophy based on Hellenistic philosophy (see Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) and early Christian tradition with Buddhismand Hebrew Kabbalistic elements (Philo of Alexandria). He also studied Gnosticism and the works of Valentinus.[11] His religious philosophy was syncretic, and fused philosophical elements of various religious traditions with Orthodox Christianity and his own experience of Sophia.
Solovyov described his encounters with the entity Sophia in his works, Three Encounters and Lectures on Godmanhood among others. Solovyov's fusion was driven by the desire to reconcile and or unite with Orthodox Christianity these various traditions via the Russian Slavophiles' concept of sobornost. His Russian religious philosophy had a very strong impact on the Russian Symbolist art movements of his time.[12] Solovyov's teachings on Sophia, conceived as the merciful unifying feminine wisdom of God comparable to the Hebrew Shekinah or various goddess traditions,[13] have been deemed a heresy by ROCOR and as unsound and unorthodox by the Patriarchate of Moscow.[14] 

Sobornost 

Solovyov sought to create a philosophy that could through his system of logic or reason reconcile allbodies of knowledge or disciplines of thought, and fuse all conflicting concepts into a single system. The central component of this complete philosophic reconciliation was the Russian Slavophile concept of sobornost (organic or Spontaneous order through integration; which is related to the Russian word for 'catholic'). Solovyov sought to find and validate common ground – or where conflicts found common ground – and by focusing on this common ground to establish absolute unity and or integral[15] fusion of opposing ideas and / or peoples.[16]

Quotes 

"As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."
"But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man's common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life."[17] 

Nikolai Berdyaev is also a notable Russian philosopher. Berdyaev and Solovyov are often mentioned together and are much more significant than Ilyin.

From Wikipedia:

Berdyaev's philosophy has been characterized as Christian existentialist. He was preoccupied with creativity and in particular with freedom from anything that inhibited creativity, whence his opposition to a "collectivized and mechanized society".
According to Marko Markovic, "He was an ardent man, rebellious to all authority, an independent and "negative" spirit. He could assert himself only in negation and could not hear any assertion without immediately negating it, to such an extent that he would even be able to contradict himself and to attack people who shared his own prior opinions."[2]

********

He was a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church, but was often critical of the institutional church. He was a Christian universalist,[5][6] and he believed that Orthodox Christianity was the true vehicle for that teaching.

The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters ofApokatastasis, of universal salvation and resurrection. ... Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot the idea of Divine love. Chiefly — it did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos.[7]

Russian Premier Vladimir Putin has instructed his regional governors to read Berdyaev's 'The Philosophy of Inequality'.[8]

In comparison with Solovyov and Berdyaev, Ivan Ilyin is considered a relatively minor philosopher, but he is still important in Russia as Russian philosopher and shaper of thought. He was a Russian nationalist and traditionalist. Hopefully, Putin will emphasize Solovyov  and Berdyaev rather than Ilyin. But Ilyin's analysis of Russia under Marxism-Leninism is revealing if this is Putin's view also.

Studying the causes of the twentieth century Russian tragedy, Ilyin wrote, “The Russian revolution is a reflection of the religious crisis we are living through now, an attempt to establish an anti-Christian public and state system thought up by Friedrich Nietzsche, and economically and politically realised by Karl Marx. The West exported this anti-Christian virus to Russia… Losing our bond with God and the Christian tradition, mankind has become morally blind, and gripped by materialism, irrationalism, and nihilism”. To overcome the global moral crisis people need to return to eternal moral values, that is faith, love, freedom, conscience, family, motherland, and nation, above all faith and love, Ilyin wrote. He trusted that “to make Russia great again, the Russian people should believe in God, and that this faith will strengthen their willpower and their mind, and will make them strong enough to overcome themselves”. Ilyin believed in the religious gift and talent of the Russian soul. He prophesied, “Russian history is all about morality triumphing over difficulties, temptation, danger, and enemies. That’s how it was, and that’s how it’s always going to be, even better…” — Ivan Ilyin: An Exceptional Twentieth Century Religious Philosopher

Putin is a frequent visitor to the isolated Valaam Monastery, where he apparently visits his spiritual mentor. Therefore, it is doubtful that this change of direction is not also accompanied by a change of heart. However, it is also politically astute.

It also explains a lot about his so-called anti-democratic behavior in enforcing traditional values rather than "freedom" when that freedom goes against traditional values. In this Putin is closely aligned with the American religious right on the drawing the line between freedom and license.

Russia Insider
Putin's Christian Vision
Iben Thranholm