He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[15] On September 25,2020,he was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board",an independent group monitoring Facebook.[16] He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.[17]
Snyder has written fifteen books and co-edited two. Snyder speaks five European languages and reads ten,enabling easier use of primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe during his research.[19] Snyder has stressed that knowing other languages is very important for his field,saying "If you don't know Russian,you don't really know what you're missing."[20]
In 2010,Snyder published Bloodlands:Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It was a best seller[26] and has been translated into 30 languages.[27][17] In an interview with Slovene historian Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčičin 2016,Snyder described the book as an attempt to overcome the limitations of national history in explaining the political crimes perpetrated in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s:
The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn't noticed a major event in European history:the fact 13 million civilians were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time. The question of the book was:'How this could have happened?' We have some history of Soviet terror,of the Holocaust,of the Ukrainian famine,of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span,so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.[28]
Bloodlands received reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous".[29][30] In assessing these reviews,Jacques Sémelin described it as one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history".[30] Sémelin noted that some historians have criticized the chronological construction of events,the arbitrary geographical delimitation,Snyder's numbers on victims and violence,and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors.[30]Omer Bartov wrote that "the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments",[31] and in a highly critical review Richard Evans wrote that,because of its lack of causal argument,"Snyder's book is of no use",and that Snyder "hasn't really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler's Germany",which "leads him into error in a number of places" regarding the politics of Nazi Germany.[32] On the other hand,Wendy Lower wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis",[33]John Connelly called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre",[34] and Christopher Browning described it as "stunning".[29] The journal Contemporary European History published a special forum on the book in 2012,featuring reviews by Mark Mazower,Dan Diner,Thomas Kühne,and Jörg Baberowski,as well as an introduction and response by Snyder.[35]
Later works
Snyder's 2012 book Thinking the Twentieth Century was co-authored with Tony Judt while Judt was in the late stages of ALS disease. The book is based primarily on material by Judt,edited by Snyder. It presents Judt's view on the history of the twentieth century.[36][37]
Timothy Snyder in conversation with Stephen Norris discussing and signing On Freedom,Cincinnati,17 October,2024
In 2017,he published On Tyranny:Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,a short book about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny,with a focus on modern United States politics and on what he called "America's turn towards authoritarianism".[39][40] The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017[26] and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021.[41][42]On Tyranny has been featured in a rap song[43] and in poster exhibitions.[44][45]
Although primarily a scholar of twentieth century Eastern European history,in the mid-2010s Snyder became interested in U.S. history,contemporary politics,international relations,digital politics,health,and education. He has said that the defunding of departments of history and the humanities since the supposed post-Soviet end of history have led to a society without the "concepts and references" or structural tools to discuss eroding factors such as modern forms of populism.[54] In interviews with The Guardian for the article "Putin,Trump,Ukraine:how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times",[40] Snyder described history as "a constant,exciting discovery of things that actually happened,which weren't anticipated and which were probably considered wildly improbable at the time. (…) And once you know that,then you can have the intuition that,well,maybe in this moment right now there's something happening which people aren't seeing." Drawing on the lessons of European history,Snyder brought into American political discussion the terms big lie,in reference to Donald Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election,[55][56][57] and memory laws,to describe Republican state legislators' bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past,in some cases affirming free speech while banning divisive speech.[58][59]
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine,and the bombing of its energy infrastructure,Snyder has spoken and written widely on the history of Ukraine and its worldwide importance for democracy,on the disastrous geopolitical effects of the invasion,and on the need for other nations and individuals to stand for the protection of territory belonging to that state. Snyder has said "The fact that we have democracies at all is kind of remarkable",that democracy means that "the people have to rule,and they have to want to rule",warning against reliance on larger historical forces to bring democracy about.[60]
