Do(es) 25
years of researching the “Eastern bloodlands” unhinge your mind? This is the
question I’m left pondering - in all honesty - after almost completing Timothy Snyder’s latest book The
Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America (2018). I appreciate it's not exactly a delicate question in view of Snyder's reputation . The reviews
in the Eurozine journal set the context -
over the past decade Timothy Snyder has sought to convince western European and English-speaking audiences of the importance of east-central Europe for the history of the twentieth-century. Although the Holocaust is usually thought of as a western phenomenon, in “Bloodlands” (2010) and “Black Earth” (2015) he shows that by almost any measure (death rates, physical devastation, population displacement, societal breakdown or institutional destruction) it was primarily an eastern atrocity.
If we wish to draw the lessons of the 1930s and 40s, we must first understand what happened there.As a scholar of totalitarianism Snyder is understandably concerned by the return of fascist ideas clothed in the guise of right-wing populism. The striking similarities between the interwar crisis that followed the Great Depression (1929-39) and the aftermath of the Great Recession (from 2007) lead him to worry that the beginning of this century might end up looking much like the early decades of the last.
His previous work, “On Tyranny” (2017), started off as a warning posted on Facebook that went viral after Donald Trump’s election and details ‘20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today’. His “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) brings his longstanding interest in combating the western-centrism of European history and his more recent attempts to apply his knowledge of the past to the present together in a single volume. The book traces the current crisis of democracy back to Russia, showing how Vladimir Putin used fake news and the hacking of personal data – as well as support for neo-fascist parties in Europe and America – to rebuild Russian power and influence in the world.
As someone
who lived in Central Asia from 1999-2007, I remember following the development
of Russia’s “managed democracy” with particular interest. I never imagined that the
crude but apparently successful efforts in building fake political parties
there in the late 90s – an updated version of a Potemkin village
– would be a test-bed for developments in the West.
Snyder’s narrative is organized chronologically, with each of the six chapters devoted to developments in a single year from 2011 to 2016. In particular, it focuses on how Russia rapidly shifted from rapprochement with the West to overt antagonism in 2012. Snyder links this transformation to the fact that Putin had to fake the presidential election that year in order to retain his grip on power.
He argues that after defeating the uprising in Chechnya, Putin needed a new enemy to rally the people behind him. He settled on the West, concocting a ‘fictional problem’ that focused on the alleged ‘designs of the European Union and the United States to destroy Russia’ (p.51).
Snyder highlights how Putin adopted the ideas of the fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), who argued that the Russian spirit must be mobilized against all external threats ‘by the caprice of a single ruler’ (p.24). Ilyin’s Manichaean worldview, combined with his obsession with sexual purity, helps explain both the vehemence of Russia’s recent rhetoric, as well as its erotic focus on the ‘homosexual’ attempts of the EU and America to ‘sodomize’ Russian virtue. Snyder notes, ‘The dramatic change in Russia’s orientation bore no relation to any new unfriendly action from the outside. Western enmity was not a matter of what a Western actor was doing, but what the West was portrayed as being’ (p.91).
Given my proximity for the past decade (in Romania) to the Ukraine, I started
the book in the hope that it would help me better understand the Russian
invasion of the Ukraine. Phrases
like “the politics of eternity”, however, soon put me off and I increasingly found myself shaking my head. Fellow historian Richard
Evans captures my own thoughts in his Guardian review when he writes
that
The effectiveness of Snyder’s thoughts on the “road to unfreedom” isn’t helped by the strangely declamatory, often obscure style in which they are expressed. One dubious generalisation follows another, as the author never troubles to support any of them with serious evidence. For instance: “Britain and France had no modern history as nation-states. The European powers had never been nation-states.” Does Snyder really think that the possession of an overseas empire negated the claim of the imperial power to be a nation-state?
Or: “The meaning of each election is the promise of the next one.” Most people think the meaning of an election is defined by the policies of the parties that contest it. And so on. Obsessed with the theory of Russian manipulation behind all the political surprises of recent history, from the Brexit vote to the election of Trump, he has little to say about the driving forces behind them, forces that are vital to understand if democracy is to be saved. And by packaging all of this in the endlessly repeated concepts of “the politics of eternity” and “the politics of inevitability”, he virtually guarantees that he will lose the attention of his readers. The current threats to democracy cry out for reasoned and powerfully expressed analysis, but regrettably, this is not such a book
And The
Nation went so far as to suggest that Snyder’s latest book
marks the next phase in his transformation from academic historian to political commentator; it is also the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake. The book’s cover comes complete with helpful directional indicators: “Russia > Europe > America”—the road to unfreedom is a one-way street.
For Snyder, Russia is to blame for the growth of the “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, stoking the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, the rise of the far right in various European countries, and the Syrian refugee crisis. Russia is also in cahoots with the National Rifle Association and has been sowing dissension in the United States by encouraging hostility between the police and African Americans. Putin’s “grandest campaign” of all, though, was his “cyberwar to destroy the United States of America” by “escorting” Trump to the American presidency.
“And
sentences that consist entirely of rhythmic abstractions”, The Nation
caustically remarks, “convey very little” eg
“As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair”. One of his favorite images in the book is the abyss: so empty and so frightening. This gives us “Having transformed the future into an abyss, Putin had to make flailing at its edge look like judo,” but also “Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.” Truly the abyss swallows up all meaning.
But most of
the media are delighted with the book.....as you will see from this "resource" which includes a 15 part series of a Snyder Youtube exposition.....I've included three more substantial texts to help the reader set the Snyder book in context.....
A Resource
Timothy
Snyder Speaks series – started Nov 2017
Building
an authoritarian polity; G Gill (2015)
The
failure of democratisation in Russia –
a comparative perspective; AB Evans (2011)
Russia’s
Managed Democracy; Perry Anderson
(2007)
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