‘Oligarchy Won the Cold War’: The Timothy Snyder Interview
We interview special guest Dr. Timothy Snyder, the historian of fascism whose warnings about American authoritarianism under Trump were prescient yet unheeded by officials. Dr. Snyder is the author of the recent bestsellers On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, and was a historical consultant on Andrea’s film, Mr. Jones, a journalistic thriller set during Stalin’s genocide famine in Ukraine, available now on streaming services like Amazon.
[begin film trailer for Mr. Jones]
Paul:
Hello.
Mr. Jones:
Paul, I need your help arranging an interview with Stalin.
Paul:
Go to Walter Duranty at the New York Times.
Speaker 4:
Listen, I really need to talk to you, I've found something big. You can crack the story wide open.
Walter Duranty:
Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones:
Mr. Duranty.
Walter Duranty:
Why are you really here?
Mr. Jones:
I need your help.
Walter Duranty:
This is Ada Brooks, she's my star.
Ada Brooks:
What do you want?
Mr. Jones:
The story no one is talking about.
Ada Brooks:
Ukraine.
Paul:
Stalin's called.
Speaker 7:
You will retract your statements to the press immediately.
Paul:
Or they will shoot our engineers?
Walter Duranty:
You actually thought you could interview Stalin and make some kind of difference, didn't you?
Ada Brooks:
I guess the agenda now–
Mr. Jones:
I don't have an agenda, unless you call truth an agenda.
[end film trailer for Mr. Jones]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Sarah Kendzior:
Today, we are joined by our special guest, Dr. Timothy Snyder, a historian who specializes in the study of fascism in 20th century Europe. He is a professor at Yale University and the author of the books, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and the recent bestsellers On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century, published in 2017, and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, published in 2018, both of which warned of rising autocracy in the United States and increasing Kremlin incursion into Western democracies. Dr. Snyder's warnings were widely read, but alas not heeded by US officials.
Sarah Kendzior:
In his spare time, Timothy Snyder does cool things like serve as a historical consultant on movies, including Mr. Jones, Andrea's film about Stalin's genocide in Ukraine and the Welsh reporter, Gareth Jones, who tried to bring the truth to light only to face scorn, censorship, and threats. Andrea, for those who don't already know, can you summarize your movie and give some information on how our audience can see it?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. So Mr. Jones is inspired by the incredible true story, as you mentioned, of the young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who had a remarkable rising career. He talked his way onto a flight with the new chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. He wrote a report based on that trip and covering Hitler's Germany, warning about the impact it would ultimately have.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then he thought–he wa going to follow that up, being very ambitious, going to Moscow, hunting down rumors of a famine and the fact that Stalin's massive rapid modernization of the Soviet empire was a bit suspicious. And so he was able to brilliantly hustle his way into Ukraine, which was closed off to journalists at that time for reasons why the film reveals, and stumbling around in Ukraine on this illegal trip, he sees ghost village after ghost village and puts the pieces together that the Soviets had systematically mass murdered millions of people, namely–largely Ukrainians, through this famine. It was like the first weapon of mass destruction, essentially, organized starvation. He comes out and blows the lid off this thing and the New York Times and powerful forces of the day rally against him to silence him. And ultimately the movie goes on and it's a very harrowing, real life, historically inspired journey. So yeah, that's the film.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so how do we see it? When is it coming out?
