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 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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Russia, Audiobook, Political Science, Philosophy

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard.

His most recent book is Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, published in September 2015 by Crown Books. He is author also of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. A New York Times bestseller and a book of the year according to The Atlantic, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Telegraph, and the New Statesman, it has won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought.

His other award-winning publications include Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (2008), and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).

Snyder helped Tony Judt to compose a thematic history of political ideas and intellectuals in politics, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012). He is also the co-editor of Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination and Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2001).

Snyder was the recipient of an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research Research.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history.

Reviews

[Michael Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Road to Unfreedom was not the book I was expecting it to be, which is not necessarily a problem, since the thing it was is at least as good as the thing I thought it would be. What I was expecting was a sort of parallel history study of Russia, the European Union, and the United States, showing how various global trends have influenced each of these entities in similar ways. What I got was a very learned history of Modern Russia under Vladimir Putin and an clear explanation of how he has influenced both Europe and the United States for his own political ends.

The book is part theory and part journalism, and the theory is important to understanding the journalism. The basic theoretical narrative that Snyder offers goes something like this: the two major dysfunctions in a society are “the politics of inevitability” and “the politics of eternity.” The politics of inevitable are fueled by wrongful optimism—the belief that history is guaranteed to take a certain direction, so there is no need to worry about anything. Classical Marxism is a manifestation of the politics of inevitability because it sees history as inevitably ending up with a socialist revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. A similar politics of inevitability saturated America after the end of the Cold War, as neoconservatives touted “the end of history,” or the belief that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy remained the only viable ideology in the world.

The politics of inevitability is pretty straightforward. The politics of eternity is harder to understand, partly, I think, because Snyder’s terminology doesn’t really work here. What he means is something more like “politics unmoored from history.” Where the politics of inevitability are driven by hope, the politics of eternity are driven by despair. In this phase, leaders portray their nation as a uniquely moral entity that has been historically misunderstood and besieged by enemies. It looks to the past for challenges and then presents those past challenges as present realities. And it presents the problems to be solved as so great that no government could ever solve them. All that a leader can do is protect the country from its eternal threats and preserve its eternal righteousness. Fascism is perhaps the clearest example of a form of government based on the politics of eternity.

The politics of eternity requires not only the suspension of historical understanding, but a suspension of truth. It cannot exist in a world of verifiable facts that motivate actions, so it must go to great lengths to separate the people from the facts. This means authoritarian suppression of speech, of course, but it also means massive propaganda. But the propaganda is not so much aimed at convincing people to believe that a lie is true as it is aimed at convincing people that NOTHING is true, so they might as well believe whatever is most convenient. The propagandists of this kind of state, as their most basic mode of communication, work to undermine people’s belief in facts. When this is gone, then the state assumes the right to declare what is true, and the leader lies with impunity simply to force other people to become complicit in the charade.

In different ways, the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity both bolster the authoritarian state because they both relieve people of any responsibility for the future:

Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. (8)

With this theoretical model in place, Snyder spends several chapters showing how Russia under Putin has moved from inevitability to eternity. A lot of this is fairly dense intellectual history, as the professor shows how the clearly fascist World War II-era ideas of Ivan Ilyin were rehabilitated by Putin and other Russian elite. He goes through a series of pro-fascist Russian intellectuals that produced the intellectual environment for Putin’s state.

What comes through very clearly here is that Putin is a fascist. Full stop. That he has not been quiet about that in his speeches and writings in Russia. He has openly quoted acknowledged fascist writers and promoted them to highly visible positions. He has labeled America and Western Europe decadent enemies to Russia, driven by a mad compulsion to homosexualize the world by forcing everybody to allow gay marriage. This is apparently the most important issue in Putin’s internal politics. Putin has manipulated elections (his own and others) and suppressed any kind of democratic freedom. Any gestures of friendship that he makes to America or Europe must be understood in this context: he has pledged to his home audience that he will destroy us.

Here Snyder brings in another theoretical concept, but a very easy one to understand. He calls it “strategic relativism,” which means, in his words, “Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia.”

This principle, Snyder argues, has driven Russia’s policy towards the West since around 2008. The two primary targets have been the European Union and the United States. A part of this strategy was the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. This was done because Russia’s own geopolitical ambitions call for the creation of a Eurasian state that balances the EU. But it was also done because Ukraine was getting too close to Europe, and Putin wanted to deprive the EU and Ukraine from each other. The invasion of Ukraine was only a modest success—if even that—as a military exercise. But it was a triumph of propaganda, as Russia figured out how to manipulate world opinion through bald-faced lies, Twitter, and Facebook.

And this is the new front of the assault on both the EU and the US. The Russians have figured out how to exploit democracy’s design flaws by flooding social media channels with misinformation and by cultivating Westerners through huge capital transfers and overt blackmail. Brexit was one example of this. Donald Trump is another. Both, Snyder argues, could not have been possible without Russia.

All of this leads up to a final chapter that is as devastating an indictment of Donald Trump as we are likely to get until the Mueller investigation comes to light. Trump, he shows, has been groomed by the Russians for years, starting in the 1990s when he was deep in debt and unable to pay his bills. The Russians transferred huge amounts of money to him through unsecured loans and purchases of real estate at wildly inflated prices. Trump’s first campaign manager—Paul Manafort—made millions advising Russians and pro-Russian Ukranians on political strategies, and nearly every member of Trump’s inner circle during the campaign had extensive contact with Russian agents.

So this is not just a few post on social media. Russia created a fictional character that Snyder calls “Donald Trump, successful businessman.” It capitalized a basically bankrupt real-estate developer and then started selling him to the world as a politician. This does not necessarily mean that Trump himself collaborated with the Russians. Snyder is careful to note that. It is just as likely that he is a useful tool whose ambition and ignorance made him a perfect fit for Russian intdeligierests. But there is no doubt whatsoever that pretty much everything Trump has done since becoming president is exactly what Putin and Russia wanted to happen.

And Trump has governed according to Putin’s playbook, which is what Snyder calls “the politics of eternity.” Elements of this kind of politics include

--Constant reference to a past era of greatness
--Hyperfocus on enemies who are enemies because of who they are and not what they do
--A profound belief in a zero-sum (or a negative-sum) world
--Willingness to hurt oneself if, in doing so, you can hurt someone else more
--The manufacture of crises and conflicts where none exist in order to control the news cycle
--Constant labeling of information sources as “fake” in an effort to delegitimize any source of truth
--Repetition of blatant, easily verifiable lies with no evidence to back them up other than the fact of the assertion

The end game here—and there is an end game—is that Americans become so distrustful of the rule of law and the political system that they no longer believe that anything they do will matter. It does not matter to Putin if Trump is shown to be a corrupt, bumbling liar. What he wants us to believe is that everybody is a corrupt, bumbling liar, so one is just as good as another. And if we get there, we will be as miserable as the people in Russia are, and Putin will have won by making us just like him. Without increasing Russia’s actual power, he will have increased Russia’s relative power by decreasing ours.

Or we could, you know, do something else.

[Michael Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent new article on Putin....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/wo...

======

Putin's Puppet

By the late 1990s, Trump was generally considered to be uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed about four billion dollars to more than seventy banks, of which some $800 million was personally guaranteed. He never showed any inclination or capacity to pay back this debt. After his 2004 bankruptcy, no American bank would lend him money. The only bank that did so was Deutsche Bank, whose colorful history of scandal belied its staid name. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank laundered about $10 billion for Russian clients between 2011 and 2015.

Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.

Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the “VERY successful businessman” of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool.

Russian money saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.

A Russian oligarch bought a house from Trump for $55 million more than Trump had paid for it. The buyer, Dmitry Rybolovlev, never showed any interest in the property and never lived there—but later, when Trump ran for president, Rybolovlev appeared in places where Trump was campaigning. Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade. Having realized that apartment complexes could be used to launder money, Russians used Trump’s name to build more buildings.

======

"In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires."

=======

The best historian of our time and an engaging writer.

In this book the reader gets the whole story of the warped thinking that led to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian leader’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust.

from the book....

Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle. Russian opposes European and American democracy to ensure that Russians do not see democracy might work as a succession principle in their own country.

“Everything begins in mystique [religion] and ends in politics”

-Charles Péguy

Rather than governing, the leader produces crisis and spectacle. Sound familiar?

Democracy and capitalism were never going to work in Russia. Markets require the rule of law, which was the most demanding aspect of the post-Soviet transformations. Americans, taking the rule of law for granted, could fantasize that markets would create the necessary institutions. This was an error.

Some intractable foreign foe had to be linked to protestors, so that they, rather than Putin himself, could be portrayed as the danger to Russian statehood. Protestors’ actions had to be uncoupled from the very real domestic problem that Putin had created, and associated instead with a fake foreign threat to Russian sovereignty. The politics of eternity requires and produces problems that are insoluble because they are fictional. For Russia in 2012, the fictional problem became the designs of the European Union and the United States to destroy Russia.

Putin had discovered a new enemy of the State, homosexuals....

Gay rights were nothing more than the chosen weapon of a global neoliberal conspiracy, meant to prepare virtuous traditional societies such as Russia and China for exploitation....He associated gay rights with a Western model that “opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.” The Russian parliament had by then passed a law “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values."

Sound familiar?

The purpose of the anti-gay campaign was to transform demands for democracy into a nebulous threat to Russian innocence: voting = West = sodomy. Russia had to be innocent, and all problems had to be the responsibility of others.

In the previous four years, when Putin had been prime minister, propaganda chief, Surkov, had placed him in a series of fur-and-feathers photo shoots. Putin and Medvedev’s attempt to present themselves as manly friends by posing in matching whites after badminton matches....it became a criminal offense to portray Putin as a gay clown.

During self-inflicted catastrophes, a certain kind of man always finds a way to blame a woman. In Vladimir Putin’s case, that woman was Hillary Clinton....On December 8, 2011, three days after the protests began, Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for initiating them: “she gave the signal."

Putin, moving very quickly, had formulated a politics of eternity that transformed Russians’ protests against his fake elections into a European and American offensive against Russia in which Ukraine would be the field of battle. It was not, according to Putin, that individual Russians had been wronged because their votes did not count. It was that Russia as a civilization had been wronged because the West did not understand that Ukraine was Russian.

We've been here before....

Whether or not the U.S. would become a democracy was an open question; many of its influential men thought not. George Kennan, an American diplomat who would become his country’s outstanding strategic thinker, proposed in 1938 that the United States should “go along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.” Using the slogan “America First,” the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh called for sympathy with Nazis.

Information warfare, has been going on for decades....

