The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

By Timothy Snyder

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America.

“A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker

With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. 

Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself.  The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies.

In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780525574484

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder es titular de la cátedra Housum de Historia en la Universidad de Yale, y fellow permanente del Instituto de Ciencias Humanas de Viena. Se doctoró en Oxford y ha sido investigador en las universidades de París, Viena, Varsovia y Harvard. Sus libros anteriores recibieron destacados premios. Es autor de Tierras de sangre. Europa entre Hitler y Stalin (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), traducido a trece idiomas, que recibió doce premios, entre ellos el Premio Hannah Arendt de Pensamiento Político, el Premio Leipzig para la Comprensión Europea y el Premio Emerson de Humanidades de la Academia Americana de las Artes y las Letras. Ayudó a Tony Judt a escribir una historia temática de las ideas políticas y de los intelectuales en política, Pensar el siglo XX (2012). Sus artículos académicos han aparecido en revistas como Past and Present y Journal of Cold War Studies, y también ha escrito en The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation y The New Republic, así como en The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune , The Wall Street Journal y otros periódicos. Es miembro del Comité de Conciencia del Memorial del Holocausto de Estados Unidos y del Consejo Asesor del Instituto Yivo de Investigaciones Judías. Sus libros El príncipe rojo. Las vidas secretas de un archiduque de Habsburgo (2014), Tierra negra. El Holocausto como historia y como advertencia (2015), Sobre la tiranía (2017) y El camino hacia la no libertad (2018) han sido publicados por Galaxia Gutenberg.

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Cover for The Road to UnfreedomBook Title, The Road to Unfreedom, Subtitle, Russia, Europe, America, Author, Timothy Snyder, Imprint, Crown

Copyright © 2018 by Timothy Snyder

Preface copyright © 2023 by Timothy Snyder

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2018. Subsequently published in trade paperback in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2019.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Snyder, Timothy, author.

Title: The road to unfreedom : Russia, Europe, America / Timothy Snyder.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Tim Duggan Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017060924 (print) | LCCN 2018015012 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525574484 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525574460 (hardcover)| ISBN 9780525574477 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Western countries—Politics and government—21st century. | Authoritarianism—Western countries—21st century. | Democracy—Western countries—21st century.

Classification: LCC D863 (ebook) | LCC D863.S59 2018 (print) | DDC 320.53094—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017060924

ISBN 9780525574477

Ebook ISBN 9780525574484

International Edition ISBN 9780525575405

Cover design by Chris Brand

Maps by Beehive Mapping

ep_prh_6.3_148356986_c0_r0

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE INDIVIDUALISM OR TOTALITARIANISM

CHAPTER TWO SUCCESSION OR FAILURE

CHAPTER THREE INTEGRATION OR EMPIRE

CHAPTER FOUR NOVELTY OR ETERNITY

CHAPTER FIVE TRUTH OR LIES

CHAPTER SIX EQUALITY OR OLIGARCHY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

INDEX

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PREFACE (2023)

The road to unfreedom means the indisputable trend away from democracy during the mysterious decade of the 2010s. As a historian, I was struck both by the weight of events in Russia, Europe, and America and by the trend of looking away, making excuses, pretending that nothing was happening. I used unfreedom rather than tyranny or authoritarianism for this reason: unfreedom includes our own complicity, the part we play in the decline of democracy by our own willful confusion or needless complacency.

As I write this preface, the trend has taken even clearer shape in Donald Trump’s attempted coup in the United States, and Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. An American president has sought to overthrow the American constitutional order, and a Russian president has undertaken a war of aggression and atrocity in Europe. These events, which surprised many, are anticipated and explained by the recent history presented here. Indeed, I wrote this book precisely to take away that sense of surprise, which has made us vulnerable and in a sense complicit. Our problems with democracy begin with our misunderstandings of history. This book addresses not only the contemporary decline of democracy, but the errors that have prevented us from addressing it.

The key events in this text are the falsified Russian elections of 2011–2012 that allowed Putin to return to power; the Ukrainian Maidan and the active Russian war against Ukraine of 2013–2015; the Russian influence campaign on behalf of Donald Trump in 2015–2017; and contemporaneous events in Europe, such as the rise of the far right, Brexit, and attacks in Poland on the independent judiciary. I was concerned to reckon with underlying causes, such as social media, the inequality of wealth, and the return of fascist ideas.

