The Road to Unfreedom
by TIMOTHY SNYDER
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE 1
CHAPTER ONE INDIVIDUALISM OR TOTALITARIANISM 15
CHAPTER TWO SUCCESSION OR FAILURE
CHAPTER THREE INTEGRATION OR EMPIRE
CHAPTER FOUR NOVELTY OR ETERNITY 111
CHAPTER FIVE TRUTH OR LIES 159
CHAPTER SIX EQUALITY OR OLIGARCHY 217
EPILOGUE 279
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES
INDEX
PROLOGUE
(2010)
My
son was born in Vienna. It was a difficult delivery, and the first my
baby. He breathed, his mother held him for a moment, and then she was
wheeled to an operating room. The midwife, Ewa, handed him to me. My
son and I were a bit lost in what happened next, but we stuck
together. He was looking upward with unfocused violet eyes as the
surgeons ran past us at a dead sprint, footfalls and snaps of masks,
a blur of green scrubs.The next day all seemed well. The nurses
instructed me to depart the ward at the normal time, five o'clock in
the afternoon, leaving mother and child in their care until the
morning. I could now, a little belatedly, send out a birth
announcement by email. Some friends read the good news at the same
moment that they learned of a catastrophe that took the lives of
others. One friend, a fellow scholar whom I had met in Vienna in a
different century, had rushed to board an airplane in Warsaw. My
message went out at the speed of light, but it never caught up to
him.
2
THE
YEAR 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years
before had eliminated much of the world's wealth, and a halting
recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of
the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the
enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A
decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end
of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the
Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.
I
was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I
admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published
in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in
assembling imperial fragments into the world's larg- est economy and
most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a
meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In
the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would
not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.In
2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a
degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in
a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his
hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth
century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American
assumptions that capitalism
was unalterable and democracy inevitable.
Tony had written of the irresponsible in- tellectuals who aided
totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about
a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of
ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized
inequality. As he and I spoke, I was writing a history of the
political mass murders committed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. It began with people and their
homes, in particular the Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, 3
Balts, and Poles who had experienced both regimes in the places where
Nazi and Soviet power overlapped. Although the book's chapters were
grim-planned starvations, death pits, gas chambers—its premise was
optimistic: the causes of mass murder could be ascer- tained, the
words of the dead recalled. The truth could be told, and lessons
could be learned. A chapter of that book was devoted to a turning
point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance that began
the Second World War in Europe.
In
September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded
Poland, each with the goal of destroy ing the Polish state and the
Polish political class. In April 1940, the Soviet secret police
murdered 21892
Polish prisoners of war, most of them educated reserve officers. The
men (and one woman) were shot in the back of the head at five killing
sites, one of them the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in the Russian
republic of the Soviet Union. For Poles, the Katyn massacre came to
stand for Soviet repression generally.
After
the Second World War, Poland was a communist regime and a Soviet
satellite, so Katyn could not be discussed. Only after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify what
had happened. Soviet documents left no doubt that the mass murder had
been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. Since
the end of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation had been
struggling to address the legacy of Stalinist terror. On Febru- ary
3, 2010, as I was finishing my book, the Russian prime minister made
a surprising proposal to his Polish counterpart: a joint com-
memoration of Katyn that April, on the seventieth anniversary of the
crime.
At
midnight on the first of April, the day my son was due to be born, I
sent my book to the publisher. On the seventh of April a Polish
governmental delegation, led by the Polish prime minister, arrived in
Russia. The next day my wife gave birth.
Two
days after that, a second
Polish delegation
set out for Russia. It included the Polish president and his wife,
commanders of the Polish armed forces, parliamentary deputies, civic
activists, priests, 4 and family members of those murdered at Katyn
in 1940. One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta, an admired
political theorist and the vice minister of culture responsible for
commemoration. Early in the morning of Saturday, April 10, 2010,
Tomek
boarded an airplane.
It
crashed
at
8:41 a.m., short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield
at Smolensk.
