When historians tell big lies

the tragic case of Timothy Snyder

Jan 27, 2024

Timothy Snyder is an eloquent, prolific and multi-lingual historian of Eastern Europe, who turned himself, after the success of Bloodlands, into that dangerous temptation, a public intellectual.

Timothy Snyder, Advocate for Ukraine

His scholarship and mesmeric prose turned him into one of the most prominent public intellectuals among historians. But powerful emotions also fuelled his passionate arguments in favour of freedom, democracy, and, most of all, Ukraine. Snyder became, in the story he told himself, a slayer of modern demons. His public advocacy presented himself in heroic defence of freedom against tyranny, and the “defiant democracy” of Ukraine against the “ageing tyranny” of Russia.

Unfortunately, his role as public intellectual distorted the quality of his history. From 2010, the obscure scholar began to produce best-sellers that chimed well with the Weltanschauung of the Atlanticist elite. Compelling prose replaced pedantic detail. Since Bloodlands in 2010, Snyder has produced poetically charged denunciations of totalitarian Russia (both under Stalin and less empirically under Putin) and other threats to Democracy. He has challenged people who tell the “Big Lies” of propaganda, and in turn been challenged as an author of such distortions of the truth. He has also let slip some ethically challenged apologies for Ukrainian nationalist heroes, who were killers in the “Bloodlands”.

Timothy Snyder, History Books

Snyder’s early works were biographies of obscure Eastern European figures and the growth of national ideas in the territories of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was reprinted in a revised edition in 2022. “Bloodlands” was Snyder’s invented term for the area around Ukraine that he saw as the main killing fields of 20th century European history. The book focused on the region between Germany and Russia, where millions of civilians fell victim to mass killing. Snyder equated the atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin, and, in some scholars’ views, downplayed the role played by the innocent victims of Ukraine in the Holocaust.

In Black Earth Snyder made a case that the ideological roots of the Holocaust lay in a distorted ecological worldview, where he believed that securing "living space" for the Aryan race required the destruction of existing states and the annihilation of millions of people. Snyder argued that understanding this ecological dimension is crucial for comprehending the scale and brutality of the Holocaust, and this book muted some of the criticism of Snyder’s account of the Holocaust. However, his argument assumed that Ukraine was central to all the conflicts of 20th century Europe. Snyder argued that it was the black earth of Ukraine that was the central territory over which empires fight, and Ukrainians suffer there as innocent victims, as they strive to bring their nation to maturity despite the depredations of surrounding empires.

Timothy Snyder, Political Commentary

Since 2010, Snyder’s roles as pundit and prophet have overshadowed the modest scholarship of a true historian. His transition to a morally charged advocate for the central role of Ukraine in the saga of freedom was well-timed. Since 2014 the USA has scaled up its aggressive policies towards Russia. NATO activated the “defiant democracy” of Ukraine in a war to expand NATO to the shores of the Pacific, and to suborn the Russian Federation to the liberal rules-based order. Since that time, Snyder has been among the most prominent, prolific advocates of the Ukrainian cause, and of the new American foreign policy of an Orwellian war of Democracy against Autocracy.

Then 2016 happened; Trump and Brexit, that is, and perhaps also the death of David Bowie. Snyder threw off any remaining scholarly scruple, and wrote like a man on a mission to save the world from a second Hitler in America, or perhaps worse yet, in Snyder’s world view, a second Stalin in the Kremlin. History took a back seat to moral grandiosity and prophecy. He became convinced that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were bringing the world to the brink of a catastrophic replay of the 1930s.

Snyder came to see the mundane world of international and domestic politics in images of good and evil. His rhetoric was unmoored from the archive; yet still mired in the blood and horror he must have witnessed in his studies of the great tragedies of Europe between 1918 and 1945. Good and evil took over his language, and a missionary role for the historian as prophet beclouded his ideas.

“The moral question of what is good and evil in public life can never be separated from the historical investigation of structure. It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that makes virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by promising that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, eternity by assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent victims.
If we wish to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.” (The Road to Unfreedom p 13.)

This rhetoric is Manichean, and reflects a regrettable tendency in American political culture, with its near religious belief in the manifest destiny of American liberalism. Sadly, if we wish to keep a sense of history alive, we may need to set aside talk of good and evil. It suffocates empathy, without which history cannot live.