In April 2007, Estonia was crippled for weeks in a major cyberattack. Although the event was confusing at the time, it was later understood to be the first salvo in a Russian cyberwar against Europe and the United States. In August 2008, Russia invaded its neighbor Georgia and occupied some of its territories. The conventional assault was accompanied by cyberwar: the president of Georgia lost control of his website.

Both Russia and China constantly pound on our systems. There are cyberattacks against Ukraine happening right now.


Brexit

A persuasion campaign on the internet, although unnoticed at the time, was probably more important. Russian internet trolls, live people who participated in exchanges with British voters, and Russian Twitter bots, computer programs that sent out millions of targeted messages, engaged massively on behalf of the Leave campaign. Four hundred and nineteen Twitter accounts that posted on Brexit were localized to Russia’s Internet Research Agency—later, every single one of them would also post on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. About a third of the discussion of Brexit on Twitter was generated by bots—and more than 90% of the bots tweeting political material were not located in the United Kingdom. Britons who considered their choices had no idea at the time that they were reading material disseminated by bots, nor that the bots were part of a Russian foreign policy to weaken their country. The margin of the vote was 52% for leaving and 48% for staying.

Brexit was a major triumph for Russian foreign policy, and a sign that a cyber campaign directed from Moscow could change reality.

from a leaked message....

The world inadvertently caught a glimpse when official guidance to the media on how to treat the Russian invasion was briefly posted online. A senior editor at Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, wrote on social media that China has to give Russia emotional and moral support but to refrain from “treading on the toes” of the United States and the E.U. In the future, the editor added revealingly, China will need Russia’s support on Taiwan, the independent island-state Beijing is determined to bring under its control.

Who does this remind us of?

If citizens can be kept uncertain by the regular manufacture of crisis, their emotions can be managed and directed.

Russian TV subverted the format of the news broadcast by its straight-faced embrace of baroque contradiction: inviting a Holocaust denier to speak and identifying him as a human rights activist; hosting a neo-Nazi and referring to him as a specialist on the Middle East.

Meanwhile, people on the Left got suckered by Putin, including "The Nation" and a Guardian writer who wrote: that Putin “was the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism.” Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne opined in January 2014 that “far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests” in Ukraine.

How were opinion leaders of the Left seduced by Vladimir Putin, the global leader of the extreme Right? Russia generated tropes targeted at what cyberwar professionals call “susceptibilities”: what people seem likely to believe given their utterances and behavior. It was possible to claim that Ukraine was a Jewish construction (for one audience) and also that Ukraine was a fascist construction (for another audience). People on the Left were drawn in by stimuli on social media that spoke to their own commitments.

On the other end, Ron Paul said Russia had done nothing wrong, and Europeans and Americans were to blame for the Russian invasion.

"Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?"

—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 1788

The rise of Donald Trump was the attack by “these most deadly adversaries of republican government” that Alexander Hamilton had feared.

Alexei Pushkov, the chair of the foreign relations committee of the lower house of the Russian parliament, expressed the general hope that “Trump can lead the Western locomotive right off the rails."

When Trump won the presidential election that November, he was applauded in the Russian parliament. Trump quickly telephoned Putin to be congratulated.

It is common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later. As a candidate for the office of president, Trump broke with decades of tradition by not releasing his tax returns, presumably because they would reveal his profound dependence on Russian capital.

It was an American and not a Russian innovation to present the news as national entertainment, which made the news vulnerable to an entertainer. Trump got his chance in the second half of 2015 because American television networks were pleased with the spectacle he provided. The chief executive officer of a television network said that the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
.
News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage. When each day is devoted to emotional venting about supposed enemies, the present becomes endless, eternal. In these conditions, a fictional candidate enjoyed a considerable advantage.

It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics. Rather than discuss reforms, eternity politicians designate threats. Rather than presenting a future with possibilities and hopes, they offer an eternal present with defined enemies and artificial crises.

Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past.

======

The Russians are masters of cyber warfare. It's directed at their enemies all the time. It's unseen, but in many ways more dangerous and destructive than conventional war. And, as we now know, Russia engaged in a comprehensive cyber campaign to help Trump win.

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us...

========

In parts, the Snyder book is pretty dense. Some might find this podcast interview more accessible....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/op...

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

" Fiction is free, every fact has a price. "

Snyder shows how sophisticated propaganda of the modern day convinces people that truth does not exist. You are encouraged to start to doubt everything and allowed to believe whatever feels best to you.
Information war is designed to undermine factuality.

The author tells the tragic story of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and explores Russia’s attempts to prove its 'innocence'.
Telling obvious lies and proposing interpretations that contradict each other (one of the examples is how Russia tried to explain what happened to a Malaysian airliner that had been brought down by a Russian missile) may become a strategy.
Political fiction deliberately mocks factuality and seeks to replace it.
Snyder defines a politics of inevitability as a sense that "the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives." Such an approach prevailed during many years.
Thus, Soviet communism was a politics of inevitability that yielded to a politics of eternity.
The Russian politics of eternity has been cultivated during recent years by finding a mythical moment of innocence some thousand years ago (the baptism of Volodymyr of Kyiv) and reviving the totalitarian ideas of the political philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Attempts to apply a Russian politics of eternity beyond Russia’s borders, to export it, have been undertaken with certain success. Snyder defines it as a calculated effort to undo logic and factual evidence.

A politics of eternity invites people to live in an alternative reality. It aims at doing away with responsibility and destroying a sense of time. If change is impossible and the past and the future are the same, why should we bother in the present?
In addition, the logic of eternity denies the simple idea that there are truths that can be understood regardless of perspective. Perspective is reality, according to those who embrace fascist ideas today.

The author introduces a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism - 'actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence.'

Snyder criticize both far-right and far-left public figures in the West. He reveals their connivance and contribution to what the author calls implausible deniability, which represents a direct assault on factuality.

"Enormous amounts of time were wasted in Britain, the United States, and Europe in 2014 and 2015 on discussions about whether Ukraine existed and whether Russia had invaded it. That triumph of informational warfare was instructive for Russian leaders. In the invasion of Ukraine, the main Russian victories were in the minds of Europeans and Americans, not on the battlefields. Far-Right politicians spread Russia’s messages, and left-wing journalists helped to bring them to the center. One of the left-wing journalists then entered the corridors of power. In October 2015, Seumas Milne, having chaired Putin’s Valdai summit, became chief of communications for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. With Milne as his chief press officer, Corbyn proved a poor advocate for EU membership. British voters chose to leave, and Moscow celebrated."

Snyder posits that the European Union and the level of integration it has made possible is rather a necessity than a choice for European countries. Contrary to the fable of the wise nation that is taught at schools (European nation-states learned a lesson from war and began to integrate), Snyder sees the EU as a first workable postimperial solution in the sense that it offered former European empires and former imperial peripheries a place to go.
The point is that most European countries never were nation-states.
Snyder argues that there is no period of sustained nation-states in European history except for the Balkans in the nineteenth century or the Weimar Rebuplic. This makes the very idea of 'let's go back to the nation-state' not viable.

If you want to learn more about the Russian war on Ukraine and how it began in February 2014, you can read chapters 4 and 5. I reckon that the author could also have mentioned Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 while discussing the Russian politics of the past two decades.

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You have to learn to see a holy war underneath the everyday. Democracy is a fallen state. To split the left and right is to divide. In the Kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one. It is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything, like in an icon; Stalin and God." - Leader of Putin's Biker Gang

************

Timothy Snyder, a Yale based historian of eastern Europe, proposes in his prologue two types of political discourse. A politics of inevitability, prevalent in both capitalist and communist ideologies, argues that whatever is done will not effect the eventual outcome of history, as in free markets will result in fair elections or that capitalism will inexorably lead to revolution and socialism. The politics of eternity invoke such myths as the unity of spirit in a people and the rise of a charismatic leader who will restore the nation's destiny, seen in past fascist and monarchist movements.

Philosophy
Snyder discusses the state revival of Ivan Ilyin, an obscure Russian pro-fascist philosopher and contemporary of Lenin, by Putin and his circle of wealthy friends after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ilyin believed the original sin in the world's creation could only be rectified when a redeemer arose from the Russian people, who would be followed implicitly and supplant individualism with totalitarianism. The problem as a political model is there is no succession principle to replace such a leader, as was the case in the USSR and now Russia. Ilyin's ideas were adapted to be dispersed by modern media.

Evolution
In the 60's and 70's, after Stalin's death, the inevitability of world communism was replaced by an eternity of heroism in WWII and of persecution by the West. It was the time Putin came of age. He held an undistinguished career in the East German KGB, as a St Petersburg politician where he enriched himself, and then as prime minister to Yeltsin. When it was time for a new president Putin was chosen by his oligarch allies but he didn't have national recognition. Bombs planted by the security service exploded killing civilians, war against Chechnya was declared and Putin became a fake news hero.

Integration
After two terms as president from 2000-2008, he was prime minister for one term, changed the term limits and returned in an election he admitted as fraudulent. In 2004 Baltic and eastern states joined the EU and NATO grew. Russia aspired to a rapprochement with Europe but with no rule of law, free markets or fair elections there wasn't path for entrance. The economy had crashed in 2008 and Putin's re-election in 2012 was greeted with massive protests. A foreign foe was needed, and fictions created that the US and EU were determined to destroy Russia and pollute her with western decadence.

Mythology
Putin wrote in 2012 that Russia was a supranational entity, which encompassed all ethnic groups from the Carpathians to Kamchatka, and Ukraine would never be divided from her. In his victory speech he declared himself the fulfillment of an eternal cycle, Lord Valdemar of Kyiv 988 AD, patriarch of Russian civilization. In 2013 a new confederation of Eurasian states was proposed, to counter the West and bring the East under Russia's sphere of influence. Ukraine began to discuss EU entry, a threat to restoring Russian hegemony. The first step in imperial expansion is to claim a state doesn't exist.

Eurasia
Political parties from Austria, Hungary, Britain and France returned to nationalist rhetoric, arguing for withdrawal from the EU. Exporting chaos through cyberwar, as a contrast to domestic order, became Putin's strategy. Along with Ilyan he began to read and quote books written by neo-nazis, anti-semites and alien theorists, installing authors in an Eurasian think tank. The group embraced political fiction as a means to sway opinion. Sexual deviance in the West was a favorite theme. Only a redeemer could save the world from a liberal conspiracy. Their goal was to resurrect a Russian empire.

History
Snyder provides a brief overview of how Ukraine came to be, and dispenses with the notion it was always part of Russia. Valdemar's Kingdom of Rus was taken by Mongols in 1240, and Lithuanian and Polish kingdoms formed the boundaries of Ukraine in the 14th C. In the 16th C. it was fought over by Cossacks and Tatars, and fell to Moscow in 1667. Kiev had passed through 800 years with no connection to Russia or Tsar. By 1721 it was part of the Russian Empire. Catherine the Great deployed Cossacks to conquer Crimea in 1783. In 1917 Ukraine broke away, but was seized by the Red Army.