There were no survivors. In a maternity ward in Vienna a cell phone
rang, and a new mother shouted in Polish across the room. The next
evening, I read the responses to my birth announce ment. One friend
was concerned that I understand the tragedy amidst my own joy: "So
that you don't find yourself in a difficult situation, I have to tell
you that Tomek Merta was killed." Another friend, whose name was
on the passenger list, wrote to say that he had changed his mind and
stayed home. His wife was due to give birth a few weeks later.He
signed off: "Henceforth everything will be different."IN
AUSTRIAN maternity wards, mothers stay for four days, so that nurses
can teach about feeding, bathing, and care. This is long enough for
families to become acquainted, for parents to learn what languages
they share, for conversations to begin. The following day in the
maternity ward the talk in Polish was of conspiracy. Rumors had taken
shape: the Russians had shot down the airplane; the Polish government
had been in on the plot to kill the Polish president, who was of a
different party than the prime minister. A new Polish mother asked me
what I thought. I said that this was all very unlikely.The day after
that, my family was allowed to go home. With the baby sleeping in a
basket, I wrote two articles about Tomek: one an obituary in Polish,
the other an account of the disaster in English that concluded with a
hopeful word about Russia. A Polish president had lost his life
hastening to commemorate a crime committed on Russian soil. I
expressed the hope that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin,
would use the occasion to consider 5
the
history of Stalinism more broadly. Perhaps that was a reasonable
appeal amidst grief in April 2010;
as a prediction, it could not have been more
wrong.
Henceforth
everything was different. Putin, who had already served two terms as
president before becoming да
prime
minister, announced in September 2011 that he wanted to be president
again. His party did poorly in parliamentary elections that December,
but was granted a majority in parliament regardless. Putin became
president again in May 2012 after another election that seemed
flawed.
He then saw to it that discussions of the Soviet past, such as the
one he himself had initiated about Katyn, would be treated as
criminal offenses. In Poland, the Smolensk catastrophe united society
for a day, and
then polarized it for years.
The obsession with the disaster of April 2010 grew with time,
crowding out the Katyn massacre that its victims had meant to
commemorate, indeed crowding out all
historical
episodes of Polish
suffering.
Poland and Russia had ceased to reflect on history. Times were
changing. Or perhaps our sense of time was changing.
The
European Union fell under a shadow. Our
Vienna maternity
ward,
where
inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the
success of the European project. It exemplified services that were
taken for granted in much of Europe but were unthinkable
in the United States. The
same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me
to the hospital: normal in Europe, unattainable
in America.
In
2013, Russia turned against the European Union, condemning it as
decadent and hostile. Its success might encourage Russians to think
that former empires could become prosperous democracies, and so its
existence was suddenly at risk.
As
Russia's neighbor Ukraine drew closer to the European Union, Russia
invaded
the
country and annexed some of its territory in 2014. By 2015, Russia
had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare
beyond
Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with
the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans.
In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had
long 6 advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their
president, an outcome Russians had worked to achieve. Among other
shortcomings, this
new U.S. president could
not reflect upon history:
he was unable to commemorate the Holocaust when the occasion arose,
nor condemn Nazis in his own country.
The
twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned.
A new
form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America,
a new
unfreedom to suit a new time.
I
WROTE those two articles about the Smolensk disaster after years of
thinking about the politics of life and death, on a night when the
membrane between them seemed thin. "Your happiness amidst
unhappiness," one of my friends had written, and the first
seemed as undeserved as the second. Endings and beginnings were too
close, or seemed to be in the wrong order, death
before life, dying before living;
time was out of joint. On or about April 2010, human
character changed.
When
I wrote the birth announcement of my first child, I had to go to my
office and use a computer; smartphones were not yet widespread. I
expected replies over the course of days or weeks, not at once. By
the time my daughter was born two years later, this had all changed:
to own a smartphone was the norm, and responses were either immediate
or not forthcoming. Having
two children is quite different than having one;
and yet I think that, for all of us, time became more fragmented and
elusive as the internet became social media. The
machines that were meant to create time were consuming it
instead. As we lost our ability to concentrate and recall, everything
seemed new. After Tony's death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss
the book we had written together, which he had entitled Thinking the
Twentieth Century. I realized as I traveled around the United States
that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I
watched Russian television toy
with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack
Obama had been born in Africa. 7 It struck me as odd that the
American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long
thereafter. Americans and Europeans were guided through the new
century by a tale about "the end of history," by what I
will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is
just more of the present,
that the laws of progress are known, that
there are no alternatives,
and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist
version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought
democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history
brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and
hence chose integration and prosperity.
