Vladimir Putin Speech 30 September 2022 - Signing Of Treaties Admitting The DNR, The LNR, And The Zaporozhia And Kherson Regions To The Russian Federation
“Dear citizens of Russia, citizens of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, residents of Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, deputies of the State Duma, senators of the Russian Federation!
You know, referendums were held in Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, Zaporozhia and Kherson regions. Their results are summed up, the results are known. People have made their choice, an unambiguous choice.
Today we are signing treaties on the admission to Russia of the Donetsk People's Republic, the Luhansk People's Republic, the Zaporozhia region and the Kherson region. I am sure that the Federal Assembly will support the constitutional laws on the admission and formation of four new regions, four new subjects of the Russian Federation in Russia, because this is the will of millions of people.
(Applause.)
And of course this is their right, their inalienable right which is enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter, which speaks directly of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
I repeat: it is an inalienable right of the people, it is based on historical unity, in the name of which generations of our ancestors, those who from the origins of Ancient Russia over the centuries have built and defended Russia, have won. Here, in Novorossiya, Rumyantsev, Suvorov and Ushakov fought, Catherine II and Potemkin founded new cities. Here our grandfathers and great-grandfathers stood to the death during the Great Patriotic War.
We will always remember the heroes of the "Russian Spring," those who did not put up with the neo-Nazi coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, all those who died for the right to speak their native language, to preserve their culture, traditions, faith, and for the right to live. These are the warriors of Donbass, the martyrs of "Odessa Khatyn," the victims of inhumane terrorist attacks by the Kiev regime. These are volunteers and militias, these are civilians, children, women, old people, Russians, Ukrainians, people of various nationalities. This is the real people's leader of Donetsk, Alexander Zakharchenko, these are combat commanders Arsen Pavlov and Vladimir Zhoga, Olga Kochura and Alexey Mozgovoy, this is the prosecutor of the Luhansk Republic, Sergey Gorenko. This is paratrooper Nurmagomed Hajimagomedov, and all our soldiers and officers who died the death of the brave during the special military operation. They are heroes.
(Applause.)
They are Heroes of the great Russia. And please honor their memory with a moment of silence.
(Minute of silence.)
Thank you.
Behind the choice of millions of people in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, in the Zaporozhia and Kherson regions - our common fate and a thousand years of history. This spiritual connection people passed on to their children and grandchildren. In spite of all the trials, they have carried their love for Russia through the years. And no one can destroy this feeling in us. That is why the elder generations, as well as the young people, those who were born after the tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, voted for our unity, for our common future.
In 1991, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, without asking the will of ordinary citizens, the representatives of the party elites of the time made a decision about the collapse of the USSR, and people found themselves cut off from their Motherland overnight. This tore and split up our national unity alive, and turned into a national catastrophe. Just as once after the revolution the borders of the Union republics were chopped up behind the scenes, so the last leaders of the Soviet Union tore apart our great country despite the direct will of the majority of the people in a referendum in 1991 and simply put the people before the fact.
I suppose they didn't even fully understand what they were doing and what consequences it would inevitably lead to in the end. But that doesn't matter anymore. The Soviet Union is gone, the past cannot be brought back. And even Russia today doesn't need it, we don't want it. But there is nothing stronger than the determination of millions of people who by their culture, faith, traditions and language consider themselves part of Russia, whose ancestors for centuries lived in a single state. There is nothing stronger than the determination of these people to return to their true, historical homeland.
For eight long years, people in Donbass have been subjected to genocide, shelling and blockade, and in Kherson and Zaporizhia they have tried criminally to inculcate hatred of Russia, of everything Russian. Now, during the referendums, the Kiev regime threatened schoolteachers and women who worked on election commissions with reprisals and intimidated millions of people who had come to express their will. But the unbroken people of Donbas, Zaporozhia and Kherson have spoken.
I want the Kiev authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me and I want everyone to remember this: people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporozhia become our citizens forever.
(Applause.)
We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire, all hostilities, the war it unleashed back in 2014, and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, it has been said many times. But the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhia and Kherson will not be discussed, it has been made, Russia will not betray it.
(Applause.)
