, the terror, and worsening labor conditions in Soviet Russia. The
Treaty of Rapallo (1922) between the German Republic and Soviet Russia opened friendly diplomatic relations. In February 1923, the Russian Scientific Institute (RSI) was founded in Berlin; funded by the
YMCA. Ilyin delivered a topical speech "Problems of Modern
Legal Consciousness". The RSI wasn't an educational institute; there were occasional lectures on Russian history, literature, law and other areas of Russian culture in
Schinkel's Bauakademie. In 1923 Wrangel contacted Ilyin in the hope of arranging enrolment in the Institution for "about 300 of young Russian men ...". In July he lost his Russian citizenship for anti-Soviet activities abroad. It was the notorious year of
hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in October and the failed
Beer Hall Putsch in November. The institute was going through a severe financial crisis. Due to invitations from the Czech government and offers from American universities, the number of employees soon thinned significantly. Ilyin briefly cooperated with
Nikolai Berdyaev on
Russian Religious Renaissance but the
philosopher of love moved to Paris and Novgorodtsev moved to Prague. In 1924, the
Russian All-Military Union was founded; Ilyin met
Pyotr Wrangel at
Seeon Abbey, a center of anti-Bolshevik activities. Wrangel was told to abandon his (military) adventures. Ilyin became part of Wrangel's inner circle; not every Russian was charmed by Wrangel's personality. In July 1924 Ilyin visited Italy for his health; his portrait of
Benito Mussolini was sympathetic but not uncritical. Far from supporting holy war, Ilyin in fact wrote that "all my research proves that the sword is not 'holy' and not 'just'." He criticized the anarchist ideology of Tolstoy and pacifist
tolstoyism. For
Zinaida Gippius his book was "military field theology"; according to her "this is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes feuilletons: it's a man possessed
running amok." The book divided the Russian émigrés with its dedication to veterans of the
White movement. In 1926 he bitterly wrote about the loss of the Motherland. Ilyin became the unofficial ideologue of the
White émigrés who gathered in Paris. Between 1927 and 1930 Ilyin was a publisher and editor of the journal
Russkiy Kolokol. He actively published in right-wing conservative newspapers. During the
1920s more than 300,000 Russians lived in Berlin. There were three daily newspapers and five weeklies. Seventeen Russian publishing houses had sprung up within a single year. Ilyin lectured in Germany and other European countries and would give 200 speeches. In 1930 the
National Alliance of Russian Solidarists was founded in Belgrade and became popular in France. It rejected both Bolshevism and
liberal capitalism and embraced Russian patriotism. In 1932 only about 60,000 Russian emigrants were living in Germany and in Berlin the number of émigrés was 8,320. The activity of the RSI gradually slowed down due to a decrease in the number of Russian-speaking students. There were difficulties in maintaining this large institution, and it was liquidated. It became impossible to be employed as either a writer or a lecturer.
Nazi Germany On 27 February, the
Reichstag building was set on fire. Göring blamed a communist plot. The
Reichstag Fire Decree on the next day restricted the rights of personal freedom, and freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Shortly after the fire, a wave of arrests began about 1500 people – Communists, in particular, were affected. Beginning on 7 April the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service required an
Aryan certificate from all employees and officials in the public sector, including education. According to
Hannah Arendt, in an interview with
Günter Gaus, having Jewish people in your inner circle became a problem. On 11 April, Ilyin handed the Ministry of Internal Affairs a voluminous work entitled "Directives of the Comintern for the
Bolshevisation of Germany," consisting of hundreds of excerpts from
Comintern documents that had been published in the press. It looked like an attempt to bow to the authorities, according to
A.F. Kiselyov. Ilyin confessed that he literally forced himself to read
Lenin's works, the materials of party congresses and plenums, the Comintern, and the Soviet press. His friend
Werner von Alvensleben was reputedly involved in a putsch, which ended in the
Night of the Long Knives. On 13 July, all German public employees were required to use the
Hitler salute. On 14 July, the Nazi Party was declared the only legal political party in Germany. Russian emigrants feared that Hitler, who on various occasions had spoken out strongly against foreigners, would begin persecuting them. On 5 August, Ilyin's house was searched, his letters were examined, and he himself was taken away for interrogation, where he was asked about his source of income and for details of the people abroad with whom he corresponded. After the questioning, he was released, although required to sign a declaration. In September the
Reich Chamber of Culture was created with additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. The Russian institute was placed under the
Reich Ministry of Propaganda headed by
Joseph Goebbels.
Adolf Ehrt who headed the organization
Anti-Komintern, recruited Ilyin,
Vonsiatsky and
Kazembek, the leader of the
Mladorossi, to work with him. On the opening of the reorganized institute He spoke on "The World Crisis of Democracy" and lectured on the works of
Remizov and
Merezhkovsky. On 9 July he was fired when Ehrt demanded that the professors of the Russian Scientific Institute join in
Nazi propaganda. Ilyin denounced the
racial policy of Nazi Germany and replied in a letter he had long wanted to retire and devote himself to science. Ilyin was paid for the work he had done but from August he was without salary. Under the (German-sounding) pseudonym Alfred Norman, he published "The Bolshevik Policy of World Domination." This is more or less Ilyin's last active political statement. He went on to publish essays in the
Berliner Kurier. In 1936, Hitler put
Vasily Biskupsky in charge of the
Russische Vertrauensstelle, a government body dealing with the Russian émigré community. Ilyin actively criticized in the press
Alexander Lvovich Kazembek, In his speech in Riga in February 1937, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of
Pushkin's death, Ilyin praised Pushkin's genius and defined his work as "the main entrance to Russian culture". He applied for membership of the
Reich Chamber of literature but he had a problem with obtaining an
Aryan certificate because he did not know the identity of all his great-grandparents. The
Gestapo confiscated this work and banned him from the
Reich Chamber of Culture and independent political activity. In May, Ilyin decided it was the time to leave but the Berlin police forbade his departure. With financial help from
Sergei Rachmaninoff, he was able to pay for
bail, but he was not allowed to work or to interfere in any way with Swiss politics.
Switzerland From 1940 Ilyin resided
stateless in the village of
Zollikon near
Lake Zürich and corresponded with the composer and pianist
Nikolai Medtner. He published in local newspapers and lectured on
Russian literature at folk high schools, which was not considered paid work. There was no danger from Ilyin's lectures, according to an expert opinion issued by the Swiss Army Command in 1942. They were "national in the sense that it is directed against the whole of the West". In November 1943 he refused to cooperate with the
Russian Liberation Army. In 1946 Ilyin stated he was never a Hegelian, as he himself expressed in the introduction to the German translation of his theses, a revised version of "Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre".--> At the end of his life, Ilyin managed to finish and publish a work on which he worked for more than 33 years,
Axioms of Religious Experience, and three volumes of philosophical and literary prose, originally written in German. He died in a hospital on 21 December 1954. In 1956, his postwar articles were compiled into a two-volume anthology called
Our Tasks. It is about the future of Russia and its State, once freed of Communism. He did not describe this future very clearly, it is something bright, good, but blurry, according to the literary critic
Alexander N. Arkhangelsky. == Personal life==