Ilyin too argued on similar lines that Russia would get a ‘redeemer’ who would make the ‘chivalrous sacrifice’ of shedding the blood of others to take power. “I believe that I am acting as the almighty Creator would want”, he wrote in his autobiography. Hitler propagated that his was a divine mission.
It suited Putin because Ilyin, in true fascist tradition, talked about a ‘redeemer’ who would be a godsend and save Russia from the Communists on the one hand and the West on the other. His shenanigans got the clue and started projecting Ilyin as the philosopher of Russia’s future. Putin started speaking about him often, inside the Duma and outside. Ilyin was reburied in Moscow in 2005 under Putin’s gaze. But Putin found in Ilyin a useful symbol and resurrected him. Soviet Russia, in the throes of post-Stalin palpitations, didn’t bother to mourn much the death of this anti-Bolshevik fascist. Snyder highlights how Putin brought back Ilyin into Russia’s political discourse in the early part of his presidency. “The principle of democracy is the irresponsible human atom”, he declared, adding “we must reject the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics” as well as “blind faith in the number of votes”. One twentieth century philosopher who came in handy for Putin was Ivan Ilyin. Only democratic systems are intransient”, he soon turned into an authoritarian himself. Snyder argues that although Putin began his presidency in 1999 on the plank of anti-authoritarianism and pro-democracy by insisting that “history has proven that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government, are transient. It is essentially a clinical exploration of the politics of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, who, according to Snyder, is exploiting the “capacious vulnerability within the European Union and the United States” to push forward with his agenda in the name of Eurasian integration. In his book “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America”, Snyder continues his analysis of the rise of authoritarianism by focusing exclusively on Russia. He has authored several books, the recent being a short educative essay titled “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”. Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University in the USA, is a recognized authority on authoritarian ideologies and their ability to undermine and nibble away at democracies.
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