And today's authorities in Kiev must treat this free expression of the will of the people with respect and nothing else. That is the only way to peace.
We will defend our land with all the forces and means at our disposal, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safe lives of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our people.
We will definitely rebuild destroyed cities and towns, housing, schools, hospitals, theaters and museums, restore and develop industrial enterprises, factories, infrastructure, social, pension, health and educational systems.
Of course, we will work to improve security. Together we will make sure that the citizens in the new regions will feel the support of the entire Russian people, the entire country, all the republics, all the districts and regions of our great Motherland.
(Applause.)
Dear friends, colleagues!
Today I want to address the soldiers and officers who are taking part in the special military operation, the soldiers of Donbass and Novorossiya, those who after the decree on partial mobilization join the ranks of the Armed Forces, fulfilling their patriotic duty, who themselves come to the military enlistment offices at the call of their hearts. I also want to address their parents, wives and children and say what our people are fighting for, what enemy we are up against, who is throwing the world into new wars and crises, taking his bloody profit from this tragedy.
Our compatriots, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine - a native part of our united people - have seen with their own eyes what the ruling circles of the so-called West are preparing for all mankind. Here, in fact, they simply threw off their masks and showed their true guts.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West decided that the world, all of us, would have to put up with its dictates forever. Back then, in 1991, the West hoped that Russia would not recover from such upheavals and would continue to fall apart on its own. It almost did - we remember the 90s, the terrible 90s, hungry, cold, and hopeless. But Russia held on, revived, strengthened, and regained its rightful place in the world.
At the same time, the West has been looking for and continues to look for another chance to hit us, to weaken and destroy Russia, which is what they have always dreamed of, to fragment our state, to pit our people against each other, to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They just can't get over the fact that there is such a great, huge country in the world, with its territory, natural riches, resources, with the people, which is not able and will never live according to someone else's orders.
The West is willing to go through anything to preserve that neocolonial system, which allows it to parasitize, in fact, rob the world at the expense of the power of the dollar and technological dictate, to collect from humanity a real tribute, to extract the main source of unearned welfare, the hegemonic rent. The preservation of this rent is their key, genuine and absolutely self-serving motive. This is why total de-sovereignization is in their interest. Hence their aggression against independent states, against traditional values and cultures, attempts to undermine international and integration processes beyond their control, new world currencies and centers of technological development. It is critically important to them that all countries surrender their sovereignty in favor of the United States.
The ruling elites of some states voluntarily agree to do this, voluntarily agree to become vassals; others are bribed, intimidated. And if they fail, they destroy entire states, leaving behind humanitarian catastrophes, disasters, ruins, millions of ruined, mangled human lives, terrorist enclaves, social disaster zones, protectorates, colonies and semi-colonies. They don't care as long as they get their benefits.
I would like to emphasize once again: it is greed and the intention to preserve their unconstrained power that is the real reason behind the hybrid war the "collective West" is waging against Russia. They do not wish us freedom, but want to see us as a colony. They do not want equal cooperation, but robbery. They want to see us not as a free society, but as a crowd of soulless slaves.
Our thought and philosophy are a direct threat to them, which is why they attack our philosophers. Our culture and art are a danger to them, that's why they try to ban them. Our development and prosperity is also a threat for them. They don't need Russia at all, we need it.
(Applause.)
I would like to remind you that the claims of world domination in the past have already been broken more than once by the courage and steadfastness of our people. Russia will always be Russia. Even now we will defend our values and our homeland.
The West is counting on impunity, on getting away with everything. As a matter of fact, it has been getting away with it until now. Strategic security agreements go in the trash; agreements reached at the highest political level are dismissed as tall tales; firm promises not to expand NATO eastward, once our former leaders bought them, turn out to be a dirty sham; missile defense and intermediate-range missile treaties have been unilaterally broken under far-fetched pretexts.
All we hear from all sides is that the West upholds a rules-based order. Where did they come from? Who saw these rules at all? Who negotiated them? Look, this is just nonsense, sheer deception, double or triple standards! For fools is calculated simply.
Russia is a great power, a country of civilization, and it is not going to live by such rigged, bogus rules.
(Applause.)
