A few weeks ago, I decided to learn more about Russia and Ukraine. In part because I listened to a zoom call sponsored by a non-profit with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba. it’s impossible not to be moved by the courage of the Ukrainians these days, especially given the haunting images of destruction on cable news.
Putin
The more I watch cable news, the less I feel that I really understand the big-picture motivations of Putin for starting this horrific war.
So, I decided to do what I’ve done my whole life when I wanted to learn more about something – I went searching for a book.
That brought me to The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale. I figured that it would at least explain something about Putin.
Turns out I got way more than I expected from this wonderful, and quite alarming, book. I don’t recall ever reading a book about recent history with so much perspective and historical context. Snyder certainly delivered on putting Putin in context. He convinces the reader that, to understand Putin’s motivations in Ukraine, we must let go of our conventional (Western) points-of-view.
Putin’s motivations seem to be not at all economic, and perhaps not even about territorial gain per se. They are more about an ideology of which a Russian identity and culture is front and center, and a (flawed in the factual sense) view of history that places himself on center stage- as a hero or savior. He is threatened by the notion of a strong democracy in Ukraine on his western border but, even more, his worldview does not accommodate the existence of Ukraine as a country. This makes me very skeptical of any negotiation with Putin which keeps Ukraine in place, as anything other than a short-term measure in Putin’s mind.
The Road to Unfreedom also convinced me of something that I suspected all along – that it is both inaccurate and intellectually lazy to pass off Putin’s war here as driven by a “man having gone insane.” Certainly, Putin’s actions are both evil and horrific. Yet it’s important, if the world is to get through this brutal period and make progress, to understand Putin’s point of view – at least if we don’t want history to keep repeating itself over the longer term. He’s not the first person in world history to convince himself he comes from a superior race and culture, unfortunately.
History
Snyder articulates that the West including America went awry when we interpreted the end of the Cold War as the end of history. History has a way of keeping going. Or, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
As Snyder puts it, “America and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned that peace was good, and hence choose integration and prosperity.”
The Road to Unfreedom argues that the politics of inevitability is really about a story about ourselves, which unsurprisingly casts us in a more favorable light that can be supported by the facts at hand.
When the story collapses, we risk falling into another delusional view of history which Snyder calls the politics of eternity. “Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.”
Putin is presented as an eternity politician. But you may also recognize Donald Trump as one – think about all the ways in which he actively attempted to destroy Americans sense of history, starting with Charlottesville. A great friend told me shortly after Trump was elected that he thought Trump was a Russian asset. I was skeptical at the time. In the Road to Unfreedom, an entire chapter is spent making the case for this, and utterly convincingly.
A Politics of Responsibility
The Road to Unfreedom argues that to make progress, we must let go of both the politics of inevitably and the politics of eternity. We must do the hard work of seeing the facts for what they are. We must participate as citizens in the hard work of democracy. We must realize that human actions, decisions, viewpoints, and values actually determine our history. A history which is still being written.
Or, as Snyder concludes, “If we see history as it is, we see our places in it, what we might change, and how we might do better. We halt our thoughtless journey from inevitability to eternity, and exit the road to unfreedom. We begin a politics of responsibility. To take part in its creation is to see the world for a second time. Students of the virtues that history reveals, we become makers of a renewal that no one can foresee.”
If you want to understand Russia and Ukraine and America and Europe, The Road to Unfreedom is a book you need to read. You will never see history in the same light again. And you may even experience, once you process all the brutal facts, an unfamiliar feeling of hope – if we can participate in seeing the world for a second time.
Thanks Doug. About 3 months ago, I picked up a book called “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” by Tony Judt. I started reading before the Ukraine crisis and just finished it. While the book “ends” around before 2010, what struck me was the dissolution of the USSR and impact across the world. While Putin was only a KGB operative in 1988-90, he was still basking in the glow of the Great Patriotic War when Russia, more likely than us Americans care to admit, was probably the most instrumental single force in defeating Hitler (and also the largest loser in terms of military lives.) The formation of the Eastern bloc was viewed as the fruits of the spoils of that victory, and Judt argues that the West was all too agreeable to Stalin, Krushchev, etc., running roughshod over these poor countries of relatively little interest to us at the time. Ukraine was also part of that “bargain” of keeping Russia focused on building its buffer between itself and a potentially resurgent Germany. Move through the formation of the EU, NATO growing in size to include many formerly communist countries and the degradation of Russia along the way, including China’s role as the replacement Superpower, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Putin was willing to do what he did. A dog feeling backed into a corner will do what it needs to do, to reassert control and get out. Unfortunately, that attempt to reassert control, has come at the loss of Ukraine’s well-being for decades to come and a rearmament of Europe supported by the US.