Revolution
Snyder chronicles the Kremlin's project to disunify the EU, discredit democratic institutions and disrupt elections, from Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage. Moscow worked diligently to undermine the EU as Kyiv finalized an agreement with it. In 2013 Putin's cronies warned Russia would invade Ukraine if it didn't join the Eurasian Union. President Yanukovych had promised entrance into the EU but when he reneged, under pressure from Putin, protesters demanded he resign. He also delayed joining the Eurasian Union, for fear of a grass roots revolution, so Russia attacked and annexed Crimea in 2014.

Propaganda
Snyder analyzes disinformation campaigns of the time. Putin cynically suggested the uniforms worn could be bought at second hand stores. He later smirked Russian soldiers were fighting against western fascism and sodomy, it was a false flag operation by right wing Ukrainians or righteous defense of Russians. As the invasion continued thousands of civilans died. An anti-aircraft missile downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a plot to kill Putin in Russian news. A Kremlin endorsed biker gang followed fabricated freedom fighters into Sevastopol as he held a nationally televised victory rally.

Cyberwars
Hackers had attacked railways, power grids and government systems in the largest cyberwar in history. By late 2015 US systems had been penetrated in the White House, State and Defense departments. Americans were found who could help with more sophisticated meddling in US politics, including Steve Bannon, VP of a data analysis company which tested 'build that wall' and 'drain the swamp' for Donald Trump. He began to study public messaging in the US for Putin as well. Paul Manafort, Kremlin puppet Yanukovych's former adviser in Ukraine became Trump's 2016 campaign manager.

Transformation
Russians had begun to launder money into Trump properties in 1984, and he started to talk about running for president. In deep debt and bankrupt Deutsche Bank began to loan him money in 2004 he didn't have to pay back. He earned huge profits from Russian backed developments, with no money down, was paid to manage Miss Universe in Moscow no work required. In 2010 he spread Kremlin lies that Obama was not an American. In 2016, financed by Russian shell companies, assisted by hacking of opponents email and filling the inet with robots, Putin gained an asset inside the White House.

If you can't compete fairly the next best thing is to weaken your adversaries, sow doubts in their systems and promote dysfunctional or compromised governments. In democratic societies there isn't the control over information and speech possible in authoritarian regimes. This will be a challenge in the foreseeable future. Snyder presents a plausible account in 2018 of what happened and continues in current events. These are not conspiracy theories or alternative facts, they are genuine threats to world peace and rights. 'The Road To Unfreedom' clearly demonstrates how liberties can be lost.

[Esil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Road to Unfreedom is written by Timothy Snyder, who also recently published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. On Tyranny is short and brilliant. The Road to Unfreedom is also good, but it takes more work and concentration. But I highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand all the quickly moving pieces in Russia - US relations these days. If I had read this a few years ago, it would have sounded like the paranoid musings of a conspiracy theorist. Today, unfortunately, it rings all too true.

I listened to this as an audio, but had also received a copy from Netgalley. It works well as an audio, but I suspect it works better as a print book because it would allow for going back over some of the dense information.

[Henri · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all. Final truth in this world is unattainable, but its pursuit leads the individual away from unfreedom. The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions. Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. The cynic who decides that there is no truth is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant."

Flipping brilliant. If you decide to read only one non-fiction book this year make it this one.

[Vadym Didyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

​​Так-с, це було очевидно, але ця книга допомогла мені зрозуміти це глибинно — Трампа до президентства в США допускати КАТЕГОРИЧНО не можна. Я усвідомлював це в контексті політичних поглядів та ідей, але Тімоті Снайдер пояснив так детально, з такими конкретними паралелями та фактами, що тепер розумієш — бляха, а це не просто питання “хочу/не хочу”, це питання життя і смерті. Українців — безпосередньо.

“Шлях до несвободи. Росія, Європа, Америка” Тімоті Снайдера — це непроста книга. Вона вб’є вашу внутрішню людинку, яка звикла до кліпового мислення. Великі, розлогі розділи, дуже багато тексту, дуже багато контекстів, ніби читаєш дипломну роботу. Для людей (як я), які звикли до того, що письменники нон-фікшну турбуються про те, щоб розділи були невеличкі, щоб перебивалось картинками, щоб мова була простішою, такі праці — це як провести тиждень в спортзалі, де тренер ганяє тебе до крові, але замість трицепса і біцепсу качаєш мозок. І після прочитання мозок ще декілька днів намагається розслабитись і відрефлексувати тему. І після цього — блаженне розслаблення і потужніший мозок.

Все пізнається в контекстах, напівтонах. Снайдер починає з розкриття режиму Путіна, він його тотально оголює і показує, як це хворе чудовисько утрималось при владі у 2010-х роках, яку роль в цьому відіграли такі ж хворі історики та діячі сучасності і минулого. Посередині розкривається роль і важливість України в цій парадигмі, і фінал — шлях Трампа.

І все це дуже пов’язано між собою. Речі, які можуть на перший погляд здаватись неочевидними, різними, непоєднаними, насправді є частинками різних пазлів. Один бік світу складає пазл “політики неминучості” (ідей немає, розвинена демократія самотужки рухається до повної й остаточної перемоги у світі) і “політики вічності” (постійне роздмухування мстивої ненависті, відомої філософам під назвою "ресентимент").

Для мене ці дві політики — це щось, що я раніше вловлював, але не усвідомлював. Снайдеру вдалось пояснити це на прикладах, і ці ідеї отримали форму.

Це книга про реальну боротьбу Добра та Зла.

“Якщо ми хочемо краще розуміти добро і зло, нам слід реанімувати історію.”

Ще більше відгуків та окололітературного шукайте в моєму книжковому блозі в Телеграмі

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is astonishingly bad. “Bloodlands,” by this author, was a decent book. This one is confused in theory, biased in orientation, and paranoid in psychology.

Essentially, the book is a Russophobic rant, with Vladimir Putin at the center of a global web of evil, with Donald Trump at one of its outer nodes. Putin, in the author’s narrative, pulls the strands connected to the Donald.

I have many quarrels with this book. I will list them until I run out of wrath and gas.

First: As a conceit to give a theme to his work, Snyder contrasts two concepts of history as employed in political language--the "eternity" view, e.g. we are victims and we have forever enemies, vs. the view of the present as culmination, as in the much-discussed, albeit trivial "The End of History." This distinction makes little sense either in terms of intellectual history or as an analysis of propaganda. It's just kind of goofy.

Second: Snyder constantly uses the word "fascist," with as much vigor as the Stalinists did when they denounced social democrats as "social fascists," or Jonah Goldberg does when he finds fascism in contemporary liberalism. Because it's a term of political abuse, "fascism" has lost much of its meaning, and there is certainly little consistency in what it means from one writer to another. I don't think it has much use beyond Mussolini's Italy and perhaps those who consciously emulated it.

Third: Snyder completely ignores the geopolitical factors that frequently drive Russian policy. Russia has no strong natural barriers to the West or to the East as nd has frequently been invaded from both directions. Europe’s insistence on swallowing up Central Europe and Russia’s near abroad was bound to provoke a reaction. Tsar, commissar, oligarch, or even a hypothetical neoliberal regime, would have the same concerns. By ignoring geopolitics and wallowing in righteous indignation over Russian concerns about Western designs on the Ukraine, Georgia, etc., Snyder is geopolitically blind.

Fourth: Snyder depicts the Maidan uprising as some kind of Kumbaya festival. He ignores the rôle of Soros, Victoria Nuland and her minions, etc. in these “color revolutions” that always seems to go nowhere.

Fifth: Snyder ignores Putin’s achievements while harping on his real and perceived faults. Yeltsin, abetted by Jeffrey Sachs and his ilk, nearly destroyed Russia. Putin pieced it back together and is building it up again. Similarly, Snyder glorifies the neoliberal world, with its sterile sexuality, materialism, and ethnic self-immolation.

Sixth: There is no social analysis. All we see is discussion of various writers, who may or may not be influential, and a Putin conspiratorial center. There are no institutions, classes, economics, nationalities, churches, laws—just “fascist” ideologues and a Putin-centered conspiracy. Hardly a way for a trained historian to explain the world.

Seventh: Snyder ultimately notices some flaws in the US (although not in the EU), but only as conditions to be exploited by a Russia-centered Trump conspiracy. This is blindness. I’m not going to take the time here to enumerate the economic, demographic, and cultural destruction wrought in our country in recent years—it would take me too far afield—but to suggest that it’s all a Russo-Trumpian conspiracy, and not a collective failure of the American political class, is blindness. Jeb! and “I’m With Her” failed for good reasons.

In short, this is a boring, incompetent, stupid, misleading, paranoid book. Truly a loathsome piece of work.

[Jan-Maat]

Snyder's nauseous comic opera is mostly a close reading of some of the ideological structure of the Putin regime in Russia, the events of the Maidan protest in the Ukraine and the 2016 presidential election in the USA.

It is all very interesting but I do feel that the absence of a wider ranging analysis for instance in his discussion of Russian political myth of innocence and victim-hood I was screaming 'Ss Boris and Gleb' at the book, but it did not listen - its an idea that has deep roots in that culture stamps a 'best consumed before' date on this book that is rather short.

It is a book that comes across as written with some sorrow and bitterness, his prescription is to hope for a politically engaged citizenry that knows history fairly well, since current democratic systems are representative and citizens required input is limited to choosing a proxy I don't see much basis for optimism, though on the other hand from his close reading I would say that although upsetting or biasing electoral political systems seems to be easy enough if you have the resources, being able to produce the precise outcomes that you wish for appears to be elusive.

I am hesitant to fully endorse everything that Synder says, I am conflicted over the role that manipulation of the internet by the Russians or dark money plays - I don't doubt that it is happening, just I suspect that messages from such interests only have traction because some people are already thinking along such lines, then again I have not subjected myself to a situation in which all of my media are shouting a particular political message, maybe if for the sake of argument all your news comes from your Facebook feed and it increasingly is pushing a certain message then maybe it would convince you to believe anything - after all there are examples of self-radicalisation which curiously rather quickly seem to turn people into would be mass murders.

Synder's basic point is that there is a politics of inevitability (there is no alternative...) and a politics of eternity, the latter is wide spread in totalitarian regimes and implies to the citizens that change is impossible, inevitability politics can be found in democratic regimes but you can see how it can flow into the idea of eternity. Furthermore, most people are ignorant of history and so tend to believe a myth of the 'wise country' that their state made certain political decisions out of pure disembodied wisdom rather than in a particular political context and this leaves people vulnerable to mythologising. The example that is most pertinent is of European states imagining that they were or could become again nation states, ignoring that in history they were empires. This leads to an interesting reading of the EU, that it and its predecessors are a mechanism that allow states to transition out of empire perhaps here he is drawing on The European Rescue of the Nation State ?.

