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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Unfreedom-Russia-Europe-America-ebook/
Book Review | India Foundation Blogs
Timothy Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University in the USA, is a recognized authority on authoritarian ideologies and their ability to undermine and nibble away at democracies. He has authored several books, the recent being a short educative essay titled “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”.
In his book “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America”, Snyder continues his analysis of the rise of authoritarianism by focusing exclusively on Russia. It is essentially a clinical exploration of the politics of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, who, according to Snyder, is exploiting the “capacious vulnerability within the European Union and the United States” to push forward with his agenda in the name of Eurasian integration.
Snyder argues that although Putin began his presidency in 1999 on the plank of anti-authoritarianism and pro-democracy by insisting that “history has proven that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government, are transient. Only democratic systems are intransient”, he soon turned into an authoritarian himself. One twentieth century philosopher who came in handy for Putin was Ivan Ilyin. Ilyin abhorred democracy. “The principle of democracy is the irresponsible human atom”, he declared, adding “we must reject the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics” as well as “blind faith in the number of votes”.
Snyder highlights how Putin brought back Ilyin into Russia’s political discourse in the early part of his presidency. Ilyin died in Switzerland in 1954. Soviet Russia, in the throes of post-Stalin palpitations, didn’t bother to mourn much the death of this anti-Bolshevik fascist. But Putin found in Ilyin a useful symbol and resurrected him. Ilyin was reburied in Moscow in 2005 under Putin’s gaze. Putin started speaking about him often, inside the Duma and outside. His shenanigans got the clue and started projecting Ilyin as the philosopher of Russia’s future. It suited Putin because Ilyin, in true fascist tradition, talked about a ‘redeemer’ who would be a godsend and save Russia from the Communists on the one hand and the West on the other.
Hitler propagated that his was a divine mission. “I believe that I am acting as the almighty Creator would want”, he wrote in his autobiography. Ilyin too argued on similar lines that Russia would get a ‘redeemer’ who would make the ‘chivalrous sacrifice’ of shedding the blood of others to take power. Ilyin’s redeemer will be “sufficiently manly” and “we will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation”.
Putin naturally loved Ilyin because, in Snyder’s words “what robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer”. Putin’s respect for Ilyin was described by Snyder as the politics of inevitability, a version of fascism. “Politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives’”, he writes, cautioning that it will deny individual responsibility and give rise to politics of eternity.
Putin’s authoritarian politics has turned Russia into a de facto one-party state. But his agenda goes beyond Russia. Building up Eurasia as a counterweight to the European Union, where politics of inevitability will play out at its fascist best, is the important mission for Putin. While Ilyin used the Orthodox Christian vocabulary like ‘salvation’ for justifying his fascist political ideas, Putin chose words like civilisation and culture to denote the same. “The great Russian mission is to unify and bind civilisation”, Putin wrote, adding, “In such a core-civilisation, there are no national minorities, and the principle of recognition of ‘friend and foe’ is defined on the basis of a common culture.”
“That politics begins with ‘friend or foe’ is the basic fascist idea, formulated by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and endorsed and propagated by Ilyin”, Snyder quips. One may argue that Snyder demonises Putin from an extreme liberal point of view. However, the later part of the book which deals with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2013 and occupation of Crimea in the name of ‘one civilisation’ certainly gives credence to Snyder’s warning about the authoritarian overdrive of Putin.
Snyder also argues that in his mission to undermine the European Union, Putin has used his army of bots and trolls to ensure that Brexit becomes a reality. “Brexit was a major triumph for Russian foreign policy, and a sign that a cyber campaign directed from Moscow could change reality”, he writes.
Then comes the most interesting part of the book, in which Snyder convincingly argues that Trump was Russia’s and Putin’s choice for America’s presidency. So much controversy has erupted over Trump’s links with Russia or the role played by the Russians in his election in 2016. But despite best efforts by the US Congress, the judiciary, the media and civil society, Trump succeeded in negating that propaganda during his four-year tenure as the President.
