- The experience of 20th century autocracy seemed to race into the distance with the end of the Cold War, but today's guest cautions that the decade since 1989, the West has seen the rise of new autocratic movements, some in traditional adversaries, and some much closer to home.

He is Dr. Timothy Snyder this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of important books on European history, 20th century autocracy, the Holocaust, and the dangers of autocracy in the West today.

He joins us today from New Haven, Connecticut.

Tim, thank you so much for being with us.

- I'm glad to be with you.

- So there's a ton that we wanna talk to you about, your scholarship is remarkable, the recent writing that you've done on the conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere, hugely important, we're gonna get to all of that.

But I was curious, this chance to ask an esteemed historian, what drew you to history in the first place?

- What drew me to history was a sense of freedom and discovery.

I was drawn to Eastern Europe and I was drawn to history at the same time, which was late 1980s, early 1990s.

And that glorious moment you have as a historian where you can find things out in archives and think carefully about how you're gonna present them, was magnified by the simple ability that I and others at the time had to read an archive which other people hadn't been reading, and to think about things openly that other people hadn't been able to think about openly.

So when I became a historian, I was young and it was like a voyage where I was learning things and had the privilege that I could share them.

And then in addition to that, I think still as a mature person, being a historian makes me feel free in that there's always unpredictable new things to learn.

And there are always new arguments to be made, and history includes so much else.

You know, you can write about philosophy, you can write about politics, you can write about a lot of things under the heading of doing and learning history.

So something like that.

- Well, and in your professional career too, you certainly have developed a reputation and a profile for yourself on things other than history.

And I'm thinking in particular about some of the reflection that you've done in public in recent years about the state of democracy in the West, certainly the war in Ukraine.

Does being an historian give you insights that might be lost on other disciplines about the contemporary experience?

- I think so, but I don't mean that as a knock on other disciplines, I think that other ways of learning can lead to other angles on the present, which I wouldn't have.

But certainly, were I not a historian, I would not be equipped to say the kinds of things that I do say about the present.

And at least from where I sit, I think being a historian does give you particular advantages.

Like you're not surprised by things because you've seen some variant of them before.

- Tim, in your book, "Bloodlands", you tell the history of the lands of Eastern Europe between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

Lands in which 14 million people were murdered by Nazi and Soviet regimes, an incredible toll and something I knew nothing really about.

Tell us about that, who were the people?

Why were they killed?

What happened there?

- Well, in a way, that question goes back to the first question about why be a historian.

I answered the first question in terms of discovery but another way to answer it would be in terms of synthesis.

So one of the things I realized in being a historian of Eastern Europe and in living in Eastern Europe and spending time in Eastern Europe and central Europe, was that on these territories, let's say from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, basically the contemporary Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Western Russia, on these territories took place several incidents, episodes, policies of mass killing.

And it's not as though we didn't know about any of them, most people would have some reaction if you said Soviet terror or some reaction if you said the Holocaust.

But there were others that people didn't really know about at all.

Like the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war.

At the time I was writing in 2008, 2009, fewer people knew then than know now about the deliberate political famine in Ukraine.

So the observation was that these events, known and unknown, happened on a certain territory.

That the vast majority of German killing and also the majority of Soviet killing happened in a certain territory.

And so from a narrative perspective, what I wanted to do was tell the story from the lens where the killing took place, which were also lands where I had lived or at least spent time and knew something about, I knew the languages.

And then from a synthetic point of view, I wanted to bring all the killing to light.

I wanted all of the victims to be known about and sometimes to be named.

And then from an analytic perspective, I wanted to clear the table a little bit because I thought some of the ways that we talked about German and Soviet mass killing didn't really make sense unless we put all of the killing before us and looked for the relationships between the different killing policies and looked at the succession of policies and looked at some of the interactions.

So that's what was going on in "Bloodlands".

It starts from this moment of insight or really just a simple aha moment that all this killing took place in a certain time, and all of it took place in a zone that one can define pretty clearly.

