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.

Inevitability and eternity translate facts into narratives. Those swayed by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades as history; each does away with history.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was a reality test for the European Union and the United States. Many Europeans and Americans found it easier to follow Russia’s propaganda phantoms than to defend a legal order. Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited within the European Union and the United States.

For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few;

The Russian campaign to fill the international public sphere with fiction began in Ukraine in 2014, and then spread to the United States in 2015, where it helped to elect a president in 2016. The techniques were everywhere the same, although they grew more sophisticated over time.

THE POLITICS OF inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one.

Eternity arises1 from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy.

Russia reached the politics2 of eternity first, and Russian leaders protected themselves and their wealth by exporting it. The oligarch-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, chose the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin as a guide.

The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin the philosopher ignored or despised: individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.

“EVERYTHING BEGINS30 IN mystique and ends in politics,” as the poet Charles Péguy reminds us. Ilyin’s thought began with a contemplation of God, sex, and truth in 1916, and ended a century later as the orthodoxy of the Kremlin and the justification for war against Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States.

Ilyin imagined society33 as a corporate structure, where every person and every group would hold a defined place.

Social mobility was excluded from the outset.

An ideology such as Ilyin’s purports to explain why certain men have wealth and power in terms other than greed and ambition. What robber would not prefer to be called a redeemer?

ILYIN HAD ANTICIPATED a different transition from Soviet to Russian power: fascist dictatorship, the preservation of all Soviet territory, permanent war against the sinful West. Russians began to read him in the 1990s. His ideas had no effect on the end of the Soviet Union, but they did influence how post-Soviet oligarchs consolidated a new kind of authoritarianism in the 2000s and 2010s.

IF THE KREMLIN’S first impulse32 was to associate democratic opposition with global sodomy, its second was to claim that protestors worked for a foreign power, one whose chief diplomat was female: the United States.

A STATE WITH a principle of succession exists in time. A state that arranges its foreign relations exists in space. For Europeans of the twentieth century, the central question was thus: After empire, what? When it was no longer possible for European powers to dominate large territories, how could the remnants and fragments maintain themselves as states? For a few decades, from the 1950s through the 2000s, the answer seemed self-evident: the creation, deepening, and enlargement of the European Union, a relationship among states known as integration.

Putin did not present the EU enlargement of 2004 as a threat. On the contrary, he spoke favorably that year of future EU membership for Ukraine. In 2008, Putin attended the NATO summit in Bucharest.

The basic line16 of Russian foreign policy through 2011 was not that the European Union and the United States were threats. It was that they should cooperate with Russia as an equal. The decade of the 2000s was the lost opportunity for the creation of a Russian state that might have been seen as such. Russia managed no democratic changes of executive power. What had been an oligarchy of contending clans in the 1990s was transformed into a kleptocracy, in which the state itself became the single oligarchical clan. Rather than monopolizing law, the Russian state under Putin monopolized corruption.

In matters of peace and war17, Moscow also took actions that made it harder for Europeans to see Russia as an equal.

TO SPEAK OF “Eurasia”32 in the Russia of the 2010s was to refer to two distinct currents of thought that overlapped at two points: the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews. 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 was not a follower of the original Eurasianists nor a student of Gumilev. He simply used the terms “Eurasia” and “Eurasianism” to make Nazi ideas sound more Russian. Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an anti-establishment 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.

For the Eurasianists47 of the Izborsk Club, facts were the enemy, Ukraine was the enemy, and facts about Ukraine were the supreme enemy.

Glazyev did not discuss the preferences of the people who lived in the European Union. Did Europeans really need to discover first-hand the profundity of a Russian system where life expectancy in 2012 was 111th in the world, where the police could not be trusted, bribes and blackmail were the stuff of everyday life, and prison was a middle-class experience? In its distribution of wealth, Russia was the most unequal country in the world; the EU’s far greater wealth was also far more evenly shared among its citizens. Glazyev helped his master maintain Russian kleptocracy by changing the subject from prosperity to values, to what Putin called “civilization.”

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.

In the post-communist54 east European member states of the European Union, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Russia financed and organized internet discussion outlets to cast doubt on the value of EU membership.

RT became the media home of European politicians who opposed the EU, such as Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Marine Le Pen of the Front National in France.

THE RUSSIAN POLITICS of eternity1 reached back a thousand years to find a mythical moment of innocence. Vladimir Putin claimed that his millennial vision of the baptism of Volodymyr/Valdemar

Igor Girkin,

A memorandum that circulated48 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.

The three "justifications" of the memo in 2014 closely resemble the points emphasised by Russia in 2022 for its further invasion of Ukraine .

the guiding concept of the Izborsk policy paper was that Russia should seize some Ukrainian territory and then wait for the state to collapse. The Izborsk Club also proposed that Russian television channels justify the intervention in Ukraine by the deliberate, premeditated fiction that “a fascist coup is coming”; this would indeed be a major line of Russian propaganda once war began.