Coupled to this Synder sees empire and colonisation as central to European history in a way that is unusual, but refreshing. He also points to empire as a more politically relevant form of organisation than we usually think. From this he points to the vulnerability of the post imperial states that briefly flowered in eastern and central europe in the 1920s and 1930s and in particular to Russia's drive to empire.

Much of this I imagine is explored in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. I was interested in his discussion of Eurasianism, which I had rather naively imagined was simply a way to transcend the Slavophile and westerniser debate in nineteenth century Russia, but here emerges as a belief in Russian imperial domination over Europe as far as Lisbon.
The link to sexuality both made sense of what had seen to me Putin's Russia's bizarre obsession with homosexuality and reminded me of an old favourite book The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950 - 1250 and of the entomological link in English between Buggery and Bulgaria a clue is heresy . However this also reminds me that the lack of a wider analysis is a weakness in this book when one recalls that Hungary's and Poland's governments are using similar rhetoric and I wondered generally about the various useful idiots who are sympathetic and supportive of the claims of the Russian government are they naive, or over exposed to propaganda, compromised, imagining that they will get rich or be politically rewarded?.

There is a lot that is interesting in this book, depressingly it reminded me of how much the USA in the too long Trump years was reminiscent of 1984 with it's daily five minutes of hate: It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics. Rather than discuss reforms, eternity politicians designate threats. Rather than presenting a future with possibilities and hopes, they offer an eternal present with defined enemies and artificial crises. for this to work, citizens have to meet their eternity politicians half way. demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion (p.257)

I forgot to mention; this book was on the 'To read' list of the late and still lamented Ted Schmeckpeper.

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timothy Snyder has coined two terms to reflect political states of mind that are ahistorical. The first is inevitablilty, as in "the politics of inevitability;" the second is eternity, as in "the politics of eternity." Once defined, both will feel familiar to us.

The politics of inevitability is a childlike state in which we assume the way things are is inevitable, unchangeable, and meant to be, since we've gotten used to it and forgotten about alternatives. In the West, once the Berlin wall came down, and once the Soviet Union had collapsed, we thought liberal (small l) democracy had won, once and for all. After a while, too, no one had experienced anything else. This is akin to the logical error that says because things have always been some way, they always will be. When the politics of inevitability prevails, we as individuals really have no meaningful political responsibility, since the current situation is, after all, inevitable. And, for the same reason, we don't have concern for caution or limits, since what is inevitable can neither need support nor suffer damage.

Then some new mental framework or attitude against which we have no ready defenses descends on society, perhaps in response to some unexpected trauma or shock to the system (think Trump, or Brexit), perhaps aided and abetted by a new disruptive form of media. In the sixteenth century, that disruptive media was the printing press; at some earlier point, it was writing itself. Now we're talking the internet and social media. After the politics of inevitability is dispatched, the politics of eternity settles in. The politics of eternity is "us-them" on steroids. "We" are innocent victims of "them" for all eternity, in an endlessly repeating cycle of drama and spectacle, with nothing to be done except get with the program, get on board, get brainwashed, and accept, along with everyone else, the acceptable beliefs. Don't think (and without thought there is no dissent). A modicum of coercion and a dash of violence will season the stew.

Between the two--inevitability and eternity--is a space for history. Only in history can we think and act and make a difference. That's what the author is aiming for. That's the good. His heroes are the investigative journalists who see and observe, often at risk to themselves, enabling us to remove from our eyes the enveloping and blinding shroud of eternity. His book's dedication:

For the reporters, the heroes of our time

Snyder organizes his book into six chapters with the title of each a political virtue juxtaposed to its opposite. The first is "Individualism or Totalitarianism." In that first chapter he describes Ivan Ilyin, the rehabilitated fascist and conspiracy theorist of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, whose thinking informs the political ideology of Putin's Russia where the politics of eternity is in full sway--helped by the fact that most Russians receive their news via state-controlled TV and at the national (not local) level. Russia, white and Christian, and meant to be at the forefront of the nations, is for all time the pure and innocent victim of fascist violation; the West, along with its liberalism, freedom, and factuality, is by definition that violator, and in the defense against it, all is justified. The individual, too, is evil except as a part of the state, about which status the individual has no choice. The second chapter is "Succession or Failure:" either the state has a succession principle by which power changes hands lawfully, or it doesn't--the Ilyin ideal being a manly leader who mystically embodies and represents his country and retains power, the model that supports Putin's Russia in its current oligarchical manifestation. In contrast, if the rule of law prevails at the top, meaning a real principle of succession, then imperfections in the system, such as corruption or inequality, are potentially correctable. Chapter Three is "Integration or Empire." In contrast to Yoram Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism, which has been making waves lately, Snyder argues that our notion of independent states is rooted in myth. He says that in actuality, what we formerly had were empires whose attempted persistence as independent states could not be maintained, and from which failed effort they were rescued by the EU. The imperial mode is colonization, which is familiar so far; but what Snyder points to is colonization within Europe, with disputes settled, not by diplomacy, but by invasion and annexation. That's the mode to which a Russia looking backward to the age of empire aspires and which its fascist and totalitarian ideology aims to justify. Inherent in those views is that circa 2010 or 2012 Russia gave up early efforts to modernize and liberalize, that is, to compete with the West on its own terms, embarking instead on its current course.

Next comes Chapter Four, "Novelty or Eternity." About halfway into that chapter, Snyder gets to what happened in Ukraine in 2013 and, eventually, 2014. Novelty means Ukraine as an independent, democracy-pursuing country intent on closer integration with Europe, while eternity as used here refers to Russian mythology that Ukraine is and always has been Russian, so that Russia was going to put its foot down and put a halt to Ukrainian independence. Thus, Snyder at this point in his book reaches recent history. He movingly describes the solidarity resulting from the Maidan protests (some of which I believe found expression in his earlier book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century). And he tells what happened--a lot of which received inadequate attention in the West. In Chapter Five, "Truth or Lies," he continues with the information war: how Russia played Ukrainian and Russian speakers within Ukraine against each other, created propaganda that the Maidan independence demonstrations were fascist endeavors engineered by the US, and also propagandized its own citizens from outlying parts of the country with outrageous stories--for example, that Ukrainians had crucified a three-year-old Russian boy--in order to galvanize them to come fight, and sometimes die. Again, Snyder highlights what journalists were doing--as long as they could--to get out the truth of what was happening. Russia had limited success on the ground in Ukraine but practiced its infowar techniques for use in Europe and then in the US. And that last area is the subject of Chapter Six, "Equality or Oligarchy," regarding the election of their man in Washington, Donald Trump.

Discussion of whether Ukraine is a fascist state still persists, and during 2014, the country was hamstrung by what Snyder terms propagandistic accusations--schizofascist propaganda that in essence accused Ukraine of being what Russia was. (Another example of schizofascism is accusing Jews of causing the Holocaust.) Snyder argues his case well, though, and he supports his argument, on this point and otherwise, with ongoing references to reports of journalists and other documentation. He does not use conventional footnote markers but instead provides running references by page and paragraph at the back of the book.

In a manner of speaking, what Timothy Snyder does in this book is celebrate and defend our institutions, even as Michael Lewis does in another, very different, book I recently read, The Fifth Risk. Many, it seems, are content to condemn the institutions that support them, with the far-Right now co-opting and outdoing the Left in that endeavor. Since nothing is perfect, warts can always be uncovered, yet Snyder looks to the conditions that support improvement. He looks, in other words, to history, change, thinking, individual effort and heroism, and solidarity. The conditions we regard as virtues, he says, cannot exist in the abstract. The virtues can exist only in the institutions that embody them.

Also, understand that the contrast between factuality and fiction is not a debate. I recently received an email from my local paper thanking me for my support and making reference to a "debate" about the news media. There is no debate, as the attacks on news are not fact-based. In fact the attack on the mainstream media for being "fake news" is another example of schizofascism. Similarly, there is no debating Trump on his wall since his story of why the wall is needed represents a departure from reality. This is my point, although based, I hope, on what Snyder says about political fiction.

Snyder has heard a call and has written this book to try and educate and alert us. He has a difficult task. What he is saying can be hard to understand. It takes study. I had to read the first part of the book twice to understand all the historical phenomena and related mythologizing, not to mention all the Russian names--I who once upon a time studied Russian. Meanwhile, a succinct slur can lodge in the mind and rally the wrong troops. The fact that the truth is more complicated than fiction can appear to be a weakness. Not only is the simplistic easier, it's also convenient. And the fact is that Trump (and Russia) won. Many people here are going around saying that nothing has changed, this is just more of the same, and this, too, will pass. In other words it's all an anomaly--a bad dream--and the inevitable will soon resume. Just as "This is not really happening" is not a good strategy to deal with a mugging, neither will it work in these times.

In a sense, Snyder has done what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says he did in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: create a story to fight a story. Most of the time he does well, the complications and difficulties notwithstanding. Sometimes when he's talking about the US, I can see him painting with too-wide brushstrokes that could catapult him into difficulties--for example, writing as though "Southern whites" are a monolith. If he does that in areas of the globe with which I'm relatively more familiar, perhaps others would notice the same for their areas.

Also, he focuses on racial and economic inequality as fueling divestiture from democracy, but perhaps instead the problem at bottom is the lack of dignity and recognition: people not finding worth, meaning or any sense of belonging. Anomie, in other words. Money, after all, is a form of recognition.

Nevertheless in writing this book he's done us a major service. Kudos, Timothy Snyder.


Even though the subtitle of this book is Russia > Europe > America, here are a couple of quotes from Americanah, about Nigeria, showing that people elsewhere know about the politics of eternity. How other people in the world have heretofore looked toward America and the West!

Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look toward somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.


Obinze envied them for what they were, men who casually changed names and passports, who would plan and come back and do it over again because they had nothing to lose. He didn't have their savoir faire; he was soft, a boy who had grown up eating cornflakes and reading books, raised by a mother during a time when truth-telling was not yet a luxury.

A highly touted National Affairs article by Jonathan Rauch entitled "The Constitution of Language" shows how disinformation works. Rauch is more sanguine about our institutions than Snyder, I think, and he focuses directly on Trump (not via Russia or Putin), yet the article is very good. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publi...

A 2015 piece for Foreign Affairs with more on Ivan Ilyin: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...

