Timothy Snyder collection

January 7, 2023 8:39 PM

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. On Tyranny (20 lessons, 10mins), On Tyranny Revisited (podcast interview 1 hour), On Tyranny (1 hour lecture), Timothy Snyder Speaks (12 episodes, 15mins), a comprehensive college level course on Ukrainian history The Making of Modern Ukraine (23 lectures, 45 mins), in podcast form, and Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (12 hour audiobook).
posted by adept256 (24 comments total)

This was a tough ride.
posted by adept256 at 9:20 PM on January 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you so much for posting this. I read Bloodlands a few years and do pay attention to him.
I have been looking for for something to listen to recently as I make certain changes around my place and way of living.

And, thank you for taking that tough ride.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:07 PM on January 7, 2023

I am working on the Making of Modern Ukraine. It is wonderful! Learning about Bandera and Maidan. I highly recommend it.
posted by irisclara at 10:29 PM on January 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

"The Bleak Prophecy of Timothy Snyder (The Yale historian warns about the risk of totalitarianism under Trump. That’s great for selling books — but scholars are alarmed.)", Chronicle article from 2019

"Much ado about nothing? A critical look at Timothy Snyder’s interpretation of Nazi and Stalinist crimes", Revue dhistoire moderne contemporaine, 2017 (academic paper by a French professor of modern history).

I've read Snyder's NYTimes interview with Ezra Klein before, but I also think especially this academic paper is interesting food for thought.
posted by polymodus at 2:11 AM on January 8, 2023

From much ado about nothing?

Another purported similarity is the proximity of the utopias that guided the two dictators: “[T]heir visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. Their utopias of control overlapped in Ukraine” (BL, 19). This claim is perplexing. What is the relevance of the notion of “lands between,” which could have us believe that there may have been, in particular, a kind of more or less independent Ukraine situated between German and Russia? Next, what is meant by the idea of “overlapping”? It is not very clear. Stalin’s plans targeted Soviet territory.

Yes, I have seen these arguments. I'm disappointed to see them here. I'm showing this one paragraph to highlight it's absurdity.

Stalin’s plans targeted Soviet territory.

I have no respect for this.
posted by adept256 at 3:18 AM on January 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Snyder's Substack is also very much worth reading, if you want to read shorter pieces by him. on the Substack he also addresses issues of US politics. You don't need a subscription to read.

Documenting Ukraine, a project he initiated, is a collection of contributions of Ukrainians documenting the war. It is a bit hard to read in mobile but on notebook or PC you can easily select categories such as Diary and Memory, or Oral History.

And i agree with adept256 who writes: "Yes, I have seen these arguments. I'm disappointed to see them here. I'm showing this one paragraph to highlight it's absurdity.
posted by 15L06 at 7:06 AM on January 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Although not audio, his book "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning" is, IMHO, a seminal work. Amazon link
posted by mdrosen at 9:29 PM on January 8, 2023

The Nazis were very bad... but their historiography on the Soviet Union was, apparently, very good.

Make no mistake, equating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany is repeating fascist propaganda. It's not a coincidence that Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization explicitly tasked with crushing communism and defending capitalist interests.
posted by jy4m at 1:18 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Are you a tankie? Because you certainly sound like one.
posted by homerica at 7:05 AM on January 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I dunno, 'the nazis were probably right' is an incredible counterpoint.
posted by adept256 at 8:20 AM on January 9, 2023

Make no mistake, equating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany is repeating fascist propaganda. It's not a coincidence that Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization explicitly tasked with crushing communism and defending capitalist interests.
jy4m

Could you elaborate on the point you're making here? Are you saying that the well-documented atrocities committed by the USSR under Stalin cited by Snyder in his books didn't happen, or are exaggerated or distorted somehow?

Perhaps it's worth considering that defending Communism as a system or philosophy does not require you to excuse or ignore those atrocities?
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:54 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Left wing writers have been pretty critical of Snyder's work, btw. (Richard Evans, Jacobin reviews of Bloodlands and Black Earth.)

I haven't read his scholarly work (and am not enthusiastic to do so after reading reviews like the ones I linked), but the absurd claims he makes in his popular writing / appearances (of the "On Tyranny" variety) make me wonder if he's not just as sloppy in his academic writing.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 4:33 PM on January 9, 2023

What do you consider to be absurd claims?
posted by mazola at 1:01 PM on January 10, 2023

I haven't read the books but as far as I can tell, the left's outrage over Snyder's books boils down to this: he's telling a story in which the Soviet and Nazi killing machines in Eastern Europe are part of the same socio-political process and should not be considered separately.

Obviously, that line of reasoning is unacceptable to a lot of leftists -- not just tankies, but people like Noam Chomsky and my sister -- who are engaged with the either-or notion that socialist states only ever fail due to meddling by the West, and that since the West comprises a sort of capitalist Great Satan, anything bad the Soviet Union (and Russia, for some reason) might have done can be dismissed as a forced error. That's leaving aside the enormously prejudicial suggestion that the Soviets and Nazis were playing the same game. But the specifics of the critique seem to concern all of the killing that happened outside the region of the "Bloodlands," e.g., Greece, and on the actors beside Hitler and Stalin who did a lot of genociding on their own. The complaint seems to be that he didn't write his books about everyone and everything, ever.