Snyder launched a $1.25m crowdfunding to upgrade Ukraine's air defense.[61][62] According to Snyder,the only way to end the war is for Putin's Russia to "win by losing",because only if Ukraine wins will it be possible for the dictator to leave the scene,and for the country to start a democratic process that will benefit Russia itself. Snyder is on the list of 200 Americans barred from entering Russian territory,under sanctions announced by the Russian government in November 2022.[63]
In 2015,Snyder delivered a series of lectures in Kyiv,Dnipro,and Kharkiv. The lectures,which were delivered in Ukrainian,were open to the public and focused on Snyder's historical research as well as the contemporary political situation in Ukraine.[64]
In The Road to Unfreedom,Snyder argues that Vladimir Putin's government in Russia is authoritarian,and that it uses fascist ideas in its rhetoric.[65] In December 2018,during a discussion with a fellow historian of Eastern Europe,John Connelly,Snyder referred to this as schizo-fascism:
fascist ideas have come to Russia at a historical moment, three generations after the Second World War, when it's impossible for Russians to think of themselves as fascist. The entire meaning of the war in Soviet education was as an anti-fascist struggle, where the Russians are on the side of the good and the fascists are the enemy. So there's this odd business, which I call in the book "schizo-fascism", where people who are themselves unambiguously fascists refer to others as fascists.[66]
On June 20, 2017, a discussion on Germany's historical responsibility toward Ukraine was held in the German Parliament.
Snyder has drawn the parallel between Hitler's rationale for territorial expansion and that of Putin. He predicted Russia's invasion of Crimea, outlining specific threats of an invasion in the New York Times op-ed "Don't Let Putin Grab Ukraine" on February 3, 2014, and said that Putin's rhetoric resembles Hitler's to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.[67]
On March 14, 2023, Snyder briefed the United Nations Security Council in a meeting called by Russia to address Russophobia. Snyder said that the term "Russophobia" was used by Russia to justify its war crimes in Ukraine, and that harm done to Russians and Russian culture is primarily due to Moscow's own policies and actions, which resulted in driving Russian emigration following the invasion, suppression of independent media, attacks on cultural assets and landmarks, and mass killings of Russian speakers and citizens. After he was challenged by the Russian representative, Vasily Nebenzya, for sources, Snyder referred to Putin's statements denying the existence of Ukraine.[69]
Views on Ukraine
Snyder has written six books on Ukraine[70] and in 2022, to explain the origins and course of the Russo-Ukrainian war, he made his Yale lecture series The Making of Modern Ukraine available to the general public on YouTube[71] and as a podcast series[72] along with the syllabus and reading list.[73] The course had been viewed by millions by November 2022.[74] He has spoken[75] and written about the war in the press and he publishes history and commentary on his Substack platform as "Thinking About…"[76]
Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine, met with Snyder to discuss the mental health and resilience of Ukrainians at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting in September 2023.[77]
Views on threats to democracy and pursuit of freedom
Since the November 2024 United States election, Timothy Snyder has assessed global and domestic affairs on his Substack platform Thinking About[78] through a variety of lenses including a 1960’s sitcom,[79] applied mathematics,[80] the debunking of historical myth,[81] neologism,[82] and a horror show of his own invention.[83] “In serious times it is important to be creative”[82] if we wish to grasp the realities of the incoming regime, including its fractures and weaknesses. He warns against shock, which excuses inaction and outrage, which distracts from larger patterns.[84] “First of all, we have to take in a very basic reality: that attempts to establish military dictatorships have been made in democracies, and will be made in other democracies -- including, very possibly, in the American one."[85] "We will have to get past arguing about the vote, and have conversations about what authoritarianism is really like,”[86] he says, instructing readers: “We cannot change the world all at once. But we can change the way we think. We can clear away the clichés and make ourselves more lively."[81] Snyder calls on those inside and outside of Congress to display “simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America.”[84]
Describing an “international oligarchy inside the American capital[79] and attempts by foreign agencies to harm American society with disinformation, he contends that the easiest way for a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States to accomplish that is “to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.[84] Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society.”[83] In Snyder's view, Trump’s public record of submission to Putin and proposed appointments: Robert Kennedy, Jr., Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noem, “look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.” He asserts that these individuals “combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done [and] taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.”[84]
