…[Ivan] Ilyin rejected the rule of law in favor of the arbitrariness—proizvol—of fascism. Having given up hope that Russia could be governed by law, he presented lawlessness (proizvol) as a patriotic virtue. Putin followed the same trajectory, citing Ilyin as his authority.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#ilyin #putin #fascism

Asked by students of history to name a historical authority, Putin could only think of one name: Ivan Ilyin. Now, Ilyin was many things, but he was no historian.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#putin #ilyin

Surkov’s pillars of Russian statehood were “centralization, personification, and idealization”: the state must be unified, its authority granted to an individual, and that individual glorified. Citing Ilyin, Surkov concluded that the Russian people should have as much freedom as they were ready to have. Of course, what Ilyin meant by “freedom” was the freedom of the individual to submerge himself in a collectivity that subjugates itself to a leader.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#surkov #ilyin #putin #russia

During Putin’s first two presidential terms, between 2000 and 2008, Surkov exploited manageable conflicts to gain popularity or change institutions. …Surkov (citing Ilyin) claimed that Russians did not yet know how to vote. … Nevertheless, Surkov continued, Russia was superior to other post-Soviet states in its sovereignty. He claimed that none of the non-Russian nations of the old Soviet Union was capable of statehood.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#putin #surkov #ilyin #russia

It was not so much elections as fictions that allowed a transition of power, a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Then Ilyin and Putin rose together, the philosopher and the politician of fiction.
—Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom
#russia #ilyin #putin