Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, NY, Tim Duggan, 2018

First, the story. If the author a well-known American historian with several other books to his credit, is to be believed, there are three kinds of people in the world. At the top of the heap are the Ukrainians. No one, perhaps not even the Jews, have suffered more! First, in 1914-17, they were occupied by the Germans as part of World War I. Next came the Civil War, which was fought in Iarge part on their territory. Next came Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” which resulted in millions starving to death. Next came the horrors of another German occupation about which nothing more need to be said.

Yet somehow, amidst all this, the Ukrainians managed to preserve their pristine virtues. A nation ancient and proud, for all the tremendous losses they took they never ceased hankering for democracy, socio-economic equality, and the rule of law. And ties with the West, of course. It was this people which, faced with a Russian invasion in 2014, threw aside any existing internal divisions between Ukrainian- and Russian speakers. Like one man they rose, defending their rights. True, the small Ukrainian Army was no match for the Russian one. The good Ukrainians did, however, manage to stave off the worst. While Russia’s wicked legions, firing at women and children, did tear off and overrun the Crimea and some of their southeastern provinces, their resistance, including several months’ worth of demonstrations at Kiev’s (which Snyder consistently spells, Kyiv) man square, sufficed to convince the bad people in Moscow that, in trying to re-absorb the country, they had taken on more than they could swallow.

Next, the Russians. Snyder has comparatively little to say about the people as such; instead he focuses on their leader, Vladimir Putin, who emerges as a diabolic figure with few equals in history. A sort of Hitler without (so far) the gas chambers, one might say. Originally he was a rather mediocre KGB officer who enjoyed life in East Germany but had no special attainments to his name. Assigned to St Petersburg after the Soviet Union’s fall, somehow he managed both to enrich himself and to have himself appointed Yeltsin’s successor as president. Once in power he set up a kleptocracy that easily made him the richest man in the word (by some accounts, his pile of about $ 200 billion is twice as large as the one figures such as Warren Buffet are sitting on). On the way anyone who resisted got crushed.

Putin’s ambition is to enter history as the savior of his people. Unable to improve the quality of their lives—not only is Russia the most unequal country in the world, but it also has a low standard of living and a low life expectancy—he turned to what Snyder calls “eternity politics.” By this view, whose chief propagator used to be one Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), it is the Russians who have always been a victim of others. Including, to mention but a few, the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the Germans, and, most recently, the West. The latter, using its wealth and its alleged democratic values as battering rams, has consistently sought to set them against each other and weaken them. Yet in all this it was the Russians who somehow managed to maintain their pristine virtues, including patience, endurance, and sexual purity (which, Snyder says, is why Putin has turned to denouncing and persecuting homosexuals).

Starting a thousand or go years ago, Snyder’s Putin story continues, Russians and Ukrainians have always been one people. Hence the first order of business is to restore unity and prevent any more peoples forming part of the Russian Federation from breaking away. Putin’s efforts to achieve this goal have been truly Herculean. He has had his army fire at, and invade, parts of the Ukraine, ruthlessly killing civilian men, women and children on its way. He has engaged in every kind of bribery, corruption and deceit. And he has lied, of course. So much so, in fact, as to construct an entirely imaginary world in words not only mean exactly what he and his henchmen want them to mean but have often lost all link to reality.
This is why; all of the patients who viagra sales have just started taking this pill. Doses of antidepressants of anti-impotence pills must not be altered without recommendation of the health professional. * De-stressing activities must be followed during the treatment: Take this medicine as it contains compounds such as adaptogens, which increase viagra online doctor http://djpaulkom.tv/cooking-with-dj-paul-check-out-his-pan-seared-catfish-recipe/ your body’s ability to adapt to any kind of physical or mental stress. Type of erections: Erection is classified into three categories. a) The cialis prices complete inability to achieve an erection. b) Inconsistent erection. c) The ability to only sustain temporary or brief erections. A person cannot repeat the 100mg levitra professional canada pill before the time period of 24 hours has been completed.
While the Ukrainians are Putin’s first target they are by no means the only one. It is here that Snyder’s third kind of people, meaning those of the West, enter the picture. So far Putin has not waged open war on any Western nation. Using every one of the remaining methods at his disposal, though, he has run any number of campaigns to undermine them all. And he is succeeding, Snyder claims. Not only has Moscow become a Mecca for European “Fascists” and “extreme right wingers”—in Snyder’s view, anyone who does not scrape and bow to the tenets of political correctness is an extreme right winger—but by bombing Syria so as to produce more refugees he has weakened the position of Angela Merkel who was forced to accept them. He has even succeeded in putting his candidate, a failed real estate mogul, into the White House. Quite an achievement, one must admit.

Still following this line of thought, Westerners seem to fall into two categories. On one hand are the scoundrels. With Trump at their head they will do every- and anything to gain power and set up their own version of kleptocratic rule. On the other are hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Law-respecting and generally full of goodwill, they are too innocent and/or befuddled to understand what they are up against. At the time Synder wrote they still put their hope in Hillary Clinton. Clinton, however, went down to defeat. With Trump and his awful Republicans—Snyder does not try to hide his Democratic sympathies—in the saddle and the influence of European “fascist” parties growing almost by the day, things are going downhill fast. Indeed there is a real possibility that, instead of Russia becoming more like the West as many people in the early 1990s hoped, the West will become more like Russia.

Let others decide how credible this thesis is. In particular, let them ponder how good the Ukrainians (many of whom, as Snyder does not say, would have been more than happy to cooperate with Hitler in 1941-45 if only he had allowed them to do so) and how weak and deluded the West, really are. I, however, found the book fascinating in another way. It can be read as a sort of handbook for what is usually called hybrid war, what my friend Bill Lind calls fourth-generation war, and what I myself have long ago called non-trinitarian war.

In particular, the term hybrid war is misleading. As Snyder rightly says, though it may sound like war minus in reality it is war plus. Including, apart from the usual open clashes between regular armies (which, in the Ukraine, only played a relatively minor role) military operations mounted by every sort of militia, identifiable or not; assassinations, subversion, and bribery; cyberattacks aimed at every kind of hostile political organization as well as infrastructure targets such as websites, factories, electricity grids, and power plant; and, above all, propaganda. Partly generated by bots, launched both by way of the social networks and by more traditional means such as TV, that propaganda so massive as to eliminate the distinction between the real and the unreal, truth and falsehood—which, Snyder says, is just how “eternity” politics work. And so massive as to make one wonder how those who design it and spread it are able to retain their sanity among all the lies they themselves invent.

All in all, in spite of my doubts about whether the good are really as good, the bad really as bad (and clever), and the befuddled really as befuddlded, as Snyder makes them out to be, a thought-provoking work.