I thought I would share this short review of Timothy Snyder’s book of that name from Jamie Mayerfield:
If you want to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I strongly recommend Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book “The Road to Unfreedom,” which I recently finished rereading. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the book’s main topic, with a focus on the sources and motives of Putin’s behavior. Snyder’s prescient analysis makes powerful sense of what is happening now.
The book’s main theme is a warning against the “politics of eternity” on the one hand and “the politics of inevitability” on the other. The former constructs an innocent nation eternally victimized by eternal enemies. The latter holds up a simplistic formula, such as free markets, that is thought to set nations on a path of unstoppable progress, with no need of moral agency. (You can think of this as Snyder’s critique of neoliberalism.)The politics of eternity perfectly describes the Russian imperialist thought that has guided Putin and his advisors. Snyder spotlights the role of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), the avowed Russian fascist quoted and venerated by Putin. The Russian imperialists are obsessed with Ukraine, and cannot bear the thought of it leading an existence apart from Russia.
A key turning point was 2011-12, when Putin used fraud to win presidential and parliamentary elections and was faced with widespread democratic protests. He responded by increasing domestic repression while ramping up imperialist discourse and figuring the West as Russia’s implacable enemy.Snyder argues that Putin saw the subversion of Western democracy and the European Union as necessary for his domestic political project. Snyder gives us the essential concept of “schizo-fascism” to describe the practice of actual fascists calling their opponents fascist. He provides many examples.
Turning to Europe, Snyder punctures “the fable of the wise nation,” a false history of self-contained nation states learning from experience to renounce war. In actual history, these were former imperial powers that could survive in a post-imperialist age only by means of regional integration.
Snyder reminds us that for decades the Russian government has been built on a foundation of slick propaganda and media manipulation. He dissects the false framing that Russia successfully exported to the rest of the world regarding Ukraine.
He is unsparing in his criticism of the right-wing and left-wing pundits – including Seumas Milne, John Pilger, Stephen Cohen, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Lyndon LaRouche, and Ron Paul – who spread Kremlin propaganda. He writes: “Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality.”In 2013-14, ordinary Ukrainians came together in large numbers to defend their freedoms. At an immense cost they succeeded in bringing about a democratic revolution. But Westerners circulating Kremlin propaganda erased their achievement by casting the event as a Western-backed Nazi coup.
Snyder writes: “The Maidan began as Ukrainian citizens sought to find a solution for Ukrainian problems. It ended with Ukrainians trying to remind Europeans and Americans that moments of high emotion require sober thought. Distant observers jumped at the shadows of the story, only to tumble into a void darker than ignorance.”
He continues: “It was tempting, amidst the whirl of Russian accusations in 2014, to make some kind of compromise, as many Europeans and Americans did, and accept the Russian claim that the Maidan was a ‘right-wing coup.’”The last chapter is an indictment of inequality in the United States. Snyder understands the Trump phenomenon as the product of the politics of inevitability leaving a desolate social landscape that creates the conditions for a politics of eternity (Make American Great Again). He reminds us of the close ties between Trump and Putin-backed oligarchs in Russia.
Snyder emphasizes the danger of lies and propaganda, so blithely encouraged by the Republican Party. “Many Americans did not see the difference between someone who constantly lied and never apologized and someone who almost never did and corrected his or her mistakes. They were accepting the description of the world offered by Surkov and RT: no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them. That way lies authoritarianism. Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.”
The book is very informative, so you will learn crucial factual background to current events. It is also theoretical rich. I think that scholars in my own subdiscipline of political theory can learn by studying and engaging with Snyder’s ideas.
I am anything but an expert on this subject but I have read a lot of Timothy Snyder (not this one, yet) and I find him to be very persuasive. I am confident that whatever he has to say on this subject is worth reading.