Russia is the most important country in this book, but not only because it is the one that has used every conceivable weapon in the direct attack on democracy at home and abroad. It is also because Russia exemplifies certain tendencies that are very much present in Europe and the United States. Observing carefully how Russia exploits European and American weaknesses should lead us to take these weaknesses more seriously.

I begin this book with the ideas of a largely forgotten Russian fascist philosopher, Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954), because he is a guide to our times. I used the forty volumes of Ilyin’s work because I wanted to make the case that fascism has been a serious and ongoing tradition, one that cannot be wished away by notions such as the end of history or the absence of alternatives or the triumph of neoliberalism. We ought not to be attracted to fascist ideas, and we need not find them interesting, but we ought to be able to recognize them when they are right before our eyes.

Ilyin wrote of a world that was flawed from the beginning, fragmented and lacking in totality. Nothing could be true in such a world, and so the notion of factuality was meaningless. What it needed was a political redeemer, a Russian leader who would come to power in violence, generate powerful myths, fake elections, and invade Ukraine. All of this, insisted Ilyin, was Christian: only Russia had the potential to heal the world, and therefore Russia and its leader must lie and kill to do so. Russians would be innocent no matter what they did; sin was impossible for them, since their efforts were always directed towards a larger redemption. Ilyin was particularly obsessed with Ukraine, whose existence he denied. Any use of the term, he believed, was a sign of an international conspiracy against Russia. This set of ideas, although emerging from Russia, can be seen in some form in fascists and supporters of Putin in Europe and the United States.

I felt authorized to dwell on Ilyin in this book because his texts have accompanied Putin throughout the twenty-first century. Before returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin had recovered Ilyin’s archive and reburied his corpse, and had been citing him regularly for years. When he returned to office as president, as I try to show in chapter 1, he continued both to cite Ilyin and to develop ideas, in his own speeches and writing, that were very similar. As I show here on the basis of primary sources, Putin developed very clear (and quite fascist) ideas about Russia and Ukraine during the early 2010s: that Russia was a civilization rather than a state; that therefore Russia had a unique right to define the meaning of the past and the destiny of its neighbors; that Ukraine was simply part of this civilization regardless of the expressed views of its population. Putin had been quite consistent on these points for a decade; it was only that the second invasion, that of 2022, finally made them impossible to ignore. During that war, he has continued to cite Ilyin, as for example in a speech justifying Russian claims to have annexed Ukrainian territory, in which he specifically denied that Russia was subject to law. Russian television propaganda, viewed by millions each night, has picked up some specific Christian fascist themes. Ukrainians are now presented as devils and Satanists, which is one argument (among many) made for their general extermination. The notion that Christianity is what requires war and murder is now widespread and commonplace in Russian mass media.

The second chapter has to do with the negative relationship between such ideas and democratic practices. This sort of Christian fascism is in explicit and total opposition to democracy as normally understood. Ilyin opposed the arithmetic counting of votes in favor of the magical consensus generated by the will of the charismatic Russian redeemer.

Just as significant, though, is the way that efforts to suppress democracy, however motivated, create the space for ideas such as this. In this more political chapter, I stress the very simple point that the purpose of democracy is to provide a succession principle for modern states. Aside and apart from all of its other virtues, democracy allows citizens to know that the state can continue as governments change. The Putin regime in Russia, now in its third decade, can be understood as one long succession crisis. He was essentially anointed president by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. He won his first election on the strength of a war he began during his short term as prime minister, as well as on the strength of terrorist attacks that seem to have been carried out by the Russian government against its own citizens. There is no suggestion, even in Russia, that any election after 2000 was one that Putin could lose. Having served two terms, the constitutional maximum, he allowed his prime minister to serve one term before returning again as president (in 2012). Having imprisoned his opponents, destroyed the independent press, and banned civil society organizations, he plans to run again in 2024 as a wartime fascist leader. All of this was dreadfully predictable, as perhaps was the increasingly tyrannical and eccentric character of his rule.