Before
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own
politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology
brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution
enacts utopia.
When
this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians
of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves
completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans
reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth
of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling
themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after
the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without
history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such
stories,
resisted facts.
The
fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after
1991 showed well enough that
the fall of one system did
not create a
blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated
rights.
Iraq
in
2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of
America's illegal war reflected upon its
disastrous
consequences.
The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation
of campaign contributions
in the United States in 2010 magnified
the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters.
As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer
Americans believed that the future held a better version of the
present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods
taken for granted elsewhere - education, pensions, 8 9 10 F G H 8
health care, transport, parental leave, vacations - Americans could
be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.
The
collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another
experience of time: the
politics of eternity.
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.
Progress gives way to doom. In power, eternity politicians
manufacture
crisis
and
manipulate
the resultant emotion.
To
distract
from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians
instruct
their citizens to experience elation
and outrage at short intervals,
drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity
politicians
belittle and undo the achievements of
countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using
technology to transmit
political fiction,
both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny
truth and
seek to reduce
life to spectacle and feeling.
PERHAPS
MORE was happening in the 2010s than we grasped. Perhaps the tumbling
succession of moments between the Smolensk crash and the Trump
presidency was an era of transformation that we failed to experience
as such. Perhaps we are slipping from one sense of time to another
because we do not see how history makes us, and how we make history.
Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those
swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter
the overall story of those who shift to eternity classify every
new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat.
Each masprogress; 9
querades
as
history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach
that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that
happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians
leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build
a myth of innocence and danger. They imagine
cycles of threat in the past, creating
an imagined pattern
that they
realize
in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama.
Inevitability
and eternity have specific propaganda styles. Inevitability
politicians spin facts into a web of well-being. Eternity politicians
suppress facts in order to dismiss
the
reality that people are freer and richer in other countries,
and the idea that reforms
could be formulated on the basis of knowledge. In
the 2010s, much of what was happening was the deliberate creation of
political fiction, outsized stories and mediumsized lies that
commanded attention and colonized the space needed for contemplation.
Yet whatever impression propaganda makes at the time, it is not
history's final verdict. There is a difference between memory, the
impressions we are given; and history, the connections that we work
to make - if we wish.
This
book is an attempt to win back the present for historical time, and
thus to win back historical time for politics. This means trying to
understand one set of interconnected events in our own contemporary
world history, from Russia to the United States, at a time when
factuality
itself was put into question.
Russia's
invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was a reality test for the European Union
and the United States. Many Europeans and Americans found it easier
to follow Russia's propaganda phantoms than to defend a legal order.
Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had
taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had
somehow deserved
to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia
soon exploited within the European Union and the United States.
History
as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda.
In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was
careful to make a distinction
between leaders'
accounts
of their 10 actions and the real
reasons
for their decisions.
In
our time, as rising inequality
elevates
political fiction,
investigative
journalism becomes
the more precious. Its renaissance
began during
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as courageous reporters
filed stories from dangerous locations. In Russia and Ukraine,
journalistic initiatives clustered around the problems of kleptocracy
and corruption, and then
reporters trained in these subjects covered the war.
WHAT
HAS already happened in Russia is what
might
happen in America and Europe: the stabilization
of massive inequality,
the displacement
of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability
to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans
and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They
understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first
seen and exploited at home. For many Europeans and Americans, events
in the 2010s - the rise of antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn
against Europe and invasion of Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the
Trump election - came as a surprise.
Americans tend to react to surprise in two ways: either by imagining
that the unexpected event is not
really happening,
or by claiming that it is totally new and hence not amenable to
historical understanding. Either all will somehow be well, or all is
so
ill that nothing can be done.
The first response is a defense mechanism of the politics of
inevitability. The second is the creaking
sound that
inevitability makes just before it breaks and gives way to eternity.
