I highly recommend listening to this interview with Timothy Snyder, historian of Russian, Ukrainian and Central European history at Yale, by Ezra Klein on his NYT podcast. It is really interesting and informative. I have "gifted" this link to both the transcript and the recording so you will be able to access it even if you don't subscribe to the NYT.
nytimes.com
Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Timothy Snyder. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s PlansThe renowned historian on Putin’s myths, Ukrainian identity and the West’s “politics of inevitability.”
So Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian. In recent years, he became something of a hero to liberals for a series of books particularly “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” which became something like a Bible for worried liberals early in the Trump era. These are books about what it feels like and what you do when your society is beginning to creep down or trip down the road to authoritarianism.
But that perspective for Snyder, those learnings, they don’t come from his immersion in American politics. They come from his immersion in Ukrainian politics and history. Snyder’s core academic subject is Ukraine. He’s written six books entirely or partially about Ukraine. And these are very much books about the way Ukraine has been repeatedly invaded and turned into a subject by surrounding powers.
And in these books, something Snyder is very alert to is the way that imagined histories of Ukraine, what he would call stories or myth, feed the justifications used for these bloody invasions of Ukraine. And so a topic for him that emerges out of that is how the stories, particularly when they’re dressed up is histories, the stories we tell ourselves, how they create all kinds of different politics, how they can lead us to peace or to war, to a sense of inevitability or a sense of desperate persecution, to a sense of integration or imperialism, to a wariness about the world or complacency about it.
And that is what this conversation is about, the stories being told in America, in Europe, in Russia, and, of course, in Ukraine, and how those stories both created and could, in the end, decide the crisis we’re in. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Tim Snyder, welcome to the show.
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