But I'm not a historian, or an expert on anything remotely relevant. If Snyder is a Western neo-liberal capitalist bootlicker, I'll surely be skeptical of his narrative, but the critiques I've seen so far are either too specialized for my amateur eye, or a bit hand-wave-y, so I really don't know what to think, at this point.

The lectures on Ukraine seem really good and interesting, though.
posted by klanawa at 6:02 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have read the books and I simply don't see him conflating the two as identical, but part of a horrific, amplifying loop.
posted by mazola at 8:37 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

What do you consider to be absurd claims?

Well, just for starters, I don't think tyranny can be defeated by making eye contact and small talk, among other things. (See the Richard Evans review of the book.)

More generally, Snyder has been a pretty unscrupulous defamer of anyone and anything he doesn't like (for example). It's dishonest and tiresome.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 6:14 PM on January 11, 2023

"Defaming" Putin is dishonest and tiresome?
posted by octothorpe at 7:27 PM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know Snyder is basically what would result if Metafilter's political opinions were transformed into a person, but allow me to humbly suggest that words have actual meaning and I don't think that employing a loaded and historically specific term like "fascist" is an appropriate label for Trump or Putin (or any other contemporary political leader), regardless of their objectionable actions. Assigning inaccurate and provocative political terms like that is demagoguery, not informed analysis.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 1:20 AM on January 12, 2023

So you're saying that if it wasn't bottled at a beer hall in Munich, it can only be called sparkling autocratic nationalism?
posted by Etrigan at 5:26 AM on January 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

a) would you care to define what checkmarks on the way to fascism that Putin's Russia does not meet? and b) even if you use such a narrow definition that Putin can wiggle out of it, calling an evil authoritarian a fascist is not *defaming* them and it is genuinely bizarre that you have come galloping to the defense.
posted by tavella at 11:16 AM on January 12, 2023

I mean, what the hell? Calling Snyder unscrupulous for describing Putin as a fascist?
posted by tavella at 11:19 AM on January 12, 2023

Yes, I have seen these arguments. I'm disappointed to see them here. I'm showing this one paragraph to highlight it's absurdity.

That paragraph looks fine to me. You didn't even link the rest of this para where the author makes clear he only pointing out the mild conceptual revisionism that Snyder engaged in. The French author is not simply yelling "spheres of influence!!" with zero nuance, because in the next breath the author asserts the facticity of expansionism, and the rest of the paragraph which you omitted makes the nuance transparently explicit. It is an academic paper and partly you do have to read it rigorously... which ironically is what the author mildly accusing Snyder of not doing when he introduces concepts like overlapping, etc.
posted by polymodus at 11:56 AM on January 12, 2023

the left's outrage over Snyder's books boils down to this: he's telling a story in which the Soviet and Nazi killing machines in Eastern Europe are part of the same socio-political process and should not be considered separately.

Obviously, that line of reasoning is unacceptable to a lot of leftists

Those would be bad leftists, such as tankies. If you're a normal leftist like Chomsky or Volodymyr Ischenko, you acknowledge the obvious wrong of imperialism and authoritarianism. But you refuse to dismiss, i.e. without contradiction, how Western hegemony automatically seeks to enrich, privilege, and reinforce itself from righteous conflicts. Chomsky himself wrote extensively on this, such as his notion of acceptable vs unacceptable war countries decided by neoliberal powers (I forget the specific term he used in his essays), and such as his assessment of the USSR. At the end of the day, if you want the sane leftists takes that don't devolve into tankie logic, you have to actually put in the homework and read the fundamental essays or lectures, largely written by academics, instead of get snippets of superficial leftist talking points. (Well, even that isn't a guarantee, as if asking a prejudiced conservative to read antiracism literature would help them understand even if they did try to read it.)
posted by polymodus at 12:59 PM on January 12, 2023

People need to be wary of the rhetorical strategy of arguing the irrelevant that is deployed to undermine larger arguments. Small critiques of minor things are fine as long as you recognize what they are small and usually irrelevant to the broader point. Failure to properly cross a T is an error and should be recognized as such. That is a handwriting error and it's relevance is to the quality of handwriting and nothing else. It does not undermine the point of a sentence. The critiques we've seen in this thread are larger than crossing a T but are almost all much smaller critiques than a critique of Snyder's main points.

This was actually an explicit UK Revolutionary Communist Party strategy that they even published as a guide for sowing doubt when they made their switch to being weirdo right-wing libertarian contrarian accelerationists. You can see their work all over the internet and it always aligns with a totalitarian authoritarianism goals while purporting to be true liberalism and has pushed to undermine any use of the state power for good ends (like public health or regulation of anything at all). Mostly it just seems they are like Bannon, deliberate chaos agents whose goal seems to be to make things much worse so that they and theirs can get what they want while people are putting out fires. You'll find ex-RCP people and their close friends whispering into the ears of almost all of the worst conservative politicians in the West. It's truly bizarre how much sway these nutjobs have and it seems with the war in Ukraine they are coming full circle and returning to their tankie origins. I'm sure some people will think this sounds like conspiracy ranting but it isn't hidden. It is right there out in the open and they brag about it. They just don't do it in their articles where they are trying to sow confusion and doubt but if you trace bylines at all you find the associations. I'd say they are kind of like the UK version of the American Randroids (and now they cross-pollinate for really spectacular hybrid incoherence but logical constraints are only for the subjects of their critiques and never for themselves).
posted by srboisvert at 4:14 AM on January 19, 2023 [1 favorite]