here we go :
Ilyin is quoted and mentioned not only by the president of Russia, but by the prime-minister
Medvedev, foreign minister Lavrov, several of Russia’s governors, patriarch Kirill, various leaders of the United Russia Party and many others besides.
It is about more than just quotes here and there. Ilyin’s books were recommended as a must read by two of the Kremlin’s “grey cardinals” –
Vladislav Surkov and Vyacheslav Volodin. Mikhael Zygar, in his book “All the Kremlin’s Men,” claims that it was precisely these works of Ilyin that influenced Putin’s definition of traditional Russian values. We could argue for a long time whether this means that he is just one of the “approved Kremlin philosophers,” or something much bigger, but I would like point out something simpler to prove: Ilyin — who the state has been promoting for the last 15 years as a genuine Russian philosopher, exemplary statist and true Russian patriot — is a very dubious historical figure to draw inspiration from, even an inappropriate person just to quote. He was a proponent of fascist ideology; a trait he did not renounce even after the end of the Second World War.
To get around this awkwardness, Ilyin’s works tend to be divided into two categories. The first one is made up of his works on Russian statehood and spirituality, which are considered respectable and worthy of quoting by the head of the state and others. The second category: dubious texts about fascism that Putin does not quote, so can be ignored. No such divide, in essence, exists between these categories, only that he is just being more explicit in the second category. Ilyin is in fact quite consistent; his ideas of spirituality and the Russian state are closely linked to his positive views of the regimes o
f Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar and Franco.
https://books.google.se › books
Olexander Hryb · 2021 · Political Science
... Presiden
t Putin not only quoted the fascist Eurasianist Ivan Ilyin three ... a new Moscow shrine,
organized by Patriarch Kirill in 2009 (
Snyder 2016).