Tag: Book Reviews

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

 

 

 

When Hillary Clinton compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler after Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in early March 2014, I thought she had gone too far—and so did many of her critics. But Clinton’s analogy turned out to be far more prescient than hyperbolic. When, just weeks later, Putin boldly annexed Crimea following a mock referendum, and then sponsored puppet separatists to launch civil war in the Donbas in Ukraine’s east, she proved that her memory of European history—of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland and the Austrian Anschluss—correctly detected echoes in Putin’s recourse to fake ballots and real bullets.

Like most Americans, I believed at the time that the economic sanctions the Obama Administration imposed upon Russia represented a sound, measured policy that sidestepped unnecessary overreaction, rather than what was in retrospect clearly a tepid, ineffective response, especially given that shortly thereafter Russian proxies shot down a commercial airliner over Ukraine that killed nearly three hundred innocents. Hardly as blatant as Munich in 1938, the lack of meaningful repercussions here certainly emboldened Putin on the path to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that came in 2022—an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. It has hardly gone as planned, of course, but then it is not over yet, either.

Along the way, some have suggested that Putin’s fantasies of himself as a kind of latter-day Peter the Great have instead degenerated into a Putin-as-Stalin motif, but that strikes as somewhat inelegant. Rather, while Clinton was pilloried for flashing that “Hitler card” back when, she was indeed on to something. There is far more than mimicry in the Russian president’s seizure of a neighbor’s territory and denial of its very sovereignty, most significantly in the pretext and justification for his acts. Because when you deconstruct Putin, you find him not only glancing backward over his shoulder at der Führer, but working with quiet determination over the last two decades to reinvent that brand of fascism for the twenty-first century.

That Putin turns out to be the driving force behind the neofascism that has had the Western world increasingly in its sway since the turn of millennium is just one of the insights to emerge in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America [2018], the at-turns brilliant and chilling work by Yale professor and acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder, which traces the roots and more recent rise of the forces of the undemocratic right, along with its sometimes Byzantine web of connections that stretch to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Britain’s Brexit, and Trump’s MAGA—and all too many strands lead back to the Kremlin, some crisscrossing Ukraine on the way. In a narrative that is engaging and well-written, if often somewhat complex, Snyder channels the philosophical, psychological, and ideological to reveal the dangerous resurrection of principles that were fundamental to 1930s fascism, retooled and even transmogrified to suit new generations, new audiences. What’s especially striking about Snyder’s analysis is that this book, published in 2018, anticipates so much of what is to follow.

Fascism, born in Mussolini’s Italy almost a century ago, takes on many forms that have been catalogued by a number of scholars and writers, including—famously—Umberto Eco. Laurence W. Britt[1] compiled perhaps the most comprehensive list of its known characteristics, although the specific expression can vary widely.  Central to all is ultranationalism, typically coupled with a yearning for a mythical, bygone era of greatness that has been lost to liberal decadence. Mussolini looked to the glory of ancient Rome; Hitler to the more recent past of Imperial Germany. Contemporary neofascism is no different. Putin mourns the collapse of the Soviet Union and its larger sphere of influence that encompassed Eastern Europe. In the United States, it simmers beneath the ultrapatriotic flag-waving surface of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement as a dog-whistle that fondly looks back on a “whiter” America when blacks were more complacent and “brown” immigrants were not threatening our borders. (Trump himself recently and unrepentantly paraphrased Hitler with talk of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America.) Racism is always a part of the equation. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews stood out in stark underscore, but antisemitism ever lurks. In the U.S., it is masked in the thinly veiled contempt spewed upon billionaire George Soros, who acts as a convenient placeholder for “liberal Jews.”

But targets of racism are not alone: they share space with a crowded field of “enemies” who threaten the harmony of the state and serve as scapegoats for society’s alleged ailments, including: communists, foreigners, lawbreakers, intellectual elites, nonconformist artists, members of the media, organized labor, minorities, feminists, homosexuals, etc. There’s always a list of grievances and national ills, real and imagined, for which the latter can be held responsible—and serve as a unifying force that must be opposed by those who seek to restore the nation’s greatness. Religion is often an ally in the combating of sin. There is an obsession with national security expressed by rampant militarism that on the domestic front translates to a hyperbolic law-and-order fixation on crime and punishment. Individuals and institutions alike are demonized. Since fascists have no respect for human rights, opponents are dehumanized, transformed into “the other,” deserving of persecution for both their actions and their ideas.  Violence and the threat of violence are ever present or looming. Among institutions, democracy itself is the foremost adversary, and an early casualty to authoritarianism. The fascist leader becomes the self-appointed savior: only he and his corrupt cronies can solve the disorders of the state, but only if he is granted the absolute authority to do so. Elections become a sham: if you lose, just declare victory anyway. Keep lying until the lie becomes the truth.