From afar, a process some psychologists call “fusion” appeared to occur in Snyder’s mind. Trump really was Hitler. Putin, really Stalin; and all his life Snyder had taught himself to believe that Hitler and Stalin were equal evils. Ukraine was really a democracy; and Snyder really was like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposing evil in a lonely heroic moral struggle.

The Moral Tragedy of Timothy Snyder

He produced a strange book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. I recall buying it and my disappointment. It turned the complex history of this terrible century into anodyne tips that you might hear on a YouTube channel. Indeed, Professor Snyder reproduced video versions of his twenty lessons recently on his own YouTube channel. “Do not obey in advance” began the book, and became a rallying cry to defy Trump. Snyder became a key enabler of the RussiaGate hoax; perhaps, in his fusion dreams, he even hoaxed himself. Other homilies from Snyder would barely help with the normal difficulties of life, let alone a genuine degradation of democracy. Stand out. Believe in truth. Listen for dangerous words. Rarely has deep reflection on twentieth century history produced such banality of virtue.

Snyder even did not take his own advice. His explication of his Ohio preacher-boy’s homily, “to listen for dangerous words”, was:

“Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.” p.99

Yet since 2022 such dangerous words, like Slava Ukraina, declaimed by patriotic killers like Stephan Bandera in the 1930s, have driven Snyder to urge Ukrainians into a new bloodlands; to sacrifice themselves in hundreds of thousands in the service of American imperial glory, or in Snyder’s own patriotic vocabulary, in the service of a “defiant democracy”, cheered on from discreet luxury of Yale common rooms.

Snyder has appeared in television ads to raise funds for various aspects of the NATO and Ukrainian military effort, such as his Safe Skies appeal. He has made the case at WEF in 2023 for why Ukraine must win the war, for the sake of European values. In 2024, perhaps less confident in his own perceptions, he was reduced merely to argue that Russia must lose, to save American face perhaps. He has been consistently passionate and persistently wrong-headed. He crossed the line from history into the swamplands of propaganda years ago, and is now well and truly lost to firm land. He has said and tweeted regrettable things, urging every kind of weapon to be employed against the Russian menace. His twitter profile features an image of Zelensky hanging on the great Professor’s every word.

Snyder is by no means the only historian to be led astray by the illusions of power conferred on public intellectuals, the service of imperial interests or the seductive songs of nationalism. There have been many such cases in the USA, Ukraine, Britain, Russia, China and around the world. Priya Satia in Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire compellingly showed the long collaboration between history and empire. Even in dear old Australia a few historians degrade their profession with their punditry, and serve the sub-imperial power like truly sycophantic colonial elites.

However, Snyder is very much a product of American cultural institutions and the tentacles of its national security apparatus. The fusion of Stalin and Hitler into “totalitarianism” began in Cold War America, and was led by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Timothy Snyder has been among the most talented prose writers in that tradition; but not its greatest mind. The tradition itself is as decadent as the over-stretched American Empire. Vast numbers of second-rate scholars and two-bit YouTubers (like @Whatifalthist) churn out these ideas at the universities, foundations, think-tanks, YouTube channels and even Substack newsletters. Truly, American culture is fuelled by America’s endless wars. It is derailed by the manifest absurdity of its exceptional destiny.

Ultimately, Timothy Snyder made his choices, and, like of all of us, will have to live with his errors. He threw his lot in with geo-strategists, propagandists and sketchy Ukrainian nationalists. He probably made a fortune that way. His books sold millions, and Ukrainian oligarchs, like Victor Pinchuk, are generous to their Pinnocchios. More genuine scholars like Richard Sakwa are muted and deplatformed, but tell the truth about how Snyder and his Atlantic Council fans like Anne Applebaum, and how Biden and Trump and Obama and Clinton and the Bushes, did not serve the truth but rather lost the peace. This story is told in Sakwa, The Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (2024)

I wonder if the coming collapse of Ukraine’s war effort and political regime will lead Timothy Snyder to write a better book than On Tyranny; and a book that reflects on the lessons of the twenty-first century. If nothing else, I hope he reflects on how, at times, he got carried away with the stories he told himself about history. I hope he finds some peace in his own life, even if he has helped bring a disastrous war to Ukraine. If he does write that book on the lessons of the twenty-first century, perhaps he could title it On Fear and Loathing; and make the first lesson of the twenty-first century this piece of ancient wisdom spoken by the Buddha.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

Life of the Mind, Weekly Tip

I myself have reflected on this. That may be my tip for a mindful life this week. Do not let anger drive your stories of the world and its past.

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