The
politics of inevitability first erodes
civic responsibility,
and then collapses into the politics of eternity when it meets a
serious challenge. Americans reacted in these ways when Russia's
candidate became president of the United States. In the 1990s and in
the 2000s, influence flowed
from west to east,
in the transplant of economic and political models, the spread of the
English language, and the enlargement of the European Union and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Meanwhile, unregulated
spaces of American and European capitalism 11 summoned wealthy
Russians into a realm without an east-west geography, that of
offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and anonymous deals, where
wealth stolen from the Russian people was laundered clean.
Partly for
this reason, in the 2010s influence flowed from east to west,
as the offshore exception became the rule, as
Russian political fiction penetrated beyond Russia.
In The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides defined "oligarchy"
as rule by the few, and opposed it to "democracy." For
Aristotle "oligarchy" meant rule by the wealthy few; the
word in
this sense was revived in the Russian language in the 1990s, and
then, with good reason, in English in the 2010s.
Concepts
and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word "fake,"
as in "fake news." This sounds like an American invention,
and Donald Trump claimed it as his own; but the term was used in
Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United
States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of
journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and
to discredit journalism as
such. Eternity
politicians first
spread fake news themselves, then
claim that all news is fake,
and finally that only their spectacles are real.
The
Russian campaign
to fill
the international public sphere with fiction
began
in Ukraine in 2014,
and then spread to the United States in 2015, where it helped to
elect a president in 2016. The techniques were everywhere the same,
although they grew more sophisticated over time. Russia in the 2010s
was a kleptocratic regime that sought
to export the
politics of eternity: to demolish
factuality,
to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in
Europe and the United States. This is well seen from Ukraine, where
Russia fought a regular war while it amplified campaigns to undo the
European Union and the United States. The advisor of the first
proRussian American presidential candidate had been the advisor of
the last pro-Russian Ukrainian president. Russian tactics that failed
in Ukraine succeeded in the United States.
Russian
and Ukrainian oligarchs hid their money in a way that sustained the
career of an American presidential candidate.
12
This
is all one history, the history of our moment and our choices. CAN
HISTORY be so contemporary? We think of the Peloponnesian Wars as
ancient history, since the Athenians fought the Spartans more than
two thousand years ago. Yet their historian Thucydides was describing
events that he experienced. He included discussions of the past
insofar as this was necessary to clarify the stakes in the present.
This
work humbly follows that approach. The Road to Unfreedom delves into
Russian, Ukrainian, European, and American history as necessary to
define the political problems of the present, and to dispel some of
the myths that enshroud
them. It draws on primary sources from the countries concerned, and
seeks patterns and concepts that can help us make sense of our own
time. The languages of the sources - Russian, Ukrainian, Polish,
German, French, and English-are tools of scholarship but also fonts
of experience. I read and watched media from Russia, Ukraine, Europe,
and the United States during these years, traveled to many of the
places concerned, and could sometimes compare accounts of events with
my own experiences or those of people I knew.
Each
chapter focuses upon a particular event and a particular year - the
return of totalitarian thought (2011); the collapse of democratic
politics in Russia (2012); the Russian assault upon the European
Union (2013); the revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent Russian
invasion (2014); the spread of political fiction in Russia, Europe,
and America (2015); and the election and presidency of Donald Trump
(2016– ).
By
suggesting that political foundations cannot really change, the
politics of inevitability spread uncertainty as to what those
foundations really are.
If we think the future is an automatic extension of good political
order, we need not ask what that order is, why it is good, how it is
sustained, and how it might be improved. History is and must be
political thought, in the sense that it opens an aperture
between inevitability and eternity, preventing us from drifting from
13 the one to the other, helping
us see the moment when we might make a difference.
As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history
of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what
resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what
must be reconceived. Because
understanding is empowerment, this book's chapter titles are framed
as alternatives:
Individualism
or Totalitarianism; Succession or Failure; Integration or Empire;
Novelty or Eternity; Truth or Lies; Equality or Oligarchy.
Thus
individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty, and justice
figure as political virtues.
These qualities are not mere platitudes or preferences, but facts of
history, no
less than material forces might
be. Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and
nourish. An institution
might culivate certain ideas of the good,
and it also depends upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they
need virtues; if virtues are to be cultivated, they need
institutions. The moral question of what is good and evil public
life can never
be separated from the historical investigation
of structure. It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that
make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by
promising that the good is what already exists and must predictably
expand, eternity by assuring that the evil
is always external
and that we are forever its innocent victims. If we wish to have a
better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.
