 Good afternoon. I'm Thomas Carruthers. I'm Senior Vice President for Studies here at the Carnegie Endowment, and it's my very great pleasure to welcome today Timothy Snyder to the endowment. Timothy Snyder, as you know, is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. Over the last 20 or almost 25 years, he has established himself as one of America's, in fact, the world's foremost historians on modern Europe. He's done so through a series of landmark books. I'll mention just a few of them, the Reconstruction of Nations, Bloodlands, Black Earth, about the Holocaust. These are books that remarkably combine an extraordinary range of breadth with an extraordinary penetration of depth, a very unusual synthetic ability that leads to explanatory accounts. All of the books are a search for explanation, a deeper search for meaning, a search for truth. They are accounts that fuse a focus on people, on ideas, on political actors, on states, so they're synthetic in a number of different ways at the same time. They're books that are unflinching, they're penetrating, and I would say they're searing. I personally have a memory of reading Bloodlands, and I reached a point in the book where I actually thought I could not turn the page. What people can do to people, and the name of ideas or the name of other causes, I felt I couldn't go on, but I also felt I had to, and I did, and those are the kind of books that Timothy Snyder writes. He has turned his attention now in his new book, The Road to Unfreedom, Russia, Europe, and America. He's turned his attention to the 21st century after having plumbed the depths of the 20th century, and The Road to Unfreedom is an account of the political trajectories of Russia, of Europe, and the United States, how they intersect with each other, how they affect each other, and how they're informed or driven by common historical patterns and narratives and ideas. One feels the weight of the 20th century in his account of the 21st century so far, and it's often a heavy weight. It's about the realities of fascism, about the power of unpleasant ideas and unpleasant actors, and I'd say he mobilizes what I found to be remarkable insights about events I already thought I knew pretty well, actually, but he brings to them a lens that provides still greater illumination. It's a disturbing book, but clearly an important one. So it's our very great pleasure to have you here. He's going to come up to the podium and speak for a while, probably 30 to 45 minutes, and he and I are going to have a short conversation and then bring you into the conversation through questions as well. So let's have a round of applause. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Tom, for that kind introduction. I think that the image of not wanting to know what comes next but nevertheless deciding to know what comes next is very important and touching, and I think appropriate to the moment. The last time I spoke in D.C. it was right after I had come back from Europe in 2013, 2014, and my obsessions then as I was finishing the book about the Holocaust that Tom was kind enough to mention, my obsessions then were Russia and the Bolotnaya protests and Ukraine and the Maidan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I was spending time during that sabbatical year in Ukraine trying to explain Russia and Ukraine, and in particular the ways in which cyber and propaganda were structuring the way that we understood what were in fact fairly straightforward events like revolutions and wars. And I remember hitting this town back then about four years ago a little bit less and thinking, wow, these people don't know what hit them. I have to say I still think that and that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book and that's one of the reasons why I'm here now. So as Tom was kind enough to say I'm a historian and I think this is one of these moments where you bring what you got and what I have is history, what I have is historiography, historical analysis. So the road to unfreedom in every single respect except for the fact that it's about the 2010s, in every single respect it's an aggressively traditional indeed an aggressively conservative history book. It's based on a huge amount of primary source research across five or six or seven languages. It's obsessively annotated and it makes an argument that takes place over time. Now I emphasize that because it seems to me that what's going on in our present moment is that we're all having a hard time putting things together. We're overwhelmed day to day by news that's surprising or by revelations from a year ago or two years ago that are shocking. We can be elated, we can be outraged, we have very strong emotional reactions to what's happening to us, there's a sense in which it's very hard to put it together. So what I'm trying to do in this book is very assertively use a historian's methods of sources, source analysis, moving forward through time to try to make all of this make sense. And so my first point is actually about time itself because this whole business of historical time it's not as straightforward as it seems. It's very, it's very possible to live in other kinds of time. In fact I start the book by trying to point out that for the past 25 years or so I think we Americans or a lot of us anyway, a lot of people in the West have been living in a form of time which is a little bit wrong and extremely misleading and historical. Let me start it out with a story of when I worked for the Carnegie Endowment. Long, long ago the Carnegie Endowment was at 24th and end and I was working there in the summer of 1990 and there were still Soviet guests in Washington and I remember in D.C. that summer a building went up and one of my Soviet colleagues thought or suspected or at least told me that he thought that the fact that a building had been built in one summer was a propaganda effort. That this kind of thing didn't really happen it was for show. Now what that recalls is a different moment. A moment where we and the Soviets were kind of in it together. We still thought it was about racing forward, building things faster, who was moving into the future faster. And then it seemed like they lost. The Soviet Union comes apart in 1991. The United States continues. We declare that the Cold War is over, that we won. We declare even more grandly, more metaphysically, more suicidally that history itself has come to an end. We declare with a kind of mental and political anesthesia that there are no alternatives. And what we do and what we have done to the younger generation and the people under 30 who we raise in this environment, what we've done is establish something which I would call the politics of inevitability. The idea that history doesn't matter, that there are no alternatives, that we basically know the rules. And since we know the rules we don't have to know the details. History is a kind of machine where for example capitalism just produces democracy and therefore you don't have to know a whole lot about anything else. That's just the way it's going to be and of course there's no alternative to that democracy. Now there are a couple of problems with this which you might have already anticipated. I mean obviously history never does come to an end and obviously there always are alternatives. But more particularly than that I want to notice that some of the specific claims that we made or that we absorbed or the axioms that we took for granted have come back to bite us. And that underneath the Russia story or the thing which makes the whole Russia story possible, and I'm going to return to this at the end, is our own politics of inevitability. The idea for example that capitalism must bring about democracy would lead you to the notion that you shouldn't interfere with capitalism because it will be more democracy. But what if capitalism in the 21st century generates degrees of income and wealth inequality that make democracy seem implausible even in this country? Or what if unregulated capitalism creates gray zones abroad where Russians and others can offshore money and where alliances are formed that are openly anti-democratic? Part of our politics of inevitability was the idea that technology in general and the internet in particular had to be enlightening. We now I think are beginning to see just how wrong that assumption was and had to be. And then the very idea that there are no alternatives, which we've been brainwashing ourselves with for quite a long time, that had the consequence that we didn't see alternatives. Alternatives have been emerging for some time. We only now begin to see them as they cross the shores and enter into our own country, but they've been emerging for a while. The major alternative, I think the way things are tilting now in this country and elsewhere, is something which I would call the politics of eternity. Which is again another way of living in time. The politics of eternity doesn't say we know the rules of history, we know how the future is going to be. The politics of eternity says forget about the future. There isn't a future, banish the future from your mind. We're not going to think about the future. We're going to loop back to the past. We're going to loop back to a time when we were great. We're going to loop back to the 1930s and 1940s for our inspirations. We're going to bring back philosophers and ideas, patterns of thought from the 1930s and from the 1940s. And what the consequence that this has is that it forms a different sort of politics where all of a sudden because we're not thinking about the future, everything is suddenly about us and them. If there's not a bigger, better future with more to share, then suddenly politics becomes tribal. It becomes only domestic politics and domestic politics becomes only about ideas of us and them. I'm assuming that some of this sounds familiar. The case that I want to make, and the case that I do make in this book, is that to understand where we're going, that's my American way to understand where we're going, we have to start with Russia. The Russia story is not just some strange thing that erupted in 2016 to our surprise. It's not that this exotic thing just happened across by chance. It's rather that in certain ways Russia got to where we are going first. And the way to understand the so-called Russia story is Russia beckoning us to move to where they already are. So what I want to say is that where I want to start is that this thing that I'm calling politics of eternity, the idea that there isn't a future but instead there is nostalgic cycle back to the past and day-to-day a cycle of spectacle by way of television or internet which drives the future from your mind, drives