The Intersection of History and Advocacy

This is the Guardian The Guardian Archive Longread Hi My name is Robert P. Baird. I'm the author of Putin, Trump, Ukraine Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our Dark Times published the Guardian Long Read in twenty twenty three This is a profile of Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe grew up in the United States, now lives in Canada He made his name as an academic and in twenty sixteen, he published a book called onn Tyranny, which made him kind of a hero of the liberal anti Trump resistance. I was drawn to Snyder in the first place because he deals with ideas and I'm very interested in the way that ideas interact with the world through politics and other means Cidder was particularly interesting to me because he's a polarizing figure both in terms of the left and the right And I was interested in looking at the ways that his work was received and treated among all those different groups of people When I finished the piece, Snyder and a lot of people thought that Trump's time in office was more or less effectively over, especially after the january sixth insurction at the Capitol Snyder was very impressent in recognizing that Trump was the start of something, not the end of something. But I think in the immediate aftermath of january six, he thought that it would be other people who carried along Trump's legacy What's been interesting now is to watch, of course, the Trump back in office, how Snyder and others have dealt with the fact that Trump is around him in some ways even more understrainint than he was the first time during his first term Welcome to the Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our longongreads, go to theguardian. com forward slash long read Putin, Trump, Ukraine Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our Dark Times by Robert P. Baird Last September Seven months after Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine The Yale historian Timothy Snyder. took a sixteen hour train ride from Poland to Key Snyder knew the city well He'd been visiting since the early nineteen nineties when he was a graduate student and the newly post Soviet Ukrainian capital was dark and provincial In the decades that followed, Kieiv had grown bigger and more interesting And Snyder, who is now fifty three, had become an eminent historian of Eastern Europe O disembarking at the Kieiv Pazarerssky station He found the city transformed by war There were sandbags everywhere. cononcrete roadblocks and steel hedgehogs designed to stop Russian tanks Air raid warnings blared from phones and pockets and handbags Not everything was unfamiliar. The first months of the war had gone relatively well for the Ukrainians a fact that surprised many observers, but not Snyder And by September, Kiv was no longer in imminent danger of occupation Life, while not normal, was regaining some of its pre war rhythms You could get a haircut at a barber shop. or here stand up at a comedy club or sunbathe on the shores of the Niper River Snyder had come to speak at an annual conference Yalta European strrategy Yes. which was founded in two thousand four to promote ties with Europe funded by a Ukrainian oligarch The conference had become an occasional stopover for the glad handing global elite Bill and Hillary Clinton. Gordon Brown, Elton John, and Richard Branson had all participated in previous years And the roster for the twenty twenty two meeting included the American National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. and Eric Schmidt the former CEO of Google. Though he is not a natural gladhander Snyder had attended the conference before His first visit came in twenty fourteen a few years after he published Bloodlands provocative and emotionally devastating account of Nazi and Soviet atrocities which established him in the words of one reviewer as Perhaps the most talented younger historian of modern Europe working today The book was a crossover success. And in the years that followed, Snyder began to write more about contemporary issues. including the climate crisis, healthcare, and Ukrainian politics But it was his writing about two figures Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. turned him into one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the past decade Snyder's mainstream breakthrough in twenty seventeen on tyranny best selling little book that helped him make the house intellectual of the Center lefte annti Trump movement sometimes known as hashtag resistance liberalism The book earned him regular invitations to appear on television. Whether or not you talk to your friends about it, Everybody you know has been reading and rereading on Tyranny Rachel Madow said on her show The news Snyder brought his audience was almost unremittingly bleak Yet it also offered a strange kind of reassurance You are not wrong to feel that the situation is grievous, Snyder told them. take it from an expert in political barbarism Things are exactly. as bad as they seem. Snyder's dire warnings were easy to caricature as bourgeois liberal doomerism Trump's attempts to overturn the twenty twenty election