And that zone also happens to be the place where both German and Soviet power were present.

So that raises questions which I tried to answer by narrating each of these policies and trying to put all of this into a different perspective.

- So hunger was one of the weapons used, talk about that.

How was it used?

Who were the victims?

And why use hunger?

- The most, actually the most important weapon, and this is something, again, it goes back to why history is useful because things change and then we forget the way they usually were.

So for most of human history, people had to be concerned about calories in a different sense than we, right?

The idea that you have too many calories is a very, very recent concern and if you grow up in that world, you know, a world where the health concern is obesity, then it's hard to imagine a different world where the health concern is literally not having enough calories.

But that's much of human history, much of the time.

And in this period, in those 14 million deaths, hunger is actually the way that the largest number of people were killed, close to four million in Soviet Ukraine, and then close to three million among Soviet prisoners of war.

And so the basic overall structure to keep in mind is that calories can be scarce.

And then the second thing to keep in mind is that calories are politically distributed.

So if you have a tyrannical system, one of the ways that people will be disciplined and very likely killed will be by the distribution of food stuffs.

And this escapes our imagination.

I mean, if we think of mass killing, we probably think of gas chambers first, and then maybe we think of bullets second.

But we think about these things in narrow human terms, as microcosms, as narrow interactions rather than as an element of an ecology or as an economy, which is affected by politics.

And then just to push the point into the future a little bit, as global warming proceeds and as scarcity becomes normal in parts of the world, there will also be political decisions about who receives food and who doesn't receive food.

And those two can episodes of mass killing.

- You know, one of the atrocities that you describe in "Bloodlands" is both the Nazi and the Soviet efforts to eliminate an idea of Polish national identity.

And one of the victims of that, where they really targeted were the intelligentsia.

Why were the intelligentsia, why were the elites of Polish society such a threat to the autocrats of that era?

- This is an interesting question because you're right, the target group of the Soviets and the Germans very much overlapped.

So just take a step back.

It's important to know or to remember that the second world war in Europe began with a simultaneous German-Soviet invasion of Poland.

The way that the memory of the war is cut up and divided into specific national perspectives, we very often lose that basic fact.

Americans start thinking about the war in 1941.

The Russians also tell a story that begins in 1941 but the war began because Stalin was willing to make an agreement with Hitler about what was going to happen to Poland and the rest of eastern Europe.

So after September of 1939, when Poland was divided between the Soviet and the Germans, each side went after the intelligentsia for different ideological reasons.

The German point of view was that the Poles were racial inferiors.

And so there really shouldn't be a Polish intelligentsia, it was some kind of historical anomaly.

From the Soviet point of view, the Polish intelligentsia, the educated people represented the bourgeoisie, the class enemy, they represented an element of an international conspiracy directed against Soviet power.

So the rationale is quite different but the effect is, the aim is to try to turn what is a complicated, unpredictable, variated national society into something which is predictable in terms of a scheme.

If you're an inferior race, if you're gonna be educated to speak a pidgin German, which was actually German policy, then you're predictable in a certain way.

If you're part of a class where everybody else has been removed or intimidated, then you're also supposed to be predictable in a different way in terms of the inevitable laws of history.

But that's the elemental thing they have in common.

It seemed normal on both sides to murder large numbers of people in order to push Polish society into what was supposed to be a normal scheme of the way things were supposed to work.

- So in your book, another very important book, "Black Earth", you described the Holocaust not simply as history, which of course it was, but also a warning.

What is that warning?

- Well, I think all history is warning, that was the subtitle.

The title was "Black Earth", and the subtitle was, Holocaust is History and Warning.

And just to be clear, almost all the book is history and it's argumentative history whereas "Bloodlands", which you kindly asked about before is mostly description within a little bit of synthesis.

"Black Earth" in a way is my own, it's like my own book review of "Bloodlands".