The Road to Unfreedom identifies the commonality of these elements in right-wing parties across Europe and in the United States. It turns out to be pretty shocking how closely each of these movements resemble one another—and how similar they are to the fascism once associated with Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler! But the real epiphany is not only the role Putin has played in inspiring and encouraging today’s brand of neofascism, but how frequently the contemporary manifestations originated with Putin himself.  Snyder chronicles how Putin managed to dismantle democracy in Russia while maintaining its outward forms, and how that has served as a blueprint of sleight-of-hand authoritarianism for his imitators abroad. (Donald Trump is just one of them.)  But, more critically still, he details how it is that Putin resurrected and reinvented fascism for the new century by returning to the philosophy and ideology of fascists of the past while embracing and encouraging the neofascist thinkers of the present.

A large piece of The Road to Unfreedom is given to events in Ukraine, to Putin’s focused attempt to recover for Russia what for him is the central component of what he calls the “near abroad,” the now independent successor states once incorporated into the USSR. For those who have read Serhii Plokhy’s landmark chronicle, The Gates of Europe[2], or his more recent book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, there is nothing new here. But, significantly, Snyder deftly locates Putin’s brand of revanchism in the fascist-friendly political philosophy of the right that thrived before he was born, and which has been reshaped, with Putin’s patronage, for our own times. He identifies Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a White Russian émigré who admired both Mussolini and Hitler, as a major influence on Putin. Ilyin was a key proponent for the socio-political “Eurasianism” that Putin holds dear, an antidemocratic imperialism that claims for Russia a distinct civilization that transcends geography and ethnicity to command a vast territory ruled by the Russian state. Perhaps today’s most prominent Eurasianist is Aleksandr Dugin, said to be close to the Kremlin. The point is that political philosophy serves as underpinning to Putin’s opportunism. It is not simply about seizing territory. There is a long-term plan.

Snyder traces the roots of “the road to unfreedom” to the naivety of a West swelling with triumphalism in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, blinded by what he brands the “politics of inevitability:” individuals and ideas were seen as obsolete, supplanted instead by an unyielding optimism in the conviction that the marriage of capitalism and democracy guaranteed ineluctable progress to a favorable future. The opposite of the “politics of inevitability,” Snyder argues, is “the politics of eternity,” that offers instead a cyclical tale of victimhood inflicted upon the state by age-old threats and enemies that ever reappear and must be vanquished. In the politics of eternity, only one man—and misogyny dictates that it must be a man—can save the nation, and because at root it is decidedly antidemocratic there can be no thought of succession. The “dear leader” is the only hope. The politics of eternity governs Putin’s Russia. It also, most certainly, governs Donald Trump’s MAGA vision for the United States.

Snyder is unforgiving towards Trump in The Road to Unfreedom, but hardly unfair, although he goes further than many dare in positioning Trump in Putin’s orbit. In a famous 2016 debate exchange, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet, and the Trump that emerges here is not unlike a more malevolent (if less bright) incarnation of Pinocchio fashioned with the fingers of a Geppetto-like Putin. The reader may be forgiven for an eyeroll or two when Snyder posits that it was Putin who crafted the fictional character “Donald Trump successful businessman” who was then marketed to the American public as a political candidate. But that hardly seems an exaggeration when you learn that it was actually Putin who first floated the canard of Obama’s forged birth certificate, the banner of Trump’s political rise. That policies that opposed NATO, decried the EU, championed Brexit, demonized Islam, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants—all central to the MAGA machine—almost perfectly aligned and still align with Putin propaganda. To channel The Godfather, it turns out that it was not Barzini all along, but Vladimir Putin.