Snyder encourages Americans to observe South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s dictatorship, which lasted less than a day, to learn the danger signs of authoritarianism and make preparations, commenting: “Others have given us time to think, and have set for us good examples.”[85] Many Americans like the idea of strongman rule including the idea that a dictator will get things done, unite the nation, and stand up for those who stay in line, but this is a fantasy, he says, as strongmen constantly shift the “enemy” label from one group to another, owe nothing to and abuse the population, and inject pervasive fear into life. He states: “An American strongman will measure himself by the wealth and power of other dictators. He will befriend them and compete with them. From them he will learn new ways to oppress and to exploit his own people.”[86] Snyder also warns against mistaken beliefs about history such as the “fall of the Berlin Wall” -- it never fell -- used as shorthand for the end of communism in eastern Europe, and points out the more useful fact that East Germans took the initiative to protest and to leave their country.[81] Snyder consistently emphasizes the importance of human agency, unpredictability, and solidarity.[87]
Snyder embeds a clear assertion in the title of his November 8, 2024 New Yorker essay What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?[88] Putin and Trump are both fascists, he says. Fascist leaders choose enemies arbitrarily absent any real harm caused to followers. This is exemplified by Trump ads fantasizing that Kamala Harris allowed millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs from Americans, a single fiction triggering gender, economic, and sexual vulnerabilities.
He describes Trump's loyalties to both hydrocarbon oligarchs like Vladimir Putin, who deliberately accelerate global warming, and to digital oligarchs like Elon Musk, who categorize us and prime our minds for conspiracy theories. Following climate change disasters, fascists promote the politics of "us and them," inventing divisive conspiracy theories to blame suffering victims and immigrants. Trump’s “talky fascism” and stereotype-rich, inconsistent, and non-reality-based stories are amplified by the Internet. Fascists and their oligarch partners describe government as evil and prevent it from delivering sound infrastructure or welfare protections for citizenry.
Citing historian Robert Paxton’s observations[89] about the solidity of Trump’s social base relative to that which Hitler or Mussolini would have had in their time, Snyder states that responsibility for what comes next belongs not only to Trump, but to all who are on his side. While the media and judiciary have amplified Trump, we have collectively failed to account for the consequences of his presence. Snyder predicts that Trump will seek systemic changes to remain in power until death, use deportations to divide Americans and render them violent, create a martyr cult around January 6 perpetrators, and cooperate with like-minded rulers abroad.
In the first chapter of his book On Tyranny, Snyder elaborates "vorauseilender Gehorsam", the concept of obedience that hurries out ahead, dating from 1933 Germany[90] and expressed most clearly in public haste to comply with Hitler shortly after his election, enabling him to seize additional powers, and during the 1938 Anschluss when Austrians were quicker to accommodate the joining of their country to Germany than even Hitler himself expected. Snyder’s formulation of “anticipatory obedience” and the exhortation “do not obey in advance” have become part of international discourse. Says Snyder: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given… In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
In an October 30, 2024 piece On Tyranny right now, Snyder elaborates additional lessons for the 21st century from On Tyranny including text from the 2017 book along with new reflections.
Beware the one-party state.[From On Tyranny] The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited the historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. Support the multiple party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. [New reflections] Trump's attempt to stay in power in 2021 after he lost the election was an attempt to create…a leader cult and a one-party state.
Be wary of paramilitaries.[From On Tyranny] When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. [New reflections] Given precisely that Trump and his allies and proxies have been trying to teach their followers that Trump cannot lose… that if they lose and try something, it's going to be that atmosphere of violence, that background violence, which is supposed to intimidate the rest of us. The Trump-Vance deportation plan…to deport 12 million people, that will involve not just federal, local, and state law enforcement. It will have to involve lots of people who are deputized to carry it out, people who are not even officially law enforcement…[d]eportation is not designed so much as to change the country by getting rid of people. It's designed to change the country by accustoming us to precisely paramilitaries, denunciation, and public violence.