April 13, 2019
I've only read Timothy Snyder's two most recent books, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and this one. Here's a new article reviewing his work that puts those two books into a context and could help with perspective: https://www.chronicle.com/interactive...

October 13, 2019
Here is a current New York Times piece that is in line with Snyder's contentions about Russia: https://nyti.ms/2LYVP6R

...Western security officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are part of a coordinated and ongoing campaign to destabilize Europe.... ...
...The Kremlin sees Russia as being at war with a Western liberal order that it views as an existential threat. ...
...A former intelligence officer himself, Mr. Putin drew a direct line between the Red Army spies who helped defeat the Nazis in World War II and officers of the G.R.U., whose “unique capabilities” are now deployed against a different kind of enemy.... ...

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

More information with links to my review coming soon- stay tuned!

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

Timothy Snyder's thorough analysis, supported by equally comprehensive documentation and the 277 endnotes spanning 80 pages at the end of the volume, will leave you feeling well-informed and knowledgeable.
Understanding the past is crucial for making sense of the present. This book enlightens us about the causes of violence in Eastern Europe, making us more aware of the situation.

[Yonis Gure · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only good portion of this book was Snyder's breakdown of the Russian war against Ukraine. Acute, historically-grounded, elegantly written. Every single Far-Right and Far-Left talking point on Ukraine is dispelled one point at a time with such precision that I don't think it could've been bettered.

Unfortunately, everything else in the book is really not worth anyone's time. He subscribes to a Cold-War ideological framework of an evil East and a Freedom-loving West; that if it doesn't get it's act together it will be trapped in an equally irrational, dangerous, insane "politics of eternity" - where everything is spectacle, the future doesn't exist, and "problems are invented to combat enemies that aren't real".

For Snyder, anything even remotely destabilizing in the West is the product of Russian meddling (Brexit, Trump's victory, the Scottish Referendum, American Racial tensions, etc.). He can't bring himself to mention the myriad of indigenous reasons as to why these events took place, inconvenient from so many points of view. He doesn't mention that many Britons actually had genuine reasons for wanting out of the EU, like for the fact that since the Euro crisis, it has shown itself for what it is: a bureaucratic, austerity-imposing, bank-controlling, undemocratic institution. Maybe that might be the reason? Certainly more plausible than Snyder's "well, the Bots are to blame for duping people into leaving the Union because people are dumb". Or the fact that many Americans (the majority) did not vote in the 2016 elections because maybe - just maybe - Hilary Clinton was an extremely problematic candidate with an awful track-record.

Snyder goes even more bat-shit conspiratorial when he suggests that the Opiod crisis lead to many Americans damaging the part of the brain that's used for rational decision making, and thus making them more susceptible to Russian bots and voting for Trump. How is this taken seriously?

I really can't see this book appealing or persuading anyone outside the confines of the already converted. Very disappointed to be frank.

[Tetiana Dzhyhar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ну це мастрід. Деякі сторінки легше читати, бо все пішло на краще (їх меншість звісно), деякі важче (бо ну от же вас попереджали), деякі дуже важко (бо от попереджали ж, але тепер українці це все вигрібають своїм життям). Шкода, що такий тип літератури не знайде масового читача і знов це прочитають ті, хто і так в курсі.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very focused investigation centered solely on Russia's more recent history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's becoming a pure Oligarchy, or rather: a Kleptocracy. What's more, we get some rather startling and almost unbelievable details into the nature of Putin's aim.

Let me be more clear: end aim is very clear. He's stated it about a million times. He's so confident in his power and methods that I can't see any truly viable method to stop him. And so he is open and honest about just how many lies he can get away with.

What's unbelievable is how he's been able to revise history on such a massive scale as to make Stalin a hero, rewrite his involvement in WW2 drastically, or taking a relatively obscure philosopher who was a contemporary of Lenin and elegize him to the point of near godhood, projecting his text as the grand narrative of Putin's Russia. Literally. He's had the book printed everywhere, talked about everywhere, and it all boils down to some CRAZY S**t.

Like the unfettered belief that the leader is the soul of the nation, and that nations are always innocent. Harm can be done to Russia, but it will always remain innocent. There can be no double standards if there are no standards. Facts are for other people. Use facts as weapons against those who rely on them, but never be fettered by them.

Trust the leader who will always steer you right.

People in Russia may not believe this s**t, but remember, every media source will be spouting it. Anyone who has ties to America or Europe are immediately branded enemy collaborators. All the western countries are ruled by the Homosexual Agenda and Russia must never fall before them.

This is just a taste of the reality under Putin. He is a master at reality control. After the devastation of the 90's when practically all otherwise well off USSR populace was cashed in and the full reserves of the government power and wealth was transferred to a handful of men, it was absurdly easy to lock down everything. Putin has an amazing amount of combatant hackers at his disposal. Full media control. Banking. And of course the military.

Remember when the Ukraine was urged to give up over a thousand nuclear missiles in 2010? And then Putin invaded them, annexed them, and completely rewrote history about 5 times in order to justify everything about it in 2012? You know, like things saying there is no such thing as Ukraine. Or there is no Ukraine language. It has always been Russia.

This book has an amazing wealth of information in it. Don't take my word for it. It'll shock you.

Let me steal this from another review of this book (and btw, thank you!):
Methods of control:

{--Constant reference to a past era of greatness
--Hyperfocus on enemies who are enemies because of who they are and not what they do
--A profound belief in a zero-sum (or a negative-sum) world
--Willingness to hurt oneself if, in doing so, you can hurt someone else more
--The manufacture of crises and conflicts where none exist in order to control the news cycle
--Constant labeling of information sources as “fake” in an effort to delegitimize any source of truth
--Repetition of blatant, easily verifiable lies with no evidence to back them up other than the fact of the assertion}

His stated goal is to always keep Europe and America as eternal enemies, a-la Eurasia in Orwell's 1984. That means always being on an antagonistic footing, flooding his population with propaganda, and just plain telling any kind of lies he likes, so long as he gets the results he wants. There is no need for any kind of verifiability. He is an Eternal Leader who is Always Innocent and he does NOT need Facts. He just needs to control every narrative. And he does.

The next part of this book is just plain scary.

We've heard all about Russia's supposed involvement with Trump. We've heard both sides make a lot of noise and get nowhere because the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely atrocious here.

When investigative journalism ACTUALLY does its job, however, a lot of truly damming facts come to light. You know, those pesky little things that Putin cares crap over?

Russian hackers, fully bankrolled by Putin's media empire, is attacking America. This statement isn't just some silly conflation. He's on record of saying it and there are MANY records proving it. Millions of fake facebook accounts with targeted marketing to tight demographics, pandering to prejudices and conspiracy theories, fake movements all across the internet, including millions of tweets by bots trying to influence the political debates. (Successfully, I might add.) Many attempts were also made on the voting machines.

Note the direction almost every convenient "leak" came from during the election cycles. The republican party knew about Trump's many economic connections to Putin, including a Trump Tower with MANY rooms bought by placeholder corporations whose paperwork all led back to Russia, many new real estate deals. The official line was to hush it up. Fire officials that tried to investigate it. And all the while, overwhelming hacker support flowed toward Trump. Let's not forget Trump and Putin's long-standing friendship. They're both fictional characters, after all, telling many interesting narratives, (read lies) that don't need any factual basis. They just need to be plausible for the moment until the power base can be firmed up.

Please refer to the list of power-grabbing methods. Does anyone else see a similarity between Russia and America?

It's almost like all the super-rich looters are playing by the exact same handbook. The goal is to get rich at everyone else's expense. If you don't make the 1% bracket, you're nothing. Just watch for the new grabs.

Look. I said it was nearly unbelievable. But I, unlike radical revisionist leaders, actually LIKE facts.

If this book tells me anything at all, it's to look beyond the noise. We can all be so involved in our little crazy lives so much that we fail to see the big picture. That goes for politics, too. What happens when we realize that a MASSIVE concerted effort to game America's political system actually SUCCEEDS?

Oh, nothing. We're still bickering between blues and reds. Of course, since we do most of that online, it's actually absurdly easy to focus all of one's resources on this choke point. Russia has a veritable army of hackers fanning the flames of all lefts and all rights, stirring up racial prejudices, sexist prejudices, and any other conflict they can dream up. And we buy it. Hell, most of all these "events" might be pure fabrication, but none of us seem to be doing ANYTHING to confirm or deny them. Certainly not our media. They're too busy running ideological platforms, themselves.

See how easy it is to sow SO MUCH confusion and chaos on your enemy...? And the best thing is, WE LAP IT UP, use it all as proof we are right, yet again.

Where are our antibodies? Where is the strong Press that digs up all this crap and shows it for what it is?

Oh, wait... that's what this book is trying to be!

[Elizabeth George]

This is a book that should be part of everyone's library. It should also be part of every high school curriculum. The author is the Levin Professor of History at Yale, and in each of his six chapters he gives the reader an either/or exploration. For example, his first chapter is "Individualism or Totalitarianism." Using this either/or method throughout the book, he explains how Putin gained control of Russia; how European integration (via the EU) strengthened the positions of the individual nations who belonged to it and, as a result, prompted Putin to promote various false narratives to destroy the EU through giving support to far right politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK; what happens when Empires fall and there is no given process for the succession of leadership; how lies become the reality in which people live and to which they cling; how citizens are manipulated to fear and hate others upon whom they place the blame for economic inequalities; how one person rises who promises to fix everything if he is given the unrestricted power to do so; how lies become accepted as truth; how the media begin to promulgate the lies; how spectacle becomes more important than facts; how powerful individuals dominated by self-interest gain power through the ridicule, false narratives, imprisonment, and even murder of those who threaten to topple them. Ultimately through careful exposition, the author turns the reader's attention to the US. By then the reader has already seen the patterns and the forces that either threaten or completely destroy Democracy. Considering the recent past of the US from 2015 until this very moment, it becomes clear that the world's greatest experiment of Democracy is cooperating in its own destruction. This probably sounds like a very dry reading experience. I assure you, it is not.

[Jonathan O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️

Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Stiflingly bleak but informative read.
RTC

[B. Rule · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can basically feel the seams in this one where Snyder decided he wasn't just writing a recent history of Ukraine and Russia, but an indictment of Russia's role in the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. Like his shorter, pithier book "On Tyranny", Snyder often styles himself as a prophet speaking against power. Frankly, that's what he's best at doing. The parts where he speaks broadly about what authoritarianism looks like in practice, the steps it takes to get there, what institutions need to do to resist, etc., are all gold. The part where he lays out the intellectual framework under which Putin is operating is also very well done. But this book wobbles some because he's trying to do two things that don't always mesh well: (1) write an essentially historical account of our present predicament, and (2) provide a theoretical framework for understanding the allure of authoritarianism and why western democracies are susceptible to it.

