On Tyranny Study Guide

Timothy Snyder was born and raised near Dayton, Ohio. He studied political science and European history at Brown University, then completed his PhD as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford. Snyder’s research ranges from intensive biographies to broader histories of 20th-century Europe (like Bloodlands: Eastern Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which brought him to international prominence), and popular bestsellers about the present-day. Snyder has won dozens of scholarly awards, including the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. He has played an important part in leading a number of prominent American scholarly and historical organizations, including the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In addition to his academic work, popular bestsellers, and YouTube lecture series “Timothy Snyder Speaks,” Snyder also writes frequently for the New York Review of Books and has lectured and fielded interviews in French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and English about his recent work. Beyond these languages and the several other Eastern European languages that Snyder can read, his books have been translated into dozens more. Although he has held several fellowships in Europe and the United States, he has been a history professor at Yale University since 2001, where he researches and teaches on the political history of 20th-century Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine and Poland), and he also holds a permanent fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna, Austria. His wife, Marci Shore, is also a Yale professor specializing in European history.

In On Tyranny, Snyder covers a wide swath of 20th-century European history in order to help make sense of 21st-century America. Namely, he worries about the unprecedented election of Donald Trump, a businessman and television star with an authoritarian populist style and no previous political experience, as the president of the United States in 2016. Snyder cites three crucial moments in the formation of 20th-century European democracies: 1918, 1945, and 1989. The years around 1918 were significant because 1918 marked the end of World War I, when the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German empires fragmented. Various new nations were born (like Finland and the Baltic states) and several others became democracies (like the United Kingdom and Germany). Similarly, 1945 marked the end of World War II and the liberation of several Nazi-occupied nations, many of which soon fell from democracy into authoritarianism. And finally, 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War: following Poland and Hungary, a number of communist Eastern Bloc nations began turning to democracy, initiating the process that eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Of course, Snyder conveniently omits the rest of the world beyond Europe, where decolonization has led to the formation of democracies (with varying degrees of success), especially from the 1940s through 1960s. In On Tyranny, Snyder focuses particularly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, two of the most extreme and murderous authoritarian regimes in history. He specifically focuses on the early period of Nazi rule, when Hitler was elected to power and then began consolidating his rule by undermining Germany’s democratic institutions, its citizens’ freedoms, and its independent civil society and professional organizations. He notes that popular resistance during this period could have stopped the Nazi regime before it became overwhelmingly powerful, just as resistance in the late 2010s can prevent Donald Trump’s regime from turning the United States into a “fascist oligarchy.” He also describes the Soviet Union’s early campaign of terror against its citizens and totalitarian attempts to make Marxist-Leninist communism a universal ideology and stamp out all dissent and emphasizes that, although the fascist Nazis and communist Soviets had opposite political ideologies in theory, both used the same authoritarian tactics.

Timothy Snyder’s early work focused primarily on the intellectual and political history of 20th-century Poland and Ukraine. Since 2010, however, he has started to focus more on the implications of 20th-century authoritarianism for the present day, especially as right-wing nationalism rapidly expands around the globe. His other recent works include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), a wide-reaching study of Eastern Europe during World War II, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), in which he analyzes Hitler’s genocidal ideology in depth and connects it to the dangers of contemporary xenophobia, and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), which focuses on Russian attempts to destabilize democracies around the globe. In the ninth chapter of On Tyranny, Snyder argues that citizens must read in order to think independently and avoid simply regurgitating the common narratives that push society toward authoritarianism. Both to provide suggested reading and offer a bibliography, he lists several works that influenced his writing, including Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich (1947), Albert Camus’s The Rebel (1951), and Timothy Garton Ash’s The Uses of Adversity (1989). He also cites dystopian novels like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) as sources of valuable insight into totalitarianism. He references classic novels like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) as catalysts for analytical thinking. And as specific warnings about the danger of fascism in the United States, he cites more political novels like Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). Since the publication of On Tyranny, which was published just after Donald Trump’s inauguration, more recent analyses of Trump’s ideology and presidency through the lens of history include How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018) by Jason Stanley, Snyder’s colleague at Yale; How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2019); and William E. Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (2017).