Timothy Snyder
The author of On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder is a prominent American historian of 20th-century Europe, whose work focuses on the Holocaust and Eastern European communism. Since 2010, he has written a series of…
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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was the infamous leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, whose imperialist expansion into Europe caused World War II (which killed about 80 million people), and who planned and implemented the Holocaust…
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Donald Trump
Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States, whose authoritarian style Snyder considers an unprecedented threat to American democracy and whose election motivated Snyder to write On Tyranny. With the United States…
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Vladimir Putin
At the time of On Tyranny’s publication, Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s authoritarian leader since 1999. He came to power by leading the Russian secret police in coordinating a series of bombings that he…
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Victor Klemperer
Victor Klemperer was a German intellectual who, after narrowly surviving the Holocaust, used his training as a literary scholar to analyze the rhetorical strategies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In his ninth and tenth chapters…
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Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a prominent German-American Jewish political theorist who, after escaping Nazi Germany, became a renowned expert on tyranny, totalitarianism, and the history of the Holocaust. She is best remembered for the…
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Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram was a psychologist famous for conducting the 1961 electroshock experiment that Timothy Snyder cites in Chapter One. In this experiment, Milgram asked subjects to deliver progressively greater electroshocks to a stranger behind a…
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Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II. Snyder cites Churchill’s insistence on fighting rather than surrendering to Hitler’s Germany as a crucial turning point that “forced Hitler…
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Teresa Prekerowa
Teresa Prekerowa was a Polish historian who was a high schooler in Warsaw during the Holocaust. When the Nazis started forcing Warsaw’s Jewish population into a designated neighborhood (or ghetto), most non-Jewish residents simply…
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Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a renowned Romanian-French playwright who watched many friends and acquaintances gradually “slip away into the language of fascism” during World War II. He wrote the play Rhinoceros, in which such…
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Minor Characters
Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian, who is best known for his complex critique of communism in the lengthy book Currents of Marxism. Snyder takes his epigraph from Kołakowski: “In politics, being deceived is no excuse.”
Václav Havel
Václav Havel was a prominent Czech anti-communist dissident writer and, later, the first president of democratic Czechoslovakia. Snyder cites Havel’s analysis of communist symbolism in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” and includes anecdotes from his experience throughout the book.