the idea of policy from your mind, that Russia got there first, that this is Mr. Putin's style of governance, that Russia got to this place first and we can see how this happens historically. So in the 1990s when we say there are no alternatives, histories over, capitalism is going to bring about democracy, the Russians move through that story much faster than we do. Russia experts can agree or disagree to the year but by the end of the 90s, at the very latest, no one in Russia is talking in that way anymore. That story is over. Russia reaches another place and what Russia manages to do or the place that Russia reaches is it finds its present leadership, finds a way to govern when it looks like nothing can change. Another way and a very material and relevant way that Russia is ahead of us is in terms of inequality of wealth. So we're not used to thinking of inequality of wealth as a trend or as a mattering. It's hugely important and according to Kledi Suisse, which is not a radical bomb-throwing left-wing organization, according to Kledi Suisse, there is only one country which has greater levels of wealth and equality than the United States and that country is the Russian Federation. What Russia has managed to do is to find a style of governance which works in conditions of extreme wealth and equality where one oligarchical plan actually basically controls the politics. So what I do in chapter two of the book is I try to explain how Russia has taken old ideas to address an even older problem but used post-modern technology to do so. So what's the even older problem? What's the traditional problem that Russia faces? The very, very traditional problem, the central problem in political science, the problem which exercised Max Weber and many others is the problem of succession. How do you keep a state going that's arguably the central problem of political science or political theory? How do you separate a leader from a state? As Max Weber put it, a man can form a charismatic entity after gathering wealth and he can distribute the wealth among other people. But how do you go from there to some kind of political institution that endures when that person dies? A very hard question actually and that problem of succession is ever more present in the world as democracy fades and as authoritarianism comes back. We're going to have in the years to come sparkling succession crises all around the world precisely because democracy is weakening. That's a good thing about democracy by the way. I mean it's good in a lot of ways or it would be good in a lot of ways but one of the things that's good about it is that it's a succession principle. It allows you to see the future. Russia has a problem with succession. The standard succession principle now is democracy. What Mr. Putin did in 2011 and 2012 was make it very clear that democracy was just a ritual. That it was fake. Which means that nobody knows what's going to happen when Mr. Putin dies. And nobody in Russia can pronounce the sentence which I just pronounced. Or at least not without being mobbed on the street very quickly. There is a modern answer to the succession problem and that modern answer is called fascism. What fascists say is forget about all those laws and all those institutions. Forget about the future because what we're going to have is a leader. A duche, a ferre, a vorge. A leader who comes from somewhere outside of history to whom the rules do not apply. Who somehow physically or charismatically embodies the whole nation and does away with all of these annoying problems about time and the future and so on. And it's striking that Mr. Putin has since 2012 in particular revived a whole series of Russian fascist thinkers, Ivan Elin in particular, who help him to solve this problem or at least address it or at least pose it in a different way. Ivan Elin who is the most important philosopher, most important Russian philosopher and I would argue the most important philosopher of our time, full stop. We don't notice him because we don't think ideas matter, right? But I think the most important philosopher of our time, he says three very useful things. The first thing he says is that democracy should be a ritual exercise, which if you're running an authoritarian state is a very convenient view. The second thing he says is that there should be no social advancement. Like many fascists he spoke of politics as being corporeal. We're all part of a body, we're like cells. So there's no reason why we should move about. We have a fixed place and freedom means knowing what our place is, realizing our role in the larger national body. This kind of idea is very convenient if you govern a place where social advancement is pretty much impossible. It's also convenient if you're the one who's making social advancement impossible because you control all the wealth. The third thing which Elin says is that there's no such thing as factuality. That this whole world is false, that God created the world but he made a mistake, a regrettable mistake. The only truth is Russia's profound innocence, but the actual facts of the world don't matter, which has the interesting implication, which is very convenient for our postmodern sensibility, that you can't lie. There's nothing wrong with lying. This whole world is already fictional, says Elin. Therefore you can't lie, which brings us to the postmodern. So you have a conventional succession problem, you have a modern set of ideas about how to do it, which are fascist, and you adapt them to a postmodern situation where the leader, Mr. Putin, really does come out of nowhere, as Moshe Gessen has very nicely described. He really does come, he comes from a realm of fiction basically, he remains in a realm of fiction. Where you fake elections, you ritualize them partly with the help of cyber at home and abroad. And where you use cyber, especially abroad, to try to spread the idea that nothing is true, and to use that idea, this extreme relativism or this absolute skepticism, to try to undermine institutions in other countries. And this has a beautiful logic. It's a new 21st century form of nationalism, which says, look, don't trust me, right? Don't trust your own leaders, fine, we understand you don't trust your own leaders. We understand you don't believe our press is true, or we know you think our media lies. We just want you to know that everyone lies, don't trust anyone. And if you don't trust anyone, then the new form of nationalism is you prefer your own lies to everybody else's lies, right? If there's no truth, you prefer your lies to other people's lies. Which, let's face it, is pretty much human. You do prefer your lies to other people's lies, don't you? Right? So if you do away with factuality, then you can get to a politics which is that kind of negative nationalism. So what this allows for on the scale of Europe and the US, and I'm going to get into the particulars in a moment, but what this allows for is a kind of dark globalization, right? Not the bright globalization where a perfect American democracy was going to radiate out its perfect model, and others were going to copy it, which never happened, but rather a dark globalization where what you're able to do is you're able to take these problems, right? To take this very weak hand that you have and transform them into a weapon. You're able to weaponize your own anxieties, your own weaknesses, your own distrust by spreading them out into the world, right? This idea that nothing can be made any better than it is, that you should distrust everything, that nothing's really true, you can try to spread that idea, and you can spread it with success. Now, let me try to be specific about this. What Russia has done is break a basic pattern of European history. I'm going to be a historian with y'all for a moment, so just indulge me. What the basic pattern of European history in the 21st century was empires break, and the metropolitan center of empires then take up a project of European integration. That's the main pattern. There aren't any nation states in the story because they never existed. The British Empire, right, around in the mid-60s, starts trading more with Europe than it does with the former empire, the Commonwealth, the Dominions. The British Empire joins the European Union. That is the core story. There is no story of European nation-state never happened. There is a story of European nations trying to have or in fact having far-flowing empires and those empires breaking, and then joining a European project. That's the story. Now, why am I stressing that? Because this is where Russia is interestingly different. Russia is the first European empire to break, right? And then to say, no, we're not going to join this larger European project. In fact, we're going to try to get inside it and undo it from within, which is the story of 2013. It's the story of something which in the book I call strategic relativism. So you know your own limits. You're not going to try to beat the Europeans economically. That'd be insane. You're not going to try to beat them technologically. That'd be crazy. But what you can do if you're Russia, you can play a weak hand well by changing the game, right? You play a weak hand well by changing the game. You redefine European civilization as not being about law, predictability, and prosperity. You redefine European civilization as being about civilization, virtue, and in particular heterosexuality. You try to change it from the traditional objective 20th century correlates of power, which are economic and technological, to the 21st century correlates of power, which is how are you feeling? Do you trust people? What is the Internet doing to your head? You try to change the nature of the game. Now, the Europeans were vulnerable to this, and they're vulnerable to it for the same reason we are. And I'm going to land on us, don't worry. I know this is largely American audience, so I should be talking about America the whole time. I've got this little thing which I think is like America is just a country. I think they're about a lot of places. Yeah, see? Right? Reaction. I think a lot of places are just countries. So what's interesting here is the way that your politics of inevitability, your sleepwalking story about how things have to happen, is a vulnerability. So the Europeans have a story. They have their own politics of inevitability, which I call in the book the fable of the wise nation. The European story goes like this. European nations are old. European nation states are wise. European nation states looked on at the Second World War and realized that war was bad. European nation states therefore started trading with one another and they formed the