I am standing on the quay in the Polish city of Szczecin. The north wind from the Baltic Sea brings a thick gray drizzle that envelops the buildings and the port cranes, creating a sense of stagnant timelessness. A tugboat on the Oder River, almost hidden by the curtain of rain and turned into a fluid silhouette, gives a loud, long blast of its horn and vanishes in the fog. But the horn still sounds, an echo out of the past. One hundred years ago this past fall, on September 30, 1922, a ship docked here. Szczecin was called Stettin then, and it belonged to Germany. The ship had come from Petrograd, the former St. Petersburg and future Leningrad: in terms of names, it came from a city that no longer exists to another city that no longer exists. The Oberbürgermeister Haken carried a group of scholars, public and political figures, and intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks; among them were the philosophers Nikolai Berdayev and Semyon Frank, Sergei Trubetskoi and Boris Vysheslavtsev. In mid-November another ship, the Preussen, arrived with a second group of deportees; others were sent out through Black Sea ports or by railroad, totaling around two hundred and fifty people, including family members. Expulsion: the strange grace of forced salvation, a gesture of absurd magnanimity on the part of the ogre. Those who remained were executed, such as the philosopher Gustav Shpet. Or they died in the Gulag, like the philosopher Lev Karsavin, a passenger on the Preussen who settled in Lithuania, which was later seized by the Soviets. But then, in the year of the Treaty of Rapallo, the Bolsheviks needed international recognition, needed a bit of a good reputation, and this gave the deportees a chance to survive. During the 1980s, in the period of glasnost, this expulsion in two boatloads of an eminent if unwanted intelligentsia was known as the Philosophers’ Steamer, a pejorative name, a symbol of the Soviet battle against free thought, of an enforced brain drain, and the destruction of culture and intellectual power. Today history repeats itself: Russians with undesired minds are once more being forced to leave their country, essentially using the same routes — through the Baltic states or through Turkey. The term Philosophers’ Steamer is current again, used by those leaving as if to stress the continuity of their flight with the earlier one, and by state media, mockingly, as if to say that the Philosophers’ Steamer was a real loss, even though the Bolsheviks were right, while today there is no one to feel sorry about losing. Well, there’s a bitter paradox in that irony. Russia’s war against Ukraine — an imperial and colonial war — has mercilessly exposed the fundamental flaw of Russian political culture. Russia has no intellectual tradition aimed at dismantling the imperial, chauvinist matrix of consciousness and its associated institutions. But the state, alas, easily adopts historical justifications for aggression, co-opting figures from seemingly opposing camps. One figure whose words are now widely quoted to buttress the claim that Ukraine belongs to the “Russian world,” descended on September 30, 1922, onto the quay of Stettin from the Oberbürgermeister Haken. He was thirty-nine. His name was Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin. Today he is Vladimir Putin’s favorite philosopher. He was my grandmother’s uncle. After a hundred years of exile, his remains rest in Russia, re-interred at Putin’s request in Moscow’s Donskoy Cemetery. I live in Berlin, where he lived in the 1920s and 1930s. He returned. I left. He, who was once considered a dangerous criminal and a reactionary ideological foe by the Soviet state, is now posthumously recognized and honored. This comes from the people who grew up in the USSR, who were brought up to despise and hate the Whites — the imperialist defenders of Old Russia whom the communists despised. Their amazing omnivorousness — they now include even Ilyin in their pantheon — merely proves that today’s Russian regime opportunistically combines disparate elements of historical trajectories dating back a century ago: the totalitarian Red left and the authoritarian, and potentially fascist, White, related to Franco’s Spanish regime. How did that happen? I will try to answer the question using Ilyin as the key — or as the guide into my family history in its conjunction with the history of my country. 
In my Soviet childhood we often went cross-country skiing in winter, sometimes taking the train to the Ilyinskaya station, where in the midst of dachas on Kolkhoznaya Street stood a snow-covered church in the Russian Gothic style, the crosses knocked down from its dark cupolas. If someone had told me that this station had been named in honor of my distant relative, a colonel engineer named Nikolai Ilyin, who had built this railroad and had owned the nearby estate that was now a sanatorium, and that Ivan Ilyin (Nikolai’s nephew) had been married in this church in 1906, I would not have believed it. I would have been unable to assimilate something so enormous into my concept of our family history. For in fact there was no history. The past was dangerous territory that one could visit only accompanied by adults; the doses of permitted chronicles were measured out scrupulously and cautiously; I was a child, lacking in experience, and I thought that this was how it had to be. I did not question why the family narrative began in 1917, as if “before” was nonexistence, minus-time; my closest ancestors seemed to have been born in the year of the two revolutions. In the photos I was shown, for example, my great-grandfather Nikolai Lebedev appears already in uniform with a Red Army star on his cap. How had he lived before? Where had he served? I did not ask myself. I had mastered the skill of not asking. I learned that a part of the past had to remain opaque and that some people existed only nominally: all that was left of them was a name, perhaps a photo, but
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence