Tag: Book Reviews

The one hundred twenty five years of Europe’s past that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I (1789-1914) is commonly treated by historians as the era known as the “Long nineteenth century.” This fact alone stands in extraordinary contrast to how the landscape of Europe—both figuratively and in all too many cases literally—was so dramatically and irrevocably altered in the slightly more than four decades that followed. The task of telling that story in a single volume—a chronicle of people and events at once complex and colossal in scope—falls to renowned British historian Ian Kershaw in To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 [2015], an installment in The Penguin History of Europe series, a big, ambitious, well-written survey of outsize consequences plotted along a concentrated timeline, and in this he mostly succeeds.

It is no small challenge. In the style of an old fashioned narrative history, Kershaw—a scholar regarded in some quarters as one of the foremost experts of Hitler and Nazi Germany—guides the reader through the catastrophe of World War I and the repercussions in its aftermath; the social, economic, and political instabilities of the interwar period that was marked by both great prosperity and financial collapse, as well as by the twin incongruities of a strengthening of democratic institutions and the birth of fascism; the unimaginably even greater calamity that was World War II; and, finally, the dawn of the Cold War. That’s a tall order, and I have to wonder if Kershaw, despite his credentials, at first hesitated at the assignment of fitting all that into one book rather than several.

Given the scope of the material and the confines of just one volume, the author must make a series of determinations as to where to focus: what warrants passing mention and what merits a deeper dive. There’s simply too much to detail it all in a bit more than five hundred pages. From the start, it is evident that Kershaw makes sound decisions. He correctly recognizes that while the aftershocks of the First World War were indeed momentous, reporting the course of the war itself other than in broad outline is unnecessary for this kind of survey. The second war gets far more attention, and rightly so. Here the reader is rewarded by Kershaw’s expertise with Nazi Germany as all the many moving parts of Hitler’s ambitions at home and abroad are skillfully assembled into what was to become the ruthless killing machine that by 1945 left the continent littered with an astonishing seventy five million dead—nearly twice as many casualties as in the first war.

But my own interests were most piqued by the author’s brilliant treatment of the interwar period that puts a lie to many popular myths, especially with regard to the Weimer Republic and its later hijack by Adolf Hitler. It turns out that reparations caused far less economic than psychological trauma. And hyper-inflation, at least in its first wave, was more helpful than harmful to Germany, as war debts were rapidly repaid, and the industrial manufacturing base rebuilt and refortified. Most surprising, perhaps, is Kershaw’s emphasis on the strength of German democratic institutions, which he pronounces among the most solid in Europe at the time. The latter serves as a tragic underscore to what might have been, absent the rise of Hitler. Fascism was born in Italy, of course, and Mussolini’s role in sponsoring and spreading its dangerous contagion internationally receives careful attention. Meanwhile, Stalin was curating his increasingly brutal brand of Soviet totalitarianism. The Spanish Civil War—which for a time acted as a kind of proxy dueling ground between Germany and the USSR—also gets the coverage it deserves. And there’s much more.

The toughest task for any so-called “European history” is to provide adequate if not exactly equitable coverage to all its member nations. That is not easy. There’s a lot of countries in Europe—many more after the First World War fragmented multiple empires into artificially constructed borders with adjacencies to sometimes hostile ethnicities. Of course, all the attention typically goes to the big guys: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and sometimes Spain—but those six only represent about eight percent of the seventy-three  sovereign states that existed in 1939!

Kershaw tries to do better, but frankly it is an impossible trial, especially in a single book. Still, he widens the lens enough to reveal most of these nations struggling against similar internal and outside urgencies and meeting these with either traditional remedies that were likely to fail or, rarely, sometimes novel approaches that might have bred success in the longer term had not the cataclysmic Second World War swallowed up all other exigencies. These forces included economic depression, the impact of American isolationism, the almost paranoid fear of the spread of Soviet communism, as well as the instability inherent in the sudden creation of multiple new nations, and the truncation of several existing empires that also saw their respective monarchies replaced by new kinds of governing mechanisms.

There was also the disenchantment of millions who walked away from the ruins of the First World War unwilling to simply return to the “business as usual” of a once familiar civilization that had been shattered beneath their feet. The latter existential crisis was more characteristic of the West, however. In the East, as Kershaw makes clear, there was far more celebration, at least at first, with nation-building that saw the tossing off of centuries-old yokes of oppressor states. The course of both wars was also quite different east and west, as were the outcomes. There were few trenches in the east in the first war, and the results of victories and defeats forged new sovereignties. But these lands were ravaged like never before in the second war, and the years that followed saw them fall victim to a new brand of tyranny under Soviet domination.

Academics may gripe that To Hell and Back lacks endnotes, but that was ordained by Penguin editors, not Kershaw. Notes here are likely superfluous anyway, for the most part, because this is a synthesis of existing scholarship, rather than groundbreaking new theses. The back matter does include an extensive bibliography, as well as a series of fine maps, something often frustratingly conspicuous in their absence in all too many books of history. Still, I suspect some readers will find something to complain about, if only because the curious mind will want Kershaw to spend more time on a topic of interest that only saw fleeting attention in the narrative. But I resist that. Instead, I have nothing but admiration for an author who was able to competently include so much between two covers while maintaining the reader’s interest throughout, and at once dodged the dreaded tedium of a textbook or Wikipedia entry. That is quite the achievement in itself.

But there’s more. Mark Twain allegedly quipped that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss, adventurism in the Sudetenland, and invasion of Poland echo eerily in Vladimir Putin’s brand of neofascist revanchism, manifested in the annexation of Crimea, the sponsoring of puppet statelets in the Donbas, and finally the full scale assault on Ukraine. That is indeed a kind of unsettling rhyme. I came to this book because while reading The Gates of Europe, Serhii Plokhy’s masterful history of Ukraine, I was struck by a series of uncomfortable gaps in my own knowledge base. It occurred to me that I could speak with greater facility of the Peloponnesian War or Appomattox than I could the Treaty of Versailles. Surveys are not intended to be comprehensive, but the very best ones—To Hell and Back certainly earns that accolade—tickle the brain to incite further pursuits.  And for that I offer my sincere gratitude to Ian Kershaw.

 

A review of the Plokhy book, referenced above … Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

My favorite moment of my favorite film is the “La Marseillaise” scene in Casablanca that has freedom fighter Victor Laszlo, portrayed by Paul Henreid, abruptly break off a conversation with café-owner Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, when he overhears German soldiers in the bar singing a patriotic military song, and with dramatic purpose that underscores his own outrage intervenes to have the orchestra take up the French national anthem instead. The bandleader hesitates, Bogie nods his assent. At first, the Germans persist, but soon nearly all the patrons at Rick’s join in, including, perhaps most memorably, the young French woman Yvonne, shown earlier consorting with a German soldier, now stridently vocalizing each syllable of “La Marseillaise” with tears streaming down her face, until the volume and force of the anthem drowns out the Germans and they surrender to the circumstances. As the music fades, Yvonne cries out reflexively, “Vive la France!”  I have screened Casablanca more than two dozen times, but the “La Marseillaise” scene grips me anew in each instance; I feel chills, and tears well up in my eyes every time. It is just a movie, of course, but the symbolism is stark and powerful nonetheless, a poignant metaphor of how ordinary people can—even with tiny measures—resist fascism.

The “La Marseillaise” scene flashed over me as I turned the pages of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by distinguished Yale professor and historian Timothy Snyder, originally published in 2017 and later reissued in this splendid Graphic Edition (2021) beautifully illustrated by Nora Krug. But while Victor Laszlo and Yvonne are fictional celluloid heroes of a staged drama, Snyder looks back to actual individuals who confronted horrific circumstances when state fascism and rising totalitarianism convulsed Europe in the twentieth century, and connects the dots to the unsettling strength of emergent strains of neofascism that threaten to consume increasingly brittle democratic institutions in the West.

But identifying elements of fascism is not always easy, since while no less menacing these typically take on forms far more subtle than swastikas sewn to a shirt. In 2014, Hillary Clinton was roundly pilloried for casting Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression in Ukraine in the same realm as Adolf Hitler’s adventurism in the Sudetenland and the Austrian Anschluss. I lack Clinton’s stature, certainly, but I was similarly rebuked in my own circles on the eve of the 2016 presidential election when I drew lines from Trump’s MAGA to Hitler’s Nazis.

But Timothy Snyder has proved a reliable guide for these matters, most prominently in his The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America [2018], a magnificent work of unassailable scholarship that clearly established that such analogies are hardly hyperbolic—and prescient enough to anticipate Putin’s malignant strain of revanchism that later saw Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. The latter made the cable news, but there’s been far more equally sinister stuff floating just beneath the radar for some years that untrained eyes have failed to detect.

Snyder argues that Putin has carefully and cleverly sculpted a rebranded neofascism for the millennium, and that his fingerprints are everywhere: in efforts to fracture the NATO alliance, by championing Brexit to weaken the European Union, in vitriolic campaigns against so-called “immigrant invasions,” as well as others promoting antifeminism, homophobia, and hypermasculinity—and especially in election interference in the United States! Snyder posits that Putin helped fashion the fictional candidate “Donald Trump successful businessman,” who was then marketed to the American people. Paul Manafort was the last advisor to the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine before he became the first campaign manager to Donald Trump. That Trump is indeed Putin’s puppet is a secret hiding in plain sight.

By the courageous acts of some, the ineptitude of Trump himself, and a certain amount of luck, America weathered his four year tenure, if only—as January 6^th reminds us—just barely. But our democracy is unlikely to survive a second go-around. Which is why in this election year  recognizing and confronting fascism, in efforts both small and large, is so vital to the future of our fragile Republic. For those paying attention, the United States in the early 2020s has begun to feel disturbingly like Germany in 1930s. But how does the average American distinguish reality from propaganda, skillfully broadcast from both Moscow and Mar-a-Lago? Or, even more challenging, detect signs of fascism in MAGA, however blatant these might seem to members of the intelligentsia like Snyder?

This is an obstacle too often underestimated. Donald Trump has bragged about his support among the lower educated, a too-true if uncomfortable reflection of a vote-casting cohort overlooked at our own peril. The problem with The Road to Unfreedom, for all of its superlative craftsmanship, is that it is directed towards intellectuals and the politically sophisticated, reducing both its reach and its appeal to a wider and arguably more significant audience. Which is exactly what makes On Tyranny—especially in this standout graphic edition—such a critical and indeed far more accessible implement in our arsenal to combat fascism. Moreover, a younger demographic, weaned on graphic novels and plagued with a certain contempt for political institutions, is more likely to find enlightenment, perhaps even epiphany, between the covers of this slender publication.

In marked contrast to The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder’s On Tyranny is a brief and easy read. The entire volume could be consumed in a single sitting, although I deliberately stretched it out over several days in order to soak in the messaging. The Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century of the subtitle are rendered as twenty chapters that look to the past and present to predict the grim future that lies ahead without an active intervention he assigns to all of us, collectively. In his words and the accompanying illustrations, the echoes from some ninety years past shriek loudly into our current political maelstrom. It may take a keen ear to otherwise catch that tune, but Snyder makes certain those sounds are unmistakable.

The first chapter, with its lesson “Do not obey in advance,” speaks most consequentially to just how the complacency of an obedient population enables the oppressor. The Nazis were pleasantly surprised at how effortlessly Austrians ceded their own sovereignty in the Anschluss,  and colluded to persecute the Jews among them. Tyrants don’t always have to seize control; sometimes it is handed to them. Hitler himself first gained political power through elections, as did the communists in Czechoslovakia in 1946. But what was to cement the absolute rule that followed was the anticipatory obedience that Snyder pronounces the true political tragedy, that conformity from a docile population that facilitates absolute rule until it can no longer be reversed—be that be Hitler’s Reich, Soviet style communism, or some other less flamboyantly ornamented authoritarian regime. In the end, totalitarianism, however packaged, is always a terrifying similar creature.

But its disguise can be quite compelling. One way to unmask it is to “Believe in truth” (Lesson Ten) and to defend that truth unfailingly against “alternate facts” being foisted upon you by those who work to blur the boundaries of reality with questionable notions that confirm a specific narrative. Snyder lectures that: “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.” This is  uncomfortably familiar territory these days, recognizable in everything from unscientific attacks on vaccines and climate science, to a whitewashing of the insurrection, to the “big lie” of election denial, along with a prevailing whiff of vague yet menacing conspiracy hovering about every discussion. What if Big Pharma is forcing dangerous vaccines into our bloodstreams? What if climate scientists are covertly colluding to advance a green agenda? What if Nancy Pelosi engineered the assault on Congress? What if Biden is not the legitimate president? The power and reach of social media dwarfs the capacity of legitimate news to keep up, as the unsophisticated and the paranoid alike are almost effortlessly swept into a maze of rabbit holes that look to distort as well as discredit empirical evidence in order to market a faith in the unfounded that promotes skillfully devised misinformation.

Snyder correctly identifies the process as “… open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” Donald Trump, of course, is the master of this mechanism. The author reports Trump averaging six lies daily in 2017, and twenty-seven a day by 2020. The Washington Post more specifically quantified that as an astonishing 30,573 false or misleading claims over a total of four years! Such is how a “fictional counterworld” is constructed, one of “magical thinking” that is “the open embrace of contradiction.” The result breeds chaos and uncertainty and finally a fear of disorder that can only be addressed by the seemingly benevolent “strong man,” the tyrant-in-waiting with all the answers, eager to come to the rescue with feigned benevolence, declaring “I alone can fix it.” Snyder turns to history to remind us that this is nothing new, that the house that MAGA built is chillingly similar to the ones fascists of the past called home.

There are eighteen more lessons, all of them valuable, but my own favorite is the final one which makes for an entire chapter in two sentences: “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” For me, those lines brought to mind Hans and Sophie Scholl, idealistic young German siblings guillotined by Hitler’s regime for handing out pamphlets associated with the doomed anti-Nazi “White Rose” movement. There have been many other such martyrs to freedom over time, but even more who survived and lived to see the day that their own tyrants were tumbled and human dignity restored. We can only do what we can. We can only be as courageous as we can be.

In the closing scenes of Casablanca, Bogie risks his life against long odds to urge Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, the love of his life as well as the wife of Victor Laszlo, to step onto a plane poised for departure to be at Victor’s side in his ongoing crusade against fascism. Rick famously tells her: “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Here Rick, Ilsa, and Victor are being as courageous as they can be.

Buy On Tyranny. Read it more than once. Share it with your friends and family. These are perilous times. Fascists walk in our midst wearing red caps. Be as courageous as you can. And while you’re at it, hum a few bars of “La Marseillaise.”

 

THE TWENTY LESSONS

• Do not obey in advance.
• Defend institutions.
• Beware the one-party state.
• Take responsibility for the face of the world.
• Remember professional ethics.
• Be wary of paramilitaries.
• Be reflective if you must be armed.
• Stand out.
• Be kind to our language.
• Believe in truth.
• Investigate
• Make eye contact and small talk.
• Practice corporeal politics.
• Establish a private life.
• Contribute to good causes.
• Learn from peers in other countries.
• Listen for dangerous words.
• Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
• Be a patriot.
• Be as courageous as you can.

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder

“Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years,”  The Washington Post. January 24, 2021.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

Review of: At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl, edited by Inge Jens

 

On February 24, 2022, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II that summoned up ominous historical parallels. Memories of Munich resurfaced, as well as the price paid for inaction. The West heard terrifying if unmistakable echoes in the rumble of armored vehicles and boots on the ground, and this time responded rapidly and unhesitatingly to both condemn Russia and steadfastly stand with Ukraine. Post-Trump—the former president seemed to have a kind of boyhood crush on Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin—the United States, led now by the Biden Administration, acted decisively to partner in near-unanimity with the European Union and a newly re-emboldened NATO to provide political, economic, and especially military aid to beleaguered Ukrainians.

The world watched in horror as Russian missiles took aim at civilian targets. But there was also widespread admiration for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who defied offers to assist his flight to a safe haven abroad by reportedly declaring that: “The fight is here: I need ammunition, not a ride.” But while most Ukrainians were indeed grateful for the outpouring of critical support from abroad, there was also background noise fraught with frustration: Russia had actually been making war on Ukraine since 2014, even if much of the planet never seemed to notice it.

Since, at least until very recently, most Americans could not easily locate Ukraine on a map, it is perhaps less than surprising that few were aware of the active Russian belligerency in Ukraine for the eight years prior to the full scale invasion that made cable news headlines. Many still do not know what the current war is really about. That vast sea of the uninformed is the best audience for The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History [2023] by award-winning Harvard professor and historian Serhii Plokhy.

The conflict in Ukraine has spawned two competing narratives, and although only one is fact-based, the other—advanced by Putin and his neofascist allies in Europe and the United States—has gained dangerous currency as of late. In the fantasy “world according to Putin,” Ukraine is styled as a “near abroad” component integral to Russia with a shared heritage and culture that makes it inseparable from the Russian state. At the same time, Ukraine has brought invasion upon itself by seeking to ally itself with Russia’s enemies. And, somehow concomitantly, Ukraine is also a rogue state run by Nazis—never mind that Zelenskyy himself is of Jewish heritage—that obligates Moscow’s intervention in order to protect the Ukrainian and Russian populations under threat. That none of this is true and that much of it is neither logical nor even rational makes no difference. Putin and his puppets just keep repeating it, because as we know from Goebbels’ time, if you keep repeating a lie it becomes the truth.

And that truth is more complicated, so of course far more difficult to rebut. It is always challenging for nuance to compete with talking points, especially when the latter are reinforced in well-orchestrated efforts peddled by a sophisticated state-run propaganda machine that has an international reach. Ukraine and Russia, as well as Belarus, do indeed share a cultural heritage that can be traced back to the ninth century Kyivan Rus’ state, but then a similar claim can be made about France and Germany and their roots in the Carolingian Empire a bit farther to the west—with the same lack of relevance to their respective rights to sovereignty in the modern day. And Russian origins actually belong to fourteenth century Muscovy, not Kyiv. In its long history, Ukraine has been incorporated into Tsarist Russia and its successor state, the Soviet Union, but its vast parcels were also at various times controlled by Mongols, by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, by Austria, and even by a Turkish khanate. Yet, Ukraine always stubbornly clung to its distinct sovereign identity, even when—like Poland under partition—it was not a sovereign nation, and even as the struggle to achieve statehood ever persisted. That is quite a story in itself, and no one tells that story better than Plokhy himself in his erudite text, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine [2015, rev.2021], a dense, well-researched, deep dive into the past that at once fully establishes Ukraine’s right to exist, while expertly placing it into the context of Europe’s past and present. Alas, it leans to the academic in tone and thus poses a challenge to a more general audience.

Fortunately, The Russo-Ukrainian War is far more readable and accessible, without sacrificing the impressive scholarship that marks the foundation of all Plokhy’s work. And thankfully the course of Ukraine’s recent past—the focus here—is far less convoluted than in prior centuries. While contrary to Putin’s claim, Ukraine is not an inextricable element of the Russian state, their modern history has certainly between intertwined. But that changed in the post-Soviet era, and the author traces the paths of each in the decades since Ukraine’s independence and Russia’s drift under Putin’s rule from a fledgling democracy to neofascist authoritarianism.

Ukraine became a sovereign state in 1991 upon the dissolution of the USSR, along with a number of former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Overnight, Ukraine became the second largest European nation (after Russia) and found itself hosting the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. As part of an agreement dubbed the “Trilateral Statement,” Ukraine transferred its nuclear weapons to Russia for destruction in exchange for security assurances from Russia, Britain, and the United States. This crucial moment is too often overlooked in debates over aid to Ukraine. Not only has Russia plainly violated this agreement that the United States remains obligated to uphold, but there surely could have been no Russian invasion had Ukraine hung on to those nukes.

Ukraine suffered mightily in its decades as a Soviet republic—most notably during Stalin’s infamous man-made famine known as the “Holodomor” (1932-33) that killed millions of Ukrainians—but 1991 and its aftermath saw a peaceful divorce and both nations go their separate ways. Each suffered from economic dislocation, corruption, and political instability at this new dawn, but despite shortcomings throughout this transition, Ukrainians looked to the West, saw greater integration with Europe as central to their future, and embraced democracy, if sometimes imperfectly.

Meanwhile, Russia stumbled. Some of this can be laid to missed opportunities by the West for more significant economic aid and firmer support for emerging democratic institutions when Russia needed it most, but much of it was organic, as well. Vladimir Putin, a little-known figure, stepped into a leadership role. With slow, calculated, and somewhat astonishing proficiency, former KGB operative Putin gradually dismantled democracy while generally preserving its outward forms, cementing his control in an increasingly authoritarian state—one which most recently seems barreling towards a kind of Stalinist totalitarianism. Along the way, Putin crafted an ideological framework for his vision of a new Russia, born again as a “great power,” by borrowing heavily from 1930s era fascism, resurrected and transformed for the millennium.

Interestingly, while I was reading The Russo-Ukrainian War, I also read The Road to Unfreedom [2018], Timothy Snyder’s brilliant study of how neofascism has gripped the West and Putin’s pivotal role in its course: interfering in US elections, sponsoring Trump’s candidacy, seeking to destabilize NATO, encouraging Brexit in the UK—and an aggressive revanchist effort to annex Ukraine to an emergent twenty-first century Russian Empire. Snyder both confirms the general outline of Plokhy’s narrative and zooms out to put a wider lens on the dangerous implications in these cleverly choreographed diabolical maneuvers that go well beyond the borders of Ukraine to put threat to the very future of Western democracy. As such, Putin may imagine himself as a kind of latter-day Peter the Great, and sometimes act as Stalin, but the historical figure he most closely imitates is Adolf Hitler.