And again, so many of the “roads to unfreedom” lead through Ukraine. Snyder reminds us that the last advisor to the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia when he was deposed, was none other than Paul Manafort, who then became the campaign manager to fictional candidate “Donald Trump successful businessman.” It was then, Snyder goes on, that Manafort “oversaw the import of Russian-style political fiction … It was also on Manafort’s watch that Trump publicly requested that Russia find and release Hillary Clinton’s emails. Manafort had to resign as Trump’s campaign manager after it emerged that he had been paid $12.7 million in off-the-books cash by Yanukovych … In 2018, Manafort was convicted of eight counts of federal crimes and pled guilty to two more, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, in a deal made with federal prosecutors.” [p236]

It is remarkable that Snyder’s book, published in 2018, anticipates so much of what is to come, and not only the Russian tanks that rolled into Ukraine. The so-called “Mueller Report” that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election may not have found a smoking gun with Putin fingering the grip, but it did deem Donald Trump guilty of obstruction, even if that outcome was mischaracterized by then Attorney General William Barr. Throughout Trump’s presidency and beyond, Putin has remained his loudest public advocate. And then there was Trump’s “perfect phone call” that attempted to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for political purposes—the subject of Trump’s first impeachment trial.  Also, on December 23, 2020, just weeks before the end of his presidency and the insurrection he sponsored in a crude attempt to extend his tenure, Trump issued Manafort a full pardon. As this review goes to press, just shortly after the third anniversary of that insurrection, Trump is in the news every day exploiting neofascist themes, threatening dictatorship, declaring the last election stolen, and running for president once more as Vladimir Putin cheers him on from the platform of Russian state TV, while Trump returns the favor at every opportunity. Perhaps the greatest gift comes via his allies in Congress, who are blocking desperately needed American military aid to Ukraine.

There is much more to give us all pause. One common feature of fascism is a celebration of hypermasculinity that also hosts a distinct antifeminism and asserts traditional roles for men and women in society. As Putin’s grip on authoritarianism in Russia grew, so too did scorn for feminists and for those who identified as LGBTQ, as he proclaimed a focus on “traditional family values,” supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, a reliable ally for his one-man rule as well as his war on Ukraine. Fascists poke fun at the soft, decadent underbelly of effeminate liberalism, hurling the expletive “cuck” at the male who does not live up to their patriarchal ideal of the man’s man. Today, sadly, that curse is no less likely to be heard on the avenues of Atlanta than it is on the streets of Moscow. Putin, who reportedly enjoys the sympathetic coverage he has come to expect from FOX News, likely chuckled to himself watching a 2021 episode when former FOX host Tucker Carlson mocked the “maternity flight suits” of pregnant women serving in the armed forces, lecturing that our military had become soft and feminine, in contrast to those of our adversaries that were tough and masculine. Of course, Putin is likely not laughing as hard these days as young Ukrainian women, some former fashion models, are at the front gunning down Russian soldiers daily.

Donald Trump is known to frequently employ projection as a defense mechanism. When Hillary dubbed him a Putin puppet, he shot back with “You’re the puppet!” When in a speech to mark the anniversary of the January 6^th insurrection President Biden branded Trump a “threat to democracy,” Trump countered that it was Biden instead who was the threat to democracy. Putin is an expert at this craft, although naturally he is more articulate and his phrasing more elegant than Trump’s. Snyder notes that Putin is the master of what he calls “schizo-fascism,” that has fascists re-branding their enemies as fascists, as when Putin has styled has invasion of Ukraine as an effort to combat resurgent Nazis—despite the fact that Ukrainian president Zelensky is Jewish. Just lie, and then keep recycling the same lie. Rinse and repeat.

It’s hard to find a real flaw in The Road to Unfreedom, other than that some of it strays to the arcane and may challenge the attention span of the popular audience that would most benefit from reading it. There is, however, terrain left unexplored. Putin gets his due as the brilliant villain he turned out to be, but the author overlooks how his rise could have been forestalled by a post-Soviet Russia given to prosperity and stability. The West, basking in the glow of Snyder’s “politics of inevitability,” failed to act consequentially when it could have, in that narrow window between Gorbachev and Putin. I would have liked to see Snyder probe those missed opportunities for economic aid and support for fledgling democratic institutions in Russia, a topic of adept analysis in Peter Conradi’s Who Lost Russia?[3] Also, unlike Conradi, Snyder is unsympathetic to Russian fears stoked by NATO expansion and US withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. These anxieties were certainly opportunistically exaggerated and exploited by Putin, but they nevertheless were and would remain legitimate concerns—even to a democratic Russia. But these are quibbles. In this election year, with the very future of our fragile Republic at stake, read The Road to Unfreedom. It may be too late for Russia, but our vehicle of democracy, if a bit clunky, is still roadworthy, and there’s still time to save America. Let’s step on the gas.

 

[1] Laurence W. Britt, “Fascism Anyone?” Free Inquiry Magazine, [Vol 22 no 2., July 15, 2003] Fascism Anyone?

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

[3] Link to my review of  Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War, by Peter Conradi