Sarah Kendzior:
You can get it on iTunes right now. You can get it on a lot of the streaming services. It's available. Just look up Mr. Jones, directed by the great Agnieszka Holland, wherever you would normally stream films. And I have to thank Tim Snyder as our historical consultant who read the script, the shooting draft, gave us some really essential notes, last minute notes on it so we didn't embarrass ourselves and then watched a cut of the film. Obviously all of his research in this period was instrumental in shaping the story. He was one of the first to really bring Gareth Jones's remarkable true story to a wider audience through his book, Bloodlands. Thank you for that, Tim.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Oh, no, my pleasure. Thank you for making the film. Balancing the historical record is such a difficult thing to do. There's always this tremendous gap between what actually happens and where we have sources. And, as in the case of Gareth Jones, the very people who were most courageous in trying to find out what's actually happening were also the ones that we never hear about. I was really glad to take part in that project and I'm really glad to be able to talk to you about whatever you want to be talking about today.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are so excited to have you on, Tim. This is awesome. This is going to be great for our audience. One of the questions I have is we're now three years into the Trump administration, and we're finally seeing both officials and pundits using words like “authoritarianism” or “fascism” to describe where the US is headed. And you, of course, warned of this long ago during Trump's campaign and in the immediate aftermath, and it seemed fairly obvious if you have knowledge of history and just a flare for the obvious. Why did it take people in power so long to admit the danger at hand?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, first of all, I want to say I wasn't... Thank you for remembering that. The problem with being right is that no one ever remembers that you're right. It's much easier as a pundit to make a career of being controversially wrong because if you're right, no one ever wants to admit it. What I really wanted to say is that there were a lot of other people who were right at the time too, like yourself, like people who were working on Eastern Europe, like a lot of African Americans, but there are two main issues.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
The first is American exceptionalism. I wrote On Tyranny on the basis of what intelligent people who had experienced Nazi Germany, who had experienced Stalinism had written because I wanted to create a kind of distance which would allow people to see themselves in a different light. Americans have this tendency to think, by definition we're free people, or by definition we're a democracy. That's what I mean by exceptionalism, that somehow history doesn't touch us or taint us, that somehow we're free of the weaknesses that concern everyone else. And history is just not like that. We're not different than everyone else. We're not better than everyone else. In some ways we tend to be worse. And exceptionalism is one of the ways that we do tend to be worse, all this constant patting ourselves on the back. That's one issue, is the American exceptionalism.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
The other issue, I think, is post Cold War complacency. The years after 1989 led to a lot of Americans saying things like, "History is over. There's only one alternative. Capitalism will automatically bring democracy. The world's going to become more like us." And so we were coasting. We were coasting morally, we were coasting intellectually, we were coasting politically, and we weren't ready for something to happen. We weren't ready for something drastic to happen. And we'd forgotten that we were part of a larger world in which people can do things to us, which is the Russian part of the story. And then underneath that, there's just the basic human tendency to think it can't happen to me. It can't happen here. And that's what I was fighting against the whole time. So thank you for remembering that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course. It was On Tyranny... There are a few books I've seen that have had that kind of impact, I think, on a lot of grassroots organizers and just Americans who were confused about what was happening, how to process it, what to do. That's why sometimes I'm shocked by the lack of foresight in our officials, because I do see ordinary readers just devouring your books and other books that did lay this out. Andrea, do you have comments or should I keep on rolling here?
Andrea Chalupa:
Keep on rolling. I like your questions.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. One thing in reference to what you just said about the post Cold War complacency; you're a scholar of this era and lately I feel like we're going through a kind of reevaluation of, did the US win the Cold War? Or what exactly was being accomplished by the Cold War? Was it really this kind of binary struggle? As we learn more and more, for example, about the role of the Russian mafia or these kinds of transnational alliances that seem to surpass state borders or our traditional ideas of Nation States or even of empires. Do you have thoughts on that?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, I think oligarchy won the Cold War, right?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Certainly Americans didn't win the Cold War; oligarchy won the Cold War. The Russian oligarchy won the breakup of the Soviet Union–not just the Russian oligarchy, the post-Soviet oligarchy won the breakup of the Soviet Union–and that post-Soviet oligarchy has had a disproportionate influence on events inside the United States, not least through the clever support of Mr. Trump in 2016. But it's not just a matter of the bad Russians, it's a matter of a complacency which leads to an inequality, which then makes democracy harder and harder. Because if you decide, “oh, we were right, history was on our side”, all you're doing is making the same mistake that the communists made. Fundamentally, if you think history is on your side, what you're saying is we don't have to do the right thing, we don't have to think about values, we don't have to bear responsibility. You just think capitalism is going to take care of everything for you. And of course it doesn't, because there is no giant mommy in the universe who takes care of everything for you. Nothing's going to take care of everything for you.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
And so what we did was we basically invited our own problems by saying “we were right”. So in a way it's like... I like your question because it's not just complacency. It's a sense of righteousness, that history proved that we were right and now history is on our side. And once you think history's on your side, then you forget that democracy means having to be an unpredictable individual actor IN history, having to be aware of unpredictable things that can happen, for good and bad, and react to them. That's a kind of art that we lost.
