The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

Gumilev was once again sentenced to the Gulag, this time to ten years near Karaganda. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he was released, but the years in the Gulag left their mark. Gumilev saw the inspirational possibilities in repression, and believed that the basic biological truths of life were revealed in extreme settings.

He agreed with his teachers that Mongolia was the source of Russian character and its shelter from Western decadence. Like the émigré scholars of the 1920s, he portrayed Eurasia as a proud heartland that extended from the Pacific Ocean to a meaningless and sick European peninsula at the western extreme.

Gumilev was a typical Soviet autodidact, an enthusiastic amateur in several fields.

Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays. Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others. These special leaders, in possession of the “passionarity” Putin mentioned in his 2012 speech, were the founders of ethnic groups.

The cosmic rays that enlivened Western nations had been emitted in the distant past, and so the West was dead. The Russian nation arose from cosmic emissions on September 13, 1380, and was therefore young and vibrant.

the Russian, warned Gumilev, must beware “chimerical” groups that draw life not from cosmic rays but from other groups. He meant the Jews.

Gumilev therefore advanced three basic elements of modern antisemitism: the Jew as the soulless trader, the Jew as the drinker of Christian blood, and the Jew as the agent of an alien civilization.

The economist Sergei Glazyev, who advised Yeltsin and Putin, referred to Gumilev and used his concepts.

Gumilev was friendly with the philosopher Yuri Borodai and his son Alexander. The younger Borodai dreamed of the “armed passionary,” people who would be “catalyzers of powerful movements” that would liberate “the entire territory of Eurasia.”

As president, Vladimir Putin would not only cite Gumilev on the Eurasian project, but he would appoint Sergei Glazyev his advisor on Eurasia. Not long after, Alexander Borodai would take an important part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Eurasianism of the 2010s was a rough mixture of a Russian tradition developed by Gumilev with Nazi ideas mediated by the younger Russian fascist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962).

Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an antiestablishment kid of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s, playing his guitar and singing about killing millions of people in ovens. His life’s work was to bring fascism to Russia.

An early influence was Miguel Serrano, author of Hitler: The Last Avatar, who claimed that the Aryan race owed its superiority to its extraterrestrial origins.

Dugin shared with Ilyin a debt to Carl Schmitt. It was Schmitt who had formulated a vision of world politics without laws and states, grounded instead in the subjective desires of cultural groups for ever more land.

Dugin dismissed Ilyin as an inferior philosopher who served nothing more than a “technical function” in the Putin regime. Nevertheless, much of Dugin’s writing reads like a parody of Ilyin.

In 2005, Dugin founded a state-supported youth movement whose members urged the disintegration and russification of Ukraine. In 2009, Dugin foresaw a “battle for Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” The existence of Ukraine, in Dugin’s view, constituted “an enormous danger for all of Eurasia.”

Concepts from the three interflowing currents of Russian fascism—Ilyin’s Christian totalitarianism, Gumilev’s Eurasianism, and Dugin’s “Eurasian” Nazism—appeared in Putin’s discourse as he sought an exit from the dilemma he created for his country in 2012.

Western enmity was not a matter of what a Western actor was doing, but what the West was portrayed as being.

Other members of the Izborsk Club explained that Putin’s Eurasian Union was “the project of restoring Russia as a Eurasian empire.” They presented the EU as an existential threat to Russia, since it enforced law and generated prosperity. Russian foreign policy should therefore support the extreme Right within EU member states until the EU collapses, as Prokhanov ecstatically anticipated, into a “constellation of European fascist states.” Ukraine, as one Izborsk Club expert wrote, “is all ours, and eventually it will all come back to us.” According to Dugin, the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia was the “necessary condition” of the Eurasian imperial project.

After Glazyev was fired from the Yeltsin administration for corruption in 1993, he got a helping hand from the American conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who held similar views.

Because the EU is a consensual organization, it was vulnerable to campaigns that raised emotions. Because it was composed of democratic states, it could be weakened by political parties that advocated leaving the EU. Because the EU had never been meaningfully opposed, it never occurred to Europeans to ask whether debates on the internet were manipulated from outside with hostile intent. The Russian policy to destroy the EU took several corresponding forms: the recruitment of European leaders and parties to represent the Russian interest in European disintegration; the digital and televisual penetration of public discourse to sow distrust of the EU; the recruitment of extreme nationalists and fascists for public promotion of Eurasia; and the endorsement of separatism of all kinds.

