The mature Ilyin rejected the rule of law in favor of the arbitrariness — proizvol — of fascism. Having given up hope that Russia could be governed by law, he presented lawlessness (proizvol) as a patriotic virtue.
Putin followed the same trajectory, citing Ilyin as his authority. When he first ran for president in 2000, he spoke of the need for a “dictatorship of the law.” Those two concepts contradicted each other, and one of them fell away. Running for president in 2012, Putin rejected the idea of a European Russia, which meant ignoring external incentives that favored the rule of law. Instead, proizvol would be presented as redemptive patriotism. The operative concept in the Russian language today is bespredel, boundary-less-ness, the absence of limits, the ability of a leader to do anything. The word itself arose from criminal jargon. On this logic, Putin was not a failed statesman but a national redeemer. What the EU might describe as failures of governance were to be experienced as the flowering of Russian innocence.
— The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder), Loc. 1167–74