In July 2021, Russian leader Vladimir Putin published a pamphlet on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The text’s core premise harked back to the nineteenth century, when Russian nationalists imagined Ukraine as an inalienable part of the Russian nation, united by Orthodox Christianity and shared Slavic roots. The pamphlet would become the ideological justification for the bloody war Putin unleashed half a year later; the myth created to give meaning to the war effort. Where did Putin take these ideas from? How did ideas from czarist Russia come back to life in Russia after having been suppressed for seventy years under Soviet rule?
In 1991, the Russian Federation declared itself independent from the Soviet Union, marking the end of Lenin’s model of a “union” of Soviet republics, controlled from Moscow. Now, for the first time, there was a self-consciously Russian state, although it still had its share of minorities across Eurasia (Buryats, Tartars, Chechens, Udmurts, etc.). Yet what kind of state would the new Russia be? As the ideological certainties of the Soviet era gave way, a wide array of new ideas about Russia’s national identity and political order emerged, including from the anti-communist right.
One newly available document from the Hoover Archives’ extensive Russian collections offers a striking perspective on this juncture in Russian history. The document, a speech given by the émigré journalist Gleb Rahr (1922–2006) at the “Third World Assembly of Russians” (Tretii Vsemirnii Russkii Narodnii Sobor) in 1995, propagates what would become the core values of Putin’s rule: the revival of orthodoxy, the rejection of liberal democracy, and an obsession with bringing Orthodox Eastern Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—back into Moscow’s fold.
A vision of dictatorship
Rahr’s speech offers a uniquely coherent articulation of a conservative, illiberal vision for Russia’s future. To “restore the greatness of our country,” Rahr advocated for nothing less than a conservative dictatorship. He went on to ask, rhetorically, if “complete freedom” was “more important than ensuring order”; and if Russia needed “democracy at all costs” or were “elements of ‘strong power’ conceivable, up to and including moderate dictatorship.” To Rahr’s dismay, the very idea of dictatorship had been discredited by the Soviet experience:
For people of the generation that lived through the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, the very word “dictatorship” has become odious. But history also knows dictators who saved their peoples and states from collapse and enslavement by red totalitarianism, who kept them from being drawn into world wars. First and foremost among them is General Franco, but also [António de Oliveira] Salazar and others.
In support of autocratic rule, Rahr cited the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954), writing in German exile in 1938:
We know that when the Bolsheviks fall, we will accept Russia as it will be at that time: with the soul of the people exhausted, worn out, and embittered, wholly disorganized and in a state of utter impoverishment and confusion. What form of government will then be possible, necessary, desirable, and salvific? The answer is clear and simple: a non-partisan, supra-class, national, religiously inspired, vitally creative and flexible dictatorship.
Ilyin considered Italian fascism to be the closest approximation of the ideals expressed in the passage, and Rahr’s vision of Russia’s future in the 1990s followed a similar logic. As Rahr put it, Russia was in need of “a strong authority that respects democracy, but, when necessary, acts on the verge of violating the democratic rules of the game”—in other words, a government legitimated by the fiction of popular consent that could dispense with legal or procedural constraints on state authority at will. After the end of communism, Rahr argued, Russia would need to reject liberalism and restore autocracy.
Like generations of Russian nationalists before him—including the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Rahr knew and admired—Rahr viewed Ukraine and Belarus as integral parts of Russia. It was an overtly imperial conception of the Russian nation. Despite Rahr’s ardent anti-communism, then, the collapse of communism was overshadowed by his deep grievances over the fractured unity of the Russian nation. Rahr thus called for “the restoration of our common home—Russia, as it was conceived by St. Vladimir, as it had emerged through the efforts of Piotr Stolypin by 1914, as we want to leave it to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” It followed that not all the post-Soviet states had an equal claim to sovereignty: while the independence of Finland and Poland would need to be “accepted as irreversible and natural,” this was not the case for Ukraine and Belarus, which were supposed to become part of one “fraternal family, by mutual agreement, of course.”
To this end, Russia’s post-1991 borders (a “poorly thought-out and inorganic structure”) would need to be revised. As Rahr put it in his 1995 speech:
I am in favor of “revising” the fate of the “near abroad” through diplomatic means. Either a particular republic grants the Russian part of the population exactly the same rights as its so-called “indigenous” nationality, in which case Russia may refuse to revise the borders and will consider this republic as an equal brother, or the republic insists on unjustified privileges of the “indigenous” nation and treats Russians and Russian citizens as disenfranchised foreigners, in which case Russia will be obliged to be guided by other criteria in its relations with this republic, up to and including raising the question of transferring territories predominantly inhabited by Russians to the Russian Federation.
In 1995, Rahr had not lost hope that Russia’s post-1991 borders could be altered peacefully; a promise forever turned moot with the aggression of 2014.
A nationalist in exile
Rahr’s speech illustrates how the ideas invoked in today’s war returned to Russia in the 1990s from the anti-Bolshevik diaspora, the descendants of the counterrevolutionary (“White”) forces who had fled Russia after their defeat in the Russian Civil War (1918–21). Rahr’s own biography was a testament to the vicissitudes of exile.
Born in 1922 into a Baltic-German merchant family in Moscow, Rahr’s parents (“bourgeois” opponents of the new regime) fled the Soviet Union for the Baltic states in 1925. In 1941, the young Gleb enrolled at the University of Breslau (today’s Wrocław) as an architecture student, where he joined the National Labor Alliance (Narodno-Trudovoi Soiuz, or NTS), an anti-Bolshevik association founded in 1930 by émigrés in Yugoslavia with close ties to the above-cited Ivan Ilyin.
When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, some members of the NTS initially welcomed the war as a pathway to the desired overthrow of the Soviet government. Collaboration with the Nazi regime, however, proved to be a dead end—the Nazis mistrusted the Russian nationalism of the NTS, who themselves were soon forced to realize that Hitler was looking to enslave, not liberate, their motherland. The movement was outlawed in 1944, and in June 1944, Rahr was arrested by the Gestapo.
An ordeal in various Nazi concentration camps ensued, which ended in March 1945 when American troops liberated Dachau, saving Rahr’s life and freedom. As historian Benjamin Trombly notes, American authorities in the occupation zone protected NTS members like Rahr from repatriation to the Soviet Union, in a bid to protect an anti-Bolshevik vision of Russia from sure annihilation. Had the camp been liberated by the Red Army, Rahr would have almost certainly have been sent to the Gulag. After the war, the repression of the movement under Nazi rule helped conceal the NTS’s initial sympathy for the war and its affinity with fascism.
As a radio journalist and a prolific organizer of Orthodox diaspora life, the intellectually sophisticated Rahr would dedicate his entire life to keeping the vision of non-Bolshevik Russia alive. Freed from the camps and living in West Germany, he wrote for the NTS’s flagship journal Posev (“The Sowing”). In 1957, Rahr moved to East Asia with his family to set up a radio station called Free Russia in Taipei. Three years later, he opened a Russian radio station in Tokyo, where the Russian community was larger. In 1963, he returned to Germany, where in 1970 he took up work for the Russian Service of Radio Free Europe, hosting radio shows on subjects like the rule of Prime Minister Stolypin and the history of Christianity in Russia.
With the onset of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Communist Party appeared to lose its iron grip over Russian intellectual life. The revival of religious life in Russia, in particular, exhilarated Rahr. As he later wrote in his memoirs, the changes of perestroika demonstrated that a “process of spiritual renewal of our nation” was under way. In 1991, just before the Soviet collapse, he visited Russia for the first time since his infancy to re-establish ties between the Orthodox diaspora and the Orthodox Church, which would offer him a platform to disseminate his vision for Russia’s future in 1995.
When Gleb Rahr passed away in German exile in 2006, he died as a Russian citizen, after Vladimir Putin had restored Russian citizenship to him and his wife by presidential decree. His son Alexander had moved back to Russia, where he became a prominent public intellectual in the service of the Russian regime. With native Russian and German, he has authored a hagiographic biography of Putin (Subtitle: “The German in the Kremlin”) and emerged as a sought-after commentator on international affairs in Russian state media (his appearances in German media stopped before the full-scale invasion of 2022).
Putinism’s intellectual origins
The popularity of Gleb Rahr’s ideas in the 1990s serves as a reminder of the explosive potential of the “Russian question” in the wake of the Soviet collapse. To Rahr, as to other Russian nationalists, it was an intolerable state of affairs that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians—to him, part of one Russian nation—were no longer part of the same state, while the emergence of new nation-states from the Baltics to Kazakhstan had left millions of ethnic Russian minorities outside the borders of the Russian state.
The emphasis on unity of Russians and Ukrainians was the central element of the NTS’s ideology. So central, in fact, that the NTS’s flag depicts St. Vladimir’s trident—the tryzub, also the symbol of Ukraine—on top of the Russian flag. Echoing the symbolism of the NTS, Putin would invoke the baptism of St. Vladimir on the Crimean Peninsula to justify its annexation in 2014.
In espousing the imperial nationalism of the NTS almost to the letter, Putin is the heir to an intellectual world of the counterrevolutionaries in exile. Of course, ideology by itself does not explain why Russia has waged war against Ukraine since 2014. The speech discussed above merely highlights how the ruling ideology of Putin’s Russia borrowed from the Russian far right in exile, of which Rahr was a prominent representative. As historian Bartołomej Gajos has recently noted, Rahr’s ideas were eagerly absorbed by Putin and his entourage in the early 1990s. Rahr’s invocation of Ivan Ilyin is particularly noteworthy, as Putin has repeatedly cited Ilyin in his public appearances (historian Timothy Snyder goes as far as calling Ilyin the “Kremlin’s court philosopher”).
Rahr’s speech provides a powerful illustration of the Russian emigration’s lasting imprint on political life within Russia. Few places are better suited to make sense of this story than the Hoover Archives, which houses the world’s foremost collection of Russian émigré records, much of which has recently been made accessible through the Russia Abroad Digital Collection. The speech discussed above forms part of the Russian Farm Supply Fund, a diaspora initiative to distribute seeds through the network of Orthodox churches after the Soviet collapse.
The importance of the “White” diaspora for Putin’s Russia extends beyond ideology. As journalist Catherine Belton has pointed out, descendants of White émigrés played a crucial role in enabling Putin’s economic model. In her telling, the banker Jean Goutchkov, alongside lawyers and oil traders from Geneva whose ancestors left Russia in the wake of the revolution, paved the way to Russia’s re-entry to Western capital and oil markets after the 1998 financial crisis, looking to Putin as a modern czar who would restore Russia’s imperial greatness.