allowed him to claim vindication for what his critics had seen as hyperbole. On the ninth of january, twenty twenty one Three days after a mob laid siege to the U.S Capitol, Snyder published an essay in the New York Times that made another presressent prediction. Trump's failed pch was more like the beginning than the end of something, Snyder argued. since Trump's big lie that he won the election was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. It would remain a potent force in American politics unless a concerted effort was made to stop it. Snyder's view of Putin was still more ominous in Putin's Russia Snyder sees a corrupt autocracy that is turned to neo fascism in an attempt to regain its imperial glory He was one of the few Anglophone commentators to anticipate Russia's twenty fourteen invasion of Ukraine a prediction that even his friends scoffed at and warned in his book Black Earth that A new Russian colonialism threatened European stability In his opinion, the full scale invasion that started last year was not, as some saw it, a minor regional conflict but rather an atrocity of ethical significance It is about the possibility Docratic future He wrote in foreign affairs Over the past year, Snyder has been one of the most eloquent interpreters of the war in Ukraine He writes and speaks frequently about the conflict including in mid March to the UN Security Council He has established a project to document the war and more controversially, has raised more than one point two million dollars for an anti drone defense system. The course on Ukrainian history that he taught at Yale last autumn has had hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube And he has become one of the most famous Western intellectuals within Ukraine itself He used to be a celebrity in historical circles and among intellectuals his friend The Ukrainian rock star Svitislav Vakarchuk told me recently Now, even ordinary people know a lot about him It was a sign of Snyder's standing that the Yes confference was only the second highest profile stop on his key itinerary The main reason for his trip, Snyder told me, During one of three long conversations we had recently private meeting with Ukraine's presresident Volodyymyr Zelensky The Ukrainiian, Snyder said. think I'm much more important than I actually am. Zelensky, he went on Th of me mainly as somebody who had some kind of voice I'm not under the illusion that Snyder stopped himself No, that's not true. He said, My wife and I have read on Tranny That's the first thing he said when I met him sitting in green leather wingbacks in Zelensky's presidential office. The men talked for more than two hours. They discussed Shakespeare The Czech playwright and politician Vatslav Havel and the Soviet physicist and dissident, Andrey Sakarov They talked about freedom too The subject of a new book Snyder is working on particularly about Zelensky's decision to stay in Ukraine once the invasion began Zelenssky said that while most Western observers had expected him to flee He had never felt as if he had any real choice That's an argument that he helped me to make Snyder told me Being free means that you actually end up in situations where you won't actually feel like you have a whole bunch of options. Snyder's fascination with what he is described as Zelenssky's Choiceless choice. is not surprising. predicted that too, on the Eve of the war As an academic and a public intellectual, Snyder has long operated on the belief that There are moments in the world where your actions are magnified It may be that you can take things that were going to swerve in a particularly bad direction and you can push them with relatively little effort Zelenssky's decision Like the Ukrainian resistance wr at large, was for him a vivid demonstration that this belief was well justified. Unusually for a serious historian, Snyder often draws analogies between the past and the present. more unusually still. He routinely makes predictions about the future. What he calls his Cassandra mode different from his historical work but not entirely disconnected History isn't the boring recitation of stuff that we all know but have forgotten. He says It's a constant, exciting discovery of things that actually happened which weren't anticipated, and which were probably considered wildly improbable at the time The First World War The Holocaust, A lot of the things which seem absolutely foundational were regarded at the time as ridiculous, absurd, impossible 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 Snyder was raised in a Quaker family in southwestern Ohio. And he retains a Midwestern faith in the virtue of saying plainly what you mean His unadorned prose has the sturdy simplicity that one associates with shaker furniture Unlike most academics, he also feels a deep responsibility to explain his ideas as straightforwardly as possible It's very, very easy to hide behind the notion that Oh, what I do as a philosopher or psychologist or cell biologist is just really complicated He says I honestly don't believe that's true Snyder dislikes the scholarly tendency to hide judgments under a cloak of pseudo