Russia is frozen because Russians could not change rulers, and because the inevitable ruler had no program. He had begun with the idea of taming the oligarchs but instead became the chief oligarch. In that situation, extending the rule of law was impossible, and a new set of ideas was needed. As the future disappeared, notions such as civilization became more attractive. Permanent campaigns were set in place against decadence, defined usually in sexual terms. As domestic policy became impossible, foreign spectacles took its place: invasion of Ukraine in 2014, military operation in Syria in 2015, support of Brexit and Trump in 2016, second invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile, something very different happened in Ukraine. Unlike in Russia, in Ukraine free and fair elections were held, and the principle of democratic succession was established. Crucially, the people who lost presidential elections stepped down. Over the three decades of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian citizens have gained experience not only in choosing their leaders but in defending those choices. In 2004–2005, protesters were able to prevent a presidential election from being falsified. Although Ukrainians, like members of any society, hold a diversity of views, in general they have associated democracy with the prospect of joining the European Union. In 2013, Ukrainians protested when their president failed, after Russian blackmail and bribery, to sign an association agreement with the EU. When that president used violence against the protests, they held their ground. After dozens of protesters were murdered, the Ukrainian president fled to Russia. A Russian invasion of Ukraine, planned for months, began at exactly the same time. The Russian propaganda around the 2014 invasion, which is a major topic of chapter 5, was carried out in the spirit of a war of civilizations: Ukraine did not really exist; it was part of Russia; Ukrainians who believed otherwise were deluded by the West. Russia used social media to spread messages in the West that were targeted to what people were likely to believe. And so Ukraine was presented to some people as far left, to others as far right, to some as part of a Jewish conspiracy, and to some as Nazi. This was nonsense, but it was effective.

Although this was perhaps an innovative use of technology, Moscow’s social media campaign was in the service of a timeless, truthless fascism. Putin was afraid of Ukraine because of its emerging civil society and its successful democracy. He claimed that the invasion was to protect Russian speakers, but the exact opposite was the case: the danger for Russia was that people in Ukraine could speak freely, including in the Russian language. Ukraine was the freest country where Russian was spoken by large numbers of people, and that is precisely what made it dangerous. This was made clear again in 2019, when Ukrainians elected, by a very large margin, a Russian-speaking Jew to be their president. Volodymyr Zelens’kyi is an excellent example of the unpredictability and novelty that democracy can bring to politics. He brought with him to power a younger generation of Ukrainians, formed by post-Soviet experience: the kind of people who never had their chance at power in Russia. When Zelens’kyi chose to remain in Kyiv after the Russian invasion of 2022, he defied the expectations of almost everyone.

The most spectacular challenge to the principle of democratic succession in this century came from the United States, in the form of Donald Trump’s attempted coup in late 2020 and early 2021. The 2016 Trump campaign for president, as I try to show in chapters 5 and 6, is inseparable from Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s campaign manager had been engaged with pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and was deeply involved with a Russian oligarch. The same Russian individuals and institutions who had developed propaganda against Ukraine now worked against Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton. The tactics were also very much the same: Americans received the sort of propaganda over social media to which they would likely be vulnerable. Racists were told that Clinton loved black people; black people were told that she was a racist.

Between the two men there was also a deeper affinity, since Putin was very much what Trump wanted to become: extremely wealthy, secure in power indefinitely, and free to use that power to increase his wealth. As I argue here, and as research has since confirmed, it is very likely that Trump won the election of 2016 thanks to Russian support; however that may be, he certainly rewarded Putin grandly during his term in office. He made the United States dysfunctional in foreign policy, alienated European and other allies, and rarely missed a chance to praise dictators. Perhaps the most obvious synergy between Putin and Trump was one of attitude: that there were no values in politics; that everything was a lie anyway; that spectacle was all that mattered; that victory was its own justification; that anyone who believed anything else was a fool.

Today, Trump’s supporters despise Zelens’kyi, and it is not difficult to see why. The entire ethos of the Trump administration was that all had to yield to the strongman. Trump treated Putin as his patron and yielded to him. Zelens’kyi resisted Putin when Russia invaded Ukraine. The sensibility of American fascists was thereby painfully violated: the leader (Putin) who dominated their own leader (Trump) was challenged by someone who was elected democratically and, to make matters worse, hailed from a country that they usually regarded as insignificant. For quite a few American fascists, Zelens’kyi’s Jewish origins were the problem. They developed themes of theft, corruption, and deception, which were clearly antisemitic. American fascists found this and other ways to support Russian fascism.

