The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

Americans 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 from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.

The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: 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. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

In August 1991, President George H. W. Bush traveled to Kyiv to urge Ukrainians not to leave the Soviet Union: “Freedom is not the same as independence,” he instructed them.

From 2012, there was no sense in imagining a worse Russia in the past and a better Russia in the future, mediated by a reforming government in the present. The enmity of the United States and the European Union had to become the premise of Russian politics.

Putin was repeating Ilyin’s understanding of both elections and law. Thus “freedom” meant subordination to the words of an arbitrary leader. Indeed, after Putin’s return to the office of president in May 2012, the Russian state was transformed in ways that corresponded to Ilyin’s proposals.

In the politics of eternity, the past provides a trove of symbols of innocence exploited by rulers to illustrate the harmony of the homeland and the discord of the rest of the world.

While visiting Kyiv in July 2013, Putin read souls and spoke of God’s geopolitics: “Our spiritual unity began with the Baptism of Holy Rus 1025 years ago. Since then, much has happened in the lives of our peoples, but our spiritual unity is so strong that it is not subject to any action by any authority: neither government authorities nor, I would even go so far as to say, church authorities. Because regardless of any existing authority over the people, there can be none that is stronger than the authority of the Lord—nothing can be stronger than that. And this is the most solid foundation for our unity in the souls of our people.”

In September 2013 at Valdai, his official presidential summit on foreign policy, Putin expressed his vision in secular terms. He cited Ilyin’s “organic model” of Russian statehood, in which Ukraine was an inseparable organ of the virginal Russian body. “We have common traditions, a common mentality, a common history and a common culture,” said Putin. “We have very similar languages. In that respect, I want to repeat again, we are one people.”

Joseph Stalin understood the Soviet project as self-colonization. Since the Soviet Union had no overseas possessions, it had to exploit its hinterlands. Ukraine was therefore to yield its agricultural bounty to Soviet central planners in the First Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933. State control of agriculture killed between three and four million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine by starvation.

As a result of the German occupation that began in 1941, more than three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine were killed, including about 1.6 million Jews murdered by the Germans and local policemen and militias.

The famine of 1932–1933 was also a war against the Ukrainian nation, in that it wrecked the social cohesion of villages and coincided with a bloody purge of Ukrainian national activists.

As in the new Russia, the 1990s in the new Ukraine were marked by takeovers of Soviet assets and clever arbitrage schemes.

And unlike in Russia, in Ukraine power changed hands through democratic elections.

Unlike in Russia, in Ukraine the European Union was seen as a cure for the corruption that hindered social advancement and a more equitable distribution of wealth. EU membership was consistently promoted, at least rhetorically, by Ukrainian leaders.

As a new state, Ukraine had enormous problems, most obviously corruption. An association agreement with the EU, which Yanukovych promised to sign, would be an instrument to support the rule of law within Ukraine. The historical function of the EU was precisely the rescue of the European state after empire. Yanukovych might not have understood this, but many Ukrainian citizens did. For them, only the prospect of an association agreement made his regime tolerable. 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.

In the oligarchical Ukraine of the twenty-first century, reporters gave their fellow citizens a chance at self-defense. 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.

If Ukrainians could solve Ilyin’s riddle of law by invoking Europe and solidarity, surely Russians could too? That was a thought that Russian leaders could not permit their citizens to entertain.

In late 2011, when Russians protested faked elections, their leaders associated the protestors with homosexuality.

In November and December 2013, the Russian media covering the Maidan introduced the irrelevant theme of gay sex at every turn.

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.

European integration was interpreted by Russian politicians to mean the legalization of same-sex partnerships (which was not an element of Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU) and thus the spread of homosexuality. When the German foreign minister visited Kyiv on December 4, the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda headlined the meeting as “Gay firewood on the Maidan fire.”

Foreign Minister Lavrov chose that very day (February 14, 2014) to formalize the idea that Russian civilization was an innocent body defending itself from Western perversion. In the newspaper Kommersant, Lavrov repeated Ilyin’s idea that “society is a living organism” that had to be protected from Europe’s hedonistic “refusal of traditional values.”