The first aim falters because he treats various still very much disputed recent events as definitive historical fact. It's mostly (all) anti-Trump, so it's kinda red meat to me. However, it seriously weakens his credibility as a historian when he consistently delivers the most partisan version of events as factual. Further, it undercuts his own point about the post-factual nature of (pre-)authoritarian thinking, because he's basically doing propaganda. Not that I didn't enjoy him dunking on Bannon et al., but it weakens his moral position to speak objectively about the dangers of authoritarianism when it's couched in such lop-sided and often hysterical terms.

Secondly, his framework of "the politics of inevitability" and "the politics of eternity", while cute, is frankly overly simplistic and often short-circuits an otherwise incisive political critique of the structures of power and influence. By "inevitability", Snyder means post-Enlightenment ideas of "the end of history" and the complacent optimism of western democracies that see free market liberal democracy as inherently self-perpetuating and therefore likely to be victorious. "The politics of eternity" are a little less clear, but focus largely on a return to mythological understandings of "the nation" or "the people" that operate to create insularity by fomenting fear of the Other, often effectuated by an ahistorical emphasis on nostalgia for a non-existent golden age or innocence. Think Nazis. Or Trumpers. But I repeat myself.

I don't necessarily disagree with the broader sweep of his categories, but he often uses them as shorthand to wave away behaviors that really deserve a deeper examination. Further, his categories seem to elide at points. At times they're described as essentially opposites, and at others, as though they are effectively the same. I think he's right that the "politics of inevitability" creates the necessary conditions for a reaction towards "eternity", but I'd really like to see that spelled out better. Snyder does present some interesting case studies on how Russia leveraged this slippage in its cyberwar on a gullible populace who never believed the Internet could be turned into the instrument of its own undoing.

Snyder's heart is in the right place, and I 100% agree that historical perspective and a shared pursuit of more-or-less objective truth are necessary preconditions for the survival of liberal democracy. I just wish he would have kept a handle on his emotions a little more and written a less hysterical, over the top account. This book won't convince anybody already in the thrall of Fox News, but it's worth reading for those who are already sympathetic to the premise that we're slipping into authoritarianism because we haven't allowed ourselves to see the dangers and the rot within.

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the first time, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America enabled me to see the relationship between the lies and fascism of Vladimir Putin, Russian interference in the politics of the United States and Europe, and the lies and fascism of Donald Trump. Seeing the big picture is no less depressing, but at least Timothy Snyder gives us a coherent sense of what is ailing us, and a chance to defeat these monsters. Everyone should hear his message before the United States embraces "the politics of eternity," as Snyder calls it, in which lies, manipulation, and artificial nostalgia for times that never were propel us into the abyss.

I have also been reading lately much of the history of Nazism, including the extraordinarily expert manipulation of the German people by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Putin, though intelligent and cunning, lacks the maniacal ideological commitment of Hitler and his cronies. But he does understand how to establish an oligarchy of outrageously rich kleptocrats (including himself and his family), while keeping the common people confused and repressed. Trump can aspire to that idea, given that inequality and racism in the United States parallels that of Russia, that billionaires like the Koch brothers, the Murdochs, the Mercers, and the Trumps have been empowered by Citizens United, and that the political deck is stacked, but Trump is too stupid in himself to implement it. I do believe, given America's overall wealth, power, and proud political traditions, not to mention common decency, that we can avoid the sad fate of the Russians—and the unfortunate Ukrainians.

We must, however, recognize that Putin's cyberwar against the United States and Europe threatens us all. He has already done great damage. Barack Obama gave a mild reproof, and Trump is delighted. Let us use our superior digital capabilities to ensure that Putin fails, and takes Trump with him.

[Велислав Върбанов · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Самият ужас от това, което ще последва, поражда усещане за страх, което може да бъде проектирано върху другите като външна политика. Тоталитаризмът е истински враг на самия себе си и това е тайната, която той крие от себе си, нападайки другите.“


„Пътят към несвободата“ е чудесна книга, която си струва да бъде прочетена от всеки мислещ човек... Историкът Тимъти Снайдър задълбочено е представил съвременната хибридна война на Русия, която всъщност водят срещу съществуването на цивилизовани общества, върховенство на закона и факти, които пречат на безкрайната алчност и мистичните ѝ представи за налагане на тоталитарна власт... Авторът дава смислени и аргументирани примери, както от по-далечни исторически епохи, така и от събития, случили се преди няколко години. Освен че разглежда детайлно философията на фашисткия режим в Кремъл, той също така повдига сериозни теми за размисъл относно обществените проблеми в ЕС и САЩ, които създават почва за лесното навлизане на зловеща руска пропаганда. Книгата съдържа изключително ценни мисли и силни послания, но същевременно е съвсем разбираемо и увлекателно написана!






„Фалшиви новини“ означава създаване на художествен текст, който се представя за журналистически материал, а предназначението му е да създаде объркване относно конкретно събитие, от една страна, и да дискредитира журналистиката, от друга. Политиците на вечността първо сами разпространяваха такива новини, след това обявиха, че всички новини са фалшиви и най-сетне – че само техните спектакли са действителност.“


„Ако това е останало незабелязано, то е, защото сме пленници на неизбежността: ние смятаме, че идеите нямат значение. Да мислим исторически означава да приемем, че непознатото може би е значимо, и да се стремим да го направим познато.“


„Когато Бог сътворил света, Русия някак си избегнала историята и останала във вечността. Ето защо, смята Илин, неговата родина е защитена от настъпващия поток на времето и от натрупването на случайност и избор, което той намира за толкова непоносимо. Вместо това Русия преживява повтарящи се цикли на заплаха и защита от заплахата. Всичко, което се случва, би трябвало да е атака от външния свят срещу руската невинност или оправдана руска реакция на подобна заплаха.“


„Спасителят потъпква фактите, насочва страстите и създава мит, като разпорежда яростна атака срещу избран враг. Фашистът презира всяка политика, която се корени в обществото с неговите предпочитания, интереси, визии за бъдещето, права и т.н. Фашизмът не започва с оценка на онова, което е вътре, а с отхвърляне на онова, което е отвън.“


„Правните институции, които позволяват смяна на властта, дават възможност на гражданите да съзират бъдеще, в което лидерите се сменят, но държавите остават. Фашизмът обаче се отнася до свещената и вечна връзка между спасителя и неговия народ. Фашистът разглежда институциите и законите като коварни бариери между лидера и народа, които трябва да бъдат заобиколени или разрушени.“


„Убедени в своите икономически принципи, американците допринасят за руската катастрофа, като заявяват, че пазарите ще породят институции, вместо да настояват, че на пазарите са нужни институции.“


„Механизмът, който гарантира, че една държава надживява своя лидер, се нарича принцип на приемствеността. Общият знаменател е демокрацията. Смисълът на всеки вот е обещанието, че ще има следващ. Тъй като всеки гражданин може да сгреши, демокрацията трансформира натрупаните грешки в колективна вяра в бъдещето. Историята продължава.“


„Пазарите изискват върховенство на закона, което е най-предизвикателният аспект на постсъветската трансформация. Приемайки за даденост върховенството на закона, американците могат да си фантазират, че пазарите ще породят необходимите институции. Това обаче е грешка. Има голямо значение дали получилите независимост държави налагат върховенство на закона и преди всичко дали те успяват да поемат курс към легално предаване на властта чрез свободни избори.“


„Демокрацията е процедура на смяна на управляващите. Квалифицирането на демокрацията с прилагателно – „народна демокрация“ по времето на комунизма, „суверенна демокрация“ след това – означава елиминирането на тази процедура.“


„Смъртта на всеки викингски военачалник предизвиква кървави битки.“


„ЕС никога не се е опитал да наложи общо обучение по история на европейците. В резултат на това баснята за мъдрата нация внушава усещането, че както националните държави са избрали да влязат в Европа, така и могат да я напуснат. Лупингът към едно въображаемо минало става възможен и дори желан. Така политиката на неизбежност отваря врата към политика на вечността.“


„Гумильов също така добавя специфична форма на антисемитизъм към евразийската традиция, която позволява на руснаците да стоварват собствените си провали едновременно на евреите и на Запада. Ключовото понятие тук е „химера“, или фалшива нация. Здравите нации, каквато е руската, предупреждава Гумильов, трябва да се пазят от химеричните групи, които черпят живот не от космическите лъчи, а от други групи. Тук той има предвид евреите.“


„Пишейки в началото на XXI в., Дугин е свидетел на успеха на Европейския съюз, който спасява държавите след империята. Дугин никога не произнася това име. Помолен да коментира ЕС, Дугин заявява, че той е обречен. Много преди Путин да заговори за Евразия, която трябва да включва Украйна като елемент от руската цивилизация, Дугин дефинира независимата украинска държава като бариера пред евразийската съдба на Русия.“


„Тъй като Великобритания и Франция нямат модерна история като национални държави, едно излизане от ЕС би било по-скоро стъпка в неизвестното, отколкото комфортно завръщане у дома, обещано от национализма. Това би означавало присъединяване към Русия като остатъчна държава на европейска империя отвъд обсега на европейската интеграция...“


„Москва взема на въоръжение баснята за мъдрата нация. В действителност Великобритания никога не е била държава, която е решавала да подкрепя другите, а разпадаща се империя, чиято държавност е спасена благодарение на европейската интеграция. Първи канал, най-важната руска телевизионна станция, успокоително потвърждава мита, че Великобритания би могла да се справя сама, защото винаги го е правила...“


„В същия момент, в който Путин прилага Илиновата идея за право в Русия, украинците демонстрират, че трябва да се блокира прекият път към авторитаризма.
Ако украинците са в състояние да разрешат Илиновата правова главоблъсканица, обръщайки се към Европа и към солидарността, защо руснаците да не могат да го направят? Това е въпрос, който руските лидери не могат да позволят да се загнезди в съзнанието на техните граждани.“


„Проблемът на формулировки, в които съществителното „война“ се определя от прилагателно като „хибридна“, е, че те звучат като „по-малко война“, макар в действителност да означават „повече война“.