15
CHAPTER
ONE INDIVIDUALISM OR TOTALITARIANISM (2011)
With
law our land shall rise, but it will perish with lawlessness. NJAL'S
SAGA, C. 1280
He
who can make an exception is sovereign. CARL
SCHMITT, 1922
The
politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those
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."
To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing
history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked
grave in a prepurchased plot.
Eternity
arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist
version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute
for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in
progress. As social
mobility halts,
inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to
oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps
with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake
protection
to people with real pain. Faith
that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle.
As
distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the
frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The
oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and
governs by invoking myth and
manufacturing
crisis.
In
the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald
Trump, from fiction to power. Russia
reached the politics of eternity first,
and Russian
leaders protected themselves and their wealth by exporting it.
The
oligarch- in-chief, Vladimir Putin, chose the fascist philosopher
Ivan Ilyin as a guide.
The
poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that "only in the middle of
the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries
come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and
difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate."
Some
of the philosophy books that matter today were written by Ilyin,
who died the year after
Miłosz wrote those lines.
Ivan
Ilyin's revival by official Russia in the 1990s and 2000s has given
his work a second life as the fascism adapted to make oligarchy
possible, as the specific ideas that have helped leaders shift from
inevitability to eternity.
The
fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin's era, had three
core features:
it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a
leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized
globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems.
Revived
today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism
serves oligarchs as a catalyst for
transitions away from public discussion and towards
political fiction;
away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the
rule of law and towards personalist regimes. History always
continues, and alternatives always present themselves. Ilyin
represents one
of these.
He is not the only fascist thinker to have been revived in our
century, but he is the most important. He is a guide on the darkening
road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity.
Learning
of his ideas and influence, we can look down the road, seeking light
and exits.
This means thinking historically: asking how ideas from the past can
matter in the present, comparing Ilyin's era of globalization to our
own, realizing that then as now the possibilities were real and more
than two.
The
natural successor of the veil of inevitability is the shroud of
eternity, but 17 there are alternatives that must be found before the
shroud drops. If we accept eternity, we sacrifice individuality, and
will no longer see possibility. Eternity is another idea that says
that there are no ideas.
When
the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American politicians of
inevitability proclaimed the end of history, while some Russians
sought new authorities in an imperial past. When founded in 1922, the
Soviet Union inherited
most of the territory of the Russian Empire.
The tsar's domain had been the largest in the world, stretching west
to east from the middle of Europe to the shores of the Pacific, and
north to south from the Arctic to Central Asia.
Though
largely a country of peasants and nomads, Russia's
middle classes and intellectuals considered,
as the twentieth century began, how an
empire ruled by an autocrat might become more modern and more just.
Ivan
Ilyin, born to a noble family in 1883, was typical of his generation
as a young man. In the early 1900s, he wanted Russia to become a
state governed by laws. After the disaster of the First World War and
the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Ilyin
became a counterrevolutionary, an advocate of violent methods against
revolution, and with time the author
of a Christian fascism meant
to overcome Bolshevism. In 1922, a few months before the Soviet Union
was founded, he was exiled from his homeland. Writing in Berlin, he
offered
a program to
the opponents of the new Soviet Union, known as the Whites. These
were men who had fought against the Bolsheviks' Red Army in the long
and bloody Russian Civil War, and then made their way, like Ilyin,
into political emigration in Europe. Ilyin later formulated his
writings as
guidance for Russian leaders who would come to power after the end of
the Soviet Union.
Hе
died
in 1954.
After
a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in
1991, Ilyin's short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian
editions, his collected
works were
published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died
forgotten in Switzerland; Putin
organized a reburial
in Moscow in 2005.
Ilyin's
personal papers had found their way to Michigan State University;
Putin
sent
18
an emissary to reclaim them in 2006.
By
then Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to
the general assembly
of the Russian parliament. These were important speeches, composed by
Putin
himself. In the 2010s, Putin relied upon Ilyin's authority to explain
why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine.