objectivity He has a strong moral feeling His wife, Marcy Shore calls it a save the world impulse that can be traced back to his parents Sore told me that Snyder's mother has this very calming sense of moral clarity It's like There are no perfect decisions in the world There's no space of innocence given the situation as it is You make the choice and you go forward Snyder, she says is much the same way Sure who is also a historian at Yale noted her husband's deep confidence in his abilities Over email, she told me a story about the birth preparation class she and Snyder had taken when she was pregnant with their son They were living in Vienna, and the midwivife spoke to the class in Venerish The colloquial Viennese dialect After the class, the couple agreed they had understood only about sixty percent of what they'd heard The difference between us can be gleaned in this small but revealing detail Sure wrote Tim was calmly persuaded that the sixty percent we did understand was the important part Whereas I was convinced that the forty percent we didn't understand was surely what was crucial As Snyder's public profile has risen, He has attracted an increasing number of critics His judgments have been controversial in part because his own politics are difficult to pin down To Ukrainian nationalists, he sounds like an American leftist To American leftists, he sounds like a Ukrainian nationalist. His books carry blurbs from an unlikely coterie that ranges from George Saunders Author of Lincoln in the Bardo, to Henry Kissinger author of the Bombing of Cambodia In Snyder's focus on the evils of Nazism and Stalinism and his advocacy of U. S. military support for Ukraine Some people see the makings of a barely reconstructed Cold warrior Yet he opposed the Iraq warar and is anything but blithe about the US's claims to moral supremacy His memoir diatribe are Malady lambasted the U. S.' privatized healthcare system. And lately, he has been speaking out against Republican sponsored laws that limit discussion of the US.'s racist history in schools Perhaps the most common critique of Snyder over the past decade has to do with the stridency of his public arguments which often see him presenting beliefs and even speculations as incontrovertible facts Earlier this year after an FBI counter intelligence official was indicted for violating sanctions against a Russian oligarch. Snyder wrote on his substack We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration our national security, and ourselves Two weeks later, he ridiculed discussions about a potential nuclear escalation in the Ukraine conflict as wrong and embarrassingly so in moral and strategic terms That is the most important thing to say about nuclear war It's not happening He claimed. This rhetorical self assurance is a crucial feature of his mainstream appeal for audiences disoriented by some of the most politically turbulent times they've ever seen Snyder's authoritative tone suggests a firm hand on the tiller. Yet it also supplies grist for critics who think Snyder is too ready to see catastrophe lurking around every corner The cultural critic, Lee Siegel, accused him of being A one man industry of panic prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true The political scientist Daniel Dresner in the New York Times described on tyranny as Overwrought and potentially self defeating because of its hyperbole And in the nation, Sophie Pinkham described the road to unfreedom Snyder's twenty eighteen book about Putin and Trump as apathheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump's wake Shore told me that her husband possesses kind of strange composure that allows him to absorb criticism without emotional disturbance Snyder, for his own part told me that he doesn't see much value in addressing his critics directly He nevertheless makes no apologies for stating clearly what he thinks will happen And while Snyder is proud of his foresight He has often been correct He also insists that his predictions are not a parlor game to rack up points central to his understanding of history is a conviction that events are not predetermined by broad structural forces such as economics or technology. his dire analogies and doomy premonitions are not meant to make people depressed or complacent The opposite To make predictions is to emphasize the unpredictability of the future. to remind readers that they might still have the freedom to change history In February, I went to New Haven to watch Snyder teach at Yale. His morning class, on a cold and sunny Valentine's Day was an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration in the U.S and USSR He was teaching the course with the philosopher Jason Stanley close friend of his who had likewise become a pillar of the anti Trump. Hashtag resistance The course was held in a classroom with Darkwood wainscoing Back marble fireplace. and gothic arch windows inset with scenes from the Bible through the window, it was possible to see the fourteen story tower that had been renamed in honor of the university's recently deceased chief investment officer. Though Snyder can sometimes seem in print, like