The Bones from Zollikon
A mentor never supplies the policy. He supplies the language in which it can be presented as necessary.
From the series The Conductors of the Leaders · Part I, The Dead
The series asks which ideologies and mentors stand behind those in power and what they actually achieve. It proceeds case by case; each text stands on its own. The typology comes at the end, not at the beginning.
I. A Reburial
On 3 October 2005, two men who had both died in exile were buried in Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery: General Anton Denikin, a commander of the Whites in the Civil War, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Ilyin’s remains came from Zollikon on Lake Zurich, where he had died in 1954. The idea of bringing him home came from the film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who had been promoting Ilyin’s work for years. A year later, the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg paid for Ilyin’s papers to return from Michigan to Moscow. In 2009, Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the grave.
In his lifetime, Ilyin was a philosopher without a country. In 1922 he was expelled from Soviet Russia along with some 160 other intellectuals on the so-called philosophers’ ship. He lived in Berlin and fled to Switzerland in 1938 with money given to him by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Half a century after his death, he became the most quoted authority of a state he never saw.
II. What Ilyin Thought
Ilyin was a lawyer and a Hegel scholar, but above all an implacable opponent of the Bolsheviks. In his 1925 treatise on resisting evil by force, he defended violence against evil as a necessary duty, one that makes even the righteous guilty but that he must not evade.
For a Russia after the Soviets, he drafted a political order without separation of powers and without competing parties. The state was to derive its legitimacy from faith and history — not from distrust of power, but from the people’s trust in their leadership. Russia, in his view, was not a sum of individuals and institutions but a living organism, a spiritual unity of ruler and people.
And he had a sympathy that cannot be left out. In 1928 he called fascism a reaction to Bolshevism, a concentration of the forces that preserve the state. In 1933 he wrote that Hitler had halted the process of Bolshevisation in Germany and thereby rendered the greatest service to all of Europe. He later distanced himself from the National Socialists, but not from the idea of a strong leadership standing above the law.
III. The Rediscovery
From 2005 onwards, Ilyin becomes state literature. Putin quotes him in 2005, 2006 and 2014 in his addresses to the Federal Assembly, and in 2012 and 2013 on other occasions. At the turn of the year 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea, senior officials and regional governors each receive a copy of Ilyin’s collection of essays Our Tasks. And on 30 September 2022, in the speech announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, the president quotes him once more.
That is the documented trail: a reburial, a wreath, a book mailing, a handful of quotations over two decades. What it means is another question.
IV. The Objection
Timothy Snyder has built a strong thesis on this evidence. Ilyin, he argues, is the prophet of today’s Russia; his thought supplies the metaphysical justification of a fascist state.
Against this stand two objections that must be taken seriously. Marlène Laruelle, who has worked on Russian nationalism for decades, considers it a mistake to declare Ilyin the Kremlin’s central doctrine, and places the system not under fascism but within a broad spectrum of conservative, illiberal regimes. Paul Robinson has counted: five quotations in sixteen years are not discipleship. Whoever quotes a thinker does not thereby adopt everything that thinker ever wrote — otherwise every philosopher who quotes Heidegger would be a National Socialist.
Both sides may be partly right. That Ilyin was quoted, distributed and reburied is documented. That he explains the actions is an interpretation. The Russian state draws on intellectual history as if from a pantry: Ilyin for the organism, Danilevsky for pan-Slavism, Gumilyov for the vital energy of peoples. Whoever turns this into a closed system usually builds it himself.
V. The Court Theorist
A second case lays the mechanism bare. Vladislav Surkov, for many years deputy head of the presidential administration, coined the term sovereign democracy: a democracy whose content is determined by the state. In a widely noticed 2019 article on “Putin’s long state”, he wrote that the West is ruled by a deep state, whereas Russia has a deep people, directly bound to its ruler.
Surkov does not think ahead; he thinks after. He supplies the theory for a decision already taken, in a language that can be quoted. Ilyin, by contrast, can supply nothing more; he is dead, and precisely that makes him useful. A dead man does not object when he is pressed into service for the present.
VI. What a Vocabulary Does
This raises the question at stake here: does this thinker lead, or does he merely legitimise?
Ilyin did not design the war against Ukraine. What he supplied is a vocabulary. Russia as an organism from which no part can separate without injuring the body: whoever thinks this way sees a neighbour’s independence not as the founding of a state but as an amputation. The West as a tempter that corrupts the Russian soul. Violence as a burden that the righteous take upon themselves.
Such a vocabulary does not design policy, but it makes certain policies sayable and others unsayable. It gives the one who acts the certainty that he is not choosing, but compelled.
And it works in both directions. Whoever publicly invokes the organism binds himself to it. A president who has spent two decades conjuring the unity of land, people and faith can no longer present a retreat as prudence; his own narrative would punish him for it. In this sense the mentor does indeed lead — only not the way one imagines a whisperer: not through advice, but through the narrowness of the language he left behind.
VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted
The thesis would be refuted if it could be shown that invoking Ilyin is mere decoration and that the Kremlin’s decisions can be explained entirely by power interests, without any narrative. It would be weakened if the quotations demonstrably came from speechwriters alone and the president never read the texts. And it would be overstated if Ilyin were arbitrarily interchangeable — if any other conservative thinker could have played the same role. This third possibility is the most serious, and the text does not dismiss it.
VIII. The Question
The question is not who whispers to the powerful, but which language he has made his own and what it binds him to.
A dead man from Zollikon gave no orders. He left words behind, and those words leave the one who speaks them fewer paths open than he believes.