Be reflective if you must be armed.[From On Tyranny] If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involve policemen and soldiers finding themselves one day doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. [New reflections] A number of things which a Trump-Vance administration would likely ask policemen, other federal services, and even the armed forces to do, which are either illegal or extra-legal or illegal, could only be considered to be legal in the sense that Trump believes that he's immunized from committing crimes. One of these would be deportations…Trump clearly has in mind changing the relationship between armed forces and policemen and the law, which is something which recalls fascism, in particular Nazi Germany.
Stand out.[From On Tyranny] Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. The moment you set an example, the spell, the status quo is broken and others will follow…[New reflections] It's very easy to drift along and you might be noticing that a lot of people are drifting now. If you want to stop the drift, you have to break it yourself, even if only in some small way, even just by smiling and contradicting someone, even if it just means not letting someone get away with some kind of bullying or belittling remark, even if it just means walking away from a conversation, even if it just means putting a yard sign up rather than not putting a yard sign up, a little bit of standing out is necessary to remain who you are…If we just drift, if we just do the easiest thing, then we will end up in an authoritarian place.
Believe in truth.[From On Tyranny] To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights… [New reflections] And in our postmodern world, the risk, of course, is that when we doubt truth, when we allow local news to die, when we put a huge amount of epistemic or propaganda power in the hands of a few oligarchs who control media or social media, we're risking a world in which everything is slidey and we have no place to stand, which is a bit where we are now. Politicians like Trump and Vance thrive in this. They exploit it. They tell big lies, for example, about the election of 2020… a medium-sized lie about Springfield, Ohio, and the notion that Haitian immigrants are consuming cats and dogs…we're supposed to react by thinking we must rid ourselves of that other, which of course Vance and Trump then promise by saying they're going to target the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio with the first deportation, even though the story is not true, even though they know that it's not true. So in the absence of truth, we end up in a place where you get fascist us-and-them politics… Of course, there is a way to deal with this, which is for you to believe in truth, to try to keep the world around you as factual as you can, which will help you to act in the ways, smaller or bigger, that you can act.
Listen for dangerous words.[From On Tyranny] Be alert to the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary…[New reflections] When [Trump] speaks of the enemy within or the enemies of the people, or when he speaks of the United States as he did at Madison Square Garden, as an occupied country, what he's doing is he's using language to define the enemy…The enemy is within, it's other Americans…if Trump and Vance are in power, they just invent emergencies, they invent crises, and then they use them to turn us against each other.[91]
Snyder's book, On Freedom, launched September 17, 2024, answers questions asked of him by readers of On Tyranny, "What exactly is that good thing that you're defending, what is the opposite of tyranny?" In the book, he asserts that Americans tend to think of freedom as absence of something, the removal of occupation, oppression, or even government. While agreeing with the need to remove bad systems, Snyder offers a positive notion of freedom that puts the focus on human aspirations, values and how these can be realized in the world, also explaining how proper notions of freedom allow good government to exist.[99][100]
In an essay Fantasy-Impotence-Fascism: The Trump-Vance Political Theory[101] and interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark,[102] Snyder describes how the Springfield pet eating hoax and other fascist lies are used to turn Americans on each other and combine with actual powerlessness and highly performative masculinity on the part of leaders. Snyder’s characterization of the Trump-Vance ethos is: “I'm not actually going to do anything. I'm going to fail at everything, but I'm going to be large while I'm failing.” He contrasts Project 2025 calls for the expulsion of civil servants who know how to keep things working with good government efforts to promote progress, stability, and prosperity.