an author unfamiliar with the concept of self doubt, person, there iss still a trace of the leny, somewhat diffident undergraduate that one of his professors recalls from his university days He has a dry humor and a talent for extemporaneous eloquence No one would mistake him for a commanding presence. Speak softly and dresses in textured grays and browns that might as well be camouflage on a Northeastern American college campus in winter amplifying this self effacing air is a sense which hangs about him like a penitential sackcloth that there is too much to do. Too many legitimate requests on his time I can't physically process the email He told me at one point, I'm just a history professor I don't have staff When he arrived in the seminar room Snyder provoked no murmur or hush among the students with his thinning white hair His lively blue eyes and his air of relaxed reticence He made for a distinct contrast with Stanley Wh showed up to the course in black clothes and black sunglasses and quickly started cracking loud jokes with the students nearest his chair The subject for today's class was late nineteenth century scientific racism But Snyder said that he wanted to start with a reminder about some philosophical arguments connected to the subject at hand Without notes, he launched into a brief lecture that touched on Plato's Permmenides The book of Genesis. The idea of dialectic in Hegel and Marx and the treatment of history by the French American polymath Renee Gerard before wrapping around to WEB DubBois Sure had told me that socializing and speaking in public can be draining for Snyder But it was clear in the seminar room that he was enjoying himself He spoke quickly and fluently gesturing with his hands, and then spooling his arguments in transcription ready sentences A few hours after the class ended Stanley explained the detour to Plato earlier that morning, he told me Snyder are texted to say that he wanted to remind the students of some earlier thinkers I said What are you talking about? Parmenides? As a joke, Stanley recalled. He took it as a dayer That's very standard. Tim is extremely competitive Snyder's friends sometimes marvel that the eldest son of a veterinarian from Ohio with no familial ties to Eastern Europe became a leading expert on the region. His family can trace its ancestry back many generations on each side in the US. And he grew up not far from the farms, where his grandparents grew pumpkins, soya beans, and corn parents were Quakers who served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador before returning to Centerville prosper suburb outside Dayton to raise their families Snyder says that his parents were very left wing and not just by American standards an inclination that set them apart from the conservatism that prevailed in the suburbs and countryside of Southwestern Ohio In the midst of an overwhelming Republican millieu They hung posters celebrating left wing Latin American causes on their walls, and regularly sat down with their three boys to write letters to prisoners for Amnesty International on Sunday afternoons. When Snyder was in the ninth grade, the family traveled to a Quaker dairy commune in Costa Rica was our idea of tourism. He said an alienated and mostly indifferent student in high school Snyder bucked against his parents' leftist politics by flirting with libertarianism. He remembers debating the virtues and vices of the Soviet Union with his mother herer starting point would be Well, they were on the right side with Nicaragua They were on the right side with Cuba It wouldn't be Hungary in nineteen fifty six or Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight Still, there were limits to his rebellion I would have never thought I'm for Reagan. Even at my most midwestern buttoned up, that would have been a different tribe When Snyder arrived at Brown University in nineteen eighty seven as an undergraduate He thought he might end up as a lawyer working on nuclear arms control classes would get him interested in history. One was a survey of European intellectual history taught by Mary Glve. The other, on post war Eastern European history, was taught by Thomas W. Simons Jr. Who would soon after be appointed ambassador to Poland That course started less than two weeks after Nikolai Coesku, the Romanian dictator executed in Book arrest on Christmas Day nineteen eighty nine I thought I'd get fifteen or twenty students Simons told me. A hundred and thirty showed up Snyder says he was obsessed with the course So much so that he suggested Simons turn his lecture notes into a book Simons hired him the following summer. to help him do just that After graduating, Snyder attended Oxford on a Marthall schcholarship Timothy Garten Ash One of his DFill advisors recalled Snyder as a very reserved young man who nevertheless stood out from his peers for his moral intensity analytical clarity and intellectual boldness which saw him pushing an argument as far as it would go. posossibly even a little farther. In his dissertation on the Polish Marxist thinker, Kazamiras Kellis Krauts And especially in his second book The reconstruction of nations which