Trump’s own initial reaction to Zelens’kyi’s election in 2019 was telling. He stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine in order to force the new president to help him in his own election campaign. When this came to light, Trump was impeached for the first time. Aware that he was likely to lose in 2020, Trump began to prepare the way, that summer, for an attempted coup (as I argued at the time). Trump’s greatest gift to his patron Putin was his attempt to stay in power even after he was decisively defeated by Joe Biden. Russian propaganda was overjoyed by the images of Americans on January 6, 2020, invading their own legislature in the attempt to overthrow the American constitutional regime. It set a precedent for the use of violence to overthrow democracy that Putin followed in 2022. The attempted coup was consistent not only with Trump’s behavior in 2020, but with everything he had done and said since he announced his campaign. It is all chronicled here.

The similarities between Trump and Putin can be understood as the problem of oligarchy, as I define it in chapter 6. In different ways, Putin and Trump represented oligarchical politics. Putin used the state to become the boss of bosses in Russia, and most likely the world’s richest man. It seems unlikely that Trump actually has very much money, but he used the image of wealth as his claim to power. He needed the presidency as a way to prevent investigations of his actual financial position, including criminal investigations. Trump treated the presidency as a kind of oligarchical fantasy, in which people should identify with his success rather than expect government to do anything much to enable their own. Putin pushed his own oligarchical fantasies into real life. Like a number of oligarchs around the world, he holds strange ideas that no one in his milieu seems able to challenge: for example, that Ukraine does not exist. In the cases of both Trump and Putin, we can see how one form of radical inequality, that of wealth, can be shielded by reference to differences in culture or race. When Trump tried to steal the election of 2020, he claimed that he had been the victim of black voters. Absurd as this was, many Americans, for reasons of their own, were willing to accept that Trump was the victim. When Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he claimed that Russians were in fact under attack by Ukrainians. In a similar way, this allowed Russians, again for reasons of their own, to believe that it was their leader who was somehow in the right and on the defensive.

A long line of thinkers, from Plato to Raymond Aron, have made the point that extreme inequality of wealth makes communication impossible. Putin himself, as chief oligarch, controls Russian state media. Trump could count on support from Fox, a network owned by the Murdoch oligarchical clan. In both cases, it took an individual to tell a big lie, but that big lie was distributed and believed thanks to staggering inequalities. Putin’s big lie was that there is no Ukraine. Trump’s was that he won the presidential election of 2020. We can take it for granted that Russian propagandists knew that Putin’s claim was nonsense, and we now know that Fox personalities knew that they were lying when they repeated Trump’s claims. In chapter 5, and in a book called On Freedom that I am finishing now, I try to make the argument that truth itself is necessary as an aspirational quality of democracy, and that it is the absence of facts that courts the big lies.

The inequality of wealth generates inequalities of knowledge. In particular, the centralization of media has been accompanied by the destruction of independent local reporting. This process took place first in Russia, and is well underway in the United States. When Trump claimed that the election had been stolen in a few localities, it did not even occur to most Americans to ask what the local journalists had reported. Americans have lost most of their local journalists; most of the country is what is called a news desert, with no independent local reporting at all.

The big lies have moved the world in the direction of unfreedom. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, a lie on a grand scale changes politics more than a thousand little ones. It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie on such a scale that your followers would not believe that you would do such a thing to them. To believe a big lie is to enter into a world of conspiracy. If Ukraine does not really exist, then all of those people who claim to be Ukrainians must in fact be serving some sort of global elite. This is exactly what Putin says. If Trump’s electoral victory was stolen, then that means that the Democrats are criminals and the institutions are all corrupt. In this way, big lies justify violence. It seems right to attack Ukraine, if the country is only there as part of a plot by others to weaken Russia. It seems right to attack the Capitol, if those inside are conspiring against the president. Even if a war is lost and a coup attempt is defeated, the damage done by the big lies lasts for generations. Russians leave behind in Ukraine a legacy of genocide: of death pits, of torture chambers, of razed cities, of homes emptied by deportations. In the United States, Trump must run for president again in order to try to stay out of prison and to garner wealth, which means that another attempted coup is possible. Putin will try to keep fighting Ukraine until Trump becomes president, since the triumph of his client and fellow big liar is his main hope for military victory. In this sense, Trump is personally complicit in the war.