It was the so-called West that trampled on the principle of the inviolability of borders, and now it decides at its own discretion who has the right to self-determination and who does not, who is not worthy of it. Why they decide so, who gave them such a right, is unclear. To themselves.
That is why their choice of people in Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson causes wild anger. This West has no moral right to assess it, even to speak about freedom of democracy. There is not and never has been!
Western elites deny not only national sovereignty and international law. Their hegemony is clearly totalitarian, despotic and apartheid in nature. They brazenly divide the world into their vassals, into so-called civilized countries and everyone else who, according to today's Western racists, should join the list of barbarians and savages. The false labels - "rogue country," "authoritarian regime" - are already in place, branding entire peoples and states, and this is nothing new. There is nothing new in this: Western elites have remained as they were - colonialist. They discriminate, they divide peoples into first and other classes.
We have never accepted and will never accept such political nationalism and racism. And what, if not racism, is the Russophobia now spreading around the world? What, if not racism, is the West's unquestioning conviction that its civilization, its neoliberal culture, is the unquestionable model for the whole world? "He who is not with us is against us. It even sounds strange.
Even repentance for their own historical crimes is shifted by Western elites to everyone else, requiring both citizens of their countries and other nations to apologize for something to which they have nothing to do at all - for example, for the period of colonial conquests.
It is worth reminding the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed by the world slave trade, the genocide of Native American tribes, the plundering of India, Africa, the wars of England and France against China, which forced it to open its ports to the opium trade. What they were doing was getting entire peoples hooked on drugs, purposely exterminating entire ethnic groups for land and resources, hunting people like animals. This is against the very nature of man, truth, freedom and justice.
And we-we are proud that in the twentieth century it was our country that led the anti-colonial movement, which opened up opportunities for many peoples of the world to develop, to reduce poverty and inequality, to defeat hunger and disease.
I emphasize that one of the reasons for centuries of Russophobia, the undisguised anger of these Western elites toward Russia is precisely because we did not let ourselves be robbed during the colonial conquests, forced the Europeans to trade for mutual benefit. This was achieved by creating in Russia a strong centralized state, which developed, strengthened on the great moral values of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, on the open to all Russian culture and the Russian word.
It is known that repeatedly plotted interventions in Russia, attempted to use the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, and the period of turmoil after 1917 - has failed. The West managed to get its hands on Russia's wealth in the late XX century, when the state was destroyed. At that time they called us friends and partners, but in fact they treated us as a colony - trillions of dollars were siphoned out of the country by a variety of schemes. We all remember everything, we have not forgotten anything.
And these days, people in Donetsk and Luhansk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have spoken out to restore our historic unity. Thank you!
(Applause.)
Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Everything is exactly the opposite: instead of democracy, it is suppression and exploitation; instead of freedom, it is enslavement and violence. The whole unipolar world order is inherently anti-democratic and unfree, lying and hypocritical through and through.
The USA is the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the way, they set a precedent.
Let me also remind you that the USA together with the English turned Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities into ruins during World War II without any military necessity. And this was done demonstratively, without, I repeat, military necessity. There was only one goal: just as in the case of the nuclear bombings in Japan, to intimidate our country and the whole world.
The U.S. left a terrible mark on the people of Korea and Vietnam with its barbaric carpet bombings, napalm and chemical weapons.
Up to now, they are actually occupying Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, while cynically calling them equal allies. Look, I wonder what kind of alliance this is? The whole world knows that the leaders of these countries are spied upon and their leaders are bugged not only in their offices, but also in their residences. It is a real disgrace. Shame on those who do it, and shame on those who, like slaves, silently and uncomplainingly swallow this boorishness.
They call the orders and rude, insulting shouts to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, the development of biological weapons, experiments on living people, including in Ukraine - noble medical research.
It is their destructive policies, their wars, their plundering that have provoked today's enormous surge in migration flows. Millions of people endure deprivation, abuse, and die by the thousands trying to get to Europe.
Bread is being exported from Ukraine. Where is it going under the pretext of "ensuring food security of the poorest countries in the world"? Where is it going? Everything goes to the same European countries. Five percent only went to the poorest countries in the world. Once again, it's another trickery and outright deception.