Russia arrived first at the politics of eternity. Kleptocracy made the political virtues of succession, integration, and novelty impossible, and so political fiction had to make them unthinkable. Ivan Ilyin’s ideas gave form to the politics of eternity. A Russian nation bathed in the untruth of its own innocence could learn total self-love. Vladimir Surkov showed how eternity could animate modern media. While working for Putin, he wrote and published a novel, Almost Zero (2009), that was a kind of political confession. In the story, the only truth was our need for lies, the only freedom our acceptance of this verdict. In a story within the larger plot, the hero was troubled by a flatmate who only slept. An expert issued a report: “We will all be gone,” the expert confided, “as soon as he opens his eyes. Society’s duty, and yours in particular, is to continue his dream.” The perpetuation of the dream state was Surkov’s job description. If the only truth was the absence of truth, the liars were honorable servants of Russia. To end factuality is to begin eternity. If citizens doubt everything, they cannot see alternative models beyond Russia’s borders, cannot carry out sensible discussions about reform, and cannot trust one another enough to organize for political change. A plausible future requires a factual present. Following Ilyin, Surkov spoke of the “contemplation of the whole” which enabled a vision of “geopolitical reality”: that foreigners tried to draw Russians away ...

RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction. It subverted the format of the news broadcast by its straight-faced embrace of baroque contradiction: inviting a Holocaust denier to speak and identifying him as a human rights activist; hosting a neo-Nazi and referring to him as a specialist on the Middle East. In the words of Vladimir Putin, RT was “funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position.” That position was the absence of a factual world, and the level of funding was about $400 million a year. Americans and Europeans found in the channel an amplifier of their own doubts—sometimes perfectly justified—in the truthfulness of their own leaders and the vitality of their own media. RT’s slogan, “Question More,” inspired an appetite for more uncertainty. It made no sense to question the factuality of what RT broadcast, since what it broadcast was the denial of factuality. As its director said: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” RT wished to convey that all media lied, but that only RT was honest by not pretending to be truthful. Factuality was replaced by a knowing cynicism that asked nothing of the viewer but the occasional nod before sleep. —

A modest affair in military terms, the Russian invasion of southern and then southeastern Ukraine involved the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare. The propaganda worked at two levels: first, as a direct assault on factuality, denying the obvious, even the war itself; second, as an unconditional proclamation of innocence, denying that Russia could be responsible for any wrong. No war was taking place, and it was thoroughly justified. When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2014, President Putin lied with purpose. On February 28 he claimed, “We have no intention of rattling the sabre and sending troops to Crimea.” He had already sent troops to Crimea. At the moment he uttered these words, Russian troops had been marching through Ukrainian sovereign territory for four days. For that matter, the Night Wolves were in Crimea, following Russian soldiers around in a loud display of revving engines, a media stunt to make the Russian presence unmistakable. Even so, Putin chose to mock reporters who noted the basic facts. On March 4, he asserted that Russian soldiers were local Ukrainian citizens who had purchased their uniforms at local stores. “Why don’t you have a look at the post-Soviet states,” Putin proposed. “There are many uniforms there that are similar. You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform.” Putin was not trying to convince anyone in that post-Soviet world that Russia had not invaded Ukraine. Indeed, he took for g...

Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an expectation of the future that calms the present. The meaning of each democratic election is promise of the next one. If we anticipate that another meaningful election will take place, we know that the next time around we can correct our mistakes, which in the meantime we blame upon the people whom we elect. In this way, democracy transforms human fallibility into political predictability, and helps us to experience time as movement forward into a future over which we have some influence. If we come to believe that elections are simply a repetitive ritual of support, democracy loses its meaning.

Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle. Russia opposes European and American democracy to ensure that Russians do not see that democracy might work as a succession principle in their own country. Russians are meant to distrust other systems as much as they distrust their own. If Russia’s succession crisis can in fact be exported—if the United States could become authoritarian—then Russia’s own problems, although unresolved, would at least seem normal. Pressure on Putin would be relieved.

The American electoral college accords victory by tallying the electoral votes of states rather than by the number of individual votes. States are allocated electoral votes not by population but according to the number of federal elected representatives. Since all states have two senators, less populous states have a disproportionate number of electoral votes; individual votes in small states count for far more than individual votes in large states. Meanwhile, millions of Americans in territories (as opposed to states) have no vote at all. Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections. American states with small populations are also vastly overrepresented in the Senate, the upper house of the American legislature. The population of the largest state is about eighty times the population of the smallest state, but each has two senators.