European Union. And now they look at America and they say, well, the Americans have not learned that war was bad. Okay, if you have ever been a European or if you've ever dated a European, you will have heard some version of this story, right? It's a very comfortable story, especially transatlantically. It's also completely wrong from beginning to end. It's entirely wrong. It is just not true that Europeans learned from the Second World War that war was a bad thing. Were that the case, then the Russians, the Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews would be the most peaceable people on the planet because they were the ones who suffered the most in the Second World War. I will let you discuss among yourselves whether it's the Jews or the Russians or the Ukrainians who are the most peaceable people on the planet. But, you know, can we just generally agree that maybe that wasn't the lesson that was learned in the place where the Second World War was actually fought and where people actually died in very large numbers, right? It's not true that the European nation states have existed. They haven't. What's true is that there have been empires and when empire failed, the European Union, European integration was the safe landing point. That's the truth, but it's an awkward truth because why talk about your empire failing? Why talk about losing wars in Indochina or Algeria? Why talk about the associated atrocities when you can talk about a progression of European nationhood, right, from ancient times, you know, through the Gauls to the present, which is what they do, right? That story makes no sense, but it's the European story. Now, why am I stressing all this? Because getting history wrong or forgetting history entirely makes you vulnerable. What's happened in the European Union in the last few years is that a politics of eternity has reemerged where people look back to the 1930s and 40s with nostalgia, not just in Russia, but in Hungary, Poland, France, Britain in different ways. And what Russia has done is that it has weaponized this. The way that Russia intervenes in Europe has a pattern and the pattern is not just to say the European Union is a bad thing because it promotes immigrants and homosexuals and terrorists and immigrant homosexual terrorists. It's not just that. There's another logic which says that, yes, you're right. You did have a nation state and it was glorious and those were the good old days, right? So when Russia intervenes on the Internet as it does heavily in central Europe, it's helping the Poles and the Slovaks and Hungarians and so on to imagine the 1920s and 1930s that never were. When it supports the full national and France financially, which it does, it's helping the French to imagine a vichy in the 1930s which never were. When 20% of the conversation about Brexit over Twitter is organized from Russia, what is being sold as a version of, which 0% of British citizens knew at the time, what is being sold as a vision of Britain which never happened. Russia is taking advantage of a basic European mistake. The basic European mistake is we've always had the nation state, it chose Europe, and therefore it could choose itself out of Europe, but they've never had the nation state. So leaving the European Union is a huge leap into the unknown, right? Britain has never had a nation state, not in the modern period. It's had an empire and it's had an integration process, but it's never had a nation state and I don't think it's going to have one after Brexit either, frankly. So getting history wrong, being in this kind of sleepwalking version of time, opens you up to people who see your vulnerabilities. I think this all begins to come together and comes together most profoundly is Ukraine in 2014. Because in Ukraine in 2014 we have the clash between a very, I mean, prosaic reality, frankly, and an extraordinarily interesting Russian politics of eternity which is behind the propaganda. The extraordinarily prosaic reality is many Ukrainians, especially young people and businessmen and women, wanted Ukraine to be closer to the European Union because that would mean that it's more likely that they would have European lives, would have the rule of law, which is the main problem in Ukraine. The one problem in Ukraine, the only problem in Ukraine that matters, even including the war, is corruption, i.e. the absence of the rule of law, right? And so sensibly many Ukrainians thought a closer relationship with the European Union would mean a more predictable politics, a more predictable economics, more predictable life. That's prosaic, right? That's not headlining, it just happens to be the reason why Ukrainian students began to protest when their president at the last moment pulled them away from an association agreement with the European Union. Now, the way that Russia tells the story is much more interesting, right? It's fascinating. So the way Russia tells the story to itself is that it's all about homosexuality. From the first day, the first day, and this is the kind of thing that I try to lay out, you know, in the book because these things like they flash and we forget them, from the first day of the student protests in Ukraine, Russian television coverage is about homosexuality. It's about homodictatorship, it's about how the European Union is going to make all the Ukrainian men marry one another. It's about how, you know, Klitschko, who's an important Ukrainian politician, is a gay idol. That's what they hit. For their domestic audience, it's all about homosexuality, right? They're trying to make it repulsive and about civilization. It can't be about Europe. It can't be about the rule of law because it can't be about things that the Russians themselves don't have. Now, what they do for us is, if anything, more interesting. And it also presages, as I was trying to say at the time, what they were going to do and in fact what they were already doing to and in the United States. So consider, you know, consider the basic thing that Russia did besides invade Ukraine. I guess we don't want to overlook the fact that they invaded Ukraine. Even in our world of cyber, an actual territorial invasion is still a pretty important thing. But with respect to us, maybe the most interesting thing that they did was that they tried to use cyber to hack a presidential election. In 2014 in Ukraine, Russia got into the Ukrainian central election server and tried to produce a result artificially in which a candidate who in fact got less than 1% of the vote would be shown as the winner. This hack was caught at the last moment. But the notion that you were going to hack a democratic election in a country that's critical to you is interesting, right? What they did in 2014 was rather primitive compared to what they were going to do in 2016. But it is a sign that we didn't pay enough attention to. Second tactic, which is also interesting and which will sound familiar, and that is what I call in the book, implausible deniability. So ahead of state, deny something that everybody knows. So when Russia invades Ukraine, the reporters know it, right? Not just the Ukrainian reporters and the Russian reporters, but the few Western reporters who were there know it. It's pretty obvious that Russia's invading Ukraine. But what Mr. Kutyn does when he gives a press conference on March 4th, 2014, is that he just denies it, right? Because those people, they bought their uniforms in army surplus stores, they're not our soldiers. He tells lies that are so extravagant that you're meant to know that he's lying. And the question is, what do you do about it, right? And that's a challenge to reporters, because on the one hand, do you then cover this charismatic, larger-than-life figure who seems to be able to defy reality, right? Mr. Kutyn, not only Mr. Kutyn. Not only Mr. Kutyn. Or do you choose to cover a war, right? Which do you choose? Most of us prefer to read about, or write about, the charismatic, larger-than-life figure who is turning this thing into a reality television show. Because that's what the press cooperated in. When you don't cover the actual war, but instead cover the figure who's lying about it, you're turning the news into reality television. That's the same dilemma. I don't have to spell this out, do I, that American reporters now face. Do you cover the larger-than-life figure, right, who generates unreality? Or do you cover the wealth inequality, the opioids, the things that are actually happening in the country? It's very tempting to do reality television. Third thing that was evident in Ukraine, which again appears in the U.S. in a much more sophisticated way in 2016, is targeting two susceptibilities. So you'll remember this. If you were on the left, and you were on Facebook or some other social platform, and you were trying to read about Ukraine, what would appear on your feed was a whole bunch of stuff about how the Ukrainians were Nazis and fascists and so on. All of them, their leadership, whatever. If you were on the far right, and I'm just doing this for rhetorical effect and I don't mean anything personal. If you were on the far right and you did the same thing, what you would read on your internet feed was that Ukraine was part of the international Jewish conspiracy. Ukrainian state was a Jewish construction, Jewish oligarchs were behind the entire thing. Now, that might seem contradictory, but it doesn't matter because the way that our cyber world works, these people and these people never contact one another, not in cyber and probably not in the real world either. And so by spreading two stories, which are both wrong and mutually contradictory, you make it very hard for there to be a reasonable discussion about what's actually going on. And so Russia could invade Ukraine and delay a discussion of the actual invasion for about nine months just by charismatic denying it was true. And also by putting out messages which got people riled up and disagreeing with one another rather than addressing the facts on the ground, which of course is what happened to United States in 2016. The messages that hit American voters were tailored to their pre-existing and revealed susceptibilities. If you were afraid of Muslims, you got messages about Muslims. If you were afraid of oligarchy, you got messages about oligarchy. It didn't matter if those were different people, right? The idea is to rile people up to prevent a rational conversation about the world from taking place. The final thing which was evident in Ukraine and which is also turned up here in a more sophisticated version is what I call in the book cacophony. So not everything can be controlled by propaganda. Every once in a while an event will take place as