The American elite, in fact, is using the tragedy of these people to weaken its competitors, to destroy the nation-states. This also applies to Europe, it applies to the identity of France, Italy, Spain, other countries with centuries of history.
Washington demands more and more sanctions against Russia, and most European politicians obediently agree. They clearly understand that the U.S., by pushing for the complete rejection of Russian energy and other resources by the EU, is leading to the deindustrialization of Europe, to take over the European market completely - they understand everything, these European elites understand everything, but they prefer to serve someone else's interests. This is no longer subservience, but a direct betrayal of their peoples. But God be with them, that's their business.
But sanctions are no longer enough for the Anglo-Saxons, they have turned to sabotage - unbelievably, but factually - by blowing up the international gas pipelines of Nord Stream, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, and have actually started destroying the European energy infrastructure. It is obvious to everyone who benefits from this. The one who benefits, of course, did so.
The U.S. diktat is based on brute force, on the law of the mailed fist. Sometimes it is beautifully covered in velvet, sometimes not, but the essence is the same - the law of the mailed fist. Hence the deployment and maintenance of hundreds of military bases all over the world, the expansion of NATO and attempts to form new military alliances such as AUKUS and the like. The military-political nexus Washington-Seoul-Tokyo is also being actively worked on. All those states that have or aspire to have genuine strategic sovereignty and are able to challenge Western hegemony are automatically classified as enemies.
These are the principles underlying U.S. and NATO military doctrines, which require nothing less than total domination. Western elites present their neocolonial plans in the same hypocritical way, even with the pretense of peacefulness, they talk about some kind of containment, and such a sly word wanders from one strategy to another, but, in fact, it means only one thing: undermining any sovereign centers of development.
We have already heard about the containment of Russia, China, and Iran. I believe that other countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, as well as current partners and allies of the United States, are next in line. We know that when something is not to their liking, they impose sanctions against allies too, once against one bank, now against another; once against one company, now against another. This is the practice, and it will continue to expand. They have everyone in their sights, including our closest neighbors - the CIS countries.
At the same time, the West is clearly and for a long time has been wishfully thinking. Thus, by initiating a sanctions blitzkrieg against Russia, they believed that they would once again be able to build the whole world on their command. But as it turned out, such a bright prospect does not excite everyone - except for complete political masochists and fans of other unconventional forms of international relations. Most states refuse to go under the radar and submit, but instead choose the sensible path of cooperation with Russia.
The West clearly did not expect such insubordination from them. They just got used to act according to a template, to take everything by pushing, blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convince themselves that these methods will work forever, as if they are hardened and frozen in the past.
Such self-confidence is a direct outgrowth not only of the notorious concept of one's own exceptionalism-though this, of course, is surprisingly simple-but also of the real hunger for information in the West. The truth has been drowned in an ocean of myths, illusions, and fakes, using prohibitively aggressive propaganda, lying like Goebbels. The more unbelievable the lie, the faster people will believe it - that's how they operate, according to this principle.
But people cannot be fed with printed dollars and euros. You can't feed them with these pieces of paper, and the virtual, inflated capitalization of Western social networks can't heat their homes. All of this is important, what I'm saying, but no less important is what I just said: you can't feed anyone with paper - you need food, and this inflated paper money can't heat anyone either - you need energy.
That's why politicians in Europe have to convince their fellow citizens to eat less, bathe less often, and dress warmly at home. And those who begin to ask a fair question "why is this so?” - they are immediately declared to be enemies, extremists, and radicals. They transfer the blame onto Russia, saying: “that's who is the source of all your troubles.” They lie again.
What do I want to emphasize? There is every reason to believe that Western elites are not going to look for constructive ways out of the global food and energy crisis, which arose through their fault, exactly through their fault, as a result of their longstanding policy long before our special military operation in Ukraine, in Donbass. They do not intend to solve the problems of injustice, of inequality. There is a fear that they are ready to use other, familiar to them, recipes.