When asked to name a historian, Putin cited Ilyin as his authority on
the past.
The
Russian political class followed Putin's example. His propaganda
master Vladislav Surkov
adapted Ilyin's ideas to the world of modern media.
Surkov orchestrated Putin's rise to power and oversaw the
consolidation of media that ensured Putin's seemingly eternal rule.
Dmitry
Medvedev, the formal head of Putin's political party, recommended
Ilyin to Russian youth.
Ilyin's name was on the lips of the leaders of the fake opposition
parties, the communists and (far-Right) Liberal Democrats, who played
a part in creating the simulacrum of democracy that Ilyin had
recommended. Ilyin was cited by the head of the constitutional court,
even as his idea that law
meant love for a leader ascended.
He was mentioned by Russia's regional governors as Russia became the
centralized state that he had advocated.
In
early 2014, members of Russia's ruling party and all of Russia's
civil servants received a collection
of Ilyin's political publications
from the Kremlin. In 2017, Russian television commemorated the
hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a film that
presented Ilyin as a moral authority. Ilyin was a politician of
eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the
politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and
2000s. As
Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic
inequality reached stupefying proportions,
Ilyin's
influence peaked.
The
Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed,
by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin
the philosopher ignored or despised:
individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.
346
ENDNOTES
Резюме с коментари
The
Road to Unfreedom, by Timothy Snyder
TEPSA's
Reading Corner
2022-10-13
Jim’s
Reading Corner is a reading list to stimulate debate in which our
Secretary-General Jim Cloos analyses and reviews books of interest to
Europe. From the unique perspective of a lifetime EU practitioner,
Jim gives his comment on books, articles, long-reads, and more –
and tackles the leading issues of the day. Today’s book is “The
Road to Unfreedom”, by Timothy Snyder.
After
having read Bloodlands,
I was very interested in discovering The
Road to Unfreedom. Snyder
was a close friend of Tony Judt, whom I admired very much, and shares
his view of the EU as a model of democracy, decency and the rule of
law. (The book opens with the birth of Snyder’s child in a Viennese
maternity in 2010, “in
conditions most Americans could only dream of”).
A model, unfortunately, under increasing threats from dark forces,
both inside and above all outside of the EU.
Snyder
is as always fascinating to read. If I have a slight reservation on
this book it is because it falls into the academic trap of inventing
theoretical concepts and then squeezing reality in a narrative based
on the concepts. He distinguishes the politics of INEVITABILITY and
the politics of ETERNITY.
Both have merits, but he packs too much into them, particularly the
second one. INEVITABILITY is
based on the tale of the end of history and a sense of linear
progress towards Western-style democracy. In the (initial) American
version: nature created the market which created democracy and leads
us to happiness. In the European version, the lessons drawn from the
wars led to the creation of an integrated Europe and a post-modem
system that will triumph everywhere. ETERNITY, on
the other hand, places one chosen country at the centre of a cyclical
story of glory and more often victimhood. Politicians in this system
manufacture crises and manipulate the ensuing emotion; they also
create political fiction based on old myths. The best illustration
here is present-day Russia, but you also saw this logic at work in
Trump’s America or in the rhetoric of some right-wing movements
across Europe.
Snyder
interprets everything bad that happens in modern times as a direct
result of Russian manipulation and aggression. Now even if Putin has
over the past months done everything possible to live up to this
characterization, I would still caution against overestimating his
power. Europeans sometimes seem to indulge in the masochistic
delight of convincing themselves that Europe is old, basically
finished, and incapable of competing with autocracies. This being
said, I am impressed by the sheer force of Snyder’s
argumentation on Putin’s machinations, as concerns Brexit and
particularly the Trump election.
It
is precisely because Putin tries to undermine our model that Snyder
so violently denounces his politics and writes: “Today’s
Russia is an oligarchy propped up by illusions and repressions. But
it also represents the fulfilment of tendencies already present in
the West. And if Moscow’s drive to dissolve Western states and
values succeeds, this could become our reality too”. Russia
certainly has huge wrecking capacities and is very adept at
manipulating and sowing division; Putin uses our own deficiencies and
weaknesses against us quite effectively. But it is economically
unimpressive, demographically weak, culturally unappealing.