Snyder responds to media questions about democracy’s connection to the 2024 kitchen-table concerns of voters in his essay Autocracy and Poverty, offering Russian and Hungarian illustrations of law bending and law breaking to the benefit of a few and the detriment of most. A Trump-Vance electoral win would destroy the American economy, he predicts, as the result of Project 2025 and other campaign promises including the firing of forty thousand federal employees who execute federal laws. Outcomes potentially resulting from an autocratic regime, says Snyder, are an end to taxes on the very rich with increases for the middle class, bank collapse in the absence of financial regulation with bailout subsidized by average taxpayers, loss of Social Security and other benefits dependent upon a functioning federal bureaucracy, stock market crash absent uniform enforcement of laws preventing insider trading and other abuses, and job loss from the failure of businesses dependent on interactions with the federal government.[103]
Snyder’s September 2024 essay Trump’s Hitlerian Month explains that the American taboo on comparisons with Hitler functions as a shield for perpetrators.[104] He argues affirmatively for invoking the past: "Democracy… depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past….’Never again’ is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.” He analyzes Trump’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric and statements about the country’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.” By implying that Zelens’kyi himself, rather than American arms manufacturers, gets the money and avoiding reference to personal courage shown in the face of Russian aggression and war crimes, says Snyder, Trump suggests that the war and Zelens’kyi’s role in it are a scam and invokes stereotypes that Jews are cowards, never fight wars, stay away from the front, cause wars that make other people suffer, and then make vast amounts of money from those wars. Trump’s statement that if he were to lose in 2024, "Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss,”[105] in Snyder’s view, also echoes Nazi propaganda themes: Jews must be singled out as a group, must pass a loyalty test, have unusual powers, make a left-center coalition illegitimate, and stab you in the back.
In response to a request from the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Timothy Snyder provided written and oral testimony[106][107] for the April 17, 2024, session: “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part I.” Snyder urged Congress to understand political warfare as "someone else trying to get you to do something you ought not to." He emphasized the role Americans play in the efforts of hostile foreign powers to exploit domestic weaknesses using divisive propaganda intended to show that democracy is impotent, hypocritical, and not worth defending. These messages are successful only when echoed by politicians, billionaires and other citizens, some unknowingly, but against their own self-interest. Financial vulnerability of politicians is an opening for psychological operations by hostile actors as it renders targets susceptible to manipulation by their foreign patrons. Political warfare conducted by authoritarian regimes where corruption is normal promotes messages that aim to normalize corruption externally in America and elsewhere.
Snyder asserted the centrality of the war in Ukraine to the general problem of political warfare. In this war, international order, the reputation of democracy and alliance structures are all at stake. While Americans may not see the connections, Beijing and Taiwan are clear that Ukraine’s self-defense deters Chinese aggression in the Pacific.[108] He described the increasing conformity of Chinese propaganda methods and themes with those used by Russian disinformation campaigns designed to promote American inaction and interfere with elections, backing candidates most likely to support authoritarian regimes. Common tropes in the Russian information war against Ukraine are: Ukrainians are Nazis, the Ukraine war is all about NATO enlargement, Ukraine is corrupt, democracy is powerless to do anything about Ukraine, Americans should pay attention to the border and not do anything about Ukraine, and Joseph Biden has accepted bribes.[109]
In written testimony and during the oral hearings, Snyder and members of Congress gave examples of Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump publicly promoting foreign propaganda tropes. Snyder responded directly to Greene’s oral testimony suggesting significant Nazi influence in Ukraine with the fact that no far-right party in Ukraine has ever gotten more than 3% of a national vote.[110] Snyder explained that availability of propaganda memes and messages from outlets like X (Twitter) obviates the need for direct contact between the Americans who spread them and the foreign actors and their media outlets who source them originally. When government or self-policing of hostile foreign propaganda by social media has been attempted, it is successful, but X (Twitter), notably, has refused to self-regulate.[111]
On April 10, 2024, Snyder joined with over 35 musicians, actors, thinkers, historians, entrepreneurs, and diplomats in an appeal[112] to Congress for aid to Ukraine in defense of democracy and in the fight “for our safety and for everyone’s freedom.” The open letter states that Ukrainian resistance to Russian dictatorship protects the international order, makes other wars in Europe impossible, and supports American interests, deterring China without provoking Beijing.
