Timothy Snyder:

It is also misleading that the book begins with the plane crash of April 2010 in which the Polish president died, as if that was a momentous event in the history of Europe. Apparently it touched Snyder personally, but, if it was important for the history of the world, the rest of the book doesn't explain why/how.

Snyder criticizes the Europeans and "Americans" (I suppose he means "US citizens", not the entire continent from Canada to Chile) who, after Russia's annexation of Crimea, a) followed Russian propaganda, b) doubted whether an invasion had taken place, c) asked whether Ukraine was a country. It would be wiser to answer these points instead of simply criticizing those who asked the questions. Was Russian propaganda false (the way US propaganda was false about the Iraqis welcoming a liberation)? Does Snyder have any evidence that the Crimean people would prefer to live in Ukraine? Second, did an invasion take place? An invasion usually results in massive casualties. How many people fought against that invasion of Crimea? Thirdly, Snyder's own book seems to show that Ukraine was never a country: Snyder shows that it was invented by Lenin, just like Putin has always claimed. (I totally side with Ukraine's desire to be independent but for wildly different reasons, the same reasons that the Kurds and the Palestinians deserve their own country even though they never had one in history, the same reasons that Croatia or Pakistan are legitimate countries even though they never existed before).

Snyder fares better when he explains what has happened under Putin: a kleptocracy that has established massive inequality in which a few oligarchs "stole" Russian resources and became billionaire and siphoned their money into the West (villas, yachts, secret bank accounts, and apartments in Trump Towers) while the vast majority of Russians live with less than $10,000 a year; a regime in which the facts became fake news and fake news became the facts (a lesson learned and applied by Putin's pupil Trump); etc. At one point Snyder correctly points out that the oligarchs who blame the West for Russia's problems are the very ones who stole Russia's wealth.

Snyder's book is mainly interesting because it reveals the philosophical influences on Putin's thought. First is Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of Mussolini and of Hitler who moved to Germany in 1922 and in Switzerland in 1938 where he died. Ilyin was influenced by Nazist political scientist Carl Schmitt. According to Snyder, Ilyin justified Russia's expansion as "self-defense" ("the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering"), prophesized of a Christian messiah (a gosudar) coming to save Russia (imagining him as a sort of Mussolini/Hitler), was jealous of the Italians who had Mussolini as their dictator ("Why did the Italians succeed where we failed?", 1927), had a romantic vision of Russia's destiny, interpreted Russia's weaknesses as virtues to be exported, and continued to write against both democracy and communism until the last days of his life. Putin rehabilitated this prophet of Russian Christian fascism and in 2005 Putin had him re-buried in Russia. Putin's propaganda chief Vladislav Surkov helped turn Ilyin into a celebrity. A few years later Putin wrote three important articles (Izvestiia, 3 October 2011; Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 23 January 2012; Moskovskie Novosti, 27 February 2012), in which first he criticized the rule of law, then proposed a Eurasian alternative to the European Union and finally invoked the right of such Eurasian Union to expand all the way to Lisbon ("from Lisbon to Vladivostok"). These three articles sounds like a practical application of what Ilyin recommended and predicted in his collected essays "Nashi zadachi/ Our Task" (1948-54). This is the book that was sent to all Russian governors when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Snyder shows how those influences trickled down into neofascist domestic politics via people like: Lev Gumilev, a fan of the Mongols who saw Russia's Eurasian empire as the continuation of the Mongol experience (Gumilev also believed in a mystical-scientific theory of the genesis of the Russian race); neofascist Alexander Dugin and the neofascist Izborsk Club founded in September 2012 by Alexander Prokhanov to advocate the re-establishment of the Soviet Union as a fascist, not communist, state, an entity that views the European Union as an existential threat because it is founded on the rule of law (they are the ones who advanced the idea of working for the advent of fascism in all the members of the EU); and Sergei Glazyev, author of "Genocide" (1999) according to which Jewish neoliberals destroyed Russia in the 1990s.

Snyder mentions Putin's friends in the West: Gerhard Schroeder, a former German chancellor (now on the board of Russia's Gazprom), and Silvio Berlusconi, a former Italian prime minister. Indirectly, the other friends of Putin are all the right-wing parties that were helped financially or in other ways (e.g. cyber-propaganda) by Putin's regime, like Marine LePen's National Front and the Freheitliche party in Austria (which in December 2017 became the first Russian-funded party to join a coalition government in a Western country).

For a professional historian, Snyder spends very little time discussing Ukraine's history over the centuries. He only briefly summarizes the story between 1667 and 1921. He then discusses the events of 2014: the revolution and Russia's (first) invasion and annexation of Crimea.