In
the longer term, it is the evolution of America that will be more
important, because America is still very powerful and because it has
been the guarantor of the Western model. That is why some of the
trends in American society, like growing inequality, political
polarization, and calls for ‘America first’, are potentially
disruptive. And then there is China, which is in the process of
becoming once again a totalitarian entity, but this time backed up by
enormous economic power and a growing expertise in using modern
technologies to control and manipulate. The interplay between the US
and China will be at the centre of geopolitics for the foreseeable
future.
The
book is structured in 6 chapters that oppose defining characteristics
of the two over-arching ‘philosophies’: individualism vs
totalitarianism, succession vs failure, integration vs empire,
novelty vs eternity, truth vs lies, equality vs oligarchy. The
approach is at times over-schematic, the more so since Snyder
associates individual years to each of the six oppositions, which is
a bit absurd. But I suppose it is a useful tool in terms of analysis.
Chapter
One: Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011)
This
part builds around the personality of a Russian philosopher called
Ivan Ilyin who died decades ago but who was “rediscovered” and
put on a pedestal by Putin and his followers. In his call for will
and violence, a mystical leader and the end of globalisation (or
‘cosmopolitism’ as it used to be called), Ilyin defended values
that were closely associated with fascism. He clearly borrowed from
the notorious Carl Schmitt who inspired Nazi ideology and for whom
politics was the art of identifying and neutralising an enemy. There
are elements of all this in Putin’s world view. I doubt whether he
reads Ilyin or anybody else of that ilk every morning before
beginning his working day; he does not look to me like a
philosopher-king. But Snyder’s description of his modus
operandi is
fascinating.
Chapter
Two: Succession or Failure (2012)
This
chapter opens with a rather laborious and not particularly novel
description of Soviet Russia and the transition period. Anybody who
has followed events knows that Putin was plucked out of nowhere by a
bunch of oligarchs convinced that he would be another marionette in
their hands. How
very wrong they turned out to be.
It is also no secret that the new leadership used the 1999 bomb
attacks in Moscow (and maybe worse than that!) to transform Putin
into the strong leader they wanted him to be. Snyder’s theoretical
point here is more interesting: the fact that democracy is based on
succession and continued change of rulers. Clearly, the way Putin
went about “organising” democracy has prevented this rule from de
facto applying.
This has gone in parallel with increasing attacks against the Western
model, described as decadent, failing, artificial. In this context,
the shrill denunciation of gays and lesbians and the use of vulgar
sexual metaphors have taken on epic proportions, together with the
ridiculous masculinity cult around the great leader. To protect the
‘pure Russian soul’, the regime at the same time built a new
repressive arsenal around elastic notions such as libel, treason,
blasphemy or extremism.
Chapter
Three: Integration and Empire (2013)
From
2012 onwards, Putin turned against the Western model, according to
Snyder. While before Russia had wanted to be treated as an equal
partner, it now pictured the West as the counter-model, as a threat
to Russia, and as a haven of decadence. I think that this trend
started earlier, with Putin’s February 2007 speech to
the Wehrkunde meeting
in Munich. I thought at the time that some of the points Putin made
were understandable, like the denunciation of the excesses of the
wild capitalism of the 90s (notwithstanding the fact that his rise to
power happened via the oligarch route!), the humiliation of Russia
led by a drunkard, the way the West took Russia for granted, be it in
Yugoslavia or elsewhere. I did not suspect that this was the
beginning of a trip to hell. In view of the development of Russia and
its politics ever since, Snyder’s assumption that this was a
reflection of deep underlying characteristics of “eternal” Russia
becomes more plausible ex
post.
It is difficult however to know whether this return to eternity was
fatal and inevitable or could have been prevented. Snyder makes
the interesting point that the politics of Inevitability can
lead to the rise of Eternity in
societies that contest the end of history paradigm.
Be
that as it may, Russia a decade ago chose the path towards empire
rather than integration. And it conceptualised this by using the old
concept of EURASIA,
developed by people such as Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), the son of Anna
Akhmatova, and taken up by the famous Izborsk
Club created
in 2012 as a hub of new Russian nationalism.
