A scholar and longtime professor of history at Yale (now at the University of Toronto), Timothy Snyder first achieved literary success with his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a history of the mass killing of some 14 million civilians by the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the lands between Germany and Russia.
Bloodlands became a New York Times bestseller and a book of the year for The Atlantic, The Independent, The Telegraph, and other publications.
Timothy Snyder’s writings have been translated into more than 40 languages, and he has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.
Snyder earned his BA at Brown University and his doctorate at the University of Oxford.
Timothy Snyder is one of the most sought-after speakers on democracy, Russia, and Ukraine. He has written six books on Ukraine that illuminate its history and its relationship with Russia.
I’ve read three books by Timothy Snyder.
2017’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a guide to resisting America’s tilt toward authoritarianism. My favorite lesson is the first one: “Do not obey in advance.” Although Trump is not named in the book, it’s clear it’s about the threat, corruption, and tyranny Trump brought to his presidency. Another gem in this book is Snyder’s observation that the Western world has accepted the surveillance state without a backlash.
In 2018’s The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder argues that Russia under Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian government that uses fascist language to justify seizing territory, much as Hitler justified expanding Germany’s territory in the 1930s. Snyder was one of the first to warn that Russia would illegally annex Crimea, in his New York Times piece “Don’t Let Putin Grab Ukraine.”
In his most recent book, On Freedom, the third in a trilogy of pro-freedom, anti-authoritarian books, Snyder explains why we fight for freedom. He identifies five forms of freedom essential to a free society. These freedoms weave into one another and are for everyone in society, not just the well-connected.
Books in Print
- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
- The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
- On Freedom
- Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
- The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569 – 1999
- Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary
- The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe
- Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine
- The Making of Modern Ukraine
- Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872-1905)
Audiobooks
- On Tyranny- Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
- Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
- On Freedom
- The Reconstruction of Nations
- Poland – Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999
- The Reconstruction of Nations – Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999
- The Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America
- Thinking the Twentieth Century
- Our Malady – Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary
See on Librofm (2 free audiobooks and support independent bookstores) and Amazon/Audible.
Quotes by Timothy Snyder
- “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
- “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.”
- “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”
- “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
- “The good people died first.”
- “Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.”
- “Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.”
- “People who lie about the end of the world will keep lying until the world ends.”
- “The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
- “The politics of inevitability is an intellectual coma we put ourselves in.”
- “A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”
- “Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
- “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”
- “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
- “The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.”
- “History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something… History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
- “Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”
- “When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.”
- “Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
- “Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.”
- “Listen for dangerous words.”
- “A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.”
- “Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been.”
- “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny”
- “But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
- “The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma. So”
- “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie,” wrote Havel, “then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”
- “When exactly was the “again” in the president’s slogan “Make America great again”? Hint: It is the same “again” that we find in “Never again.”
- “A nationalist…is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”
- “In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values.”
Find books by Timothy Snyder on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might also like books by Anne Applebaum.
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