Snyder is more interesting when he discusses Putin's regime. Snyder details how Vladislav Surkov turned Russian television into a pro-Putin propaganda machine, with stars like Dmitry Kiselev (the host of Vesti Nedeli) spreading whatever lies justify Putin's actions. Snyder mentions the case of a Russian child cruficied by Ukrainian nationalists, a case that outraged Russians: except that it never happened. Alexander Dugin had invented the whole story on social media and Russian television picked it up. Snyder also mentions that in December 2014 the Izborsk Club specifically mentioned "filling information with misinformation" not only internally but also internationally: two years later this tactic was used in the Brexit referendum and in the US elections.

Vladimir Antyufeyev is the architect of the policy of "frozen conflict": Russia helps separatists carve out a region of a country and this "frozen conflict" prevents the country to be accepted in the European Union (Moldova in 1991, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014). Antyufeyev was also one of the first Russian politicians to argue that Putin's enemies are the fascists (not Putin). Most of Russia's news coverage routinely claims that Russia is at was against fascists and nazists. Snyder calls it "schizofascism": the fascist who accuses the antifascist of being fascist. Glazyev, Dugin and Prokhanov spoke at an international conference in Yalta on "antifascism". This is a step ahead of Western neofascists: Western neofascists don't call themselves fascists but don't claim either than their rivals are fascists. Russian fascists, instead, based their fascist theories and activities on the premie that Russia is under attack by foreign fascists. Snyder maybe misses the point that most Russians would not be able to define what is a "fascists" (Russia has always been ruled by czars, autocrats and dictators, except for the brief Yeltsin years): the term "fascist" is understood to refer to any foreign enemy of Russia, regardless of their ideology. Therefore any democrat is a fascist for the Russian public.

At this point Snyder turns to Putin's masterpiece: electing Trump president of the USA. Snyder summarizes Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and the collusion between Trump and Putin. Trump was hailed as a hero by all the Russian fascists and by all Russian tv hosts. What the USA saw on Fox News, the Russians saw on their television programs. When Trump's victory was announced, the Russian parliament gave him a standing ovation (perhaps the standing ovation was for Putin, for engineering such a spectacular feat). There had been many coups before, and many of them engineered by foreign powers, but Trump was the first president created by cyberwarfare. There was no coup in Ukraine in 2014 but maybe there was a coup in the USA in 2016.

There is now no doubt that, in July 2014, it was a Russian missile that shot down a Malaysian airplane over Ukraine killing 295 people, mostly Dutch citizens, but most Russians believe that it was a Ukrainian missile.

Snyder then summarizes the case against Trump. He was bankrupt when Russian money rescued him from bankruptcy. Russian money came in the form of purchases of Trump Tower apartments by Russian gangsters and oligarchs and in the form of loans by Deutsche Bank (which at the time was laundering money of Russian gangsters). The list of Russians who bought real estate from Trump is endless. Why did they choose Trump? First of all he was bankrupt and desperate, second he was a scumbag, and third his Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York that allowed anonymous purchases of condos. And there are probably more than we know because 700 Trump properties in Florida were purchased by "shell companies". Snyder mentions the case of Smitry Rybolovlev, who bought an expensive house from Trump and never even lived there: it was just a way to give Trump $55 million to help his political career. Snyder summarizes how Russian bots and trolls amplified Hillary Clinton "scandals" while covering up Trump's own (and much bigger) scandals. It was Russian bots and trolls that originated and spread the "fake news" that Fox News, Breitbart, News Network and other right-wing tv channels picked up in the USA. Snyder concludes that perhaps Russian bots and trolls had more influence on the Republican Party than its elected leaders. And shows how Steve Bannon was basically a less sophisticated version of Vladislav Surkov. The last chapter is devote to the collusion. Snyder revisits the Russian-friendly careers of Michael Flynn, Felix Sater, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, etc. See my dossier on the Trump-Russia Collusion case.

Snyder also implies that there was fraud in the 2016 election. After all, 144 thousand fewer people voted in Ohio's cities than four years earlier, 60 thousand fewer people voted in Wisconsin than in the previous election, and in Florida 23% of blacks were denied the right to vote because they were convicted felons (felonies in Florida include many trivial offenses). Trump lost the 2016 election by three million votes to Hillary Clinton but narrowly won those three "swing" states. There was no massive fraud in 2020, but maybe there was in 2016, and that's why Trump is so certain that elections can be manipulated.