Sarah Kendzior:
What do you think of all these Republicans, whether Karl Rove or recently, Bill Barr, who have come out and just outright said, "We are the writers of history. We will be recording history."? So that this whole idea of “history will judge you unkindly”, it makes no difference to them.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, I don't think they believe it. I think they believe that there isn't going to be proper history in the future. That's what I think. I think Mr. Barr thinks there isn't going to be proper history in the future. The way Mr. Barr comports himself is fundamentally as a censor and as a propagandist. The work that Mr. Mueller did, although it had its limits, was a kind of historical effort. It involved collecting primary sources, carrying out interviews and so on, and laying out much of what happened in 2016. Mr. Barr's work, with respect to Mr. Mueller, was as a censor and a propagandist. He made every effort to make sure that people didn't find out what happened. So I think what Mr. Barr means is that we are going to mess things up so badly, and that history is going to be impossible to carry out in the future.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
In other words, it's a promise of authoritarianism because only in authoritarian regimes is it impossible to do proper history. I think that's the meaning of it and that's why it's such a dark prophecy. Because what's being said is, "Look, in the future, America is going to be like the Soviet Union used to be. No one's going to be writing proper history anyway, so people like us are going to be heroes." Because let's face it, the only way Mr. Barr is going to be a hero in some future textbook is for the United States to be an authoritarian regime.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, I agree. It's very much in keeping with the lessons of Andrea's film, of Mr. Jones, which of course is the story of how Gareth Jones faced obstacles not only from Soviet officials to tell the truth in real time, but from those who were writing the first draft of history, people at the New York Times like Walter Duranty, who was covering for the Soviet regime.
Sarah Kendzior:
I was wondering if you have thoughts on the coverage of the New York Times today because it has come under fire for similar reasons: the refusal to document Trump's full relationship with the Kremlin or with Russian oligarchs, refusal to call out authoritarian ambitions in plain terms. How does this compare to Duranty's era and what do you think of it in general?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Okay, I'm going to start with a general and then land on the New York Times. I think if we take a deep breath and look at the horizon, we can see some basic problems with our journalism, with our culture of journalism, with our economy of journalism, which have helped to land us in all the messes that we're in. One of them is that we don't really have foreign correspondents anymore. In 2016, what we should have been reporting was that Russia had done things like this in Estonia, in Georgia, most recently in Ukraine. If we had foreign correspondents, we would have been all over that story, but we weren't. And so instead we fell back into this kind of American exceptionalism, which was like, “well, nothing like this has ever happened to us, and so therefore it can't be happening at all. And you're a conspiracy theorist if you talk about the rest of the world.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
A second big, big problem we have is the collapse of local journalism, because without local journalism, a lot of people stop trusting journalism at all. And without local journalism, people find themselves riding on talk radio, or Fox, or the internet, and get themselves into conspiracy theorizing and into a politics of “us and them” instead of caring about the basic things that actually matter in day to day life. Those are some real underlying problems that make everything worse, whether it's racial violence, or whether it's a pandemic, or whether it's Russia interfering in our elections, those basic breakdowns in journalism have made everything worse.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
As far as the New York Times goes, I think they're in a kind of difficult position that they have to kind of be the press as such. Taking what I said just now, keeping that in mind, the New York Times is in kind of an unfair position because they, and to some extent, the Post, have to do everything and they can't do everything. They have to kind of stand for journalism itself and that's really too much for anyone to bear. But, I do take your point. As I see it, the essential problem with the New York Times is that it tries to both be creative and investigative AND basically think the status quo is normal. That's just too hard, it's too contradictory.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
You guys were kind enough to mention On Tyranny at the beginning–the New York Times didn't want any part of that. In 2016, 2017 when I was way out in front of certain issues involving Russia or the US, I mean it's characteristic that that was one of those times that I could not publish in the New York Times. They were just not interested in that sort of thing because it made the bandwidth too wide. I think they're kind of caught in this, “on the one hand, on the other hand”, which is a basic problem of the US press coverage, that you try to be fair. And of course it's better to be fair than unfair, but if you're on the one hand, on the other hand, it’s just capturing the voices that are already in the room. What you're missing is the reality which is far outside the room.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
When I say that, I should say also the New York Times has done lots of local reporting. They've tried to fill some gaps. They've done remarkable work on lots of stories, including the Russian one. But I think the basic problem is a structural one, that there's not enough fact finding happening out there in the world. And when there's not enough fact finding, then the status quo starts to seem normal and people who offer challenging views seem to be coming out of left field or from outer space, because you're not aware that those challenging views are actually based around facts, whether they're facts out there in the world or facts even in the United States.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I agree. It’s incredibly frustrating because there just seems to be a lack of a basic historical knowledge, a lack of a comparative perspective in terms of, as you mentioned, similar incursions by the Kremlin and its affiliates into other democracies, and kind of a refusal to accept the words of Trump, or Bill Barr, or Roger Stone, or any of the more blatant and outlandish figures in this at face value. They announced their plans. What's going on now is the platform that Trump ran on, and they've often confessed their sins or their crimes to the public, whether it's going on Lester Holt and admitting to obstruction of justice, or Trump Jr. tweeting out evidence for a federal probe on his own account.
Sarah Kendzior:
What do you make of this? Because I've been sort of struggling with this. It's one thing if you're doubting the words of an outside analyst; it's another thing if you're taking the first person, primary source narration from the protagonist and saying, "No, no, we must give them the benefit of the doubt. We must assume something better about them than what's right in front of our eyes."