It's my answer to the question like, if all of this is true, like how did it happen?

So whereas "Bloodlands" is mostly descriptive, "Black Earth" is largely synthetic and argumentative and it's the argument that leads you from the past to the future.

So the argument of "Black Earth" and I'm gonna be abstracting away from all kinds of detail here, but the argument of "Black Earth" is that the Holocaust was possible because of a certain kind of global antisemitism in which Hitler imagined that nature was on the wrong course because of the presence on earth of Jews combined with a practice of state destruction in which the Germans and sometimes the Soviets and sometimes the Germans and the Soviets went after the other destroyed existing states.

And imperfect as those states might have been, it was the destruction of states and the transformation of people from citizens into organisms, from people who had some legal protection and people had no legal protection that enabled in practice the Holocaust.

And so, if those are the lessons, then those help you look into the future because Hitler's view of this kind of global antisemitism had to do with the competition for resources.

Hitler's idea was that we all really should just be competing for resources.

And anyone who stops us from competing for resources, anyone who tries to distract us from our racial destiny of starving out other races, those people are Jews and they have to be removed from the world.

And so that's a reminder that really existing shortages of things, which we were talking about before in respect to famine, can be consistent with conspiracy theories which then tell you one way to proceed.

And then the other part of the warning for the future would be the statelessness part.

That if you wanna have more or less decent situations, you wanna have more or less decent states.

And so a situation where one state announces that it's gonna destroy another state isn't just illegal or repressive, it's also creates conditions where things can happen that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

And at the end of "Black Earth", I gave the example of, I was writing this in, I think 2012, 2013, 2014, and I gave you the example of a future Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That this could be an example of one state trying to destroy another state, which would not just be a conflict but it would be a conflict where certain kinds of things can happen that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

So there you go.

Those are the lessons.

But in the broader sense, what I was trying to say, Wayne, is that, there's a danger in putting the Holocaust as one of the smarter reviewers of "Bloodlands" put it, there's a danger of putting Holocaust behind plexiglass, that if you treat it precisely, if you treat it as a source of taboos, then you're precisely not learning from it.

You're unlearning rather than learning.

And you may be making the production of similar events more likely if you say, "Okay, the Holocaust is unprecedented, "therefore unique, therefore outside of history."

Once it's outside of history, then precisely you can't learn anything from it.

It becomes this kind of force field that you have to shy away from, mixing my metaphors now, and when you do that, then you may be making similar events more likely.

- Well, you know, and this is actually a great segue into discussion of the current war in Ukraine.

You and other historians have raised the alarm about the war in Ukraine.

Where does it grow from?

Is it this period in the 20th century or is it something else?

- Well, it goes from many places but I'll start with the 20th century.

And it arises from the 20th century in a double sense, both because as a historian, as you quite rightly suggest, one recognizes, so to speak, objective resemblances.

So one recognizes the aspiration to destroy a state and one sees the objective dangers of creating stateless zones.

One recognizes the claim, although Russians make it somewhat differently than Germans did.

One recognizes the claim that this society is not a nation, it doesn't have the right to exist as a society.

Maybe some of the people have a right to exist but only after we've killed or eliminated or intimidated the people who say that this society actually exists as a society or as a nation.

One recognizes that, one sees the danger, that's the objective side.

But then there's the subjective side which is that Putin is clearly playacting the second world war but not as people think on the Soviet side, he's playacting the German side.

What he's imagining is a situation which is much more like the German fantasy of 1939 than the Soviet planning of 1939.

He really is looking at the world as being a place where there aren't any rules, all that matters is resource competition, where he gets to decide, who is a nation and who is not.

And so, there's the objective side and then there's the subjective side.

So that's the 20th century, if you want me to talk about other centuries then, you know, let me know.

- Well, in the interest of time, we might move on but I think that it's fascinating and I'm curious though now, if we sort of maybe prognosticate a little bit, how does the current U.S. election factor into what might be, how this war plays out?

