The return of White Russia

‘Unbelievable,’ the professor told me. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-communist Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in. Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Il’in’s books would have brought six years in prison. Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster.

Earlier this month the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Il’in but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern Russia during the Russian civil war. Denikin was the White movement’s military leader; Il’in its most prominent theoretician. Together, they were the pen and the sword of anti-communism. Denikin fled Russia after his defeat in 1920 and Il’in was expelled from the young Soviet Union in 1922. Both died in exile. This month their bodies were exhumed from graves in America and Switzerland, and returned to their native soil.

Before the ceremony, I met a journalist from a Moscow newspaper. Over tea and a bowl of gurevskaia kasha, we discussed the state of modern Russia. Life was getting better, we agreed. For a start, even five years ago it wouldn’t have been possible to find such a nice café, serving such good quality fare in such comfort at such a reasonable price. There are fewer beggars and fewer old ladies at street corners selling their last possessions to supplement their meagre pensions; and while there are still occasional packs of wild dogs sunbathing beside apartment buildings, there are not nearly so many. Prosperity is gradually returning (in so far as Russia has ever experienced it since the revolution of 1917).

The most prevalent narrative of Russian affairs in the Western press talks of a return to dictatorship under a former KGB colonel.