he'd largely completed by the time he got hired at Yale in two thousand one. It is already possible to see Snyder engaging with the major themes that would shape his subsequent work first was that Eastern Europe was not an a historical no man's land trapped between Europe and the Soviet Union place with its own agency and its own history The second was that history could be shaped by individual human choices The third was the importance of ideas as a primary mover of historical events particularly The fraught idea of the nation Since college, Snyder had nurtured what he describes as Larger ambition to be. sounds very pompous, but to be an intellectual. A writer. Bloodlands, published in twenty ten marked the first major inflection point in his public career. By that time, he had already been writing occasionally for non academic audiences. But his powerful account of the human toll of Nazi and Soviet horror won him his first major audience among non academic readers. Snyder took as his subject the political mass murder million people that occurred between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty five in a swath of Eastern Europe that stretched from central Poland to Western Russia through Ukraine Belarus and the Baltic States from this simple formula Snyder drew several arguments He suggested, for instance, that the Nazis and the Soviets treated the countries of the bloodlands The term alludes to an Anna Akmatava poem approximate colonies He also argued that too much of the previous research on the killings had seen them through the eyes of the major powers moreore fundamentally His book proposed that the events that transpired in these countries to be seen as central to twentieth century European history Among academics Bloodlands won praise for Snyder's wide learning. speaks five languages Reads five more. and belong to the first generation of Western scholars to gain widespread access to Eastern European archives after the fall of communism There was also criticism Some reviewers balked at his juxtaposition of the Holocaust with Stalin's crimes while others, notably Richard J. Evans in a particularly vehement article accused him of failing to explain the causes of the events he was describing in Black Eth H is far more controversial follow up to Bloodlands Snyder seemed to have both criticisms in mind Its subject was the causes of the Holocaust Yet Snyder's provocative efforts to reframe European history brought new energy to what was already coming to be seen as settled history that whole history had been told as a story of Russia and Germany And of course the Holocaust Garten Ash told lands, he said The spotlight on East Central Europe in a way which changed the historical perspective Thanks for listening to the Guardian Longroom The story continues right after this Welcome back to the Guardian Longread Snyder believes that doing good history requires taking bad ideas seriously And he applies the same principle to his writing on current events Bad ideas matter. He says They have their own coherence and their own power. Shortly after he published Bloodlands He noticed that Putin who was serving a term as prime mininister speaking with concerning frequency about the essential unity of Russia and Ukraine In twenty thirteen, Putin visited Kyiv for the one thousand and twenty fifth anniversary of the baptism of Prince Vladimir the Great In Kyiv, Snyder says, Putin gave this wacky speech saying that Ukraine and Russia were w because of the baptism And no one could do anything about it because it was beyond politics It was a spiritual truth Basically, God made it so. The Maidon uprising began that November in Ukraine It was sparked by the sudden refusal of Ukraine's president Vikor Yanukovich under pressure from Russia too sign an association agreement with the European Union The protests grew to more than half a million people. And by January, the protesters were locked in an increasingly deadly standoff with the state On the third of february, twenty fourteen Snyder published an op ed in the New York Times under the headline 't grab Ukraine. citing Putin's increasingly vocal desire for a Eurasian Union to rival the EU as well as Russian officials who had been openly discussing the partition of Ukraine He warned that Putin might try to engineer a coup in Kyiv If that failed, he suggested Putin might see Armed intervention as the only way to save face Snyder says his warning was a judgment call based on his sense that Putin was driving the Ukraine policy more than people realized. When I read those angry things that he published in Russian newspapers about civilization His anger didn't seem to be tactical It seemed to somehow come from someplace deep The other factor that triggered Snyder's suspicion was a very visible uptick in anti Ukrainian propaganda along the lines of They're Nazis Gay Gay Nazis. on Russian television in November and December of twenty thirteen. became very carnivalesque And that got me thinking that something was in the works Snyder's concern about Russian aggression was not widely shared. Western newews reports from the Tim repeatedly assured their readers