The Road to Unfreedom - Book of the Week

Timothy Snyder's Explanation of Russia's Fascist Turn

Having recently returned from Trudeau’s Canada, I somehow felt the urge to read books about the erosion of civil liberties and the evolution of governments into either soft or hard authoritarian states. [Note, that was a joke, I periodically use humor to poke fun at Americans, Australians, Brits, Canadians, Anglicans, Baptists, and even myself. It is a joke. Don’t overreact like Reagan in Grenada! The fact that I need to add this disclaimer is simultaneously alarming and amusing].

So I naturally picked up a copy of Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom. In an earlier post, I listed his On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century as one of my top five books to read on opposing authoritarianism. I did a video review of those books as well. The Road to Unfreedom too is very, very good.

In sum, it’s about the rise of Russia from the demise of communism, the fall of Yeltsin, the power of the oligarchs, and Putin’s transformation of Russia into a “schizofascist” state (his term, not mine). The irony is that Putin’s Russia says it is anti-fascist even while it is nakedly fascist. What is interesting, and what Snyder strikingly describes, is how Putin did it!

A lot of the book details the influence of Russian fascist author Ivan Ilyin on Putin which makes for a fascinating read. Snyder documents how Putin went hard in 2011/12 to forge a new political order in Russia around himself and has attempted to eliminate the Ukrainian state, defined the West as effeminate, debauched, and homoerotic.

It also shows how Putin has exported his propaganda through media, pseudo-media, infuencers, and political parties in Europe, the UK, and America. Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, have spread fake news to create unrest and distrust, at the same time giving overt support to Eurosceptics and quasi-Fascist parties.

One depressing conclusion we have to make from the book is the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy of sowing chaos and undermining confidence in western democratic institutions has been overwhelmingly successful. Putin is winning the propaganda war and has agents and actors, unwitting or not, all over the west as recent news points out.

The only things I don’t like about the book are: (1) Snyder is anti-BREXIT and has a huge man-crush on the European Union. I’d like to sit Snyder down and have a chat with him about that as I think he’s not aware of how undemocratic the EU is and British people voting for BREXIT had little to do with Russia and was more about immigration and economics; (2) Russia has been a military dictatorship since the fourteenth century. It was the quasi-democracy of the Yeltsin years that were the exception not the norm. Democracy and liberalism are not indigenous to Russia. In the last hundred years Russia has gone from Czarist absolutism to Communist Stalinism to Oligarchy to Putinism. So I don’t have the “OMG, Putin is a dictator!”

Otherwise a terrific book to read, especially in the aftermath of how various influencers are on the Russian payroll.