Andrea Chalupa:
That's what Duranty essentially did with Stalin.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, it's a hard question to answer because you formulated the question so, so perfectly to start out with. It's a failure of imagination, because in order to see reality you have to have imagination. If you don't have imagination, you can't see reality. And imagination comes from history. Imagination comes from saying, "Oh, things like this have happened before. We've seen characters like this before, whether it's on the Far Right or the Far Left." It's entirely possible that he means what he says because people have announced these kinds of things before, and then they've carried them out, right? Not just history, but political theory. I mean, Hannah Arendt is very good on all of this. People say things and the things that they say start to change the reality. The predictions that they make then become the things they have to enforce and bring into the world and make happen.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
And I think your point is so good because, in a way, what one is doing is you end up becoming a better press officer for these people than they have themselves, because you're constantly nipping and tucking. You're constantly making things square with the status quo that you kind of want to think can sustain itself even though it can't because it's under open attack. So I think this is really the problem. And the comparison with Duranty–Walter Duranty who was the New York Times correspondent in Moscow in the early 1930s and won a Pulitzer in 1932–the comparison with Duranty makes a lot of sense, because Duranty was in the story where he was saying, "Look, it's all about progress. You have to make some sacrifices for progress. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet." And that story of progress, of modernization, which is a kind of normal story, that story then makes it seem like it's okay that these massive starvation events are taking place. It molds the facts into the story of normality.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
That, in a way, is what's so breathtakingly frightful about the whole thing, is that a powerful medium–and you're talking about the New York Times, and of course the New York Times is far from the worst, we should be clear about this. It's far from the worst perpetrator of all this–but the powerful medium can use its intellect, can use the skill of its writers to make what history will see as utterly extraordinary can make it seem normal, or at least normal enough that we lose the time we need to act, that we sleep through one day, then we sleep the next day, and then we see for the third day, and before we know it, it's too late.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. Gareth Jones, this young guy, independent journalist, he was ringing the fire alarm. His first announcement of the mass murder that was going on in the Soviet Union, it wasn't an article. He went straight into holding a press conference. He wasn't wasting any time. And then Duranty, the great Walter Duranty coming out in the New York Times and essentially muddling the truth and trying to paint Gareth as having a political motive because he had worked for Lloyd George, a former prime minister of Great Britain and so forth. And in the pages of the New York Times, Walter Duranty writes, "There is no famine." And so that really slows down the urgency and gives cover to the powerful of the day to essentially normalize relations with the Soviet union and turn a blind eye to them.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, the basic principle of journalism is that the more powerful people are, the greater critique their work should be subject to, not the other way around. You do it the other way around, you're not a journalist anymore. And it's not just a matter of fact checking, which I think the Times and the Post and others have done a good job on. It's a matter of critique of motives. It's a matter of critique of purposes. It's a matter of looking at things that are said from every possible angle rather than providing alibis.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So what's startling about Gareth Jones, because not everybody's going to know about Gareth Jones, he's spoken and rose in a plain language under his own name about extraordinary events, which for various reasons, many people in the world didn't want to hear about. The Soviet Union was trying very hard to make clear that... It was very trying very hard to prevent people from seeing that millions of its own citizens were dying, especially in Ukraine. And in the depression era United States where our policy was to renew diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, there weren't really that many people who were interested in hearing about a distant famine in a distant country either. Gareth Jones wrote about these things directly on the basis of his own eye witness experience and therefore cut one bright line through the fog–the only bright line, really. Malcolm Muggeridge also wrote very well, but not under his own name. And the important thing here is how one bright line is just so much better than zero bright lines. If you have zero bright lines, then you're always going to lose.
