Narrator: What if the story you’ve been told about the inevitable march of progress is a lie? What if, instead of moving forward, we are being pulled into a dangerous cycle of manufactured crisis and eternal victimhood? In April 2010, historian Timothy Snyder was in a Vienna hospital, holding his newborn son, a moment of profound personal joy. At that very moment, he received news of a national tragedy: a plane carrying Poland’s president and much of its political elite had crashed in Smolensk, Russia, killing everyone on board, including Snyder’s friend. This collision of creation and destruction, of a personal future beginning and a collective history rupturing, crystallized a terrifying shift in the world. The comfortable, post-Cold War belief in a steady, inevitable path toward democracy was shattering. In its place, a darker political narrative was rising.

In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder provides the intellectual toolkit to understand this shift. He argues that we have moved from a "politics of inevitability" to a "politics of eternity," a deliberate strategy pioneered by Russia and exported to Europe and America to undermine truth, dismantle institutions, and pave a road back toward authoritarianism.

Narrator: For two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West was guided by the "politics of inevitability." This was the comforting belief that history had a clear direction, that the expansion of free markets would automatically lead to the expansion of liberal democracy. It was the idea that there were no real alternatives. But the 2008 financial crisis cracked this foundation, revealing that unchecked capitalism could generate crippling inequality rather than universal prosperity.

Into this void of certainty stepped the "politics of eternity." Pioneered by Vladimir Putin's Russia, this narrative rejects the idea of progress. Instead, it presents history as a cyclical myth of a glorious, innocent nation perpetually under threat from external enemies. In this worldview, there are no new ideas, only permanent threats. To build this ideology, Putin’s regime reached back into the past and resurrected the work of Ivan Ilyin, a Russian fascist philosopher who was expelled by the Bolsheviks in 1922. Ilyin believed in a mystical, authoritarian leader, the rejection of individualism, and a Russia that was eternally innocent and destined for empire. Putin was so taken with Ilyin that he arranged for the philosopher's remains to be exhumed from Switzerland and reburied with honors in Moscow, recommending his writings to Russian officials and youth. Ilyin provided the blueprint for a state built not on facts and policies, but on political fiction and permanent crisis.

Narrator: Unlike democracies, which have a principle of succession, authoritarian states live in constant fear of what happens when the leader dies. The Soviet Union lurched from one succession crisis to another. Vladimir Putin, having risen to power through a managed, non-democratic transition known as "Operation Successor," faced his own legitimacy crisis. After fraudulent elections in 2011 and 2012 sparked the largest protests in modern Russian history, Putin abandoned any pretense of democratic procedure.

He understood that if there is no legitimate future, the present must be made to feel eternal. To achieve this, his regime needed a permanent state of emergency. Political fiction became state policy. The government began to demonize its enemies, creating a narrative where Russia was besieged by a decadent, hostile West. A key part of this strategy was the weaponization of sexuality. The regime portrayed the West, and particularly the European Union, as a "gay paradise" intent on destroying traditional values. This narrative served a dual purpose: it distracted from domestic corruption and inequality, and it created a "civilizational" mission for Russia as the defender of traditional morality. By manufacturing endless external threats, Putin’s rule was no longer a matter of political choice but of national survival.

Narrator: The European Union represented everything the politics of eternity opposed. It was a project based on integration, shared laws, and the idea that nation-states could overcome historical grievances to build a peaceful, prosperous future. For Russia, this was an existential threat. In response, Putin’s ideologues promoted an alternative: "Eurasia."

This vision, heavily influenced by thinkers like Alexander Dugin, was not one of integration but of empire. Dugin, a radical intellectual who blended Eurasianism with Nazi ideas, envisioned a vast Russian empire dominating the continent. He called for a "fascism, borderless and red" and saw the West as "the place where Lucifer fell." This ideology explicitly denied the sovereignty of neighboring countries, most importantly Ukraine, which was seen not as a separate nation but as an essential part of the Russian heartland. The goal of the Eurasian project was to dismantle the EU, break its system of laws, and replace it with a Russian-led sphere of influence. This ideological war became a real war in 2014, when Ukrainians took to the Maidan square in Kyiv, choosing a European future over Russian domination.

Narrator: When the Maidan Revolution succeeded and Ukraine’s pro-Russian president fled, Russia launched a new kind of war—a war on reality itself. The Russian state media apparatus, led by figures who openly declared that "objectivity is a myth," went into overdrive. It portrayed the popular, pro-European uprising in Kyiv as a violent "fascist coup" orchestrated by the West.

This strategy, which Snyder calls "schizofascism," involves calling your enemies fascists while employing fascist tactics yourself. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea under the guise of protecting Russian speakers from these fictional fascists, holding a sham referendum where turnout was reported at an impossible 123% in one city. When Russia sent its own soldiers into eastern Ukraine to foment a separatist war, it denied their existence. Snyder tells the tragic story of Anton Tumanov, a young Russian soldier who told his mother he was being sent to Ukraine, only to be killed in action. His death certificate listed the cause as "blood loss" and the location simply as "place of performing military service." His mother was attacked as a traitor for sharing the truth online. For Russia, the war in Ukraine was not just about territory; it was about proving that truth is powerless and that lies, if repeated loudly enough, can create their own reality.

Narrator: The final stage of Snyder’s analysis shows how Russia exported this model of political fiction to Europe and the United States, seeking to prove that democracy everywhere was a sham. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was the ultimate test case. Russia’s cyberwarfare was not just hacking; it was a sophisticated operation to exploit existing American vulnerabilities. Decades of rising inequality, the collapse of local journalism, and deep-seated racial tensions had created a fertile ground for disinformation.

Russian intelligence created thousands of fake social media accounts and targeted specific demographics with tailored propaganda. They stoked racial hatred, promoted conspiracy theories, and amplified the message of Donald Trump, a candidate whose business career had been repeatedly saved by Russian capital. Trump himself was the perfect vehicle for the politics of eternity. He was a fictional character—the successful mogul from The Apprentice—whose campaign was built on a sense of nostalgic grievance and the promise of returning to a mythical, innocent past. Russia’s goal was not just to elect a preferred candidate, but to shatter Americans' faith in their own democratic process, proving that their system was just as corrupt and fictional as Russia's.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Road to Unfreedom is that democracy is not an endpoint, but a constant, fragile practice that depends on a shared commitment to truth. The road to unfreedom is the journey from the politics of inevitability—the lazy assumption that the future will take care of itself—to the politics of eternity, where a manufactured, crisis-ridden present is designed to last forever.

Snyder’s work is a chilling diagnosis of our times, but it is also a call to action. It challenges us to recognize that the virtues of equality, individuality, and truth are not guaranteed. They must be actively defended. The most challenging idea is that the greatest threat is not just a foreign adversary, but our own vulnerability to the fictions they sell. The ultimate question Snyder leaves us with is this: Are we willing to do the hard work of investigating facts, rebuilding institutions, and bridging our divisions to reclaim a politics of responsibility, or will we continue down the road to unfreedom, lost in a maze of lies?