„Европейците се оказват уязвими за приспивната руска пропаганда, която твърди, че проблемите на Украйна показват колко е далече от ЕС.“


„Тоталитаризмът заличава границата между частно и публично, така че изглежда нормално всички да са прозрачни през цялото време.“


„Дори когато Украйна се отбранява, европейските и американските автори са повлияни от руската пропаганда. За разлика от украинците американците не са свикнали с идеята, че интернет може да бъде използван срещу тях.“


„Вместо да се опитваме да осмислим онова, което е около нас, ние жадуваме за следващото разкритие. Държавните служители, разбира се, несъвършени и грешащи, стават личности, за които си мислим, че имаме право да познаваме изцяло. Но когато разликата между публично и частно се разпадне, демокрацията е подложена на неудържим натиск.“


„В някои важни отношения американските медии са станали като руските и това прави американците уязвими за руската тактика. Опитът на Русия показва какво се случва с политиката, когато новините губят заземеността си. На Русия й липсват местна и регионална журналистика. Много малко от онова, което се публикува в руските медии, се отнася до преживяванията на руските граждани. Руската телевизия насочва недоверието, което това поражда, срещу другите извън Русия. Със слабостта на местната си преса Америка започва да наподобява Русия.“


„В крайна сметка обаче свободата зависи от гражданите, които могат да правят разлика между истина и онова, което желаят да чуят. Авторитаризмът идва не защото гражданите казват, че го искат, а защото губят способността си да правят разлика между факти и желания.“

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read On Tyranny, I picked up this book because I was aware of how well Snyder understood our times and its perils. I did not realize how timely it was until I began reading it. The book tells how Putin has used a Russian brand of fascism to make himself dictator of Russia and how he has attracted disciples from most parts of the world to carry out his agenda. Realizing that Trump was a failure and loser (his opinion) he was instrumental in getting him elected, in getting Britain out of the EU, in impacting countries all over the globe. He has borrowed methods right out of the Nazi playbook and up until now, has been very successful. What he has not done is to create a policy of succession in his own country and has destroyed the idea there that the rule of law must be respected for a country to enjoy any prosperity or future.

Now, with his latest invasion of Ukraine, the world appears to have awakened to what a danger that this man poses. Even his own citizens are protesting. Maybe there is some hope for a return to full democracy in countries like our own, and for some sense of normalcy and security for the citizens of his own country and Ukraine. What is clear is that the road back to normalcy, if the world should find its way there, will be a long one fraught with danger.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The appeal of the politics of eternity to such men is all too understandable. Far better to shackle a nation and rattle the world than to risk the loss of so much.

Finding a certain upheaval in my life presently and Dr Snyder adroitly details a politics of upheaval, a public culture and foreign policy of manufactured chaos and I am all the worse for it. This is an analysis of the highest order, one illustrating the origins of the 2014 phony war in the Dombas and the collusion which dare not speak its name on Pennsylvania Avenue during the reign of DT45. Frank Capra has been replaced by Sergey Lavrov and now nuclear angst is our pastime, a human diversion from the wrenching costs of the Anthropocene. Snyder describes an epistemological crisis and a permanent distrust. Snyder is a fine philosopher (though I doubt he'd admit such) and a scholar for the ages.

[H.M. Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early on in the Mueller investigation and the Trump–Russia scandal, Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends looked into the camera and asked rhetorically, “Do you even care?,” seemingly asking a question, but really, telling his audience how they should think. This book explains why everyone should care about Trump-Russia.

First, it explains who Putin is, what he believes, and what he wants. Spoiler alert: Putin is not a communist holdover trying rebuild the old U.S.S.R. Rather, he is influenced by far-right fascist “philosophers” who believe in the innocence of Russia in the face of an immoral, decadent, and homosexual west, and he wants to weaken western democracies, destroy the European Union, and replace it with a “Eurasian Union” stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and led by Russia.

Next, the book examines the many actions Putin has taken to undermine democracy. It’s now common knowledge that millions of Russian fake social media accounts promoted emails hacked from the DNC and attacked Hillary Clinton while promoting Donald Trump. But Russian influence operations were also involved with Brexit, the move for Scottish independence, the French Presidential election, and many others. In 2012, Putin fixed his own election by electronically adding votes, and when thousands of Russians took to the streets in protest, he said they were paid as part of a plot initiated by Hillary Clinton and the decadent, homosexual west. Sound familiar? Worst of all, Putin invaded Ukraine and managed to convince people that the Ukrainians themselves were the fascists. In 2014, Russian forces crossed into Ukrainian territory and shot down a civilian aircraft. Nearly three hundred people including children died on flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and the Russian government put out numerous stories in the aftermath, including that this was a Ukrainian plot to assassinate Putin.

Finally, this book delves into the many connections between Trump and Russia and how Trump willingly accepted Putin’s help in the 2016 election. It talks about how Russian money helped create the fictional character of Donald Trump, “successful businessman,” and how Trump’s associates participated in Russian influence operations on social media, and Trump himself lied, calling these events a “hoax.” Snyder also analyzes some of the deeper socio-economic issues in the United States that made all of this possible. His theories of “the politics of inevitability” versus “the politics of eternity” are nothing short of brilliant. Importantly, impeaching Trump alone does not solve the problem. Putin and similar leaders will return, and unless the U.S. addresses its racial and economic inequalities, it will remain vulnerable.

I want to be clear that I have nothing against the Russian people. They are victims in this as well, and they deserve a functioning democracy just like everyone else. As world citizens, we are all in this together, and must all resist fascism.

I also enjoyed Snyder’s, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... It’s much shorter and reads more like a “how to guide” for resisting fascism in the age of Trump. Anyone who likes that book will love this one.

[Darya Silman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a great temptation to DNF the book when Snyder went into blaming Russia for the whole migration crisis in Germany, Brexit, and Donald Trump's victory. I totally didn't get the connection between the American healthcare crisis (commercialization of drug prescription) and Russia. As one reviewer on the largest Russian online bookstore noted, "If you want to know the Western point of view, read this book." (the quote is not word-by-word). And again, I was reminded of the difference between education and propaganda; a difference that lies only in the eyes of the beholder. We are living in an era where every fact instantly becomes a myth. And if most of the time, the result of the fact is at least established (like the death of the plane passengers), in other instances even the fact is blurred or rejected/believed in at face value (like the death of the Snake Island defenders, who were shown alive and unharmed on Russian media the day after the bombardment). More thoughts to follow. I refuse to take the information on our media or Russian media at face value. Everyone lies, as Dr. House says.

If you know a book on the Russian/American politics of the 2000s, you can recommend it.

[Emiliya Bozhilova · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Авторитаризмът започва тогава, когато вече не сме в състояние да направим разлика между истинно и привлекателно. В същото време циникът, който решава, че изобщо няма истина, е гражданинът, който посреща с отворени обятия тирана.”

——
Имам два любими филма на вече нелюбимия ми режисьор Никита Михалков, с ясното съзнание, че краят на единия е пропаганден, а идеята е директно взета от златната ера на Холивуд. Макар и доста ужасно човешко същество, все пак Михалков е добър режисьор (и актьор). За малко тези любими негови филми да станат три - но третият ме ужаси с една съвсем банална на вид сцена, и завинаги след нея задрасках Михалков от плейлистата си. В споменатата сцена едно невежо селянче разговаря с изтупан царски офицер. Офицерът обяснява на хлапето теорията на Дарвин с обобщението, че хората произлизат от маймуните. Ама и царят ли, блещи се дивото селянче. И царят, казва офицерът. Царят - от маймуната, вайка се диването с изцъкления поглед на разбита душа. Скок във времето - същото това диване е вече фанатизиран млад червеноармеец, който извършва зверства срещу благородните и ангелоподобни бели офицери (включително срещу този с Дарвиновата теория). Причината за тази поразяваща трансформация от сладка детска невинност и пълно невежество към мракобесен екстремизъм? Дарвин, драги зрителю! Царят трябва да си остане цар, без връзка с никакви там маймуни, а селянинът да си стои невеж и прост - защото само така духът му ще остане чист и невинен. Само така ще се съхрани националната душевност!

——
Оказва се, че ужасилото ме послание не е случайно. Преди тази книга не бях чувала за руския фашистки философ Иван Илин, прокламиращ върховната и неоспорима руска невинност и произтичащото от това превъзходство, но Никита Михалков е бил запознат, както впрочем и Владимир Путин. Дугин, оказва се, просто копира, клетникът, и съвсем не е бащата на новия руски фашизъм. Този фашизъм е с дълбоки корени - като започнем от руския панславизъм на XIX век. Илин просто го доошлайфа, а падането на СССР предизвиква мнозина в руините на съветската империя да потърсят предефиниране на предопределената роля на нация-световен праведник. Подобно на старозаветните евреи след разрушения Соломонов храм и те имат нужда да утвърдят, че страданието идва от Бога и именно то е знакът за тяхната уникална съдба. Отгласи от ваймарската република в зората на нацизма? Едва ли са случайни…

——
Веднъж щом философката база е положена, останалото е лесно.

Действителността не е реалността и не са фактите в тази реалност. Вместо това имаме мистично предопределение и съдба.

Историята не съществува, а и полза от нея - никаква. Трябват вяра, отдаденост и подчинение на дълга. Защо ни е история, като може да си караме с митология? Дресировката в тези три направления в Русия тъй или иначе е на висота от 1917 г. до 1991 г. А криминалният разпад на държавността и икономиката и формирането на пълна клептокрация в Русия довършват картинката.

Бъдеще Русия няма (освен ако не броим, че морално ще спаси света от Сатаната и срещу извратения Запад), но за сметка на това какво минало си има само! Славно! Чисто! Величаво! На кого са му нужни реформи, работеща икономика, законност, справедливост, благоденствие, щом си има такова приказно минало! На кого са му нужни скучни и периодично дразнещо сменящи се реформатори, след като си има Спасител?

Остава само да закрием малко медии и да убием малко журналисти и политически съперници, както и да приемем закон за … втората световна война! Путин прави всичко това, и още много.

——
След като живописно очертава източниците на зародилия се нов руски фашизъм, основните му проявления и напасването му с установилата се бандитска държава (бандитите обожават приказки за еднолични спасители и световно величие, така не им е нужно да се пънат да свършат някаква работа или - да не дава Господ - да понесат отговорност), Снайдър се прехвърля на Украйна. Не на днешна воюваща Украйна, защото книгата е от 2018 г. Но Украйна на същата криминална приватизация от бандити като в Русия, но с някои мънички и нежелани от Кремъл отлики, състоящи се в някое и друго случайно и плахо проявление на нормалност, довели до Майдана от 2014 г.

Тук с тъга и гняв трябва да призная, че до избухването на формалната “специална операция”, аз - и хората около мен - изобщо не сме били наясно, че на ок. 400 км по море от родната ми Варна се води война, или си мислехме, че там някакви странни етнически неразбирателства са взели лош обрат. У нас нямаше обзорна информация в медиите, а и все още такава липсва. Снайдър прелиства историята на това кътче от света, което ненапразно носи името на покрайнина, и очертава основните исторически линии, които от Х век насам се огъват на Изток и Запад, както и на Юг с османците, но като цяло формират и днешните разломи.