And here it is worth recalling that the West emerged from the contradictions of the early 20th century through World War I. The profits from World War II allowed the U.S. to finally overcome the consequences of the Great Depression and become the largest economy in the world, to impose the power of the dollar as the global reserve currency on the planet. The West largely overcame the crisis of the 1980s - and the crisis worsened in the 1980s - by appropriating the legacy and resources of the Soviet Union, which eventually collapsed. This is a fact.
Now, in order to get out of another tangle of contradictions, they need, by all means, to break Russia and other states that choose the sovereign path of development in order to plunder even more of others' wealth and at this expense to close, to plug their holes. If this does not happen, I do not exclude that they will try to bring the system to collapse, on which everything can be blamed, or, God forbid, they decide to use the well-known formula "war will write everything off".
Russia understands its responsibility before the international community, and will do everything to bring such hotheads to their senses.
It is obvious that the current neocolonial model is doomed in the long run. But again, its real masters will cling to it to the end. They simply have nothing to offer the world except the continuation of the same system of robbery and racketeering.
In essence, they spit on the natural rights of billions of people, most of humanity, to freedom and justice, to determine their own future. Now they have moved to a radical denial of morality, religion, and the family.
Let us answer some very simple questions for ourselves. I now want to go back to what I said. I want to turn to all Russian citizens, not just to my colleagues in the audience, but to all Russian citizens: do we really want to have "parent number one", "parent number two", "parent number three" instead of "mom and dad"? Do we want children in our schools, starting from elementary school, to be forced to endure perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want them to be taught that in addition to women and men there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex reassignment surgery? Is this what we want for our country and our children? All this is unacceptable to us, we have our own future.
Again, the dictatorship of Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of Western countries themselves. It is a challenge to all. This total denial of man, the subversion of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom takes on the characteristics of a "religion of evil" - outright Satanism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ, denouncing the false prophets, said: "By their fruits you shall know them.” And these poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, not only in our country, but in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
The world has entered a period of revolutionary transformation, it is fundamental. New centers of development are being formed, they represent the majority - the majority! - of the world community and are ready not only to declare their interests, but also to defend them, and in multipolarity they see an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, and thus to find true freedom, a historical perspective, their right to independent, creative, original development, a harmonious process.
Around the world, including in Europe and the United States, as I said, we have many like-minded people, and we feel, we see their support. A liberation, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is already developing within various countries and societies. Its subjectivity will only grow. It is this force that will determine the future geopolitical reality.
Dear friends!
Today we are fighting for a just and free path, first of all for ourselves, for Russia, for dictatorship and despotism to be forever in the past. I am convinced that countries and peoples understand that a policy built on the exceptionalism of anyone, on the suppression of other cultures and peoples is inherently criminal, that we must turn over this shameful page. The breakdown of Western hegemony, which has begun, is irreversible. Once again, it will not be the same.
The battlefield to which fate and history have called us is the battlefield for our people, for the great historical Russia.
(Applause.)
For a great historical Russia, for future generations, for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them from enslavement, from the monstrous experiments that seek to cripple their minds and souls.
Today we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, our culture, can be taken and erased from history. Today we need the consolidation of all of society, and such consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values are humanity, mercy and compassion.
And I would like to conclude with the words of the true patriot Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin: "If I consider Russia my homeland, it means that I love, contemplate and think, sing and speak in the Russian way; that I believe in the spiritual forces of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my grief; its flourishing is my joy."
Behind these words is a great spiritual choice, which for more than a thousand years of Russian statehood was followed by many generations of our ancestors. Today we, and the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, and the residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions have made this choice. They made a choice to be with their people, to be with their homeland, to live its destiny, to win together with it.
The truth is with us, Russia is with us! (За нами – правда, за нами – Россия!)
(Original at http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69465 in Russian)
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Biography of Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin
”Ivan Ilyin was born in Moscow on March 28, 1883. His father was a nobleman, a godson of Emperor Alexander II, a solicitor of the Moscow Court Chamber, and his grandfather was an engineer who built the Moscow Kremlin, where he later lived with his family.
Ivan was the third son in the family. Both of his brothers were lawyers and the young man could not deny his father’s wishes. A “golden” graduate of grammar school, he entered not the philological department, as he wanted, but the law faculty of Moscow University. By this time, the 18-year-old Ilyin knew German, French, Latin, Greek, and Church Slavonic.