that Putin would not be so rash Most experts dismiss the possibility of military force The Times said, a week after it ran Snyder's off bed Ser he Ploi. a Ukrainian historian at Harvard who is friendly with Snyder told me that he'd been certain the oped went too far Yet just a few weeks later A Yanukovich fled the country Russia seized Crimea. and sent troops into Etern Ukraine Soky laughing at the memory, said he spoke to Snyder not long afterward. I told him Okay I thought you were a complete nut Snyder says that at the time of the invasion, there had been a tendency to treat Russia as though it were merely a failed or corrupted version of a Western liberal democracy. Both the American and the German view of Putin was about denied agency. They're like Oh well, they're trying to have a transition, but it's hard for them, poor souls Therefore, they have to invade Georgia or Ukraine contrast, he said If you say Putin is a guy who reads and changes and pulls in ideas, you're saying Okay, he's not an idiot He's not predictable He makes moves we wouldn't expect. This is one of the reasons Snyder insists on calling Putin fascist It sounds weird, but To say that he is influenced by fascism is to give him credit He's not just a historically determined piece in this story of transitions He's been doing something different for more than a decade two years after the annexation of Crimea Snyder noticed that Russian politicians and state media outlets spreading the same kinds of propaganda and misinformation about the U. S that it had about Ukraine though it is not true, as Snyder claimed recently on Twitter that he the story of Trump and Putin He was early in devoting sustained attention to the incipient relationship between the two men In april twenty sixteen, he argued that Trump's weakness and vanity made him an easy mark for Putin. who had already started cultivating him as a future Russian client And by that autumn, it was becoming clear that Russia was behind the hack and leak campaign that generated weeks of unfriendly headlines for Hillary Clinton in the final stretch of the presidential campaign citing Putin's rehabilitation of Ivan I Yin, a twentieth century Christian fascist philosopher Snyder argued that there was a logic, and even a political philosophy behind the apparent chaos of the cyber attacks If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, He wrote in the New York Times then democratic ideas will seem questionable as well And so the US would become more like Russia which is the general idea If Mr. Trump wins Russia wins. But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome Russia also wins. A few days before the election, Snyder flew back to his native Ohio to Cvas for Clinton. They assigned me literally the neighborhood where I grew up He recalled I was struck by how people didn't want to have a conversation I mean, I'm an introvert, but I was a harmless looking white guy and I had a lot of trouble getting people out to talk When he got home, he told Sure that Trump was going to win Ohio Still, he thought Clinton would prevail overall I think there was a certain amount of white naivete, he says Tim always kind of believed in America more than I did Sore says He's not used to being wrong reallyally wrong And he really didn't think Trump was going to win When I told the kids the next morning My daughter, who was four at the time said Maybe Daddy forgot to tell someone to vote for Hillary Clinton Snyder was stunned by Trump's victory, but it also provided the immediate impetus for on tyranny flying home from Sweden after the election. He started writing a list of lessons for thwarting tyranny on an airplane napkin The list included advice such as Do not obey in advance. and defend institutions. He posted it on Facebook when he got home and the post went viral Snyder's editor told him they could publish it as a short book if he added some context to each lesson The result which saw Snyder's plain declarative sentences become plain imperative exhortations that drew from the history of European political terror more closely resembles a Samistat manifesto Th one of his heavy historical volumes thanks to its urgency and its brevity. became a totem for Americans horrified by their new president on tyranny sold more than half a million copies during Trump's term of office. and spent nearly two years in total onn the New York Times bestest seller list The exaltation of Snyder among ciner left liberals prompted an equal and opposite reaction within certain quarters of the American lefte For these critics Snyder's portentous analogies and breathless warnings smacked of historical naivete and ideological convenience imply that Trump was a Hitler in waiting was not only to overlook the native horrors that American politics had conjured in the past It was also to neglect the ways that a bipartisan program of neoliberalism had created the conditions that led to Trump's election Writing in august twenty seventeen, Samuel Moyne and David Priestland Historians at Yale and Oxford criticize the views that Democracy is under siege and Totalitarianism is making a comeback. as forms of hysterical