Това, което усещам като липса, е малко по-дълбокият поглед в украинските разделения като манталитет и принадлежност, които не са маловажни. Фокусът е върху имперския поглед на Кремъл към тяхната Новорусия, която никакви случайни граници не са в състояние да откъснат от Русия. Стратегията за пълна дезинтеграция на Украйна е доста ясно заявявана от Кремъл много преди 2022 г.

——
Това, в което Снайдър е доста убедителен, е как войната за Украйна (говорим за периода 2014 - 2018 г., когато “украински доброволци” в руски униформи без опознавателни знаци вършеят в Луганск и Донецк) е война на реалности. А целта на нападателя е да наложи фикцията за външна и вътрешна употреба, да манипулира страхове и емоции, в което - благодарение на Тръмп - постига забележителни успехи в САЩ.

——
С Тръмп Снайдър очертава - твърде накратко, според мен - разломите в днешните САЩ, където се вихри носталгия към расово “чистите” 30-те. Банкрутирала здравна система, партизанщина в голямата политика - звучи познато. На руснаците също им звучи познато и дигиталната информационна война достига майсторски висоти.

——
Ще приключа с репликата на Пилат Понтийски - “А що е истина?”. Често уместен въпрос, който никога не бива да забравяме. Но използван да създаде повсеместно недоверие и цинизъм в океан от често фалшива информация, генерирана на база лични потребителски предпочитания или директно от пропагандни ботове, е първата стъпка към авторитаризма.

——
Някои от тезите на Снайдър (като тази, че Русия не може да се реформира, затова иска да отслаби всички останали и са им насади същите проблеми) ми се виждат твърде опростени, но си струва да им се отдели подобаващо внимание.


4,5⭐️

****
▶️ Цитати:

“🚩 Ако държавите са устойчиви, гражданите могат да си представят промяна, без да се страхуват от катастрофа.”

🚩 “След като гражданите вече не очакват чудеса от бъдещето, носталгията трябва да запълни оставения от утопията вакуум.”

🚩 “Мастилото на политическата фикция е кръвта.”"

🚩 “Нациите са нови образувания, които се отнасят до стари неща.”

🚩 “Да се мисли исторически не означава да се заменя един национален мит с друг”

🚩 “Когато върховенството на закона функционира във висшата политика, винаги има надежда един ден то да се пренесе и във всекидневния живот.”

🚩 “Пропагандата функционира на две равнища: първо, като директен щурм срещу фактите […]; второ, като безусловна прокламация за невинност […].”

🚩 Теорията на “Вечността взема определя и точки от миналото и ги изобразява като моменти на праведност, пренебрегвайки времето между тях.”

🚩 “Неведението ражда невинност”

🚩 “След 2010 г. конкуренцията не е за материални неща, които могат да бъдат консумирани […], а за психологически състояния, които могат да бъдат генерирани в съзнанието на човека.”

🚩 “Авторитаризмът идва, не защото гражданите казват, че го искат, а защото губят способността си да правят разлика между факти и желания.”

🚩 “Вместо да обсъждат реформите, политиците на вечността сочат заплахите. Вместо да предложат бъдеще с възможности и надежди, те предлагат вечно настояще с определени врагове и изкуствени кризи.”

🚩 “Политикът на вечността дефинира врагове, вместо да формулира политики.”

🚩 “Хората придобиват усещане, че печелят, защото вярват, че другите губят.”

🚩 “Да се търси истината означава да се намери път между конформизма и самодоволството…”

🚩 “Фашизмът е лъжата, че врагът, избран от даден лидер, трябва да е враг на всички.”

🚩 “Когато неравенството е прекалено голямо, истината е твърде обременяваща за окаяните и твърде нищожна за привилегированите.”

[HAMiD · Rating 5 out of 5]

فاشیسم عقیده ای غلط است که می گوید، دشمنِ منتخبِ یک رهبر حتمن دشمن همه ی مردم است. در آن صورت سیاست از احساسات و عقیده ی اشتباه سرچشمه می گیرد. صلح دست نیافتنی می شود چون وجود دشمن خارجی برای کنترل مردم لازم است. یک فاشیست از مردم حرف می زند اما منظورش "بعضی از مردم" است، کسانی که او در آن زمان ایشان را ترجیح می دهد.

زمانی که برای نخستین بار مستندِ "زمستان در آتش: نبرد اوکراین برای آزادی" ساخته ی یوگنی آفینیفسکی را نگاه می کردم پرسشم این شد که اکنون روسیه با چه سازوکاری پس از فروریختنِ نظام کمونیستی کارش را دارد پیش می برد؟ آنها اکنون در رودررویی شان با پیرامون و جهان چه می کنند؟ و دوامِ وضعیت تا کجا و چگونه خواهد بود؟ اگرچه پیش از اینها سینمای مدرنِ روسیه بسیار یاری رسان بود برای فهمِ بخشی از رخدادهای اجتماعی و آنچه که مافیای دولتی و فساد حکومتی خوانده می شود و کمابیش دانسته هایی از گوشه و کنارهایی که در برخی کتاب ها به دست رسیده بود و جست و جوهایی اندک، اما این تکه پاره ها در ذهن مانده بود و آن چنان نضج نداشت تا نوبتی که کتابِ گرانقدر "جبر جغرافیا" نوشته ی تیم مارشال را خواندم و سپس رسیدم به این کتاب: در برابر ناآزادی، که می شود گفت گواهی درستی است درباره ی آن رودررویی که در پی اش بوده ام
تیموتی اسنایدر اگرچه در چند فصل به نقشِ روسیه ی اُلیگارش، ولادیمیر پوتین و یارانش در اثرگذاری بر سیاست جهانی می پردازد اما از انفعال و دروغ زنی های دیگر حکومت ها نیز چشم پوشی نمی کند تا فرض نخستِ کتاب که اهمیت مسوولیت فردی برای رسیدن به فضای دلخواه است و نمی شود و نباید انکارش کرد و از آن کناره گرفت را کاملن نشان بدهد. وا دادن در برابر ناآگاهی و دل سپردن به دروغِ سیستماتیک سرانجامش رسیدن به وضعیتی است که بخش بسیار بزرگی از یک جامعه جان فدای درصد بسیار ناچیزی از همان جامعه خواهند شد. درصدی ناچیز که قبضه کننده ی منابع و ساختار است و هیچ تعهد و دلبستگی ای به جامعه ندارد و هر روز با بحران آفرینی و پرداختن به دشمنِ ساختگی در پی عادی نشان دادنِ وضعیتی است که خود آن را سبب شده است و در بن بستِ ناکارآمدی خویش در تلاش برای پیشبرد و بقای آن است. چنین است که در هر فصلِ کتاب، انتخاب هایی پیش روی ما طرح می شود که پذیرفتن یا نپذیرفتن اش نیاز به درکِ وضعیت و چگونگی منشِ حاکمان و کنش یک یک ما دارد. انتخاب هایی که دقیقن به عهده ی هر فرد است که با نادیده گرفتن این مسوولیت، خودخواسته به دامان حکومت توتالیتر فرو می افتد. حکومتی که می خواهد با از میان بردن مساله ی خصوصی و تبدیل کردنش به مساله ی عمومی فضای شایعه سازی و انکار حقیقت را به گونه ای حاکم کند که تمایز میان امر حقیقی و امر ساختگی از میان برود و کج رفتاری های خویش و نبود مدیریت اش را امر بدیهی و از قضا درست نشان بدهد. چه بسا از میان رفتنِ ساختارِ اقتصادی یک کشور، بی اخلاقی اجتماعی و سیاسی، ناتوانی در دوستی با دیگران و پرهیز از جنگ، در آغاز نتیجه ی همدستی هر فرد از جامعه است که با پی گرفتنِ سود شخصی و بسنده کردن به بخشی از واقعیت که تنها در خدمت اوست طبقه ی الیگارش را برای هرچه بدکار و دروغگو بودن پرتوان تر می کند

بیست و یکمِ شهریور 1399

[Mircea Petcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cine a fost Ivan Ilin?

"Ilin murise uitat in Elvetia; in 2005, Putin a organizat o reinhumare la Moscova. Documentele personale ale lui Ilin si-au croit drum catre Universitatea Statului Michigan; in 2006, Putin a trimis un emisar care sa le revendice. La acel moment, Putin deja il cita pe Ilin in mesajele lui prezidentiale anuale, in fata parlamentului rus reunit. Erau discursuri importante, compuse de Putin insusi. In anii 2010, Putin s-a bazat pe autoritatea lui Ilin ca sa explice de ce Rusia trebuia sa submineze Uniunea Europeana si sa invadeze Ucraina. Cand i s-a cerut sa numeasca un istoric, Putin l-a citat pe Ilin drept autoritate din trecut."

Ivan Ilin este parintele fascismului rusesc.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book at first, but it turned out to be the best investigation of Russia’s imperialistic kleptocracy that I’ve read. The first part describes the development and features of the Putin clique’s ideology. And since their ideology is basically a vague set of claims to purity and supremacy, the description of it seems like a series of boring declarative statements rather than a story. But then Snyder starts giving detailed stories, of how the new autocrats eliminated their opponents and moved to impose their manifest destiny on all regions of the old Russian empire. Next he details the cynical tactics used to undermine Western unity in the EU and the USA. It’s very well documented. Maybe I’ll just give two short quotes that suggest food for thought:

“Authoritarianism arrives not because people say they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.”
“American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own population.”

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Information' in the digital sense is infinite, knowledge ever scarcer, and wisdom fleeting.

SF writer John Scalzi (who is the last person I want to take on in a verbal duel) recently fulminated against a cretin on Twitter who suggested we should all read history books right now rather than his just-published ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’. Which, as its title suggests, is a fun and tongue-in-cheek read. Scalzi rightfully pointed out that people need escapism as much as (and probably even more so) than historic elucidation in an era where the world is spinning into hell faster than Dorothy could click her heels together three times. Anyway, if you need a succinct, impartial, and highly informative synopsis of Russian-Ukraine relations to date, leading up to Russia’s cyber-interference in the US election, which saddled the world with Trump for a ghastly presidential term, then this is the book for you. That is the Tweet (er, review.)

[Radiantflux · Rating 5 out of 5]

41st book for 2018.

This book is a slow burn, systematically laying down the case for the rise of fascism in Russia, it's war in the Ukraine, and it's systematic attacks on the West (including Brexit), leading up to the final chapter that assesses Trump's presidency and his obvious ties to Russia.

While at times I found Synder's writing style a little irritating, I also found his ability to call a spade a spade very refreshing. The content is first rate, and this is a MUST read for anyone wanting to understand Russia, Trump, and the rise of nationalism in the West.

5-stars.