And these are very much books about the way Ukraine has been repeatedly invaded and turned into a subject by surrounding powers.Īnd in these books, something Snyder is very alert to is the way that imagined histories of Ukraine, what he would call stories or myth, feed the justifications used for these bloody invasions of Ukraine. He’s written six books entirely or partially about Ukraine. Snyder’s core academic subject is Ukraine. They come from his immersion in Ukrainian politics and history. These are books about what it feels like and what you do when your society is beginning to creep down or trip down the road to authoritarianism.īut that perspective for Snyder, those learnings, they don’t come from his immersion in American politics.

In recent years, he became something of a hero to liberals for a series of books particularly “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” which became something like a Bible for worried liberals early in the Trump era. And in that book, Snyder writes, “There is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given, and history, the connections that we work to make - if we wish.” If we wish. But if you read it, it is very much about Ukraine. There is this line I’ve been thinking about from Timothy Snyder’s book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” which is a book that, when it came out, people understood it’s about totalitarianism or authoritarianism coming to America. Transcript Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans The renowned historian on Putin’s myths, Ukrainian identity and the West’s “politics of inevitability.” Tuesday, March 15th, 2022

Snyder timothy on tyranny