- Well, I'm gonna, you got me in historian mode so I'm gonna stay with things that are helpful from the 20th century.

For me, like the really helpful analogy from the 20th century is 1938 in Czechoslovakia.

And so like the reason we had it, as I see it anyway, the reason we have the second world War the way that we have it is that, the moments it could have been stopped were all ignored.

So one of those was Czechoslovakia in 1938.

The Germans were really in no position to militarily defeat Czechoslovakia in 1938.

They needed the help of the democracies and Italy.

They needed Munich, they needed the Czechoslovak state to be divided up and for the Czech to lose their munitions factories and to lose their fortresses.

And in that situation, the Czech chose not to resist.

And then when Germany attacks Poland in 1939, it's doing it with Czech tanks and Czech explosives and from what had been Czechoslovakia territory, then you get the momentum of the second World war.

And in 1939, France and Britain could have held Poland more than they did but France was very slow and hesitant.

France could have ended the second world war by invading Germany in September of 1939 but didn't.

And so the second world war isn't just this thing had happened, there were moments along the way, right?

So in this war, there were also moments along the way.

In this war, the Ukrainians chose to fight unlike the Czechoslovaks.

And in this war, a broader war can be stopped if the Ukrainians are helped by others.

The Ukrainian economy is about 1/250th the size of the NATO economies taken together.

And so a tiny fraction of what the NATO economies have would easily be enough to make sure that Ukraine can hold its own and win.

We are not, however, mobilizing our economies, anything like the way that the U.S. did in 1941 and 1942.

And at the root, that's the reason why the Ukrainians are not winning as they should be.

- So it feels like we live in a very perilous time.

I mean, certainly if you keep up with the news, you would come to that conclusion.

As a scholar of history, you wrote about that in "The Road to Unfreedom".

Would you put the current era in that same context?

- Well, I mean, that goes back again to your first great question.

You know, things don't repeat.

I don't really even think they rhyme.

I mean, maybe there's a slant rhyme every now and again.

The reason why I don't like the rhyming and the repeating is that, it tends to do away with the human agency.

And one of the reasons, again, going back to earlier question, one of the reasons I like history is that it accepts usually that there's some kind of irreducible human element to all of this, it's not always just larger factors, things aren't always entirely predictable because people do unpredictable things.

So in "The Road to Unfreedom", and also I'm writing from the knowledge that there have been other kinds of dictatorships and that dictatorship is possible.

But I'm also trying to describe how in the history of the 2010s, we're moving towards particular 21st century kinds of unfreedom.

So there are familiar elements like one person rule and propaganda but there are unfamiliar elements like the internet and the particular ways that one can use social media or other digital means to propagate the message of the leader.

There are familiar things like wealth inequality but there are unfamiliar things like that wealth inequality not necessarily being used to build physically impressive things but instead to dominate in quieter ways, right?

There are familiar things like the destruction of states.

So the book, "Road to Unfreedom" starts with Russia and moves through Russia's first war against Ukraine and the reaction to that or the lack of reaction in Europe, in the U.S., into the Trump era and the decline of American democracy.

So there are familiar things like the attempt to destroy the Ukrainian state which begins back in 2014.

But there are also unfamiliar things, I think, like a kind of instantaneous everyday fascist international where the people who want to bring down democracies are in this kind of irregular transactional relationship, one with the other, right?

So the things that are old can sometimes help you to recognize the things that are new 'cause nothing's completely new.

But when you see a certain kind of resemblance, that can kinda sort of be the platform on which you make the argument about what's new.

- Hey, Tim, I'm gonna fan boy here for a moment.

2017 you published a short little book called "On Tyranny", and after I read it, I bought a couple dozen copies and I just started handing out to people that I thought ought to read it.

And I would love to spend an entire episode talking to you about the lessons from autocracy of the 20th century for today but there was one point in particular that in our last couple of minutes, I wanted to make sure we hit.