However, Snyder comes out with massive conjectures in his book linking Trump with the Russian oligarchs and Putin’s media and internet tech-machine. He explains how the Trump Tower in New York became the hub of Russian operatives during the US Presidential elections in 2016, and how a massive vilification campaign against Hillary Clinton, the Democrat candidate and an equally massive support campaign in favour of Trump as a “successful businessman” was unleashed by Russian media channels including RT, fake Facebook accounts, Twitter bots, algorithms, and real persons – in a way the entire internet.
Snyder worries that American institutions like the Congress, judiciary and media failed to understand the trappings of the authoritarian campaign launched from Russia and fell victims to it many times. He insists that it will surely take the West down the “path of unfreedom”.
“It would help the cause of democracy if citizens knew more about Russian policy, and if the concepts of “news”, “journalism”, and “reporting” could be preserved on the internet. 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” Snyder meaningfully warns.
The book is a good wake-up call in trying times for those who still have faith in democracy and the rule of law as against autocracy and the rule of the ‘redeemer’.
https://chintan.indiafoundation.in/articles/book-review-the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-europe-america/
Chilling and Unignorable - Review From The Guardian
Even presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin came up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin.
Ilyin is a figure who might have been easily lost to history were it not for the posthumous patronage of Russia’s leader. Putin first drew attention to him – Ilyin was a philosopher, not a historian, a Russian who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954 – when he organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains for reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.
Timothy Snyder begins his pattern-making deconstruction of recent Russian history – which by design, he argues, is indistinguishable from recent British and American history – with a comprehensive account of Putin’s reverence for the work of Ilyin. Like much of Snyder’s analysis in this unignorable book, the framing offers both a disturbing and persuasive insight.
Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy (he had been psychoanalysed by Freud). A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin.
To establish that dystopian state, Snyder argues, Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomising” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorships under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theatre director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralisation, personification, idealisation”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.
In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a bodged attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.
The second half of Snyder’s book explores how Russia has sought to export this policy to those who threaten it, primarily through a mass disinformation war, a 2.0 update of Sun Tzu’s “confusion to our enemy” principle, with the aim of dividing and polarising pluralist democracies – in particular the EU and the US – against themselves.
Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, sought to spread fake news to undermine faith in the democratic process, at the same time giving overt support to European separatists and Russia TV regulars such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. He details how, for example, Russian “news” sources spread the idea that the Scottish independence vote had been “rigged” by “establishment forces” with the aim of undermining faith in democratic institutions in Britain before the EU referendum. We are still awaiting, of course, the full disentangling of Donald Trump’s complex relations with Putin’s government, and the many links between his campaign organisation and Russian operatives. As with Luke Harding’s book Collusion, however, there is more than enough here to keep Robert Mueller busy for a long while yet.
One unavoidable conclusion of this depressing tale lies in the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy has been so successful in shaking faith in the sanctity of fact and expert knowledge. A measure of that assault comes when you examine your reaction to this meticulously researched and footnoted book as you read it. Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale. His book Bloodlands, about the fallout of second world war atrocities on the eastern front, won the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize and was described by the late, great Tony Judt as “the most important book to appear on this subject in decades”. And yet as he unfolds this contemporary sequel, you might well hear, as I did from time to time, those sneery voices now lodged in your head that whisper of “liberal elitism” and “fake news” and “MSM” and “tempting conspiracies”, and which refuse ever, quite, to be quieted. How did we get here? Snyder has a good idea.
This Is Not How We Got Here
How did we end up here? Yale scholar and historian, Professor Timothy Snyder’s latest book attempts to explore the issues behind Russian revanchism (a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory), the rise of “illiberalism,” and Western weakness. Snyder worries that the United States may be sliding to autocracy, and has joined the “resistance.” He is not the only one. Since Britain voted to raise the drawbridge across the grey moat a cottage industry has emerged of such polemical texts, books, and op-eds, from sources including Frum, Goldberg, Ioffe, Applebaum, Boot, Mounk, and the entire editorial boards of The Economist, Washington Post, and the Financial Times. Even Francis Fukuyama has waded into the conversation, securing a book deal to explain on why his last thesis about the End of History in the Hegelian sense was proved wrong.