At university, his brilliant education continued. Ilyin’s teachers were the prominent religious philosopher Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy and the eminent philosopher and jurist Pavel Novgorodtsev. The latter recalled the student: “Ilyin displayed an absolutely out-of-the-ordinary capacity for work, coupled with the greatest devotion to his chosen specialty. He did not need to be induced, but had to stopped in his studies, fearing for his overwork from excessive work.” Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel were the ideological centers of Novgorodtsev’s school. It was Hegel who turned out to be the most important philosopher in Ilyin’s life—he devoted many scholarly works to him.
Ivan Ilyin’s scientific career began in 1910. He became a member of the Moscow Psychological Society and published his first scientific work, The Concept of Right and Power. At the end of the year, Ilyin with his wife went on a scholarly trip to Germany and France. There he studied the latest currents of European philosophy, including philosophy of life and phenomenology, and according to some sources, even had a meeting-session with Freud. Ilyin entered this expansion of his world and the new stage of his discipleship with excitement: “Sometimes, anticipating, I grit my teeth with a writing appetite. In general, I think and think about so much that in moments of fatigue or decline, I seem to myself a fool.”
In 1913, Ilyin returned to his homeland for the last time. Renewed, established in his own strength, he consolidated his reputation as a young scholar, a brilliant lecturer—his classes were always packed, and adoring students even dedicated to him an epigram:
“You can dispel all spleen.”
Associate Professor Ilyin.
At the same time, armed with new knowledge, Ilyin became even more ruthless toward his opponents. “Ilyin’s ability to hate, despise, and insult his ideological opponents was exceptional. And it was only this side of him that the Muscovites got to know,” recalled Eugenia Herzek.
Ilyin never accepted Soviet power. He wrote: “Socialism by its very nature is envious, totalitarian and terroristic; and communism differs from it only in that it manifests these features openly, shamelessly and ferociously.” These views were formed in the philosopher quite early; but if he perceived the February Revolution as a temporary disorder, he regarded the subsequent October Revolution as a complete catastrophe.
Ilyin’s confrontation with the young Soviet state was quite open. He supported the White Army in print and even financially, and, according to investigators, was a member of its southern association, the “Volunteer Army,” and was in charge of the Petrograd branch. Immediately after the Bolshevik coup, Ilyin published an article entitled, “Gone to the Winners” in Russkiye Vedomosti (Russian News). In it, he addressed the White Guards who had fallen in the struggle: “You have won, friends and brothers, and bequeathed to us, to bring your victory to an end. Believe us, we will fulfill your will.”
On February 22, 1914, Ilyin made a presentation on “Hegel’s doctrine of the essence of speculative thinking.” It began a series of six papers that made up the work, Hegel’s Philosophy as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Man.
This scholarly work is still considered one of the best commentaries on Hegel’s philosophy. In it, Ilyin criticized the inability of the “rational concept” to subdue the “irrational element” of the empirical world. The dissertation made Ilyin famous as a world-class philosopher and was for a long time his last publication in Russia, and one that ultimately saved his life.
Ilyin was first detained in April 1918. Already by then, the outcry caused by the arrest of the Doctor of State Sciences, lecturer in the History of Law and Encyclopedia of the Law Department, was significant. It went so far as to say that many of Ilyin’s scholars and colleagues in the department demanded that they be taken “hostage” just so that the philosopher himself could be released. The case ended with an amnesty.
By 1922, Ilyin had already been arrested six times. And the sixth would have been the last—after his arrest, he was immediately convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. At that time under investigation were more than 200 people—all creative intellectuals. The Soviet regime could not afford to liquidate such a number of “golden minds.” Lenin himself understood the inconceivability of shooting Ilyin. “It is impossible. He is the author of the best book on Hegel,” he wrote, referring to the philosopher’s dissertation. So, it was decided to replace the execution with a mass expulsion to Europe, which went down in history as the “philosophers’ ship.” Trotsky summed up: “We expelled these people because there was no reason to shoot them, and it was impossible to tolerate them.”
Those deported were allowed to take only two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, a jacket, pants, coat, hat and two pairs of shoes per person: all money and other property, including extensive libraries, were subject to confiscation.
