The Road to Unfreedom summary

On March 26, 2000, the Russian Federation held presidential elections. The winner, Vladimir Putin, would go on to rule – and transform – the world’s largest country, and continues to do so to this day.

But those who elected Putin didn’t realize how large the ideas of Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin loomed in the new administration’s political ideology. Although Ilyin had been dead since 1954, Putin was keen on reviving his ideas and putting them front and center in his political program.

Ilyin lived through the 1917 Russian Revolution, which ushered in the Soviet Union and one-party communist rule. But he was no communist – he was a Christian fascist, inspired by Adolf Hitler and Italian fascist Benito Mussolini rather than Lenin or Stalin.

Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1922, he began conceptualizing his ideal version of a right-wing, Christian dystopia in Russia, which he thought would follow the inevitable collapse of communism.

Ilyin’s ideal Russia would resemble the fascist states of the 1920s and 1930s. The anxieties of a population demoralized by harsh socioeconomic conditions would be channeled into glorifying a redeeming, savior-like leader who promised to defend the nation from external threats – whether or not those threats really existed. Violence would be glorified over reason, and propaganda would triumph over rational discourse.

But Ilyin went a step further than the one-party fascist states in Europe at the time; he thought that even one real political party was too many. A multi-party system might be useful in order to justify the ritual of holding elections, but all real power should be invested in a man, not a party, and this man would be in charge of the government, judiciary and armed forces.

Ilyin’s writings on his ideal Russian fascism had been banned and dormant for decades. But with the liberalization of Russian media in the 1990s, his books again began to circulate.

And after Putin’s election in 2000, this accelerated. Ilyin’s books were recommended to school pupils, and Russian civil servants were given copies of his complete writings. Putin even arranged the transport of his body from Switzerland for reburial in Moscow in 2005.

For Putin, implementing Ilyin’s vision of a right-wing dictatorship in Russia has proven successful. But to discover how we got there, we must go back to the tragic events of September 1999, three months before Putin would be named acting president of Russia upon the resignation of Boris Yeltsin.