ON FREEDOM, by Timothy Snyder
On Nov. 9 it will be 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The exhilaration of that moment was followed by high hopes for the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, then in Russia itself when the Soviet Union imploded. Gradually hope gave way to frustration, disappointment and then dismay. Russia did not become a liberal democracy, and nor did a number of its former satrapies.
Few people have had more opportunity and reason to ponder this than Timothy Snyder. Before he became a Yale professor and a prominent historian, he spent several years in Central and Eastern Europe, where he came to know one country after another, learn one language after another, and meet many people, among them those who had been brave dissidents against communist rule in its last decadent phase.
His scholarly work includes his formidable and harrowing book “Bloodlands,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished one way or another at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a particularly awful mass grave. When he published that book 14 years ago, he must have hoped — didn’t we all? — that such large-scale bloodshed wouldn’t be seen there again.
He has also written political and polemical journalism and books, notably “On Tyranny” (2017). Inspired by the numb horror he and so many Americans like him felt at the election of Donald Trump, the book looked back at the way 20th-century fascism had so widely succeeded in Europe, not least by using democratic means to destroy democracy. Snyder sought lessons which might help guard against any such American disaster, even as in my view the suggested historical comparison doesn’t really work. There may be an American people, but there is no American Volk, and the objective conditions for anything that could be called fascism don’t exist in the United States, although there might yet well be something very nasty.
Now, as another election approaches, Snyder has returned with “On Freedom.” A longer antithetical companion to the earlier book, it is part memoir, part meditation and part manifesto. Between descriptions of his time in Eastern Europe and reflections on the events there in recent decades, there are invocations of his personal heroes, from European thinkers who lived and died in the Bloodlands days such as the philosophers Simone Weil and Edith Stein, to more recent rebels against despotism such as the former Czech president Václav Havel and the Polish historian Adam Michnik. And there are plenty of sharp phrases: “Donald Trump proved to be a compelling sadopopulist”; “Oligarchs do not just have the biggest piece of the pie. They often have the pie cutter”; “Freedom justifies government.”
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