Brexit was a major triumph for Russian foreign policy, and a sign that a cyber campaign directed from Moscow could change reality.

Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.

Yanukovych’s career demonstrates the difference between Ukrainian oligarchical pluralism and Russian kleptocratic centralism. He had run for president for the first time in 2004. The final count had been manipulated in his favor by his patron, the outgoing president Leonid Kuchma. Russian foreign policy was also to support his candidacy and declare his victory. After three weeks of protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square (known as the Maidan), a ruling of the Ukrainian supreme court, and new elections, Yanukovych accepted defeat. This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the heights of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life. After his defeat, Yanukovych hired the American political consultant Paul Manafort to improve his image. Although Manafort maintained a residence in Trump Tower in New York, he spent a great deal of time in Ukraine. Under Manafort’s tutelage, Yanukovych got a better haircut and better suits, and began to talk with his hands. Manafort helped him to pursue a “Southern strategy” for Ukraine reminiscent of the one that his Republican Party had used in the United States: emphasizing cultural differences, making politics about being rather than doing. In the United States, this meant playing to the grievances of whites even though they were a majority whose members held almost all the wealth; in Ukraine it meant exaggerati...

So when Yanukovych suddenly declared, on November 21, 2013, that Ukraine would not sign the association agreement, he became intolerable. Yanukovych had made his decision after speaking with Putin. The Russian politics of eternity, ignored by most Ukrainians until then, was suddenly at the doorstep.

Mustafa Nayyem was one of these investigative journalists, and on November 21, he had had enough. Writing on his Facebook page, Nayyem urged his friends to go out to protest. “Likes don’t count,” he wrote. People would have to take their bodies to the streets. And so they did: in the beginning, students and young people, thousands of them from Kyiv and around the country, the citizens with the most to lose from a frozen future. They came to the Maidan, and they stayed. And in so doing they took part in the creation of a new thing: a nation.

Alongside the regularity of elections and the absence of war, the right to peaceful assembly was one way that Ukrainians themselves distinguished their country from Russia. So it came as a shock when riot police attacked the protestors on the Maidan on November 30.

Ukrainian citizens came to Kyiv to help the students because they were troubled by violence.

On January 16, 2014, Yanukovych retroactively criminalized the protests and legalized his own use of force. The official parliamentary record included a raft of legislation which the protestors called “dictatorship laws.” These measures severely limited freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, banning undefined “extremism,” and requiring nongovernmental organizations that received money from abroad to register as “foreign agents.” The laws were introduced by deputies with ties to Russia and were copies of Russian legislation. There were no public hearings, no parliamentary debate, and indeed no actual vote: a show of hands was improperly used instead of an electronic count, and the number of hands raised was short of a majority. The laws were nevertheless entered into the books. Protestors recognized that they would be treated as criminals if apprehended.

Six days later, two protestors were shot dead, and a third, who had been abducted, was found murdered. From the perspective, say, of either the United States or Russia, both much more violent societies, it is hard to appreciate the weight of these three deaths for Ukrainians. The mass killings by sniper fire four weeks later would overshadow these first two deaths. The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began five weeks later brought so much more bloodshed that it can seem impossible to recall how the killing began. And yet to the society actually concerned, there were specific moments that seemed intolerable breaches of common decency.

For those who took part in the Maidan, their protest was about defending what was still thought to be possible: a decent future for their own country. The violence mattered to them as a marker of the intolerable. It came in bursts of a few moments or a few hours: beatings on November 21 and December 10, abductions and murders in January, a bombing on February 6, and finally a mass shooting on February 20. But people came to the Maidan not for moments or hours but for days, weeks, and months, their own fortitude suggesting a new sense of time, and new forms of politics. Those who remained on the Maidan could do so only because they found new ways to organize themselves.

The Maidan brought four forms of politics: the civil society, the economy of gift, the voluntary welfare state, and the Maidan friendship.

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States.

Ukrainian citizens on the Maidan spoke as they did in everyday life, using Ukrainian and Russian as it suited them.

People spoke Ukrainian from the stage erected at the Maidan, since Ukrainian is the language of politics. But then the speaker might return to the crowd and speak to friends in Russian. This was the everyday behavior of a new political nation.

protestors most often selected “the defense of the rule of law” as their major goal.

