Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Timothy Snyder

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EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein. And this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

There is this line I’ve been thinking about from Timothy Snyder’s book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” which is a book that, when it came out, people understood it’s about totalitarianism or authoritarianism coming to America. But if you read it, it is very much about Ukraine. And in that book, Snyder writes, “There is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given, and history, the connections that we work to make — if we wish.” If we wish.

So Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian. In recent years, he became something of a hero to liberals for a series of books particularly “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” which became something like a Bible for worried liberals early in the Trump era. These are books about what it feels like and what you do when your society is beginning to creep down or trip down the road to authoritarianism.

But that perspective for Snyder, those learnings, they don’t come from his immersion in American politics. They come from his immersion in Ukrainian politics and history. Snyder’s core academic subject is Ukraine. He’s written six books entirely or partially about Ukraine. And these are very much books about the way Ukraine has been repeatedly invaded and turned into a subject by surrounding powers.

And in these books, something Snyder is very alert to is the way that imagined histories of Ukraine, what he would call stories or myth, feed the justifications used for these bloody invasions of Ukraine. And so a topic for him that emerges out of that is how the stories, particularly when they’re dressed up is histories, the stories we tell ourselves, how they create all kinds of different politics, how they can lead us to peace or to war, to a sense of inevitability or a sense of desperate persecution, to a sense of integration or imperialism, to a wariness about the world or complacency about it.

And that is what this conversation is about, the stories being told in America, in Europe, in Russia, and, of course, in Ukraine, and how those stories both created and could, in the end, decide the crisis we’re in. As always, my email, [e-mail]. Tim Snyder, welcome to the show.

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