Andrea Chalupa:
So growing up watching historical films, I would always go and read about from that film I just saw what is true, what is poetic license? And I think when people watch Mr. Jones, so much of it is shocking, but the actual beats of the story are quite historically accurate. So could you give people–since you, of course, have written about Gareth Jones and this whole chapter extensively in your work–could you give people an overview just so they understand how much of this history is in the actual film? And I want to also point to how shocking sections of Bloodlands... We didn't show the full horror in the film clearly, like we did like an Alfred Hitchcock approach where you show the knife, but not the knife stabbing the body. Could you kind of go into a little bit of an overview of what this famine was, the level of propaganda around it, the level of censorship of the Western press that should have been reporting on it, and the level of self-censorship as well, just to validate that this was a horrendous event and how it all sort of operated?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Let me start with the event itself and then I'll say something about the film. It's a feature of the very problem that we're talking about that not very many people know that there was a mass starvation in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933, of which the chief victims were inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, mostly Ukrainians. It's a feature of the problem that we're trying to discuss that that never really made it into the history books, or it's only making it to the history books now properly documented thanks to recent work by historians like Anne Applebaum or Terry Martin. It's a feature of this problem that we have that 90 years of past almost and we're still trying to talk about the basics.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So the basics are that, in the course of trying to collectivize agriculture–that is, taking land and farms away from individual peasants and taking control by the state–in the course of that policy, Stalin decided that Ukraine and Ukrainians were a particular problem and intensified aspects of that policy, such as putting villages on a blacklist where they couldn't get any goods from the rest of the country, such as imposing a meat penalty which meant that the very last source of calories for peasants was taken away, such as closing the border of Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union so that people couldn't go anywhere, such as even preventing peasants from going to the cities to beg, making that illegal.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
All of these things together meant that several million people died in Soviet Ukraine as a result of political decisions who did not have to die. Several hundred million people died in Ukraine of starvation at a time the Soviet Union was exporting grain around the world. That's the event. And we know about the event from eyewitness testimony. We know about the event from Soviet records themselves, which are bountiful on this point. There are aspects of it that can be debated, but the event itself is absolutely beyond question. It's a kind of paradigmatic example of how history needs the help of journalists if it's going to happen–going back to Bill Barr and what the future of history is going to look like–there have to be first-person accounts by people who have seen things written under their own name if big historical events are going to be understood as they're happening.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So the reason why the film is important is that the basic historical event which stands behind it–that is the famine in Soviet Ukraine–is absolutely true and absolutely happened. And as you say, it was much, much worse than you portray it in the film. Peasant children who escape these restrictions and flee to the cities Kharkiv or Kyiv and then put in underground barracks so they won't be seen starving on the street, so they starved in darkness, away from their parents, all by themselves, the daily spectacle in the big cities of Central and Southern and Eastern Ukraine of people dying on the streets and this becoming so normal that passers by just ignore it, these are things which are very difficult for even the most hardened watcher of films to take in. This is horror, not in the Hollywood sense, but horror in the actual human sense of some of the most horrible things that can happen.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So the basic historical event that you portray absolutely happened. To be clear, the film is not a documentary. The film is a kind of dramaticized relation of what Gareth Jones did and saw. And as that, it's very effective. It gets across the central point that he was a young, courageous person who did an extraordinary thing. As a film, here and there, there are things which are not exactly the way they happened in reality, because you made a film, but the fundamental truth about the event goes deeper and broader than even you presented it. And the basic point that you're trying to make, namely that you can't have history without truth tellers, and without truth tellers all you'll have is tragedy, is a very fundamental one. And I'm very glad you made it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, of course. And of course there are certain changes for conveniences. I mean, we know that Gareth didn't attend an orgy at Walter Duranty's apartment in Moscow, but it is a fact that Walter Duranty did love himself a good satanic ritual orgy. We have that documentation from his years in 1920s Paris, and Duranty did live a lavish lifestyle in Moscow, and he did host a lot of the illiterati that would come from the west to visit Moscow. They lived quite a surreal life and went to some really weird, creepy parties– even in Moscow itself–where you had sort of an avant garde movement that they would enjoy. So just for the sake of economy, obviously we would combine events based on fact together just for the convenience of moving the story along, without question.