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RUSSIA’S INVASION of Ukraine is a war of imperialism and colonialism. As such, it constitutes not only a series of atrocities in Ukraine, but a threat to the European order. As I try to show in chapter 3, the fundamental alternatives in Europe are empire and integration. This is not the story that Europeans tell themselves, but the story that Europeans tell themselves is mistaken. The official version, which is generally believed, is that European integration is a result of the Second World War: Europeans understood that war was no longer possible, and that peace should be built on the basis of economic exchange. This is simply not true: Europeans continued to fight wars around the world, until they lost them. European integration is not a postwar phenomenon but a postimperial phenomenon. Charles de Gaulle’s famous (and wise) choice for Europe followed defeat in Indochina and Algeria. Much the same can be said of most of the western European powers that founded or later joined the integration process. For the Dutch after Indonesia, for the Belgians after the Congo, for the Spanish and the Portuguese after Africa: the story was always the same. European integration was a substitute for empire. It was chosen not because of wisdom about war in general, but because of imperial exhaustion. This holds, most importantly, for Germany.

The Second World War was, in Hitler’s mind, a European war of colonial expansion. Its main target was Ukraine, as the breadbasket of Europe. The goal of Hitler’s war was to destroy the Soviet Union and seize Ukrainian territory as a German colony. Ukrainians would be treated as colonial subjects, starved and enslaved. Their foodstuffs would be transferred to Germany to allow it to become a superpower that could rival Britain and the United States. In fact, Germany lost an imperial war in 1945, and then West Germany had to seek alternatives. Germans have since been allowed to forget the imperial character of the Second World War, just as Europeans generally have been allowed to forget about their own imperial wars around the world. The political myth around European integration works the same way. Germans, like other Europeans, are allowed to tell themselves that they learned from war that peace was good.

The standard myth of European integration was never innocent. It made the Russian war against Ukraine more likely. Because Europeans believed that peace was about economic exchange, it seemed legitimate to trade with Russia, even after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Because Europeans set aside the category of empire for the convenience of their national myths of innocence, they failed to see Russia as an empire, and failed to evaluate its behavior appropriately. Perhaps most blatantly and unforgivably, they failed to see that Ukraine was a traditional target of empires, and thus to understand its predicament as the victim of a new colonial war.

Because Europeans (especially Germans) never developed a tradition of self-criticism about empire, they tended themselves to see Ukrainians as a subordinate, colonial people. Ukraine, although at the very center of the Second World War, never figured in European histories of that war. European schoolchildren never learned that more Ukrainian civilians were killed during that war than Russians, nor that more Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht than French, British, and Americans—taken together. Europeans were all too willing to accept Russian imperial stereotypes about Ukraine: that it is not a real country; that it is corrupt by nature; that its people do not know who they are. The war has revealed these errors; this book is about their sources.

To end war in Europe, Europe will have to understand itself. European power and the European project will depend on Europeans taking a hard look at their own history, and drawing the right lessons. Getting past empire to democracy requires moral advance, not technocratic tales of progress. Russia is not simply a state with interests but an empire with an ideology. Its invasion of Ukraine is not just a conflict but an imperial war of aggression. As European history shows, empire ends only in exhaustion. The relevant category is therefore not peace but defeat. The war only ends when Russia is exhausted. Europeans (beyond Ukraine) can bring this about at little cost to themselves—but they must decide to do so. Russia must be defeated not only to halt atrocity in Ukraine and give Ukrainians a chance to fulfill their own European mission. It must also be defeated because empire will otherwise threaten Europe, from within and from without. As European history shows, Russia must be defeated for the sake of Russia itself. If Russia is to reform, it must lose its imperial war. Russia can only win by losing. Anyone who cares about Russians should be working for Russia’s defeat in this war.

