Michael: Most of us think history is something that happened in the past. But what if I told you the most dangerous political weapon today is a fight over the future—a battle between the belief that things will inevitably get better, and the certainty that they never will? Kevin: That’s a heavy way to start the day, Michael. It sounds less like history and more like a philosophical cage match. One side is all sunshine and progress, the other is just… eternal gloom? Michael: It’s the central question in Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom. And it’s not just philosophical; he argues this clash of worldviews is actively shaping our reality, right now. Kevin: And Snyder is the perfect person to tackle this. He’s not just a political commentator; he's a world-class historian at Yale, fluent in something like ten European languages, who spent his entire career studying the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Michael: Exactly. So when he says he sees the ghosts of those regimes walking around today, you listen. He wrote this book as a stark warning, connecting the dots from Russia's invasion of Ukraine all the way to the 2016 US election. It’s a book that got a lot of praise for its insight, but also stirred up controversy for its directness. Kevin: I can imagine. Pointing out ghosts in the political machine is bound to make people uncomfortable. So, where does this road to unfreedom begin? What are these two clashing worldviews? Michael: It starts with what Snyder calls the "politics of inevitability."

Kevin: Okay, the 'politics of inevitability.' That sounds… optimistic? Almost a little bit arrogant, maybe? Michael: It is. Think about the feeling after the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. There was this widespread belief in the West, especially in America, that we’d won. That history had reached its final destination. Kevin: Right, the "end of history" idea. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were the undisputed champions, and it was only a matter of time before everyone else caught up. Michael: Precisely. That’s the politics of inevitability. It’s the belief that the future is just a better-lit, more efficient version of the present. Progress is automatic. You don't need to think too hard about policy or civic virtue, because the market and the march of democracy will solve everything. It’s a comforting thought. Kevin: It is, but it also sounds incredibly passive. Like we're all just passengers on a train that's already on the right track. What’s the problem with that? Michael: The problem is that when you believe the future is guaranteed, you stop paying attention to the present. You ignore rising inequality, the decay of institutions, the erosion of truth. You become vulnerable. And that’s when the other worldview, the "politics of eternity," finds an opening. Kevin: Hold on, 'politics of eternity' sounds like something from a fantasy novel. What does Snyder actually mean by that? Michael: It’s the polar opposite. If inevitability says the future is a bright, open horizon, eternity says there is no future. There is only the past, repeating itself in an endless loop. It’s a politics built on a mythic cycle of innocence, victimhood, and revenge. Kevin: That sounds… bleak. And exhausting. Who would choose to live in that mindset? Michael: You don't choose it; it's imposed on you. Snyder argues this is the model Putin’s Russia perfected after 2012. The narrative is always the same: "We are the innocent victims. We have always been attacked by outsiders. Our glorious past was stolen, and we must now fight to reclaim our greatness against these eternal enemies." Facts don't matter. All that matters is the story. Kevin: Can you give me a real-world example? Because that still sounds very abstract. Michael: The story of the Smolensk plane crash is a devastatingly clear example. In 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and dozens of other top Polish leaders crashed in Russia. They were on their way to commemorate the Katyn massacre, where the Soviets had murdered thousands of Polish officers in World War II. Kevin: I remember that. A horrific national tragedy for Poland. Michael: A complete tragedy. The official investigation, which included Polish experts, concluded it was a crash caused by pilot error in extremely dense fog. A terrible, senseless accident. But in the hands of eternity politicians in Poland, the story changed. Kevin: How so? Michael: They began to craft a fiction. They claimed it wasn't an accident; it was an assassination. A conspiracy between the Russian government and their political rivals in Poland. They floated theories about artificial fog, explosions on the plane, and secret deals. None of it was supported by evidence. Kevin: Wow. So they took a real moment of national grief and twisted it into a political weapon. Michael: A perfect weapon for the politics of eternity. Because now, the tragedy wasn't a random event in history to be mourned and learned from. It became part of the eternal cycle: Poland, the innocent victim, once again betrayed by its treacherous neighbor, Russia. It created a permanent sense of crisis and a permanent enemy. It polarized the country and fueled a nationalist movement that eventually took power. Kevin: That's just ghoulish. It turns history into a constant, open wound that can never heal because it's politically useful to keep it bleeding. But it makes me wonder… was the West's 'politics of inevitability' just as much of a fiction? A different kind of fiction, but still a story we told ourselves that wasn't entirely true? Michael: That's the core of Snyder's argument. He’s not letting the West off the hook. Our own belief in inevitability made us blind and complacent. We assumed Russia would just naturally become like us. We ignored the rise of oligarchy, the dismantling of their democracy, and the deliberate construction of this alternate, fact-free reality. We were so sure of our own story that we couldn't see they were writing a completely different one. Kevin: And that their story was designed to be a weapon against ours. Michael: Exactly. And they didn't just stumble into this 'eternity' mindset. They deliberately built it, brick by brick, using the ideas of some very dark thinkers.

Kevin: Okay, this is the part that sounds truly wild to me. You're saying that modern Russian strategy isn't just about military power or economics, but about… philosophy? Michael: And not just any philosophy. This brings us to one of the strangest and most chilling stories in the book: how Vladimir Putin’s regime resurrected the ideas of a long-dead fascist philosopher named Ivan Ilyin. Kevin: I have to be honest, I've never heard of him. Can you give me the 'too long; didn't read' version of who this guy was and why on earth he matters today? Michael: Ilyin was a Russian intellectual who lived from 1883 to 1954. He was an anti-communist, which sounds good, but he was also a fervent nationalist and, essentially, a Christian fascist. He was exiled from Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1922. While living in Germany, he openly admired Mussolini and, for a time, Hitler, seeing them as saviors of European civilization from godless Bolshevism. Kevin: Wait, a fan of Mussolini and Hitler? And this is the guy whose ideas are being revived? That seems like a massive red flag. Michael: You would think so. Ilyin's core belief was that Russia was not a normal nation-state. It was a unique, spiritual organism, eternally innocent, and destined to be led by a mystical, father-like "Redeemer" who would rule not by law, but by will and violence. He believed individualism was evil, democracy was a sham, and that the West was a decadent, corrupting force. He even denied that Ukraine was a real country, seeing it as an inseparable part of the Russian body. Kevin: That sounds… disturbingly familiar. It's like a checklist of modern Russian propaganda points. So how did this obscure, fascist thinker's work get from a dusty archive into the Kremlin? Michael: This is the "strategic fiction" in action. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had an ideological vacuum. Putin and his circle went looking for a new national idea. And they found Ilyin. Starting in the mid-2000s, Putin began quoting him in major speeches. They had Ilyin's personal papers brought back to Russia from the United States. They even arranged for his body to be exhumed from Switzerland and reburied with full state honors in Moscow. Kevin: They literally dug him up and brought him home. That's not just an academic interest; that's a symbolic embrace. It's like they were consecrating him as the patron saint of the new Russia. Michael: That's a perfect way to put it. Ilyin's books were distributed to state governors, military officers, and youth groups. His philosophy became the intellectual justification for everything the regime wanted to do. It justified concentrating power in one man. It justified kleptocracy, because if the leader is a mystical redeemer, who are we to question where the money goes? And most importantly, it justified aggression. Kevin: So when we hear Putin talking about the "spiritual unity" of the Russian and Ukrainian people, or denying Ukraine's right to exist as a separate nation… that's not just political spin. It's lifted directly from this century-old fascist ideology. Michael: Word for word, in some cases. Ilyin wrote that any battle fought by Russia is, by definition, a defensive one. This is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for an aggressor. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, the official line was that it was a defensive act to protect the "Russian world" from a decadent, hostile West. That is pure Ilyin. It’s a strategic fiction designed to make an imperial war of conquest sound like a holy crusade. Kevin: It's terrifying because it creates a closed loop. If you believe your nation is eternally innocent and always the victim, then any action you take, no matter how brutal, is justified as self-defense. There's no room for facts, no room for accountability. Michael: And that fiction was exported. The same logic was used to interfere in Western elections. The goal wasn't necessarily to get one candidate to win, though that was often a bonus. The primary goal was to shatter the West's own story—the politics of inevitability. Kevin: To make us doubt our own systems. Michael: Exactly. To flood our information space with so much fiction, so many conspiracy theories, so much division, that we would start to believe that our democracy was also a sham. That truth was unknowable. That we, too, were trapped in a cycle of eternal conflict. Russia’s goal was to make the world look more like Russia. Kevin: To pull everyone else down into the politics of eternity with them. Because if everyone believes history is a meaningless, violent cycle, then no one can judge you for your actions. Michael: And in that chaos, the autocrat thrives. That is the road to unfreedom.

Kevin: So, when you put it all together, the road to unfreedom isn't a sudden coup or a dramatic revolution. It's a slow poisoning of reality. It starts when a society stops believing in a future it can build, and instead gets trapped in a fictional story about an eternal past it can never escape. Michael: That's it exactly. Snyder's ultimate warning is that democracy has a prerequisite: factuality. It depends on our shared ability to distinguish between what is true and what we want to be true. When leaders can create and successfully sell their own "strategic fictions"—whether it's about a plane crash, a dead philosopher, or a neighboring country—they sever the connection between citizens and reality. And in that void, freedom dies. Kevin: It’s a powerful and, frankly, frightening diagnosis of our times. It’s also a book that has been criticized by some for drawing too straight a line, for blaming too much on Russia and not enough on the West's own internal failings. Michael: And Snyder would agree, to a point. He's clear that Russia was able to succeed only because of our own vulnerabilities—our inequality, our racial tensions, the collapse of local news, our naive faith in technology. They didn't create the cracks in our society; they just expertly widened them. Kevin: So what's the antidote? If we're on this road, how do we get off? Michael: Snyder argues for what he calls a "politics of responsibility." It's the opposite of both inevitability and eternity. It’s the hard work of being an individual citizen. It means actively choosing to live in history, not mythology. Kevin: And what does that look like in practice? Michael: It means supporting the things that anchor us to facts: investigative journalism, historical education, science. It means holding our leaders, and ourselves, accountable for the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. It means repairing our own institutions so they are less vulnerable to fiction. It’s about recognizing that the future isn’t guaranteed to be better, nor is it doomed to be worse. The future is what we choose to make it, through our actions in the present. Kevin: It's a call to reclaim our own agency, to stop being passive passengers and start being active drivers of our own history. Michael: That’s the hope. It’s a demanding one, but it’s the only one we have. Kevin: A powerful message from a truly essential book. It reminds us that the fight for freedom is, first and foremost, a fight for truth. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.