Andrea Chalupa:
But I think the larger point is that the film only hints at the full horror, and the full horror, it's hell on earth. It's like hell opening up on earth. It's an evil that people really can't grapple with when they confront it. Just to speak to all the research you've done, clearly, into this chapter and into the Holocaust and the Bloodlands, as you call it...how do you do that? How do you stare evil in the face and all the record keeping of these horrors? How do you do that and maintain some level of sanity?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Well, it's kind of you to say that I'm some level of sane, I appreciate that. I think that when I came to these subjects, I came to them as an Eastern European historian, as someone who knew a lot of the relevant languages and who had written books on other subjects, and who thought this is the single most important subject. The fact that well over 10 million people–Jews, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Poles, others–were murdered on a certain bit of land over a very short period of time in the 1930s and 1940s, that this is the subject, this is the missing subject, this is the thing that makes everything make sense. We have very good histories of the Holocaust, we have a few histories of the famine. We have some history–especially in Russian and Ukrainian and other languages–of Soviet terror, but we didn't have a sense of the grinding awfulness across this territory between the Baltic and the Black Sea where the whole Holocaust took place, where the famine took place.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
And so I'm trying to answer your question as best I can. I saw it as a sense of obligation. I thought, this is the thing that I should be doing. This is the book that I should be writing. And as I wrote it, and as you suggest, I came across all of these primary sources from the survivors. And those are very helpful, not because they're terrible, but they're also human. And so they keep any historian modest because you're trying to make sense of things on the basis of what thousands of other people have experienced. And so you're grateful to them for having tried to get some of it down. And your humble job is then just to try to make sense of all of it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, and I want to talk about sort of the dark times we live in today where you see people making these connections of either having an attitude of “there is no future” with the pandemic, and economic decline, and the rise of autocracy worldwide. Is there a future? Do we have a future? And then you see the opposite spectrum, the attitude of, “this is a great spiritual awakening. We're finally being forced through all these big events to confront ourselves and these are all birthing pains of a new world”. And so you see those attitudes, including attitudes like on Instagram and Twitter being meme-d, saying this is the birthing of a new world and so forth, but these attitudes are not at all new.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we saw this in the 1930s where people were struggling from this as well. And one big influence during this time, somebody that I kept coming across in all my research that went into the film, was Hegel, Hegel's promise that history is a spirit learning to self-actualize. Could you speak a little bit about that, about this attitude that always pops up during dark times? That it's all this large sort of spirit, that's what history is, and that we're sort of promised progress.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
It's very characteristic for people not to want to think of history as history, because on the one hand history means that there's a future and that it's open. History is about understanding the past, which allows you then to make choices, responsible choices, informed choices, in the present, which means that you're changing the future all the time. So if you think historically, it means that there is a future for sure but also that that future is open and probably more open than we realize. So one of the basic problems in the politics of the last few years, whether it's Mr. Putin or whether it's Mr. Trump, has been the success of tyrants in closing off the future and making it very hard to think about the future, making the future seem impossible, and getting large sections of their populations to think only about a kind of mythological past–right?–when America was great, or May 9th, 1945.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
On the one hand, the people who get us to stop thinking about the future are the ones who are very successfully killing off civil society, and individualism, and democracy. Now, on the other hand, the fact that things are very bad now–although it does create certain kinds of possibilities–doesn't guarantee any kind of outcome, right? The fact that things are worse doesn't mean they're going to get better, and there's no automatic process about this.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So I, too, am hopeful that Americans and others have learned some things in the last few years and the last few months and that 2021 can be better than 2020, but it's not automatically going to be so. The fact that we've suffered doesn't mean that we've learned. We actually have to do learning from the suffering. There's an automaticity about it. And that's where we get to Hegel and the notion that history is dialectical, and that history is a slaughterhouse, and that first you have the suffering, and then you have the higher stage of history. That, of course, is all nonsense. There are no stages in history, there's no automaticity, there's no mechanism, and there's no world spirit. None of that's right. We can learn from suffering, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. And that's the part which is up to us.
Sarah Kendzior:
I have a question related to that, just about the concept of time and the autocrats playbook, like when Trump came in, he basically did all of the things, or his backers advised him, to do all of the things that an autocrat does to cement power. They purged agencies, they packed courts, and we kept hearing these false assurances of, "Oh, just wait until 2020 or wait until Mueller finishes their report." And I was thinking to myself the whole time, he's doing what autocrats always do, which is run out the clock as a strategy. And I think I recall you saying, Tim, back in 2016, 2017, that we had about a year and a half into this administration to kind of see what direction it will go, to see if those autocratic tendencies harden or how well they can be fought. What do you think about where we're at now, how we can undo the damage that is done? How far down the road are we? So on and so forth.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah. I want to reinforce your point about time because it's so important. And it's just one more way that history helps us, because history is the main way we have of thinking about the world in which time flows forward. It reminds us that time itself matters. So your metaphor of playing out the clock is a good one because that's one way to have an authoritarian changeover, is that you just keep the other people on the bench while you have the lead and you hold the ball and that's it. And at some point, everyone realizes it's over and a referee blows the whistle and everybody goes home. And then you haven't done anything. And that's the sad thing.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
I gave an interview to–I think it was the Süddeutsche Zeitung–in January of 2017 where I said, "We've got about a year." And what I meant was we've got about a year to start doing stuff, because the thing about these transitions is that you have to start acting right away. You can't wait for the target to show up clearly on your screen and say, "Oh, yes. Here we clearly have an authoritarian regime change," because by the time it does, it's already all over and you're already in trouble. You have to start acting right away, even though you're not exactly sure what's going to happen. And there's nothing wrong with acting right away because the things that you do when you act right away are things that you should be doing anyway. Every single lesson on tyranny applies to a democracy which is perfectly vibrant as well as to democracy which is falling. The basic political hygiene that we should be undertaking all the time is always valid, whether your democracy is falling apart or not.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Even if I had been wrong, which I wasn't, but even if I had been wrong, doing things like making eye contact, or subscribing to newspapers, or taking part in demonstrations, that's good advice anyway. But the point is that because authoritarians try to get us into this kind of hypnosis where we just stare for awhile and don't do anything, we have to start acting right away even though it feels weird to act right away. We have to get into the timestream ourselves to slow them down, but also to start up new things which then they have to contemplate and they have to deal with.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So to the question, how have we done? It's a very mixed bag. Some people did do things right away. And the fact that some people did do things right away–including a lot of lawyers, including people who organized marches like Andrea–because some people did some things right away, it's taken them longer than it would have done. If it hadn't been for that, 2020 wouldn't even be a hope. There's hope for November–we're talking in June–there's hope for November, but only because a lot of people did things in 2017 and 2018, and 2019. If not for that, this would already be out of reach, I think.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
That's my main sense is that... We've done a pretty mediocre job, all in all. We haven't done nothing, but we've been very slow off the mark. If all the people who are writing columns now, saying, "Oh, hey, actually something is wrong.", if all those people had gotten off their duffs in 2017, had been willing to shake their heads a little bit and breathe in some fresh air, then we'd be in a much better position than we are right now. But yeah, that's about as warm and fuzzy as I can get.