it were out of a clear blue sky, like for example, Russia invades Ukraine and shoots down a civilian airliner. What do you then do? You don't deny it. You don't deny it because if you deny it, then you're setting up a conversation, you're framing a conversation in which the question is did you do it, didn't you do it? You don't deny it. What you do is you surround a fairly straightforward event with multiple fictional versions. So you say the Ukrainians were trying to shoot down the Russian presidential plane, which was similar in the sense that it had two wings and was also in Europe at the time. Or you say that there were various Ukrainian aircraft. You say that there was a Ukrainian ground-to-air missile trial. Or you say that there was a Ukrainian, over here you're far right guys. There was a Ukrainian Jewish oligarch who controls Ukrainian airspace and he shot it down and you can tell by the shape of his nose, which actually happened on Russian television, what that narrative I just gave you. You create a bunch of versions which crowd out the original straightforward event. And at the end of that, and you do it right away. So when MH17 was shot down, by that afternoon, these versions were already out there. Now, that's the Access Hollywood tape. So you might remember the half an hour when you thought that the Access Hollywood tape was going to have some kind of political significance. Why didn't the Access Hollywood tape have some kind of political significance? Because a real event in the real world, that is a presidential candidate advocates sexual assault, is quickly drowned out by fictions. The fiction that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile pimp, the fiction that John Podesta consumes bodily fluids at these very odd dinner parties. Those things, those fictions, came out of a Russian hack of Mr. Podesta's email and they were spread by Russian bots. Not incidentally, by the way, the same Russian bots that worked on Brexit, and the same Russian bots that worked on Ukraine, and the same Russian bots that support the German far right. This is not all just philosophically and strategically one story. It's also technically one story, which brings me to the U.S. So much of the book, I mean the whole book in some sense is the Russia story, but I'm trying to tell it in a way that makes sense of it all. And what I'd like to do in the last five minutes or so here is to referee what I take to be a big disagreement about Russia in the country in general. Where on the one side, folks say, well, we shouldn't talk about Russia because there are deep problems in America. And on the other side, people say, we have to talk about Russia because Russia violated our sovereignty and shows our president. What I want to suggest is that in a way everyone's right and that we have to be able to bring those two points together. So on the one hand, of course, Russia intervened very substantially. They chose, I use the word carefully, who the Republican nominee was going to be well before Republicans had any notion that he was going to be their nominee, not even speak of the general election. But on the other hand, the only reason this could work is because of the weaknesses in our own politics of inevitability. So let me try to spell this out. So some of this I've already mentioned. So if you think that capitalism produces democracy, then naturally more capitalism is more democracy and freer markets mean better democracy. So it's great that companies can register anonymously in Delaware, right? Like that's cool that there are 285,000 corporate entities registered anonymously at a single address in Delaware, right? That's cool. It's great that companies can do business anonymously with major US banks. That's cool, right? And farming out $7 to $21 trillion of America's wealth offshore, that's fine, right? That's cool because that's unlimited capitalism. That's good, right? I'm expecting more resistance or something from you people. Because the point is that obviously when you think that, when you allow that, those mechanisms I just named, plus anonymous real estate purchases, are the mechanisms that allowed Russia to put Mr. Trump in the American public sphere in the first place. Without our attitude towards the quote unquote free market, without our attitude towards that, it's impossible for this kind of synthesis of Russia and Trump. Or for that matter, some other foreign country and some other American to take place. So without the way we look at the world and tech, the notion that technology had to bring progress, or as Facebook put it, that internet access is a basic human right. This made it very hard for us to see that it mattered or that it could happen, that a whole political party could be hacked. It made it very hard for us to see that hostile actors, corporate or national, could substantially change our conversations, which they did. It made it very hard for us to see that Russia could target, for example, voters in Michigan and Wisconsin who happened to be hostile towards Muslims and the critical few days before the elections. We didn't see that as it was happening, not because we didn't have the facts, we did, we actually did have those facts. But because we weren't capable of imagining this kind of thing was possible. And by the way, it's worth stressing that this is a war. I mean, if you spend your time either physically or mentally, that is to say reading Russian sources, the Russians call this a war all the way through. I mean, even when they invade Ukraine, the Russian commanders are quite clear about the fact that they regard this as part of a larger offensive against the United States. Which in the 2014, you can kind of dismiss or laugh it off. But remember in 2014, that's when the Internet Research Agency in Russia starts working in the United States. It's all one story in this respect. So this is war, not in the Klausovitzian sense. I mean, this is the thing that I think we just don't get. I think it does say something special about America, that America can be subject to a war and lose it without noticing either the former or the latter. But we just lost a war. When a country intervenes and changes your will and leads to an outcome which you didn't expect, for very good reasons you didn't expect it, you've lost a war. And that's not just Russia's exotic 2013 military doctrine, which declares that you can win a war without engaging in combat. That's what Klausovitz says. Klausovitz says war is about breaking the will of the enemy. Combat is a means to that end. Combat is not the thing itself. And what the Russians concluded and said openly in 2010s is, we think we can win a war without engaging in actual combat. And that is welcome to where we are. And then to make the most obvious point, our notion that there are no alternatives made it very hard for us to understand what was happening in 2016. But there were alternatives. They were already there in the world and now one of them has arrived in our country. So let me close with just one more word about history. As I said, this is a very assertively conventional history book in almost every way. And one of the exuberantly conservative things I think about history is that at the end of the day history is about virtue. That is that it's about good and evil. These other ideas about time, these ways of sleepwalking through time, inevitability and eternity, these are the things which make us laugh about good and evil, make us cynical, make us dismissive. Because if you believe in the politics of inevitability, if you believe in progress, you don't have to ask about what's good. The presence got good stuff. In the future there's going to be more of that good stuff. So you don't have to ask what's good. If you believe in the politics of eternity, if you think that history is a big cycle, that the outsiders are always coming for you, that you're innocent, they're guilty. You don't have to ask what's good. It's obvious that you're good and they're bad. You don't have to ask. But history makes you ask. History forces you to ask. Because if what you do is you say, well, I'm going to try to understand the structures that are around me as they move forward in time. I'm going to try to see those structures and see my own place inside those structures. Then you have to ask, well, what can I do? And the attendant question to what can I do is what should I do? One of the things, one of the most impoverished things about our impoverished, I'm sorry to say, American discussion about where we are, is that there isn't very much talk about what's good, what should be, right? How things would look if we got out of this mess. So history, for me, is that. When you write a history about how institutions are being challenged, disrupted, destroyed, you're reminded of the virtues that those institutions animated or meant to animate. And when you see your place inside those institutions, this would be a good place for me to thank the institutions, which allowed me to be here today. The Carnigan Down for National Peace and Freedom House. When you see where you are in those institutions, then you can ask, well, what kind of agency do I have? What kind of power do I have? What can I actually do? And then you have to ask what's good, right? And I think, you know, I'm going to end on that note. I think that question of what's good is a very important one. And like in general, I think this is a time to try to put things together and try to make sense of things. And part of making sense of things is saying, yeah, I think some things are true and some things are false. And I think some things are good and some things are evil. And that's where I'm going to end. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's magisterial, just like the book. I'm going to start, actually, with a very general question that takes off right from where you left us. But then I want to go back and give you a chance to bring out a clue of what you mentioned. But given the limits of time, you weren't able to go into too much to develop them a bit more. The broad question is, as I was reading it, I... It took me a little while to get into the power of the framework of the juxtaposition or the dialectic of the politics of inevitability versus the politics of eternity. But once I did, I saw the power of it and I appreciate it. But I also left the book asking myself, what's the third alternative? The politics of what? But what would they be that would be in a better, healthier place for us or for other countries that would like a better future? Yeah. I mean, I do a lot of things that I think are a little risky in this book. And one of the risky things I do is to start by these ideas of time. Because who wants to hear about the ideas of time? You know, everyone wants to hear about that. We want to be shocked. We want to be surprised. We want to be outraged. We want to be elated. We want to have the latest revelation. But I mean, the one thing that historians notice is that ideas of time matter a lot. And that ideas of time are actually variable. And they only seem like they're not variable when you're in them. The politics of inevitability, this notion that history is over and the yada yada. That seemed normal for a lot of people for a long time. But for a lot of Americans, it broke in 2008. For a lot of other Americans, it broke in 2016. It breaks. And then when it breaks, you're vulnerable to other things. And one of the things that I think is very important is the way that eternity beckons. Because eternity also allows you not to have responsibility. It also allows it not to be your fault. So the future goes away and the future went away. And that's somebody else's fault. It's the immigrants. It's the refugees. It's the blacks. It's somebody else's fault. It's a very tempting shift. And we've seen a lot of Americans make that shift. And a lot of people around the world. So I'm trying to turn time into a variable. It's the hard thing. Because we all want to say, like, oh, we're just, you know, what's taking courses like minutes and hours? No, but that's actually not the case, right? You get shocked. And then the question of the book really is just what you say, Tom. What do you do when you are shocked? What I mean by the road to unfreedom in the title is this passage from inevitability to eternity. Like, that's the road to unfreedom that I think we're on. Where the exit is what I call the politics of responsibility. Which is what I very briefly alluded to in the end. Where you take for granted that time does flow in a way which you can see and chart and understand. You take for granted that there is factuality, even though you can never perfectly get to it. And you take responsibility for policy over a range like one year, five year, ten years out. Knowing that things aren't predictable over long spans. But also knowing that what you do makes a certain kind of a difference. So the alternative that I try to sketch out in the book, and it's just a tiny bit of like faint light I know at the end of a very dark book. But what I try to sketch out at the end of the book is this idea precisely of a politics of responsibility. Okay. Let's go back to a few of the sort of points along the way in the analysis. You have a very arresting analysis of how President Putin in 2011 and 12 returning first through the Duma elections and then the presidential elections returning to power. But as you say, with no succession plan, having sort of frozen democratic politics into an empty ritual, although one pursued with a lot of spunk, he needs legitimacy. And as you said, in the early 2000s he was able to use the Chechen wars and anti-terrorism in various forms to build his legitimacy. Then he was able to use the price boom of oil and, you know, the benefits to the Russian economy in the second half of the 2000s. But then his deck is a bit empty at that time. And as you say, he turns to end the tea with Europe and the United States. And he says, the legitimacy is that I'm the defender of Russia against that, but only in 2011 and 12. And you note points in the 2000s before where he didn't have that view, where he actually had not yet arrived at this state of very great hostility with the United States. And what's interesting is we had an event here last week where Mike McPaul, the former ambassador to Russia, and William Burns, the president of Carnegie, talked about the attempted reset of Russia and how it went. And they were both architects of the reset and implementers of it. And it's interesting because they also both said, you know, we started in 2009 and 10, we were making some progress. And then in 2011 and 12, as Putin returned to power, we hit a wall and it stopped. The reset stopped. And they didn't really pinpoint it so much as to the evolution that you described. They had other ideas. They emphasized, for example, Putin's shock at the Arab Spring and his being convinced that this must be the United States orchestrating regime change in other places as a warm-up to Russia. But given that there's this deep structural condition of Putin's rule, you know, he's not going to change the non-successional nature of it, at least for the time being. And therefore the need for this enmity with the United States and Europe, is the United States then stuck in this relationship with Russia? Okay, so thank you for the question. I'm just going to address a couple of the premises. So the way that I try to run the first couple of chapters is by following the Russian sources very respectfully and in particular following what Mr. Putin himself says very respectfully. So in the run-up to the presidential election of 2012 and also in the run-up to the December 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, Mr. Putin publishes a series of articles in which he lays out essentially what I'm telling you. He doesn't use exactly the same terms. He doesn't talk about the politics of eternity, for example. That's my general concept for the whole worldwide phenomenon. But he talks about how Russia is a civilization state. And by civilization he means something which is defined by a past as he defines it. So Russia and Ukraine are a single entity because borders and law and things like that don't matter. What matters is the baptism of Vladimir and what matters is the Russian Empire. What matters is the Second World War. And one of those three articles he closes on a very combative note saying, you know, for those of you who would wish to separate us, he means Russians and Ukrainians, you know that it will never happen. And he's referring to the Second World War and the camaraderie and arms of soldiers in the Red Army. And that's very weird because that was, I mean, that was at a moment when no one in the U.S. thought that we were doing anything to them, right? It was a moment when no one in Europe thought that they were doing anything to Russia. But in the way that Mr. Putin is changing the nature of international relations normatively, suddenly we are. Because if a national relations is supposed to be about historical sensibilities and culture and you can change it to that, then Europe and America, even if they're not doing a thing, suddenly become threats. And in some sense really are threats if that's what you think politics is all about. And then again, I try to follow what I think the basic problems in Russian domestic politics are, rather than just kind of flashing to points where there's some kind of clash between the U.S. and Russia, as I think we sometimes do too much of. And for me, the basic problem in Russia is wealth inequality and oligarchy. So if you are Mr. Putin, by the time you get to presidency round two, you've basically got the oligarchal situation cleaned up. You've got a state created where you're the oligarch in chief and where the security services are basically your security services. And in that situation, you can't promise a future. You just can't because there's not going to be rule of law under you because there's not going to be rule of law under you. And so you have to do something else besides promising policy. And the thing that you can promise is a foreign policy of spectacle, which is what the war on Ukraine largely is. And there's this very interesting moment, I'm sure some of you noticed this in the Russian press where in the last weekend of September 2015 in the Russian press, the subject changed literally from one day to the next. I think it was 28th to 29th. One day to the next from Ukraine to Syria. Just bang, just like that. Like it was Orwellian, right? Like, okay, forget about that war on Ukraine. It didn't sort out exactly the way we expected. But hey, look at Syria. And then, and it's roughly speaking the same storyline, right? It's basically in the good legitimate leader against the overwhelming power of the West. And Russia's other basic problem, which I think we just don't pay enough attention to was Europe. Like what to do with Europe? Europe is so much more important than we are, if you're Russia, frankly. I mean, one thing we share with the Russians is we really like for everything to be about geopolitics. You know, it's about DC and Moscow and like, we're the great powers. That's a weakness that we share with them. And that's a weakness which I think leads into our dialogue with them or our conversation about them. Europe is so much more of a relevant example for actual Russians than the United States is. Russians have so much more direct experience with Europeans than they do with us. And Europe's a bigger economy than we are. And the example of European democracy, frankly, is more important than the example of American democracy. And I don't just mean now. I mean before 2016 as well. And a lot of Mr. Putin's evolution has to do with Europe. I mean, I try to follow this in the things he says and writes. But there's a moment in 2010 where he writes an article for the German press where he says, okay, look, we admit we can't be like you, but we want to integrate with you anyway. I see that as the kind of point where everything is tottering. We want a partnership with you, but we admit we can't integrate in your sense of the word. We can't have the rule of law. We're not going to do those things. We want to integrate anyway. And the next step from that is you change the meaning of the word integrate. So it's no longer about following the same rules. And suddenly it's about culture or civilization or as it becomes, you know, operationally, it becomes heterosexuality and homosexuality becomes the big thing. Europe becomes decadent and corrupt and so on. And that's the difference between them and us. So what does that mean for the U.S. and Russia? I mean, I think, I mean, I've already said my main conclusion, which is that we have to see how we are and how we aren't important for them. In some ways we're not important for them, although we say we're not important for them in the way that we think we are. And we're not important for them often in the way they say we are. The Europeans are actually much more important. And what follows from that is that the best way for the U.S. to have a Russia policy is to have a European policy. I mean, I realize I'm galaxies away from anything which is remotely thinkable right now. But the best way for the U.S. to have a Russia policy is to have an EU policy and to have a Ukraine policy. Those things would actually make some kind of a difference. It's