Because the world was sinful and God was absent, his champion must emerge from some uncorrupted realm beyond history. “Power,” Ilyin imagined, “comes all by itself to the strong man.” A man would appear from nowhere, and Russians would recognize their redeemer: “We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.” Emerging from fiction, the redeemer disregards the facts of the world and creates a myth around himself. By taking on the burden of Russians’ passions, he channels “the evil nature of the sensual” into a grand unity. The leader will be “sufficiently manly,” like Mussolini. He “hardens himself in just and manly service. He is inspired by the spirit of totality rather than by a particular personal or party motivation. He stands alone and goes alone because he sees the future of politics and knows what must be done.” Russians will kneel before “the living organ of Russia, the instrument of self-redemption.”
The redeemer suppresses factuality, directs passion, and generates myth by ordering a violent attack upon a chosen enemy. A fascist scorns any politics rooted in society (its preferences, its interests, its visions of the future, the rights of its members, and so on). Fascism begins not with an assessment of what is within, but from a rejection of what is without. The outside world is the literary source material for an enemy image composed by a dictator. Following the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, Ilyin defined politics as “the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” Ilyin thus began his article “On Russian Nationalism” with the simple claim that “National Russia has enemies.” The flawed world had to oppose Russia because Russia was the only source of divine totality.
The redeemer had the obligation to make war and the right to choose which one. Ilyin believed that war was justified when “the spiritual attainments of the nation are threatened,” which they always will be until individuality is brought to an end. To make war against the enemies of God was to express innocence. Making war (not love) was the proper release of passion, because it did not endanger but protected the virginity of the national body. In the 1930s, Romanian fascists sang of “iron-clad breasts and lily-white souls.” By guiding others to bloodshed, Russia’s redeemer would draw all of Russia’s sexual energy to himself, and guide its release. War was the only “excess” that Ilyin endorsed, a mystical communion of virginal organism and otherworldly redeemer. True “passion” was fascist violence, the rising sword that was also a kneeling prayer.
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“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” as the poet Charles Péguy reminds us. Ilyin’s thought began with a contemplation of God, sex, and truth in 1916, and ended a century later as the orthodoxy of the Kremlin and the justification for war against Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States.
Destruction is always easier than creation. Ilyin found it difficult to specify the institutional form a redeemed Russia would take—and his unsolved problems haunt Russia’s leaders today. The chief of these is the durability of the Russian state. Legal institutions that permit the succession of power allow citizens to envision a future where leaders change but states remain. Fascism, however, is about a sacred and eternal connection between the redeemer and his people. A fascist presents institutions and laws as the corrupt barriers between leader and folk that must be circumvented or destroyed.
Ilyin tried to design a Russian political system, but in his sketches could never get beyond this conundrum. He attempted to solve the problem semantically by treating the personality of the redeemer as an institution. The redeemer should be regarded as “leader” (gosudar´), “head of state,” “democratic dictator,” and “national dictator,” an assemblage of titles that recalled the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 1930s. The redeemer would be responsible for all executive, legislative, and judiciary functions, and command the armed forces. Russia would be a centralized state with no federal units. Russia should not be a one-party state as the fascist regimes of the 1930s had been. That was one party too many. Russia should be a zero-party state, redeemed only by a man. Parties should exist, according to Ilyin, only to help ritualize elections.
Allowing Russians to vote in free elections, thought Ilyin, was like allowing embryos to choose their species. Voting with a secret ballot allowed citizens to think of themselves as individuals, and thereby confirmed the evil character of the world. “The principle of democracy is the irresponsible human atom,” and so individuality must be overcome by political habits that excite and sustain Russians’ collective love for their redeemer. Thus “we must reject the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics” as well as “blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.” Voting should unite the nation in a gesture of subjugation. Elections should be public, and ballots signed.
Ilyin imagined society as a corporate structure, where every person and every group would hold a defined place. There would be no distinction between the state and the population, but rather “the organic-spiritual unity of the government with the people, and the people with the government.” The redeemer would stand alone at the heights, and the middle classes would lie crushed at the bottom, under the weight of everyone else. In normal parlance, middle classes are in the middle because people rise (and fall) through them. Placing the middle classes at the bottom was to assert the righteousness of inequality. Social mobility was excluded from the outset.
An idea that Ilyin intended as fascist thus permits and justifies oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few—as in Russia in the 2010s. If the purpose of the state is to preserve the wealth of the redeemer and his friends, then the rule of law is impossible. Without the rule of law, it is difficult to earn the money that will allow for better lives. Without social advancement, no story of the future seems plausible. The weakness of state policy is then recast as the mystical connection of a leader with his people. Rather than governing, the leader produces crisis and spectacle. Law ceases to signify neutral norms that allow social advance, and comes to mean subordination to the status quo: the right to watch, the duty to be entertained.
Ilyin used the word “law,” but he did not endorse the rule of law. By “law” he meant the relationship between the caprice of the redeemer and the obedience of everyone else. Again, a fascist idea proved to be convenient for an emerging oligarchy. The loving duty of the Russian masses was to translate the redeemer’s every whim into a sense of legal obligation on their part. The obligation, of course, was not reciprocal. Russians had a “special arrangement of the soul” that allowed them to suppress their own reason and accept “the law in our hearts.” By this Ilyin understood the suppression of individual reason in favor of national submission. With the redeemer in command of such a system, Russia would exhibit “the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.”