These varied commentators offer explanations that tend to be unsurprisingly similar. The post WWII “liberal order” is collapsing, Russia is a revisionist power determined to wreck Western unity by interfering in Europe, electing Trump, and waging wars over territory; and any nation-state that believes in a Christian, conservative, nationalist democracy, or opposes open borders, NGO activism, mass migration, and transgender rights, is by definition illiberal, and therefore evil. These accusations stand independent of society, history, cultural background, or even public opinion. “This book is an attempt to win back the present for historical time, and thus to win back historical time for politics,” thunders Snyder. He clarifies that the way forward is thus to understand the set of interconnected events, from Russia to the United States, at a time when “factuality” itself is put into question. This is, in fact, one of the predominant themes of Snyder’s sparsely sourced polemic: that facts are being abandoned for nostalgia and romanticized notions of the past.
Snyder argues that the great adventure of European integration which started in the 2000s, including the expansion of the liberal institutions, and by virtue of that, EU hegemony in the east, came to an end as Russia elected Donald Trump. “The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all.” It seems remarkable, that for all his authoritarian tendencies, Trump has managed to gut the all-encompassing Obama-era administrative state, and seems so far either incapable or incompetent to fill up all his government and ambassadorial posts. Authoritarians, especially fascists, are usually more disciplined, adroit, and zealous to capture all the administrative apparatus. Moreover, though there was Russian interference in the election, the evidence that such interference swayed votes and resulted in Trump’s election is at best tenuous.
Snyder traces the roots of Russian revanchism to a relatively obscure philosopher named Ivan Ilyin. According to Snyder, Ilyin is Putin’s favorite philosopher and Putin, along with much of Russian ruling elite, has internalized Ilyin’s dictums. “As Ilyin saw matters, ‘the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.’ Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia.” Modern Russia has rehabilitated Ilyin, and Ilyin’s ideas are arguably the guiding light of the Russian political and military class. “If European states were empires, wrote Ilyin, it was natural that Russia was one and should remain one. Empire was the natural state of affairs; fascist empires would be most successful; Russia would be the perfect fascist empire.” Snyder places great emphasis on Ilyin’s role in Russian revanchism, but also discusses the similarly quirky philosophers Lev Gumilev and Alexander Dugin. Naming a specific philosopher as a causal variable behind the foreign policy of a great power is a polemical device that has been done before—far more masterfully—even though individual agency is not now taken seriously as a causal factor in international relations. Snyder also maintains this line of argument. “Like Ilyin, Putin wrote of Russian civilization as eliciting fraternity. “The Great Russian mission,” wrote Putin, “is to unify and bind civilization. In such a state-civilization there are no national minorities, and the principle of recognition of ‘friend or foe’ is defined on the basis of a common culture.” Snyder laments the Orthodox Church’s support for the Russian president’s social policies. According to Snyder, Putin offers “masculinity as an argument against democracy.”
In sum, Snyder’s central thesis is that Russia is a nationalist, hyper-masculine, reactionary great power that wants to return to an age of soft imperium and spread Christian social-conservative ideas across a postmodern, effete, liberal, and secular Europe. This is the cause of Brexit, of European disintegration, the war in Ukraine, the election of Trump, and the overall terrible misfortune of humanity.
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/this-is-not-how-we-got-here/
On the Book Title - On the Road from Unfreedom
Snyder’s argument is a jab at neoliberal ideas and policies that have arguably exacerbated inequalities within countries such as the United States and Poland. The book’s title, The Road to Unfreedom, echoes that of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. Hayek was a famous Austrian-born exponent of neoliberalism in the United States. For Snyder, the political safety valve against deepening social and economic inequalities is precisely what Hayek considered the cause of modern enslavement: the social-democratic welfare state.
https://inference-review.com/letter/on-the-road-from-unfreedom
Book Excerpt - The road to unfreedom If we do not wake up, the free world
may be gone very soon, says Timothy Snyder.
https://tippingpoint.net/the-road-to-unfreedom/
Review of ‘The Road to Unfreedom’ by Timothy Snyder
https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/blog-review-the-road-to-unfreedom/