Andrea Chalupa:
Instead, in 2017 a lot of the leading pundits and anybody with hacks in the media that had powerful platforms, they were making fun of the people. They were writing hit pieces against those that were warning us about how bad this was, calling us hysterical and so forth. Where does that come from? I know you touched on journalism and then sort of the limitations of where we are now with our media. Is that it? Is it just people are just so blind by the status quo that they can't imagine...Is it just American exceptionalism? Is that it? It's that simple?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Yeah, you're right to push me on this, I think, because I think there is more to it. One thing is conformism. Most people didn't react that way. Right?
Andrea Chalupa:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Therefore, it must be wrong. And so let's all stay in the herd, and the people who have stepped out of the herd a little bit, let's push them off the cliff so that the herd can keep wandering forward. Conformism is a big part of it and people in the media are unfortunately no less conformist than anybody else.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Another thing is the way that Americans, in particular Americans under conditions of digital oligarchy which is where we are now, have a hard time thinking beyond the immediate present. And then you're trapped, right? Because if your mind only functions in terms of this moment, then of course you can't see a danger coming, because your mind is only functioning in terms of this moment. It's just about the latest tweet, just about the latest post. And so long as you're always in the moment, then you can't think something could be coming down the road.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
And then the third thing, which is really important, is normalization. Normalization started the moment Donald Trump was elected. At that moment, the thing that supposedly couldn't happen, when it did happen, then suddenly we were making it normal. "The institutions will save us." "He's going to have smart advisors." "The Republican party will discipline him". Whatever it was, the moment he was elected, the normalization started. And pushing away the unusual people who say “don't normalize” is part of normalization, it's part of moving along. That's why lesson number one of On Tyranny is “Don't Obey in Advance–and lesson nine is “Stand Out”–because when you normalize, what you're doing is you're taking your own creative potential, you're taking all of your talent and you're turning it to help an authoritarian regime change. So another part of it was the normalization, the impulse to normalize, which people were not aware of in themselves, but they definitely had.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I want to ask about fashionable people flirting with fascism. I've read interviews with you where you've mentioned this before. And sort of, why do you think some George Bernard Shaw–the great artist who gave us My Fair Lady and other plays–there's an example of this in the 1930s, we see it today with some of the hipsters in media interviewing Steve Bannon and normalizing Steve Bannon–the white supremacist. Why do you think fashionable people, and of course they tend to be white people–some of them–why do you think some have a draw towards fascism?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Artists, creative people are all over the political spectrum, some people who are doing wise things trying to defend civil society are also artists or creative people. And some people on the far left, there isn't much of a far left in America now, but historically the far left has also been populated by creative people and by artists. I think part of it... There is a particular current, though, I agree with you, which stretches back to the first fascism to now, which is the idea that we're just against something, right? So we are the creative people. We're the critical people. And all we're trying to do is cast light on the iniquities and hypocrisies and so on and so forth. We're not actually taking a position; we're just showing how all of this stuff is hypocritical and all of this stuff is imperfect.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
I think that might be the kind of connecting tissue, that if you're a creative person you can say, "Well, I'm not really political. I'm not really taking a political position. I don't support any candidates or anything like that. I just want to show how..." and then you use an aesthetic style of thinking to show that something is hypocritical or contradictory, or that people don't always live up to their word, and then it's natural for you to bring in the people who talk about the system and how the system is bound up in inconsistency. And of course, any democratic pluralist system is going to have lots of lying and hypocrisy, and that's the way we are. The whole point of democracy is that everybody's hypocrisies, and everybody's inconsistencies, and everybody's different preferences, and hopefully everybody's virtues get a voice and balance each other out, as opposed to one person's hypocrisy is getting to dominate everything.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