In its conclusion, and in the titles of its chapters, this book makes a case that politics has an inescapably ethical character. Ukrainians have reminded the rest of us of this by resisting totalitarianism, oligarchy, and lies, achieving things that almost no one beyond Ukraine thought possible. Beyond Ukraine, courage on such a grand scale is not needed, but some small dose of courage is. There are always alternatives in politics, and now some very bad ones have presented themselves. The better ones, such as Ukrainian resistance, will have to be affirmed. If we give up on the ethics at a time of such clear moral choices, we will be giving in to those who say that nothing is true, and therefore everything is permitted. The progress of such ideas has a history, which I try to tell in this book. Whether it has a future will depend upon choices we make now.

Newport, Rhode Island, May 3, 2023

PROLOGUE (2010)

My son was born in Vienna. It was a difficult delivery, and the first concern of the Austrian obstetrician and the Polish midwife was the baby. He breathed, his mother held him for a moment, and then she was wheeled to an operating room. The midwife, Ewa, handed him to me. My son and I were a bit lost in what happened next, but we stuck together. He was looking upward with unfocused violet eyes as the surgeons ran past us at a dead sprint, footfalls and snaps of masks, a blur of green scrubs.

The next day all seemed well. The nurses instructed me to depart the ward at the normal time, five o’clock in the afternoon, leaving mother and child in their care until the morning. I could now, a little belatedly, send out a birth announcement by email. Some friends read the good news at the same moment that they learned of a catastrophe that took the lives of others. One friend, a fellow scholar whom I had met in Vienna in a different century, had rushed to board an airplane in Warsaw. My message went out at the speed of light, but it never caught up to him.

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THE YEAR 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.

I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.

In 2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American assumptions that capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable. Tony had written of the irresponsible intellectuals who aided totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized inequality.

As he and I spoke, I was writing a history of the political mass murders committed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. It began with people and their homes, in particular the Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Balts, and Poles who had experienced both regimes in the places where Nazi and Soviet power overlapped. Although the book’s chapters were grim—planned starvations, death pits, gas chambers—its premise was optimistic: the causes of mass murder could be ascertained, the words of the dead recalled. The truth could be told, and lessons could be learned.

A chapter of that book was devoted to a turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance that began the Second World War in Europe. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland, each with the goal of destroying the Polish state and the Polish political class. In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war, most of them educated reserve officers. The men (and one woman) were shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. For Poles, the Katyn massacre came to stand for Soviet repression generally.

After the Second World War, Poland was a communist regime and a Soviet satellite, so Katyn could not be discussed. Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify what had happened. Soviet documents left no doubt that the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation had been struggling to address the legacy of Stalinist terror. On February 3, 2010, as I was finishing my book, the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal to his Polish counterpart: a joint commemoration of Katyn that April, on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. At midnight on the first of April, the day my son was due to be born, I sent my book to the publisher. On the seventh of April a Polish governmental delegation, led by the Polish prime minister, arrived in Russia. The next day my wife gave birth.

Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out for Russia. It included the Polish president and his wife, commanders of the Polish armed forces, parliamentary deputies, civic activists, priests, and family members of those murdered at Katyn in 1940. One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta, an admired political theorist—and the vice minister of culture responsible for commemoration. Early in the morning of Saturday, April 10, 2010, Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed at 8:41 a.m., short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors. In a maternity ward in Vienna a cell phone rang, and a new mother shouted in Polish across the room.

The next evening, I read the responses to my birth announcement. One friend was concerned that I understand the tragedy amidst my own joy: So that you don’t find yourself in a difficult situation, I have to tell you that Tomek Merta was killed. Another friend, whose name was on the passenger list, wrote to say that he had changed his mind and stayed home. His wife was due to give birth a few weeks later.

He signed off: Henceforth everything will be different.

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IN AUSTRIAN maternity wards, mothers stay for four days, so that nurses can teach about feeding, bathing, and care. This is long enough for families to become acquainted, for parents to learn what languages they share, for conversations to begin. The following day in the maternity ward the talk in Polish was of conspiracy. Rumors had taken shape: the Russians had shot down the airplane; the Polish government had been in on the plot to kill the Polish president, who was of a different party than the prime minister. A new Polish mother asked me what I thought. I said that this was all very unlikely.