On September 29, 1922, the steamship Oberburgermeister Haken, the first of the two “philosophers’ ships,” set sail from Petrograd. Its passengers included the philosophers Berdyaev, Trubetskoy, and Ilyin.
Berlin and the Second Exile
The first thing Ilyin did upon his arrival in Germany was to contact General A. von Lampe, a representative of Baron Wrangel, whom he held in great respect. Wrangel reciprocated: “Many, spiritually weary by the hard years of exile, lose faith in the moral necessity of struggle and are seduced by the idea of the sinfulness of ‘violence,’ which they begin to see in active opposition to evil. Your book will open their eyes.” The White general was referring to the work, On Resisting Evil by Force, in which there are such quotations as:
“In calling to love one’s enemies, Christ was referring to one’s own personal enemies. Christ never called to love the enemies of God who trample on the divine.”
Many émigrés were less enthusiastic about Ilyin’s radical new pathos. Zinaida Gipius called the book “military field theology;” and Nikolai Berdyaev observed that “Cheka” in the name of God was more repugnant than “Cheka” “in the name of the devil.
In Germany, Ilyin organized the work of the Religious-Philosophical Academy, a philosophical society attached to it, and the religious-philosophical publication, Russkiy kolokol (Russian Bell), which had the characteristic subtitle: “Journal of the Willful Idea.” In addition, the philosopher began work at the Russian Institute of Science, where he became Dean of the Law Faculty. In 1924, Ilyin was elected a corresponding member of the Slavic Institute at the University of London. In short, his public life in Berlin was almost more intense than in his home country. Ilyin, like many passengers on the ship Oberburgermeister Haken, did not disappear into the streams of emigration, but made public in the European cultural field a new Russian ideological platform, previously unknown to Europe.
However, the clouds were gathering over the philosopher—fascism had come to Germany.
Ilyin’s attitude toward fascism changed in the same way as his attitude toward the Russian revolution: from underestimation of the threat to extreme aversion. Initially, the philosopher saw in the emergence of a new radical doctrine a natural, albeit forced, measure. According to Ilyin, fascism emerged “as a reaction to Bolshevism, as a concentration of state and security forces to the right. During the onset of left-wing chaos and left-wing totalitarianism, it was a healthy, necessary phenomenon.” Ilyin found the racial theory itself (he was an ardent opponent of anti-Semitism) and the anti-church struggle to be unsympathetic aspects of the doctrine.
However, the Nazi system itself was far less favorable to Ilyin. Immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933, the philosopher came into conflict with the German propaganda ministry. As a result, Ilyin was fired from the University of Berlin. A ban on teaching followed. This was followed by the banning of all his printed works and a complete ban on public speaking. The philosopher was left without means of subsistence.
The new blow from his “stepmother” country, Ilyin took painfully: “What a terrible time has fallen to our lot, that to scoundrels, complete liars and shameless men the ways are open, and to us—a stream of humiliation.” In July 1938, Ilyin was forced to leave Germany and move to Switzerland. He looked to the future without optimism: “When an egg is broken it either pours into a glass or into a frying pan. I feel that the egg is broken, but I don’t see either the glass or the pan.”
A Third Attempt to Get on with Life
The attempt to re-establish his life, for the third time, began bleakly. In Switzerland, they did not want to grant Ilyin the right of residence and even tried to send him back to Germany. Only the personal intervention of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who agreed to contribute 4,000 francs to the writer’s “boarding house,” eased the matter. Nevertheless, the Swiss authorities immediately stipulated a condition—a ban on any political activity. Ilyin was humiliated; he was aware of his role and fate as a martyr: “If only to tell,” Ilyin wrote to Sergei Rachmaninov in August 1938, “how many times people have cheated and betrayed me, it is a whole martyrdom. For—I will tell you quite frankly and in confidence—my soul is not at all created for politics, for all these tenacious intrigues.
The philosopher and his wife settled in the Zurich suburb of Zollikon. The new life took place in a different capacity for Ilyin. An orator, lecturer, publicist, organizer, and ideologue, he spent more and more time in seclusion and, deprived of the opportunity to publish, began to write away. These years saw the creation of the most extensive part of Ilyin’s literary and philosophical heritage.