Snyder likened NBC's pre-2024 election hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to the anticipatory obedience he described in his book On Tyranny: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked." In an interview with NBC's sister station MSNBC, he cited McDaniel's role in trying to disassemble our democracy and said: “What NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ’24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down,’" adding, "If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them."[113]
Asked in early 2017 how the agenda of the Trump administration compared with Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Snyder said that history "does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance".[114] Elaborating in 2021 on the resonance of Nazi history within Donald Trump's claim to a landslide victory, Snyder recalled the German Reich's "stab in the back" lie that its army did not really lose the First World War, but rather, Jews and left-wingers betrayed "true Germans" on the home front, leading to defeat. This lie, when repeated and expanded by Hitler to a claim that Jews were responsible for everything that is wrong, fueled anti-Semitism and led to the Holocaust.[115] Trump's "big lie" tears the very fabric of factuality, said Snyder, echoing Hannah Arendt, by denying verifiable reality and forcing believers to accept an illogical premise that Democrats rigged the 2020 election only for the presidency and not for members of Congress. It requires adoption of a conspiracy theory in which everyone is against the believer, and the high stakes of the lie demand action including violence.[116]
In January 2021 Snyder published an essay in The New York Times on the future of the GOP in response to the siege of the United States Capitol, blaming Trump and his "enablers", Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, for the insurrection fueled by their claims of election fraud, writing that "the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump's big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact, he observed, a big lie can survive the liar, and in the case of Cruz and Hawley, it expresses a wish for Trump's political death."[117][118]
In a May 2017 interview with Salon, he warned that the Trump administration would attempt to subvert democracy by declaring a state of emergency and take full control of the government, similar to Hitler's Reichstag fire: "it's pretty much inevitable that they will try".[119] He repeated the warning in Commonweal on November 2, 2020: "The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power some other way."[120] According to Snyder, "Trump's campaign for president of the United States was basically a Russian operation."[121] Snyder also warned that Trump's lies would lead to tyranny, as democracy is impossible in a society divided between true believers and everyone else, asserting that the only cure is truth.[121][122]
Personal life
In 1994, Snyder married fellow academic Milada Vachudova, with whom he also collaborated on scholarly work.[123][124] Snyder's second marriage was in 2005 to Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. The couple have two children together and reside in New Haven, Connecticut.[125][126]
In December 2019, Snyder fell seriously ill following a series of medical misdiagnoses. While recuperating through the coronavirus pandemic he wrote Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, about the problems of the for-profit health care system in the USA, and the coronavirus response so far.[56][127]
Charity
On November 2, 2022, Timothy Snyder became the tenth ambassador of UNITED24,[128] where he completed a fundraiser to collect donations for a system to counter Russian unmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine, thereby protecting Ukraine's critical infrastructure.[40][129] On August 18, 2024, joined by Mark Hamill, he launched the United24 Safe Terrain Initiative funding mine clearing robots to rid Ukrainian lands of explosive ordnance, reduce risks for sappers, and allow people to return to their businesses and farms.[130][131]
Through the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, he leads the "Documenting Ukraine" project to support journalists, scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and archivists based in Ukraine in their efforts to create a factual record of the war.[132]
Starting in November 2023, Snyder began leading 90 scholars in the "Ukrainian History Global Initiative" to study Ukraine and its history. The initiative is a charitable foundation that will include disciplines beyond history and sponsor three major academic conferences, various publications, and archaeological excavations.[133][134]
Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Co-edited with Peter Andreas. ISBN978-0-7425-0178-2
A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermenschen" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.
The Polish Operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938 was an anti-Polish mass-ethnic cleansing operation of the NKVD carried out in the Soviet Union against Poles during the period of the Great Purge. It was ordered by the Politburo of the Communist Party against so-called "Polish spies" and customarily interpreted by NKVD officials as relating to 'absolutely all Poles'. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 Poles living in or near the Soviet Union. The operation was implemented according to NKVD Order No. 00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov.