Russian Propaganda, within and without Russia, claim the Ukrainian government is fascist or nazi, and the war is a denazification process

THE SNIPER MASSACRE55 and the flight of Yanukovych marked the shift from Russia’s first Eurasian plan to its second. Russian leaders had accepted that Yanukovych was useless. His bloody downfall, foreseen in Moscow, created the chaos that served as cover for the second strategy: military intervention designed to make the state as a whole disintegrate. In the few days between the sniper massacre of February 20 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, shocking but fictitious reports appeared about Ukrainian atrocities in Crimea, and about refugees from the peninsula who needed urgent assistance.

This was a new variety70 of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence. It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.” According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism.

Thus Russians educated in the 1970s71, including the leaders and war propagandists of the 2010s, were instructed that “fascist” meant “anti-Russian.”

Schizofascism was one72 of many contradictions on display in spring 2014. According to Russian propaganda, Ukrainian society was full of nationalists but not a nation; the Ukrainian state was repressive but did not exist; Russians were forced to speak Ukrainian though there was no such language.

IN A WAR that75 was supposed to be against fascism, many of Russia’s allies were fascists.

The usual litany of fascists, neo-nazis and white supremacists from Europe and USA.

A few dozen French77 far-Right activists came to fight in Ukraine on the Russian side. They were screened by the Russian army and then sent into the field. About a hundred German citizens also came to fight in the company of the Russian army and Russian paramilitaries, as did citizens of a number of other European countries. Russia’s war in Ukraine created training grounds for terrorism. In fall 2016, a Serbian nationalist was arrested for planning an armed coup in Montenegro. He had fought on the Russian side in Ukraine, and said that he had been recruited for the plot by Russian nationalists. In January 2017, Swedish Nazis trained by Russian paramilitaries in Russia bombed an asylum center for refugees in Gothenburg.

Foreign far-right fighters in the Russian forces following annexation and invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, including Germans, French, Serbs and Swedes.

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.

As the reporter Charles Clover put it in his study of Lev Gumilev: “Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class. The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin power.”

After implausible deniability13, Russia’s second propaganda strategy was the proclamation of innocence. The invasion was to be understood not as a stronger country attacking a weaker neighbor at a moment of extreme vulnerability, but as the righteous rebellion of an oppressed people against an overpowering global conspiracy.

Prokhanov compared23 Russia’s failed coup in Odessa to the Holocaust; an antisemite invoked the mass murder of the Jews to justify an offensive war. The politics of eternity consumes the substance of the past, leaving only a boundless innocence that justifies everything.

In that text, Prokhanov53 was rehabilitating Stalinism by associating it with victory in the Second World War, and justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it was like the defense of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

THE CRUCI-FICTION (JULY 10), the MH17 cacophony (July 17), and the “bike show” (August 9) were only three examples of the televised propaganda to which Russians were exposed in the summer of 2014. This creative ignorance invited Russians into a sense of innocence. It is hard to know what effect all of this had on Russian citizens in general. It certainly persuaded men to travel to Ukraine to fight.

How were opinion leaders118 of the Left seduced by Vladimir Putin, the global leader of the extreme Right? Russia generated tropes targeted at what cyberwar professionals call “susceptibilities”: what people seem likely to believe given their utterances and behavior. It was possible to claim that Ukraine was a Jewish construction (for one audience) and also that Ukraine was a fascist construction (for another audience). People on the Left were drawn in by stimuli on social media that spoke to their own commitments.

Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.

From a Russian point of view, Trump Tower is an inviting site for international crime.

By the late 1990s, Trump was generally considered to be uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed about four billion dollars to more than seventy banks, of which some $800 million was personally guaranteed. He never showed any inclination or capacity to pay back this debt. After his 2004 bankruptcy, no American bank would lend him money.

A Russian oligarch bought7 a house from Trump for $55 million more than Trump had paid for it. The buyer, Dmitry Rybolovlev, never showed any interest in the property and never lived there—but later, when Trump ran for president, Rybolovlev appeared in places where Trump was campaigning. Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade. Having realized that apartment complexes could be used to launder money, Russians used Trump’s name to build more buildings. As Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

It was in the localities where the American dream had died that Trump’s politics of eternity worked. He called for a return to the past, to a time when America was great. Without inequality, without a sense that the future was closed, he could not have found the supporters he needed. The tragedy was that his idea of governance was to transform a dead dream into a zombie nightmare.

In an American politics of eternity, white Americans trade the prospect of a better future for the vision of a valiant defense of American innocence. Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.