The day after that, my family was allowed to go home. With the baby sleeping in a basket, I wrote two articles about Tomek: one an obituary in Polish, the other an account of the disaster in English that concluded with a hopeful word about Russia. A Polish president had lost his life hastening to commemorate a crime committed on Russian soil. I expressed the hope that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, would use the occasion to consider the history of Stalinism more broadly. Perhaps that was a reasonable appeal amidst grief in April 2010; as a prediction, it could not have been more wrong.

Henceforth everything was different. Putin, who had already served two terms as president before becoming prime minister, announced in September 2011 that he wanted to be president again. His party did poorly in parliamentary elections that December, but was granted a majority in parliament regardless. Putin became president again in May 2012 after another election that seemed flawed. He then saw to it that discussions of the Soviet past, such as the one he himself had initiated about Katyn, would be treated as criminal offenses. In Poland, the Smolensk catastrophe united society for a day, and then polarized it for years. The obsession with the disaster of April 2010 grew with time, crowding out the Katyn massacre that its victims had meant to commemorate, indeed crowding out all historical episodes of Polish suffering. Poland and Russia had ceased to reflect on history. Times were changing. Or perhaps our sense of time was changing.

The European Union fell under a shadow. Our Vienna maternity ward, where inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the success of the European project. It exemplified services that were taken for granted in much of Europe but were unthinkable in the United States. The same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me to the hospital: normal in Europe, unattainable in America. In 2013, Russia turned against the European Union, condemning it as decadent and hostile. Its success might encourage Russians to think that former empires could become prosperous democracies, and so its existence was suddenly at risk.

As Russia’s neighbor Ukraine drew closer to the European Union, Russia invaded the country and annexed some of its territory in 2014. By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their president, an outcome Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, this new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate the Holocaust when the occasion arose, nor condemn Nazis in his own country.

The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.

---

—

I WROTE those two articles about the Smolensk disaster after years of thinking about the politics of life and death, on a night when the membrane between them seemed thin. Your happiness amidst unhappiness, one of my friends had written, and the first seemed as undeserved as the second. Endings and beginnings were too close, or seemed to be in the wrong order, death before life, dying before living; time was out of joint.

On or about April 2010, human character changed. When I wrote the birth announcement of my first child, I had to go to my office and use a computer; smartphones were not yet widespread. I expected replies over the course of days or weeks, not at once. By the time my daughter was born two years later, this had all changed: to own a smartphone was the norm, and responses were either immediate or not forthcoming. Having two children is quite different than having one; and yet I think that, for all of us, time became more fragmented and elusive as the internet became social media.

The machines that were meant to create time were consuming it instead. As we lost our ability to concentrate and recall, everything seemed new. After Tony’s death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss the book we had written together, which he had entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century. I realized as I traveled around the United States that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.

Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about the end of history, by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.

The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of

Reviews for The Road to Unfreedom

[sageness · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4.5 stars.

Epic, thorough, mostly satisfying. I had major issues with the introduction and epilogue, but all the substantive chapters were good, especially the fact-based indictment of Trump at the end. I also have issues with the terms "politics of inevitability" and "politics of eternity" as they don't in themselves mean anything. Empty jargon isn't helpful.

[rmagahiz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book makes the case that many or most of the declines in openness and freedom over the last three decades in Western Europe and in the United States can be traced by a consistent effort by Vladimir Putin's Russia to spread strife to other nations which are seen as perpetual enemies. The author goes back to the first half of the twentieth century where a man I'd never heard of before, Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin, put together the right-wing counterpart of the Russian Communist philosophies. Ilyin died in the 1950s but was brought back in the 1990s as someone who explained the misfortunes experienced by that country as a kind of contagion by the decadent and evil west which was determined to frustrate the realization of a united Eurasian empire inspired by the kingdom of Kievan Rus in the early Middle Ages centered. The rise of the class of oligarchs found themes in this philosophy which suited the kinds of things they were doing to enhance their personal wealth, much of it revolving around a narrative of endless struggle with outside nations which parallels the class struggle emphasized by the left.

