is Professor of History at Yale University, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Among his publications are: Sketches From a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, 2005), The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York 2008), Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Penguin, 2015), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017) and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Tim Duggan Books, 2018). In May 2009, he delivered the keynote speech at the Eurozine conference ‘European histories’ in Vilnius.
For three decades, Memorial has delivered the facts that have enabled Russians to seek the truth about the Soviet past. Without its research, international accounts of the GULAG would also have been impossible. The attempt to close the NGO is the latest move in the Putin regime’s attempt to monopolize history.
Defenders of human rights often face high stakes. When the Ukrainian Helsinki Group openly challenged the Soviet Union in the name of the 1975 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, young dissidents soon became political prisoners. The price for being a non-conformist was steep yet encouraged solidarity, paving the way to Euromaidan.
Sadopopulism and the politics of eternity: Shalini Randeria and Timothy Snyder discuss why it’s impossible to talk sensibly about Trump without invoking the history of fascism.
The European Union was originally the creation of failed or failing European empires, even if it now tends to pose as an assembly of innocent little nation states. Facing up to the responsibility for half a millennium of imperialism is painful, but doing so would allow Europe to recognize its unique and auspicious recovery from empire, argues Timothy Snyder in the speech he delivered for Europe Day 2019 at Judenplatz, Vienna.
As a bruised apple attracts flies, human thoughtlessness draws algorithms. Digital beings encourage our false beliefs, exploit our anxieties, and then use us as alibis for what they have done. Timothy Snyder examines what Turing said about the digital threat to a human future.
In ‘The Road to Unfreedom’, historian Timothy Snyder traces the intellectual roots of modern authoritarianism in Russia and how its influence has spread, not least in the West. In the following exchange, three east-central European scholars, brought together by ‘Razpotja’, critique Snyder’s new book – and Snyder responds.
Der russische Philosoph Iwan Iljin starb 1954 vergessen im Schweizer Exil. Seine Wiederentdeckung verdankt er Putins Regime. Es stützt sich auf ihn als Vordenker einer Politik, die die westlichen Werte im Namen eines neuen Autoritarismus systematisch untergräbt, mit Erfolg. Man könnte, meint Timothy Snyder, in Iljin den Propheten unseres Zeitalters sehen.
Historian Timothy Snyder, in conversation with Simas Čelutka of the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis, discusses how to approach problematic works of political theory. In addition to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Snyder has recently studied the works of Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century Russian writer whose ideas are influencing the Kremlin’s current world-view.
Don’t fall for the official Russian line on WWII, historian Timothy Snyder warns German MPs in a speech at the Bundestag. In the debate over Germany’s historical responsibility for its wartime actions in Ukraine, ‘Germany cannot afford to get major issues of its history wrong.’
In his recent book Black Earth, the historian Timothy Snyder analyses the Holocaust in terms of the destruction of the state. This allows him to compare the roles of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in causing the Holocaust, despite their different ideologies and intentions. In interview with the Slovenian journal Razpotja, Snyder explains this argument and its implications for contemporary conflicts in Europe and beyond.
Russia has adopted an open policy of dividing the European Union and undermining the security of its members, of which the Dutch referendum questioning the Association Agreement with Ukraine is simply a small part. So says Timothy Snyder in a succinct account of the background to the 6 April referendum.
As Russia revives the tradition of wars of aggression on European territory, Vladimir Putin has chosen to rehabilitate the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as good foreign policy. But why violate now what was for so long a Soviet taboo? Timothy Snyder explains.
In these impressions of the Maidan protests collected by Timothy Snyder and Tatiana Zhurzhenko, one hears the voices of those who witnessed history in the making. The role of civil society and the Russian-speaking middle class, as well as individual existential decisions, also come to the fore.
Commemorative causality, the confusion between present resonance and past power, denies history its proper subject, writes Timothy Snyder. What is easiest to represent becomes what it is easiest to argue and, in lieu of serious explanations, only emotional reflexes remain.
If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag – generally taken to be adequate or even final symbols of the evil of mass slaughter – we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
