Narrator: Imagine a moment where personal joy collides with national tragedy. In April 2010, historian Timothy Snyder sent out an email announcing the birth of his son. The replies that came back were a mix of congratulations and condolences. In the time it took for his message to travel across the Atlantic, a plane carrying the Polish president and much of the country's political and military elite had crashed in Smolensk, Russia, killing everyone on board. A friend wrote back, "Your happiness amidst unhappiness." Another, sensing the gravity of the crash, simply said, "Henceforth everything will be different." This single event, a tragedy wrapped in conspiracy and political maneuvering, was a dark omen of a world slipping from one sense of time into another—a world where the future was no longer a promise of progress, but a cyclical trap of victimhood and myth.

In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder argues that this shift was not an accident. He reveals how a new form of authoritarianism, born in Russia, was exported to Europe and America, threatening the very foundations of democratic societies. The book is a guide to understanding how we got here, connecting the dots between Russian kleptocracy, the invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump.

Narrator: Snyder begins by diagnosing two dangerous political mindsets that have defined the 21st century. The first is the "politics of inevitability." This is the comfortable belief, popular in the West after the Cold War, that history has a clear direction—that the expansion of free markets and liberal democracy is a natural, unstoppable force. This narrative suggests there are no alternatives, which encourages passivity. If the future is guaranteed, why take responsibility for the present? Snyder argues this mindset led directly to staggering inequality, as the market was treated as a substitute for policy, allowing oligarchs to rise in both Russia and the West.

When the politics of inevitability fails, as it did with the 2008 financial crisis, a more sinister alternative emerges: the "politics of eternity." This worldview rejects progress and traps citizens in a cyclical myth of national innocence and perpetual victimhood. A strongman leader emerges, not to guide the country to a better future, but to protect it from eternal threats. History is no longer a source of lessons, but a grab-bag of myths to be weaponized. In this world, facts don't matter, only loyalty to the leader and the national story. Russia, Snyder shows, became the master of this dark art.

Narrator: To build his politics of eternity, Vladimir Putin needed an ideological blueprint. He found it in the works of a forgotten Russian fascist philosopher named Ivan Ilyin. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922, Ilyin admired Mussolini and Hitler, believing Russia needed a "redeemer" to save it from a decadent and conspiratorial world. For Ilyin, individuality was evil; the goal was a totalitarian state where all citizens thought and felt as one, mystically connected to their leader. He believed Russia's destiny was to be an innocent, spiritual empire, perpetually at war with its enemies.

Starting in the mid-2000s, Putin began to resurrect Ilyin. He arranged for the philosopher's reburial in Moscow, cited him in major speeches, and had his books distributed to state officials. Ilyin’s ideas provided the perfect justification for Putin's regime. It allowed him to frame his kleptocracy not as theft, but as a defense of Russian civilization. It justified the invasion of Ukraine by claiming it was not a sovereign nation but an inseparable part of a "Russian world." And it transformed domestic opposition from a call for rights into an act of treason orchestrated by foreign enemies. Ilyin’s Christian fascism became the Kremlin’s official, if unstated, ideology.

Narrator: Once Russia had perfected its model of unfreedom at home, it began to export it. The goal was not to make other countries exactly like Russia, but to weaken and destabilize them, particularly the European Union and the United States. Snyder calls this "strategic relativism"—the idea that if you can't get stronger, you can gain power by making your rivals weaker. The primary weapon in this hybrid war was information, or rather, disinformation.

The playbook was tested and refined. Russia funded and promoted far-right political parties across Europe, from Marine Le Pen's National Front in France to Nigel Farage's UKIP in Britain. It used state-controlled media like RT to amplify their messages, casting the EU as a decadent, failing project. A key tactic was exploiting social divisions. For instance, Russia launched a global campaign against gay rights, framing it as a defense of "traditional values." This allowed them to build an unlikely coalition of the European far-right, American evangelicals, and social conservatives, all united against a supposed "global sodomite conspiracy." The 2016 "Lisa F." affair in Germany provided a stark example. Russian media fabricated a story about a Russian-German girl being raped by Muslim refugees, sparking protests, fueling anti-immigrant rage, and directly undermining Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Narrator: The war in Ukraine, which began in 2014, was the ultimate expression of Russia's politics of eternity. When Ukrainians took to the streets in the Maidan Revolution, demanding a future in Europe and an end to corruption, the Kremlin saw it as an existential threat. It was an act of novelty and self-determination that broke the eternal myth of Russian-Ukrainian unity.

Russia's response was a masterclass in political fiction. Putin claimed the Maidan was a "fascist coup" orchestrated by the West. This was what Snyder terms "schizofascism"—a regime espousing fascist ideas while labeling its opponents as fascists. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, staging a sham referendum where the only options were to join Russia. In eastern Ukraine, it deployed soldiers without insignia, using "reverse asymmetry" to make a conventional invasion look like a local rebellion. They deliberately provoked violence to create martyrs for their cause, then used Russian television to blame Ukraine, trapping locals in a cycle of outrage and revenge. The goal was to create a "frozen conflict" that would permanently destabilize Ukraine and prevent its integration with the West.

Narrator: The 2016 U.S. election was the culmination of Russia's strategy. America's own vulnerabilities—extreme inequality, political polarization, and a media landscape ripe for manipulation—made it a prime target. The central character in this drama was Donald Trump, a figure who seemed tailor-made for Russia's purposes. After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump was a pariah to American banks, but he found a lifeline in Russian capital, much of it laundered through his real estate projects. He was, in effect, a Russian asset long before he ran for president.

His public persona was a fiction created by the television show The Apprentice, which portrayed him as a decisive business mogul. Russia’s cyber campaign worked to merge this fictional character with political reality. Using thousands of fake social media accounts and bots, Russia’s Internet Research Agency targeted American voters with divisive propaganda, amplifying racial tensions and spreading conspiracy theories. They hacked the emails of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, strategically leaking them to create chaos and distract from Trump's own scandals. Trump himself adopted the politics of eternity, promising to "Make America Great Again" by returning to a mythical, racially pure past. His constant lying mirrored Russian tactics, eroding the very concept of objective truth. His victory was a victory for oligarchy, both American and Russian, and a devastating blow to American democracy.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Road to Unfreedom is that democracy is not a destination; it is a practice. It is not guaranteed by history or economics, and it can be undone when citizens succumb to the alluring fictions of inevitability or eternity. Snyder shows that the path to unfreedom is paved with lies that justify inequality, myths that celebrate victimhood, and the cynical belief that truth is irrelevant.

The book's challenge is to recognize that these forces are not confined to Russia. They are present in every society where facts are contested, where history is manipulated, and where citizens are encouraged to see each other as enemies rather than equals. To resist this road to unfreedom, we must choose a politics of responsibility—one grounded in the hard work of understanding our own history, defending the institutions that support truth, and recognizing that the future is not written for us, but by us.