hard for us to have any kind of direct influence on Russia, I think. And the second thing that follows is that on operational questions of actual security, there's no reason why the Russians and we can't talk. And we do. Like on things which actually have to do with nuclear weapons as opposed to nuclear weapons as a distraction on the Internet or on Sputnik. But on things that actually have to do with nuclear weapons and actually have to do with, you know, with hardcore national security. There's no reason why we can't talk to them and they can talk to us. There's no reason why that can't happen. That leads actually naturally to my next question, which is you several times in today in the book you describe the United States as you use the term sleepwalking and some kind of partial awakening in the last couple of years. I think Europe is on that same scale. Europe was also sleepwalking to some extent. Of course Europe, many countries, a lot of diversity in different European states are many different places. But can you characterize your impression of the same message that you're conveying when you convey it to European audiences? Where are they in terms of what you regard as a necessary understanding of what Russia is and what Russia is doing or wants to do? Yeah, boy that's complicated because it is different in every place. Like in a country like Poland, the national security elite and the political elite will in general say, well of course Russia is our basic threat. But they won't necessarily see, they're beginning to see it now I think, but they won't necessarily see that the cyber and the psychological stuff is important. Or in a country like Germany there can be acknowledgement at least on the side of the center and the center right that Russia is a threat and that cyber and psychological operations work. But there's a deep current of guilt which is, I mean the main thing, the main emotion the Russians use with respect to Germany is the guilt. You should feel guilty towards us, not towards Ukraine where you actually killed more people, but you should feel guilty towards us. We went on a monopoly on the guilt and that still works extremely well in Germany but that's very specific to Germany. And then with Britain, I mean they try to talk to the British and they say things like Peter the Canal says things like, well you're a great empire, you don't need Europe and so on. I don't think the British are paying any attention to that, but the British I think carried out Brexit in a kind of, you know, the point of phrase, splendid isolation. Like they didn't realize that so much was going on and it's like for them very much like for us. I mean we are like them in a couple of ways. One is that our weird Anglo-Saxon legal traditions allow for all kinds of practices involving real estate which many Russians find extremely convenient. But the other is that we really do kind of think that our politics takes place in a vacuum when the opposite is true, you know, just because we only speak English doesn't mean other people don't speak English. And no, that's like a basic logical problem that we in the British both have, right? So it doesn't occur to the British that a whole lot of that conversation about Brexit could be organized from St. Petersburg because it just doesn't occur to them that other people speak English. Or I mean Americans, right, part of Texas, the Texas secession site which many notable people were retreating, had 10 times more followers in 2016 than, sorry, it had more followers than the Texas Republican Party. It had more followers than Texas Democratic Party. It had more followers than both of them put together. It was run by Russians with really bad English, but it just doesn't occur to us, you know, etc., etc. Tennessee GOP did have 10 times more followers and was quoted and was, you know, retweeted by Kellyanne Conway and by Michael Flynn. That was run by Russians, right? It just doesn't occur to us that English is a two-way street. So that's, I mean, that's a special thing about Britain, this is a special thing about us. The European story, their common story is one of how the nation state has to sort itself out into this Europe. And that's what makes them vulnerable. That's the one thing they all have in common, but then there are these specific differences. In the section in the book on Brexit, you amass some quite damning facts which you put forward to make the argument that you, I think, used the phrase, Brexit was a, quote, triumph of Russian foreign policy. And you describe how that was the case, what they did. The account you give is not one that has become standard wisdom in the UK, and they're still struggling to come to terms, I think, with what happened. But I was picturing what you wrote, you know, in the British press or in the British public life, that isn't the standard narrative of the depth of Russian engagement in effect. What accounts for the difference between the account you put forward and where the British public and sort of political life is on this issue? I mean, I sent in your question, another question about the United States because it strikes me that we're actually very similar to them. So first, I think we are just not used to the idea of globalization being a two-way street, especially in the English-speaking world. We think globalization, if it's happening, it's broadcast outward from us to the rest of the world. Our models, our language, you know, our Magna Carta, our constitution, our democracy, whatever. We just don't really have the idea, the British don't have the idea, I don't think either, that globalization is something which gets deep down into them, right? I mean, the sort of material correlate of this is how much of London is owned by Russia, which is a fact, or Russians, which changes British life, but it's very hard to kind of get your mind around it. The second thing I think is it's hard for any country to imagine that certain kind of intimate forms of politics are actually subject to external intervention. The British, you know, as they always, I mean, I get into debates with them all the time now about this thing, and they'll say things like, well, we've had a democracy for the longest time. Yes, that's why you're vulnerable because you couldn't imagine that it could happen. You say Magna Carta as though that's going to ward off Twitter, but it doesn't. I mean, I've tried it, right? Like, I get up in the morning and I paint a star and I burn it and I say, Magna Carta, it doesn't stop Twitter at all. So I don't actually do that. But I mean, I think it's the very sense that this is intimate and this is ours, right, that made them vulnerable. And then, of course, now the Brexit vote is not the most important thing in Britain. The most important thing in Britain is what form is Brexit actually going to take. And that's very hard for them to examine. You know, we've now, like, the U.S., similar things have happened. People double, you know, there's a very questionable event in 2016 here was there, but people then double down, you know, later. They take the outcome for granted. They double down. They morally commit themselves to something. And it's very hard to then, you know, with clear eyes, investigate what happened back then. To the audience a minute, one more question. You mentioned a couple of times here the issue of homosexuality as a theme or an issue that the Russians pushed in other ways. I was quite struck in the book the number of ways you described it. I guess I had seen pieces of it here and there, but I'd never seen it. I'd never quite come to the realization of how systematic it was and how central it was to the narrative. Could you talk a little bit more about that, if that was powerful and unusual? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, just to confirm what you say. It does turn up all over the place. I mean, it turns up in Russian domestic politics, as I'm sure everyone here will know. I mean, passing the law in 2013 against, you know, what's characterized as a homosexual propaganda changes the political climate inside Russia. It creates a sense of us and them. And like all these powerful senses of us and them, the way that it works is that somebody in the country is not us, but that somebody in the country is not us is also linked to a powerful international conspiracy, right? So, it's not just the gays and the lesbians in Russia. It's the gays and the lesbians, you know, around the world who are notionally supporting them, right? So, it works very well in us and them politics and it works very... So, it's in Russian domestic politics. It was in Ukraine. The alliance with the Fondationale in France, right? Marine Le Pen's party has actually formed in early 2013 after France passes a partnership law and then delegates from the Fondationale go to Moscow and talk about how awful this all is. And that's when their relationship begins, which then becomes a financial relationship. So, it does turn up all over the place. And, you know, American evangelicals are... This is one of the reasons why some American evangelicals admire Russia, by the way, because this kind of thing is much more possible to do openly there than here. It works because of the us and them thing. It also works because sexuality is just an inexhaustible source of anxiety, right? So, you can always kind of hit people with it. It's like the Second World War is slowly losing its force in Russia, slowly, slowly, but sexuality is always going to be there, right? As a way to make people try to define themselves one way or the other. And they're pretty clever about how they do it. The last thing I wanted to say about this is that once you... So, when you redefine international relations as not about economics and law and social advancement and sort of objective national interests, and you say international relations is actually about civilization and sensibility, you then have to have some kind of content for what that is. And that's actually quite tough, right? I mean, it is tough to say what American civilization is. It's hard to say what Russian civilization is. It's hard to say. But so, for the time being, at least, homosexuality serves as a kind of proxy for that. Like, we're straight and they're not, right? We protect traditional families and they... And so, it's like they can't cut... In an odd way, it's like the lowest common denominator. You can't think of anything else and so you use this. Turn to the audience. I'm going to turn to this side over here and state your question in fairly compact form and make it a question if possible. Start here and then work back. Yes, sir. Right here. Dr. Snyder. This is about the politics of responsibility and you decided to write a political pamphlet which went all over the world. And so, you moved out of just your really important role as a historian. And so, I guess my question is how do you view that your role now? And I'm not asking it as a people magazine question. I'm asking it sort of, you know, what is our role as we move out of just our day-to-day activity? Okay, sorry. You threw me for a moment with the people magazine reference. Margaret Atwood did mention road done freedom and vanity fair. I think it was. Which is like, yeah. That's as close as I can get to people. So, with the politics of responsibility and being a historian, I actually... Like the way that I've been thinking about this is that I said earlier in the talk, we kind of have to bring what we got. And for many of us, that's going to be a stretch. But it may not be a stretch which actually reduces where you come from. So, history really does depend upon factuality, I think. History really does depend upon putting things in order over time. History really does say that we can reverse entropy intellectually. We do say these things as a discipline, at least some of us do. And that does actually have political implications, at least in the present moment. So, one of the things I say in the book, which I believe is that history actually is a form of political thought. If you actually carry out that form of reasoning, you're doing something political. Given that the dominant climate in politics is that nothing makes sense, everything is scattered, it's just a matter of how we feel. We can't remember what came first and what came second. In that environment, then just doing history or just being a historian starts to become political. And I think that's true about a lot of vocations and not just the obvious ones. It doesn't take much tweaking to show how being a reporter matters hugely. The book is devoted to reporters who I call the heroes of our time, which I sincerely believe. But it doesn't take much tweaking either to see how being a lawyer or being a physician, as one sees, just a little bit of a turn, a little bit of thinking about professional ethics, can move you out further into the public sphere than you were before. On tyranny is at once a very ambitious and not very ambitious book. It's very ambitious in the sense of history, which is what I was trying to describe here. Namely, we're in a moment where what we do actually matters a lot more than other moments. But it's also kind of simple. It just says you can do this small thing, this small thing, this small thing, and it will change you and it will change the people around you. And the trick is to recognize, to turn back to Tom's first question, that you're in a moment where the politics of responsibility matters. Like that's the trick, like saying, okay, here I am in history. It's happening around me. I can see now what I can do. I think that's the trick right there. Right behind you there. Right there, yes. Thank you, Professor Snyder. Do you see what you're describing in terms of the politics of eternity going on in Asia as well? Or is this just a western phenomenon? Yeah, you kind of got me on the on methodological grounds there because I try to work in sources that I think I understand. So when I try to sketch out Putin's thought, for example, I'm trying to read him really carefully and pay attention to what he says over time. And Putin cites this philosopher, Ivan Ilyn, who I mentioned briefly. He cites him in several parliamentary addresses. He cites them right after Russia annexes Crimea. He cites him in connection to the European Union. And so I took the 40 volumes of Ilyn's writings and I read them and I tried to make sense of them and I tried to see what the connections and the resonances were between the passages that the passages that Putin cited and the meaning in Ilyn's work and our contemporary reality. And those are all things I can do because of language. You know, Ilyn wrote in German and Russian. I can read those languages. With China, it's just harder for me because I don't feel like I have that same you know, finger spits into food. I don't feel like I have, I can get into it in the same way. My broad answer would be yes. And I think that creating a succession problem for yourself, which she and the Communist Party of China have just done, tends to reinforce the politics of eternity because when you block out the immediate future, the temptation to then loop back becomes all the stronger. But I don't think I want to go any further than that. Come right here and then I'll get this one back and I'll come over here. Yes, this gentleman right here. That's not Bill Taylor. Thank you. You say that Europe is really the important geography for the Russians and you say that this is a war and the aggression against Ukraine is part of that war and they have attacked the United States and they have attacked European democracies as well. What's their priority? If Russia sees Europe as the most important and yet they in some sense succeeded more in the United States than they have in the... That's a really good question. I just want to start by emphasizing that it's not just me who characterizes this as a war. This is something that you get from the Russians. This is the kind of language which is kind of a matter of everyday discourse over there. And following the war in Ukraine from the Russian sources, I found that at first I was struck by it and surprised by it and then I realized that in some sense these people meant it. I mean not just like the head of security who was sent over in 2014 from the Russian Federation from Transnistria actually talked about how Ukraine and the United States were very similar. They had divided politics. They were both disintegrating states. The United States is an artificial... He also said demonic. The United States is an artificial demonic creation. One day it will cease to exist. It seems kind of striking and wild at first glance. But then you realize this is a person who has serious responsibilities and who does think that he's part of this larger campaign. And the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, some of whom were actually interviewed. There are many things. There are more primary sources than people think. So we have actual interview transcripts with Russian soldiers in Ukraine carried out in Russian as well as with Ukrainian citizens fighting on the Russian side. And they would say things over and over again. I'm fantasizing about Russian stealth fighters flying over the capital. I'm fantasizing about a red flag flying over the White House. And after a while you begin to... At first it seems kind of wacko. But then you realize... What historians always do, what we're taught to do is when something strikes you rather than dismiss it you're supposed to then try to see it from the point of view of the speaker. And if you pour in that exercise enough times you realize there may be some patterns here. Like they're thinking this and maybe they're thinking it for a reason. And then in retrospect when you put the sources together as I try to do in the book you realize, well if you look at the chronology the annexation of Crimea has followed very... within a couple of weeks by the Internet Research Agency turning its attention to the U.S. There is a sense chronologically in which this all does kind of fit together just by way of riffing on the premise of your question. I think there are two interesting things here. The first is that I think the general idea which I call strategic relativism is not to make Europe or the U.S. follow some model. It's not like the 20th century where we have some notion of communism which we think is going to be either inspiring or maybe we'll force it on you but even if we force it on you there is a kind of template. There are the ways it's supposed to work letting the system. We want to kind of haul you out from within so that you're more like us but not exactly like us. More like us in the sense of higher levels of distrust greater dysfunctionality of the rule of law. We want you to be more like us in that sense. Not that we need you to have the Russian Orthodox Church or anything like that. But we need for the things that are most functional in Europe and the U.S. we need those things to be weaker and in that sense for you to be more like Russia. That's something which I think is very important. Which is the relative failure in Ukraine and the relative success in the United States which is something I think we have a whole lot of trouble swallowing over here. Because yeah Ukraine in military terms lost territory but in terms of opinion many Europeans and many Americans were just to be very blunt about it taken in and said all kinds of wacky or relevant things about the Russian war in Ukraine but not that many Ukrainians did relatively speaking. They have more practice with this kind of thing and the native Russian speakers and they knew that they were being invaded. So an interesting thing happened and I said this first way back in early 2014 an interesting thing happened where there was this kind of branch where I think the Russians realized that the subjective psychological part directed at Europe and America was going much better than the objective operational military part in Ukraine. And so when people asked me starting back then in 2014 do you think Russia is going to invade another country, is it going to invade Estonia? I've always tended to think not because they realized that it was the psychological part of the hybrid war that they were clearly winning and the military part was much, much more ambiguous. They had trouble with Ukraine which at the time basically did not have an army but they won, I mean let's face it they won great battles and what they call the psychosphere in Europe. I think, I mean this is just a hunch now I think they'd been surprised by how, I think they were surprised by how well that went and I think they kind of followed it you know they followed success upon success to where they reached a point where they're much further along than they kind of expected to be. I think in follow, I mean there seems to have been a certain amount of talk in fall of 16 about wait a minute is this really going to work? Do we really want it to work? I think to take this woman right here I'm going to come and speak over here. Thank you. When I think about the issues of inevitability versus responsibility I wonder, you seem to frame the politics of inevitability in the United States in a sort of vacuous hopeful sense you know that there's this vacuous hopefulness but what about the sense of inevitability in terms of fatalism the fatalism that often underscores a lot of thinking