and counterproductive tyrannophobia barely veiled shot at Snyder The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red They wrote It is not hard to guess why On Tranny became a target for leftists annoyed with efforts to draft them into an anti Trump popular front. The twenty sixteen election witnessed the first serious resurgence of socialism in the U. S in half a century. And many on the left were not in a mood to make nice with the mainstream liberals who had failed to stop Trump at the polls Yet Snyder was never a neoliberal triumphalist Nor was he complacent about the US.' failures I honestly think this is just something people want to be true because it would be comfortable, if true. He told me In previous writings, he had denounced free market fundamentalism And in the epilogue of on Tyranny itself Snyder wrote that the danger of Trump was that he would usher the U. S. from A naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy What Snyder hoped for was something different from either option A renewal Now as he would put it in his next book The road to unfreedom that no one can foresee. Snyder admits that when he wrote on Tyranny He did not sufficiently account for the ways in which Trump was a familiar type in American history My take was that this was new and dangerous I was probably a little bit wrong about the new part but he says he was correct about the extent to which people would tell themselves America's exceptional And nothing bad can happen here Throughout Trump's presidency, he continued to warn that Trump would try to hold on to power unlawfully And in the essay he published a few days after the siege of the U. S. Capitol, He didn't pass up the chance for a moment of self congratulation It was clear to me in October that Trump's behavior preage to coup He wrote And I said so in print Even ming who calls his colleague? An extraordinarily gifted human being doesn't dispute Snyder's right to claim prescience In their twenty seventeen opPad. Priestland had asserted that There is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally And there is no reason to think he could succeed Mone told me he still holds that view today even after the sixth of January siege I don't believe that democracy was ever on the brink, he said Yet he also acknowledged that It almost doesn't matter for me to say, I don't think it provided that vindication. because everyone else thoughtought it did popular mind, he conceded Snyder won the debate about Trump Right up until the attack came, Snyder was still unsure whether to expect another Russian invasion of Ukraine There wasn't a propaganda rollout the way there had been in twenty fourteen He says, My normal intuitions come out of Russian propaganda. And they were starving me In late February, he was in New Haven Teaching two courses at Yale, plus a third on freedom at a prison in Central Connecticut After the war began on the twenty fourth of February He and Sure canceled the family holiday they'd been planning. didn't feel morally right He said Jason Stanley told me that the war was not abstract to Snyder One always has to remember that These are his friends Tim takes friendship extremely seriously. These are people he's known for decades. It is also true that the war represents a stark illustration of the themes that have shaped Snyder's work over the past three decades most obviously Ukraine's surprisingly successful defense efforts offer an instance of the sort of geopolitical agency that he has in his work tried to restore it to the historiography of Eastern Europe Putin's war has also provoked crucial questions about Ukrainian nationhood and the Ukrainian state precisely the kind that Snyder has spent his career investigating And while Snyder predicted that the outcome will be decided by material factors humanitarian support, debt forgiveness, weapon deliveries He also sees the war as a fight about ideas to Snyder. Putin's repeated claims about the spiritual unity of Russian and Ukrainian nations are not mere propaganda meant to obscure a hard no strategic calculation part of a deeply held neo imperial vision that Putin has cobbled together from his reading of Ilin fromom Soviet history and from a more general sense of Russian greatness emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticized by some in the Realist schoolchool of International Relations. Imma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center A think tank counts herself an admirer of Snyder's historical work But she also says that his Understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas. Whereas I would say that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region the dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears every additional degree of Western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the war's roots lie in Putin's fascist worldview then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative A lot of smart people have said it before me Fascism was never discredited It was only defeated, he says The Russians have to be defeated. just like the Germans were defeated. In two thousand four protests against