Chapter
Four: Novelty and Eternity (2014)
This
is the tale of what happened in and around Ukraine. Snyder sees this
as a battle between the Ukrainian effort at novelty (a new kind of
politics) and the Russian way of exporting its eternity. Again
the question arises as to whether this in itself had an element of
inevitability or whether the Russian action was at least partly
prompted its perceptions of the western debate about NATO
enlargement, the EU-Ukraine trade and association agreement or the
assistance provided to opposition forces before Maidan. Whatever the
answer, nothing justifies what Russia has done and even less so how
it has done it; the blatant violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the
stream of disinformation about all Ukrainian patriots being ‘Nazis’
(levelled most vociferously by Russian Nazis) , the invocation of
Volodymir’s (Vladimir’s!) conversion to Christianity in 998, as
if that gave licence to Russia to claim Ukraine for itself.
Chapter
Five: Truth vs Lies (2015)
This
is still mainly about Ukraine. Chapters 4 and 5 could have been
contained in one chapter. There is further description of
disinformation, about the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukraine
(undisputable), about the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner
(clearly done by Russians having crossed the border before with the
BUK missiles, as documented by the remarkable Dutch Court action),
about Nazism reigning in Ukraine. And of course the use of historical
facts/myths to create a picture of Russian eternity and greatness
(998, 1941, as well as the victory against the Ottoman empire in
1774). Talking about the latter: that was the time when the concept
of Novorossiya arose
to qualify the territories in the south taken of the Turks. Now it
was used to create the fiction of the 8 south-eastern provinces of
Ukraine becoming a new territory of brotherhood and integration with
mother Russia!
Snyder
then moves into new territories, starting with the migration crisis
in 2015. Russia certainly tried to fuel the anti-Merkel rebellion and
the rise of the extreme right-wing AfD (like it has for a long time
supported Le Pen and other movements of that ilk). I am not sure
though that Putin bombed Syria with the primary aim of creating
refugees so as to swamp Europe, as Snyder implies.
An
interesting part of the book is about the crisis of the Polish
government leading to the downfall of Tusk. Snyder recalls the
framing of Sikorski whose loose talk at a restaurant was taped and
published. The assumption seems to be that this was a Russian plot,
although Snyder does not say so explicitly. It is not implausible
against the background of the Soviet and Russian habit of kompromat.
Which often works because of the way politics functions: “The
only politicians who are invulnerable to exposure are those who
control the secrets of others, or those whose avowed behaviour is so
shameless that they are invulnerable to blackmail.” This
is of course the secret of someone like Trump. I had my first
experience with this principle early on in my career when a prominent
member of the European Parliament, who used his mandate to gain
favours for an important company that employed him, was never taken
to task because he was …very open about it.
Chapter
Six: Equality and Oligarchy.
This
is the most convincing and disturbing chapter of the book. It is
convincing in portraying the transformation of Trump, a failed real
estate investor, into a “successful businessman”, with the active
help (including financial) of Putin. Many of the things said here are
things we have heard before, but I for one, while not disputing them,
had always thought that seeing the hand of Putin in the rise of Trump
was a bit blown out of all proportions. After having read Snyder, I
am far less certain of that. I say this also because Snyder sets the
action of the Russians in the framework of the trends that have
transformed the American political system over the past years. In
other words, it is not the tale of Russia single-handedly changing
the US system, which would not be credible. It is the very clever use
of and investment in home-grown American deficiencies and perversions
(growing inequality, the presents made to what one can only call
American oligarchs, the elective disenfranchisement of many American
citizens, the gerrymandering, the blurring of the boundaries between
fact and fiction, the nationalistic grandstanding) by a Russian
leader who knows a lot about all of those things! I was also struck
by the close Russian connections of Trump and a lot of those
surrounding him, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Jared
Kushner, Michael Flynn, to name but a few.
All
in all, I recommend reading this book, which is full of interesting
information. It has led me to revise or at least ‘nuance’ some of
my earlier judgements. It is a potent reminder of the need to defend
ourselves against all sorts of attacks and disinformation and to
fight for the integrity of our system. It is also an interesting
invitation to always question the hidden assumptions in what we are
made to read, including by Snyder himself, of course.