So, of course, there's always going to be these things to say about any kind of democratic system and you're always going to be able to find someone like Mr. Bannon who proposes that actually, if we just had a leader, if we just had a leader and we stuck to a set of a few simple truths, then things would feel much better. And I think that appeals to some people's aesthetic sense. So you say, "Okay, on the one hand I'm just criticizing here, I'm just noting. On the other hand you might be attracted to the notion that there's one truth or one simple set of ideas that will pull everything together and make everything make sense as an art. And that can work in art–maybe, I'm not a specialist–but it certainly doesn't work in politics.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I'm curious what you think of the current protests that are happening now, the Black Lives Matter protests. One, just what you think it means for the state of democracy, but also as a historian, what you think of the tearing down of statues, monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to other white supremacists and so forth.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Okay, I'll start with the general and then onto the particular. I think the protests are very heartening. In order for there to be democracy, people have to get their voices heard. And in order for there to be democracy, we have to have some basic kinds of values. One value is that people shouldn't kill other people without a reason. And another value is that we should have some basic sense of the history of our own country and be aware of who victimizes who, and in what patterns, and for how long. And the racial question is a key, if not the key, to unlocking a larger sense of justice in the United States, because it's not just that racism is a horror in and of itself, which it is. It's also that racism blocks a whole lot of other reforms which would allow us to be freer, everybody to be freer, in this country.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
I like to think that some of the younger people who are taking part in these protests get that, that they're protesting something which is intolerable and abhorrent in and of itself, but also are aware that for Black people and white people alike, and for everyone else, if we could get through racism, then we'd have a country in which it's easier for everybody, that we have a country in which people couldn't stop the government for doing the right thing by appealing to our worst instincts.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
As to statues. I'm a historian, but I'm a historian of Eastern Europe. And any Eastern European historian is going to say statues come down all the time. That's what you do. In Ukraine, as you know very well, both of you, there's even a term for it; Leninopad, taking down the statues of Lenin. Are we really supposed to say that because there was a statue of Hitler somewhere, it should be there forever? Or that there was a statue of Stalin, it should be there forever? Or a statue of Lenin, it should be there forever?
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
The thing is, the people who make statues are engaging in memory politics; that's what a statute is all about. That's you try to make permanent–some expression of your values or your power at a certain time. The idea that statues are some kind of objective history, that THEY are history, as opposed to memory politics, I find very, very strange. What humans do and record, that's history. If we put up a statue, okay, that's history. If we knock down a statue, that's also history, but the statue itself is not history. It doesn't stand beyond reality or the facts. It's a piece of marble or a piece of stone which humans put up and which humans will eventually take down. Every statue ever, that has ever gone up in the history of the world, has eventually come down. And so, it's an expression of values of the moment which statues come down under which circumstances.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
To answer your question, as somebody who has been present while statues were pulled down, for a very good reason, I don't really see why people make such a fuss about it. It's a pretty normal human impulse.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well said. Andrea, do you have more questions?
Andrea Chalupa:
I always have more questions, but Tim is very limited with time. I just want to thank you, obviously, for all of your work. It has been a guiding light for so many. And especially for helping bring Ukraine's own heartbreaking history to a wider audience and doing it in such a compelling way through your work. Your books are a must-read and necessary for every collection.
Andrea Chalupa:
I have to tell you, Tim, a really funny story. I was caught in the rain in Paris one afternoon while doing some research for Mr. Jones. I was visiting the Jazz Museum of Paris, which is just one guy's private jazz record collection. He's a clarinetist, or plays the clarinet. I was waiting for his shop to open that day, because I was looking for music for Mr. Jones, and I ducked into a random bookshop and there was on display, not your better known books, but your book about the history of Poland, which is like, more obscure work. But I just thought it was so funny that... It just made me love Paris so much that they do the underground Tim Snyder work and they display it prominently.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
That's nice. Yeah. Well, I'm really glad to talk to both of you. So much of what I think I understand about the US or about politics in general comes from the privilege that it's been to work on Eastern European history and Ukrainian history. And a lot of it's come straight forward from Ukrainians during the Maidan and in the last few years in general. We have to learn from each other and I'm glad I've had the chance to learn from both of you, too.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're grateful for you. Thank you so much for joining us and this was really fantastic. We hope to talk again.
Dr. Timothy Snyder:
Good, I hope so too. All the best of both of you.
Andrea Chalupa:
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