corruption and electoral fraud were building into what would become the Orange Revolution Snyder wrote that Ukraine today is the test for Europe Nearly two decades later, it seems clear that he sees the war in Ukraine as a test not only of Europe and the US But of himself after he returned from Kieiv last autumn He was asked to become an ambassador for United twenty four crowdfunding effort that Zelensky had launched in the early days of the war The campaign's organizers suggested that he might want to raise funds for the reconstruction of a library in Chanahhiv which had been destroyed by Russian shelling early on in the war I thought about that, Snyder says. I knew the library I knew Chair Nahheiv I was there in September and I'd seen the ruins It would have been a perfectly natural thing for me as a historian to do No one's going to say Oh, you're doing something wrong by raising money for the library But Snyder didn't want to decide based on what he felt politically correct or easiest for him personally Instead, he asked his Ukrainian friends what would be most useful They all said drones The historian said drones The humanist said peace activists said drones I asked Snyder whether he'd have done the same, had his friends in Kieivves said that an offensive weapon was needed. Battle tanks say Snyder said You got me there The anti drone system was a weapon, he acknowledged It's a weapon meant to save civilian lives at a time when Russia was openly threatening to take out the infrastructure. and to try to starve and freeze out as many people as they could You can't stop that by rebuilding a library You can't stop a drone by political correctness But if they had said Would you help us fund a tank I would have said no. I think that probably just shows the limit of my willingness to take hits It would probably be okay to raise money for a tank Even with the drone catcher, Snyder says I knew one hundred percent that people were going to say Look at him, he's an activist. He's raising money for a government He was thinking particularly of his critics in Germany whose version of being a public intellectual is criticizing other people for being public intellectuals Snyder raised more than one point two million dollars for the anti drrone system in under three months The criticism came as expected And he says it only confirmed to him that he had made the right choice In thinking the twentieth century, A book that Snyder helped the historian Tony Jett compose before he died in twenty ten Jutt argued that contemporary public intellectuals faced a choice between writing thoughtfully for a small audience or becoming what he called a media intellectual This means targeting your interests and remarks to the steadily shrinking attention span of TV debates blogs, tweets and the lik These were alternatives, not compliments, Judd insisted. It is not at all obvious to me that you can do both without sacrificing the quality of your contribution Not everyone would agree that Snyder has fully escaped the horns of Jut's dilemma. So far, he has managed enough of what he calls professional hygiene to avoid too much cross contamination The Ukraine course he taught at Yale and on YouTube might fairly be described as pro Ukrainian. in the sense that it offered a thoroughg rebuttal of Putin's assertion that Ukraine is not a real country The millennium long story it told was complex and surprising Nothing at all like the pithy Almost propagandistic appeals Snyder was writing on sububstack Snyder says he feels no philosophical tension between his work as a historian and his advocacy He also tends to downplay any concern about any potential effects of the war on his own reputation Still. in tying himself so completely to the Ukrainian self defense effort put himself on the line in a way that is rare for a public intellectual of his stature Wars are messy after all. Even wars that offer what he calls An unusual amount of moral clarity and the questions that Ukraine will soon need to confront How to end the war how to rebuild the country and its aftermath probably need answers that cannot be provided by uncomplicated appeals to basic values Swvitislav Wakarchuk, the Ukrainian musician said of his friend some people think he's a romantic I would say he's not a romantic He's an idealist The distinction seems apt Snyder is not Christopher Hitchens He doesn't long for the existential thrill of whistling artillery and crossfire overhead. I certainly don't feel like the Ukraine warar is a fulfillment of my destiny or anything like that He told me Yet his faith in the power of ideas has an important corllary. idea that costs you nothing is worth exactly what you paid for it As he put it, during our last conversation in New Haven, Good ideas real. unless you're willing to do some little thing Thanks again for listening to the Guardian Longroom was Trump, Ukraine Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our Dark Times Robert P. Baird Rad by Christopher Raglland The executive producer was Ellie Bury For more Guardian Long reads in text and a selection in audio, go to the guardian. com forward slash long read This is the Guardian