Like Hitler, Putin first sought to achieve his objectives without war. For Ukraine, that meant bribery, disinformation, election interference, and other tactics. And Putin nearly succeeded with former president Viktor Yanukovych—who attempted to effect a sharp turn away from the West while placing Ukraine firmly into Russia’s orbit—until he was toppled from power and fled to Moscow in 2014. A furious Putin replayed Hitler’s moves in Sudetenland and in the Austrian Anschluss: puppet separatists agitated for independence and launched civil war in Ukraine’s east, and Crimea was annexed by Russia following a mock referendum. The war in Ukraine had begun.

The Obama Administration, in concert with the West, responded with economic sanctions that proved tepid, at best, and went on with their business. Ukrainians fought courageously in the east to defend what remained of their territory against Russian aggression. Meanwhile, Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office, voicing overt hostility towards NATO while projecting a startling brand of comraderie with Vladimir Putin. Snyder wryly observes in The Road to Unfreedom that the last advisor to the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was none other than Paul Manafort, who then became the campaign manager to candidate Donald Trump. You can’t make this stuff up.

If Snyder sometimes leans to the polemic, Plokhy strictly sticks to history, even if the two authors’ perspectives essentially run parallel. The Russo-Ukrainian War is most of all a well-written, competent history of those two nations and of their collisions on and off the battlefield that spawned a full-scale war—one that did not need to occur except to further Putin’s neofascist nationalist ambitions. If I can find fault, it is only that in his sympathy for the Ukrainian cause, Plokhy is sometimes too forgiving of its key players. In the current conflict, Ukraine is most certainly in the right, but that is not to say that it can do no wrong. Still, especially as I can locate much of the same material in Snyder’s work, I cannot point to any inaccuracies. The author knows his subject, demonstrates rigorous research, and can cite his sources, which means there are plenty of notes for those who want to delve deeper. I should add that this edition also boasts great maps that are quite helpful for those less familiar with the geography. Plokhy is an accomplished scholar, but an advanced degree is not necessary to comprehend the contents. Anyone can come to this book and walk away with a wealth of knowledge that will cut through the smokescreen of propaganda broadcast not only on Russian TV, but in certain corners of the American media.

This review goes to press on the heels of Putin’s almost-certain assassination of his most prominent political opponent, Alexei Navalny, in an Arctic gulag where he had been confined under harsh conditions for championing democracy and standing against the war in Ukraine, and just days away from the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, as Ukrainian forces abandon the city of Avdiivka and struggle to hold on elsewhere while American aid withers under pressure from Trump’s MAGA allies in the House of Representatives, who went on recess in a deliberate tactic to sidestep a vote on aid to Ukraine already approved by the Senate. Trump himself, the likely Republican nomination for president this year, recently underscored his longstanding enmity towards NATO by publicly declaring—in a “Bizarro World” inverse of the mutual defense guaranteed in Article 5—that he would invite Russia to attack any member nation behind on its dues, a chilling glimpse of what another Trump term in the White House would mean for the security of both Europe and America. Trump once again lives up to his alarming caricature in Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom: the fictional character “Donald Trump successful businessman” that was manufactured by Putin and then marketed to the American public. And just a week before Navalny’s murder, former FOX News host Tucker Carlson conducted a softball “interview” with Putin that gifted him a platform to assert Russia’s right to Ukraine and even cast blame on Poland for Hitler’s invasion in 1939. We have truly come full circle, and it is indeed the return of history.

These are grim moments for Ukraine. But also for America, for the West, for the free world. With all the propaganda, the misinformation, the often fake news hysteria of social media, the average American voter may not know what to believe about Ukraine. For a dose of reality, I would urge them to read The Russo-Ukrainian War. And, given the stakes this November—not only for Ukraine’s sovereignty but for the very survival of American democracy—I would advise them to take great care when casting their ballot, because a vote for Putin’s candidate is a vote for Putin, and perhaps the end of the West as we know it.

 

Link to my review of:  The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Link to my review of:  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder