This is a laudable goal, but one in which Snyder spectacularly fails.

Instead, Snyder claims that his goal is to ‘win back the present for historical time, and thus to win back historical time for politics’ (p. In both models, facts are translated into narratives, and history becomes little more than incidental to the grand narratives represented by the two models of time. Russia is exporting its malign politics of eternity, but Snyder writes as if no other nation but Russia has grievances and unresolved problems with their own history. According to Snyder, it is Russia that is locked into a permanent cycle of eternity, nursing its grievances and even manufacturing crises to be able to manipulate the resultant emotion. One does not have to be a genius to recognise which nation Snyder has in mind for this tailor-made definition. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past’ (p. Inevitability implies a better future, but eternity ‘places one nation at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood. 8) opens the door to another conception of time, what Snyder labels the politics of eternity. The ‘collapse of the politics of inevitability’ (p. Snyder ascribes them not to the contradictions of liberal democracy, but to an external agency. The collapse of the communist systems in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s opened the door to what appeared to be the triumph of capitalist democracy, but this project has now encountered setbacks. Reading Snyder, one would not have a clue that there is a vast and interesting literature on the subject, as well as some rather primitive analysis along Fukuyama lines. This is what in Marxist, or Hegelian, language is known as historicism, the belief that the meaning and purpose of history is knowable, and hence manageable. 7), in which the laws of progress are known and there are no alternatives. Snyder sets up a potentially stimulating contrast between what he calls the politics of inevitability, the sense that ‘the future is just more of the present’ (p.

Snyder’s book is characterised by all the main features of the type: broad but unsubstantiated assertions a mix of profound erudition and overwhelming prejudice and penetrating analysis combined with the absence of even basic standards of scholarly methodology.

There is a type of book that contributes to what can be called the literature of the New Cold War, and this work will undoubtedly take a top place in the bibliography of the genre. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

The road to unfreedom book