The author then focuses on the years between 2010 and 2016 when Putin had consolidated his power as lifetime ruler and has gathered other oligarchical families in Russia and outside. The invasion of Ukraine is part military operation, part cyberwar, and a good deal psyops to the population of Russia. The presentation is not scholarly and there are no guides to primary sources here, so the careful reader would have to do a good deal of fact-checking on their own to verify the dozens or hundreds of incidents covered. There are a few names which recur over and over as fellow travelers with fascistic tendencies hoping to emulate the successes in their own governments. Towards the end of this section come the more or less direct attacks against the political systems of Poland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I got the impression that they must have been pleased with the amount of success they have had beyond their wildest dreams in foisting a kleptocratic structure modeled on the Russian oligarchy on America as punishment for our attempts to meddle in their affairs over the past century.

It is a horror story for a person who believes in the old myths about liberal democracy and about its inevitable spread among all nations. It made me angry and outraged that this whole scheme played out so perfectly to Putin's advantage and still somehow left him as something other than an utter pariah in public opinion. Of course the other world leaders do not have the freedom to shun such a dangerous character, and of course there are thousands of Ukrainians who know how the actions on the ground and the embrace of alternative facts came so close to dismembering their entire country, and yet it doesn't seem like there's an enormous reservoir of loathing among Western European and North American citizens at what he has orchestrated over all this time. There have been dangerous strongmen in the past which weren't greeted with a collective shrug. There have been sanctions, but beyond that, it seems like there has been no way to register the kind of revulsion these kinds of authoritarian moves cause in people who still believe in Enlightenment ideals.

I listened to the audiobook version of this and found it maybe even more gripping than it would have been in print. This is a case where the voice of the author add something to the experience of the work; it makes it easier to hear the alarm bells he's ringing, in my opinion. I found it an absorbing work that scared me out of my wits that I would recommend to anyone who would want to be shaken in the same way.

[over.the.edge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Road To Unfreedom
by Tim Snyder
2018
Tim Duggan Books
5 / 5

If your wondering just how deep-how involved- Donald Trump is with Russia, this book will make you sweat. His ties with Putin have a long history and is much deeper and longer. Putinś ´Politics of Inevitablity´ , his stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the ¨fake news¨ are some ways Putin used to spread confusion, distrust and discredit journalists, beginning 20 or more years ago. How he rose to power and drove out opponents, by attacking the individual vs. totalitarianism. Russia still claims no responsibility for the war with the Ukraine.
This book shows how Putin helped Trump, a failed real estate developer, into a recipient of capitol. To portray that failed real estate developer as a wealthy American businessman on TV and to finally intervene and support this person in the 2016 election. No surprise he called Putin first to be congratulated.
Putins buying of Trump began before the 1990ś. He taught Trump one lesson: strategic relativism.
*Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others appear weak, as weal as Russia.
*Putin can´t change his own reputation, so he must change how others view his opponents.
p. 267: ¨Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.¨
¨He referred to them as the ´enemy of the American people´ and claimed what they produced was ¨fake news¨. Trump was proud of these formulations, although both were Russian.¨
It was more important to try to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the USA. Putin waited to find an easy and vulnerable candidate. He has groomed Trump for years, training him to do his dirty work. Trump still does not get it.
This is a chilling and detailed history of the Soviet Union and EU- the Ukraine and Russia. The history of the countries and their political histories are detailed. And how it affects the USA-how deeply Putin has been able to begin to turn us from a democratic country to a much more vulnerable and easily controlled state of authoritarian rule. He commandeered Trump to be his pony...his boy......to make confusion, rhetoric and fake news become the norm.
Because you can´t change Russia.
But you can try to change the way the rest of the world views your biggest opponent. With Trump in the White House it is that much easier to convince the rest of the world that Russia is not much different than the USA. So Putin is just like us......Russia is innocent. Russia is pure. Its the USA that we should fear.......
Put down ´Fear´ and read this. It actually is a more true and real account of what kind of monster Trump is.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tracks Russia’s propaganda (and at times physical) assault on Ukraine, Europe, and the US. Snyder argues that Russia has fallen under the spell of “eternal time”—in which people believe that nothing can change for the better, and so all that can bring relief/pleasure is a mythic past nationhood that must always be asserted against enemies. Europe and the US were complacent, believing that there was no alternative to modern capitalism—but autocracy was waiting, and has succeeded in placing its representative in the US Presidency. Very distressing look at the theorists, if you can call them that, behind Russia’s export of autocracy, as well as at how Russia invaded Ukraine but got the world to ignore that fact.