So you wrote, "To listen for dangerous words; "be alert to the use of words extremism and terrorism.

"Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception.

"Be angry about the treacherous use "of patriotic vocabulary."

The question I have is in, at a democracy, when we see warning signs of that slip towards autocracy, how do we warn other citizens about it without in effect slipping into the instincts of tyranny ourselves?

- Yeah, that's a wonderful question.

And I think it's one that people really struggle with because you wanna tell people that something really bad can happen, right?

So not long after the book came out in February, so in February of '17, I gave an interview where I said, "Look, before Trump's term of office is over, "he's gonna try some kind of Reichstag fire thing.

There's gonna be a fake emergency, he's gonna try to stay in power in a non-democratic way.

And people were really shocked by that but like the shock was largely directed at me and not at Trump, even though as a statement of political reality, it was 100% correct.

That is in fact exactly what he did.

So I'm taking your point that we can push people back into their own complacency if we don't help them with the political imagination part.

And so this is, again, going back to your earlier question, this is one way history can be helpful because we can say, and this this is the move I was trying to make on "Tyranny".

We can say, well, look, Germans in the 1920s and 30s were not any less smart than you and here's some mistakes that they made.

So let's try to identify with them and with their mistakes.

U.S. historians can do things that I can't do about American history.

They can say, well, look, in the 20s and 30s, we had, let's say America First.

And just like now, the people who say America First are actually talking about, not just isolationism but they're talking about race and they're talking about the constraint of American democracy and white supremacy.

That's one move you can make.

Another move you can make is to try, and I've been thinking about this lately myself, to try to talk about everyday life under authoritarianism.

Because when people think, and I've had these conversations myself now, quite a few times, when people think about dictatorship, they think what's gonna happen is a strong man's gonna come and he's gonna do the stuff I want him to do.

And that's not true, he's gonna come and do the stuff that he wants to do.

And you're gonna get used to it and you're gonna start saying that that's a normal.

And what people don't think about is that dictatorship and democracy, it's not this sort of glorious fight of black and white where at the end of the day, people are gonna rise up and defend freedom.

The way it actually works is that you vote for the wrong person, you don't get to vote again because elections become meaningless and you start to become afraid of things you hadn't thought about being afraid of before, especially around children.

I mean, in everyday authoritarian life, the point where people are weak is their children, they're afraid their children are gonna be bullied or lose their place in school.

And that's how authoritarian regimes work.

They look for that place where you're weak and they push it.

And people don't think about how, if you have that strong man in power, you're not gonna be able to say what you think anymore because people will denounce you or you have to worry that you're gonna be denounced and so you're gonna lose your access to public space.

You're not gonna trust your private relationships anymore.

The whole warp and wolf of your life is gonna change in a way that you don't like.

So that's another way of trying to communicate this, like it's not a clear story of black and white where one day you may choose black and then you get to choose white or whatever, vice versa.

It's more like you make the wrong move and you start to descend into this world where things are much worse and from which it's very hard to ascend again.

So I really take your point but there are also, and this is my third and last point, there are also times when you just have to say to people, "Look, this stuff is possible."

You have to listen to what the aspiring dictator is saying in his own words and just think through the actual political implications of that.

Don't judge it just as spectacle but judge it in terms of what your life is going to be like if the entire federal government is replaced by incompetent loyalists or if there's a dictatorship from day one or if concentration camps are built.

You know, you have to, there is a point, I guess I'm also trying to say, at which people do have to take responsibility for hearing what's being said around them.

And if we can be as careful as we want with history and with contemporary reality, but other people have to take responsibility too.

Like democracy kinda depends upon that, that we all take responsibility for like the real range of reality and not give into fantasies about how one person can come along and make everything better.

- Timothy Snyder, your work is important, we're so grateful to you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week but we hope that you'll join us again next week.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, thank you for joining us on "Story in the Public Square".

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