The Dirlewanger Brigade, also known as the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger (1944), or the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, or The Black Hunters, was a unit of the Waffen-SS during World War II. The unit, named after its commander Oskar Dirlewanger, consisted of convicted criminals. Originally formed from convicted poachers in 1940 and first deployed for counter-insurgency duties against the Polish resistance movement, the brigade saw service in German-occupied Eastern Europe, with an especially active role in the anti-partisan operations in Belarus. The unit is regarded as the most brutal and notorious Waffen-SS unit, with its soldiers described as the "ideal genocidal killers who neither gave nor expected quarter". The unit is regarded as the most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Poland and Belarus, and arguably the worst military unit in modern European history based off its criminality and cruelty.
Fascist has been used as a pejorative or insult against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.
Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones was a Welsh journalist who in March 1933 first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, including the Holodomor and the Asharshylyk.
The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region and Carpathian Ruthenia during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine.
Geoffrey Roberts is a British historian of World War II working at University College Cork. He specializes in Soviet diplomatic and military history of World War II. He was professor of modern history at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland and head of the School of History at UCC.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It is about mass murders committed before and during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Grover Carr Furr III is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, that the Katyn massacre was committed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel and not the Soviet NKVD, that all defendants in the Moscow Trials were guilty as charged, that claims in Nikita Khrushchev's speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences are almost entirely false, that the purpose of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was to preserve the Second Polish Republic rather than partition it, and that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland in September 1939, on the grounds that the Polish state no longer existed. Furr claims that the mainstream narrative of the Soviet Union and in particular the Stalin era is biased and that many of the claims by mainstream historians are unfounded, because they follow "anti-Stalin paradigm".
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America is a 2018 book by Timothy Snyder. In it, Snyder explores Russian attempts to influence Western democracies and the influence of philosopher Ivan Ilyin on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation in general.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a 2017 book by Timothy Snyder, a historian of 20th-century Europe. The book was published by Tim Duggan Books in hardcover and by Penguin Random House in paperback. A graphic version, illustrated by Nora Krug, was released October 5, 2021. The book topped the New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017 and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021.
Bloodlands (full title Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder.
On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians is an essay by Russian president Vladimir Putin published in Russian on Kremlin.ru website 12 July 2021.
Ruscism, a portmanteau of Russian fascism, is a neologism and a derogatory term which is used by a number of scholars, politicians and publicists to describe the political ideology and policies of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin. It is used in reference to the Russian state's autocratic political system, ultranationalism and neo-imperialism, militarism, expansionism, corporatism, close alignment of church and state, political repression, use of censorship and state propaganda, and a cult of personality around Putin.
"What Russia Should Do with Ukraine", is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state, as well as the full destruction of the Ukrainian national identity in accordance with Russia's aim to accomplish the "denazification" of the latter.
This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the history of Belarus. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. Book entries have references to journal articles and reviews about them when helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below. The External links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities.
"The Vladimir Putin Interview" is a television interview hosted by the American journalist and political commentator Tucker Carlson with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. It premiered on February 8, 2024, on the Tucker Carlson Network and the social media website X (Twitter). It is the first interview with Putin to be granted to a Western journalist since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Historians have pointed out many false claims in Putin's statements.
↑ "Timothy David Snyder". Academic Board V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. November 2, 2022. Archived from the original on October 8, 2024. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
↑ Котвіцька (Kotvitska), Катерина (Каterina). "Історія для майбутнього"[History for the future]. Україна Молода (Ukraine Young) (in Ukrainian). Retrieved December 22, 2021.
↑ Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak: The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Ukraine. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Ed. Jens Rydgren). Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 862, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.30.
↑ Vachudová, Milada Anna; Snyder, Tim (1996). "Are Transitions Transitory? Two Types of Political Change in Eastern Europe Since 1989". East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures. 11 (1): 1–35. doi:10.1177/0888325497011001001. ISSN0888-3254.
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