in certain parts of the world compared to more sort of determinism in a way in the United States and how does that affect your construct first of all and secondly when you talk about the politics of responsibility I also think about the global refugee crisis you know we've almost stopped talking about trying to solve the problems at the point of origin and people are only concerned when the symptoms arise in such a critical way as they did a few years ago in Europe and still do to a certain extent today I think it's... No but go ahead if you want to... So the question there is is that part of what you're thinking in terms of the differentiation between inevitability and responsibility? Absolutely. One of the ways that I got to this concept was by writing about the Holocaust in fact I wrote a book called Black Earth which was about the Holocaust in which I made a couple of new arguments and one of the new arguments was that we need to take Hitler's thinking about ecology seriously that one of the sources of the Holocaust was Hitler's idea that technology can't save us from problems of scarcity therefore we have no choice but to take land and that was a kind of temporal notion like there isn't any future with progress that's out so therefore we have to take what we can now and that got me thinking about 2012, 13, 14 it got me thinking about climate change and what it means to say the science isn't true the technologies aren't going to make any difference and what that means is that you're kind of collapsing time because technology and science like democracy can be ways of creating a sense of time creating a sense of a predictable near-term future if you say it's not going to work it's not really there the climate change is not really a problem but you're basically what you're doing is you're creating a future and you're ready for it so climate change for me is a very good example of the politics of responsibility it's about the one year, five year, ten year future you have to do something about it now and it relates directly to refugees I mean there are many root causes of refugee crises but one of them is precisely climate change the desertification of what used to be called the fertile crescent in Syria is one of the root causes of what's happening and I mean it's a completely different way of thinking about the whole issue of Muslims and immigration you can think well we don't like immigration we don't like Muslims that's the politics of eternity talking these people are different and they come from there to hear over and over again the politics of responsibility says the crescent shaped part of the world where most of the Muslims live is the part that's most directly affected by climate change so if we want to prevent instability in that part of the world right and fatalism for me like I'm not sure I may not grasp what you mean but I think fatalism tends to play into the politics of eternity because if you think it doesn't matter what we do maybe we don't know what to do we don't trust anything we don't trust our leaders we don't really have any power then it's just kind of the same thing over and over again but I don't really go more into that so I can take some more questions here yeah okay right here this woman I'll do my best but we won't be able to get to her please keep your questions fairly compact could speak up that microphone either it's not working or you're not speaking directly hold on we have another one Elizabeth Wilson thank you very much for this really stimulating conversation I'll make these questions short first I just wanted to observe that you seem to work from a premise that Russia is Europe and that it deviates from the European narrative and I just wanted to ask you is that what's going on there I really liked your economic approach to this to the conundrums of the moment and I'm just wondering where you situate yourself in terms of like economic theory and critique you know there's a there's a narrative out there that you could say okay we have a capitalism versus command economy communism capitalism one therefore you know it stands for democracy we were not able to imagine authoritarianism coupled with a free market of approach which seems to be one of the things that is emerging right now but what is the what's the on the politics of responsibility what's the economic alternative to this market fundamentalism I think two questions all work out of time I want to just take a couple more Tim and then we'll finish up yeah this one right behind him this gentleman over here see if we can squeeze this this woman right here so cryptocurrency has come into passion in the past couple of years can you share your thoughts on how or if this will affect the coming years okay this gentleman no right behind you right there in the white shirt where does the politics of eternity what is the impact on on natural physical scientists and biologists and people like that who are trying to make a career in Russia okay one last one Bill Courtney Rand Corporation following up on a bastard Taylor's question about Europe is that Europe is much more important for Russia than America is yet Russians sometimes behave as though the United States is more important is this because they see us as a large superpower because they overrate the importance of military power relative to political economic and social power or is there some other reason great out of that I can choose three minutes worth of comments okay so whether Russia really is European I don't have a I don't have no view on that my view is that past empires in that geographical space say the British Empire the Dutch Empire the French Empire have followed a certain pattern invisible even to themselves in which they've joined the larger project called Europe that Russia had to do that should do that I don't have a view on other things my view though is that in that part of the world Russia is now the first country not to join that project and we don't we then we don't want to say he couldn't do it because it was Asian because of course the British Empire was even more Asian than Russia was in many respects so that's not exactly it but it's striking that this move towards civilization is called Eurasia and there's a whole Eurasian tradition in Russian philosophy old and new which is part of the subject of the book and then you also had a second great question which is what economics okay so Hayek was wrong it's just not true that intervention by the state in capitalism leads to authoritarianism that did not happen in Austria which is where he's from it didn't happen in Germany either if anything it's the contrary in order to have these wonderful individuals that are libertarian friends fantasize about you have to have a whole lot of state intervention especially when those people are young so you can't do it without pluralism you have to have some notion of what the state is supposed to be doing to create these individuals who will then go off to some systems of industry and talk about how they don't need the state so there's a dialectic there and in the Cold War the welfare state won the Cold War even in the United States I mean just look at the timing we started breaking up the welfare state under Reagan the welfare state won the Cold War not pure capitalism the whole pure capitalism thing comes in with Reagan and Thatcher and by then the dialogue already cast by then our model had proved to be better but our model was not a pure capitalist model between the 40s and about 1980 the difference in wealth between the top 1% and the bottom 9% in the US was closing it's since the 80s to the present that it's opened up again so if we won the Cold War with the model it was actually the welfare state model and not the pure capitalist model which is a false retroactive false retroactive narration okay on you know on Bitcoin I'm going to punt except to note that I've just group your two questions slightly frivolously and say that Russian scientists are now diverting supercomputer power in order to mind bit but you know the fundamental link you know the fundamental link science crypto what am I missing there's one other thing am I dropping someone else's question sorry what was it it was a bit about Europe Europe is more important why do they treat you yeah so that means the serious answer about science I mean I don't have a detailed knowledge about Russian scientists but a serious answer about science is that science in my view is part of a politics responsibility which constantly throws out facts and forces you to improvise new policies looking at in your term future we I quite agree with the premise of your question but it's something that's kind of hard for us to grasp we are more important than Europe narratively right because we are a superpower you know that's how Mr. Putin refers to us we're a superpower and I think for Russian public opinion like that notion that Russia and America are somehow comparable because we're superpowers with armies and so on that's important narratively in that particular sense but I think politically Europe is much more important over the long run and I think we have to learn to distinguish our narrative function and also learn not to fall into this particular discourse with them about the superpowers and the geopolitics I think one thing which has happened which happened to us in 14 with Ukraine was that we fell for that you know that this is about the superpowers and the geopolitics as opposed to being about the rule of law and the super boring association agreement with the European Union so it's narratively important for them and it could also I think be a little bit of a trap for us I'd like to thank Freedom House for partnering with us on this event but above all I'd like to thank Timothy Steiner for traveling down today to Washington to do this event coming back to Carnegie after 28 years we're glad to have you back and we've changed buildings but not changed our soul so we're also in the packed business here and that's important to us and your lecture is a very big part of that so let's have a round of applause for Timothy Steiner thank you can you tell them if there are books out there? there are can you tell them not? there are books for sale out there you saw them on the way in I saw you buying them please buy some more thanks yeah oh good my pleasure thank you for coming okay I'm gonna maybe I should go out there I'll be with you yeah you should go step out there okay oh very nice to meet you yeah thank you for coming yeah thanks thanks oh thank you thanks for being here oh right yes nice to see you and I owe you an email I will eventually get back to you yeah thanks thanks for saying so we'll be in touch hey hi