The political and social activity of the Maidan from December 2013 through February 2014 arose from temporary associations based upon will and skill.

A visitor would be surprised to find deep order amidst apparent chaos, and realize that what seemed at first like extraordinary hospitality was in fact a spontaneous welfare state.

Hrytsak and others recalled the French philosopher Albert Camus and his idea of a revolt as the moment when death is chosen over submission. Posters on the Maidan quoted a 1755 letter by the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Ilyin had wished for a Russia ruled by law, but could not see how its spirit would ever reach the people. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he accepted that lawlessness from the far Left must be met by lawlessness from the far Right. At the very moment that Putin was applying Ilyin’s notion of law to Russia, Ukrainians were demonstrating that the authoritarian shortcut could be resisted. Ukrainians demonstrated their attachment to law by cooperating with others and by risking themselves.

In November and December 2013, the Russian media covering the Maidan introduced the irrelevant theme of gay sex at every turn. When covering the very first day of protests by Ukrainian students in favor of the association agreement, the Russian media sought to fascinate its readers by conflating Ukrainian politics with handsome men and gay sex. A social media page of Vitali Klitschko, a heavyweight boxer who led a Ukrainian political party, was hacked and gay material introduced. Then this was presented as a news story for millions of Russians on a major television station, NTV. Before Russians could apprehend that pro-European protests were underway in a neighboring country, they were invited to contemplate taboo sex.

Dmitry Kiselev, the leading figure in Russian television media, warmed to the theme. In December 2013 he was appointed the director of a new media conglomerate known as Rossiia Segodnia, or Russia Today. Its aim was to dissolve the Russian state media’s pursuit of news as such into a new pursuit: of useful fiction. He greeted his new staff with the words “objectivity is a myth” and set the new editorial line as “love for Russia.”

Getting one’s own history wrong is essential to eternity politics.

In the Ukrainian context, these were two activists at a press conference. In the Russian press, the sexual orientation of the one and the male beauty of the other was the story.

Rather than asking how past experience might instruct reformers of the present about possibilities for the future, Russians were meant to adapt their minds to a news cycle which instructed them on their own innocence. One eternal verity of Russian civilization turned out to be sexual anxiety. If Russia were indeed a virginal organism threatened by the world’s uncomprehending malice, as Ilyin had suggested, then Russian violence was a righteous defense against penetration.

December 17, 2013, Putin offered Yanukovych a package of $15 billion in bond purchases and reduced prices for natural gas. The aid seemed to be conditional: it was offered along with Russian requests that the streets of Kyiv be cleared of protestors.

A group of twenty-seven Russian specialists in the suppression of protests, officers of the FSB and instructors from the ministry of internal affairs, arrived in Kyiv. On January 9, 2014, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine informed Yanukovych that Ukrainian riot policemen would be given Russian citizenship after the coming operation to crush the Maidan. This was a very important assurance, since it meant that these policemen did not need to fear the consequences of their actions. If the opposition won in the end, they would still be safe.

Russian-style laws did not have the same consequences in Ukraine as in Russia.

Moscow was unable to move Ukraine into Eurasia by helping Yanukovych to repress the opposition. It was time for a shift in strategy. By early February 2014, it appeared Moscow no longer aimed to maneuver Yanukovych and Ukraine into Eurasia. Instead, Yanukovych would be sacrificed in a campaign to provoke chaos throughout the country.

A memorandum that circulated in the Russian presidential administration in early February 2014, apparently based on the work of Girkin, anticipated the change in the course of Russian policy. It began from the premise that “the Yanukovych regime is utterly bankrupt. Its diplomatic, financial, and propaganda support by the Russian state no longer makes any sense.” Russian interests in Ukraine were defined as the military-industrial complex of Ukraine’s southeast and “control over the gas transport system” in the entire country. Russia’s main goal should be “the disintegration of the Ukrainian state.” The proposed tactic was to discredit both Yanukovych and the opposition by violence, while invading southern Ukraine and destabilizing the Ukrainian state. The memorandum included three propaganda strategies meant to provide cover for such a Russian intervention: (1) to demand that Ukraine federalize itself in the interests of a supposedly oppressed Russian minority, (2) to define opponents of the Russian invasion as fascists, and (3) to characterize the invasion as a civil war stoked by the West.