At the end of his days, the philosopher wrote: “I write and put aside—one book after another and give them to my friends and like-minded people to read… And my only consolation is this: if Russia needs my books, then the Lord will save them from destruction, and if neither God nor Russia needs them, then I myself do not need them either. For I live only for Russia.”
Hard work daily and frequent illnesses exhausted the philosopher. On December 21, 1954 Ivan Ilyin died. A monument with an epitaph was erected over his grave in Zollikon:
Everything has been experienced
So much suffering.
Before the eyes of love
There are sins.
Little has been achieved.
Thanks be to you, eternal blessing.
Coming Home
Ilyin’s archive was preserved by his students and associates. In 1965 it was taken from Zurich to the United States by Nikolai P. Poltoratsky, a student of philosophy and professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Michigan. This was in accordance with Ilyin’s will—he bequeathed to keep his archive abroad “until the Bolshevik regime in Russia is over.” However, the philosopher’s journey to his homeland was a long one. The publication and analysis of Ilyin’s writings were completely banned in the Soviet Union. Only at the end of Perestroika, in the era of glasnost, did works devoted to Ilyin’s activities begin to appear. But the publication of his works was still out of the question.
In October 2005, the ashes of Ilyin and his wife, Natalia Vokach, were moved to the Donskoe cemetery in Moscow. Next to the philosopher are buried the writer Ivan Shmelev and the White general, Anton Denikin, communication with whom was an important part of his life abroad. And in 2006, Ilyin’s archive returned to his homeland. It was brought from the U.S. to Russia and transferred to the philosopher’s alma mater, Moscow State University.
The 100 boxes of the archive contain manuscripts, photographs and the philosopher’s personal library. Here are found unique epistolary materials: correspondence of Ilyin with the famous Russian composer Nikolai Metner, writer Ivan Shmelev and White Army commander Peter Wrangel.
Digitization of the archive took over four years. Today, 27 volumes of Ilyin’s collected works have been published. Quotes and texts from them are widely used as assignments for the school Uniform State Examination; they can be found in the speeches of state officials. On June 15, 2012 the first monument to Ivan Ilyin in Russia was unveiled in Ekaterinburg.” https://www.thepostil.com/ivan-ilyin-exile-and-patriot/
Jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in 2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin but also for all politicians of his generation,” Navalny stresses.
He goes even further, acknowledging that “Control over Ukraine is the most important article of faith for all Russians with imperial views, from officials to ordinary people. In their opinion, Russia combined with a subordinate Ukraine amounts to a ‘reborn U.S.S.R. and empire.’ Without Ukraine, in this view, Russia is just a country with no chance of world domination. Everything that Ukraine acquires is something taken away from Russia.”
Russia’s war against Ukraine, Navalny continues, has raised “Putin’s approval rating by super-mobilizing the imperially minded part of society. The news agenda is fully consumed by the war; internal problems recede into the background: ‘Hurray, we’re back in the game, we are great, they’re reckoning with us!’”
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The Russian oppositionist realizes that “The war with Ukraine was started and waged, of course, by Putin, trying to solve his domestic political problems.” But here he makes an important point: “the real war party is the entire elite and the system of power itself, which is an endlessly self-reproducing Russian authoritarianism of the imperial kind. External aggression in any form, from diplomatic rhetoric to outright warfare, is its preferred mode of operation, and Ukraine is its preferred target.”
Russia’s “self-generated imperial authoritarianism is the real curse of Russia and the cause of all its troubles,” he concludes.
Navalny ends his unexpectedly forthright and penetrating thoughts about the dangerous perennial Russian malaise and how it should be treated with the following advice and prescription:
“While I commend European leaders for their ongoing success in supporting Ukraine, I urge them not to lose sight of the fundamental causes of war. The threat to peace and stability in Europe is aggressive imperial authoritarianism, endlessly inflicted by Russia upon itself…. Only a parliamentary republic can prevent this. It is the first step toward transforming Russia into a good neighbor that helps to solve problems rather than create them.”
With this new powerful piece in the