Snyder was born on August 18, 1969,[6] in the Dayton, Ohio, area, the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian.[7] Snyder's parents were married in a Quaker ceremony in 1963 in Ohio, and his mother was active in preserving her family farmstead as a Quaker historic site. Snyder attended Centerville High School. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science from Brown University and his doctor of philosophy degree in modern history in 1995 at the University of Oxford while under the supervision of Timothy Garton Ash and Jerzy Jedlicki. He was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.[8][9][10]
He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[14] On September 25, 2020, he was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent group monitoring Facebook.[15]
He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.[16]
Snyder has written fifteen books and co-edited two. Snyder speaks five European languages and reads ten, enabling easier use of primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe during his research.[18] Snyder has stressed that knowing other languages is very important for his field, saying "If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing."[19]
In 2010, Snyder published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It was a best seller[25] and has been translated into 30 languages.[26][16] In an interview with Slovene historian Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič in 2016, Snyder described the book as an attempt to overcome the limitations of national history in explaining the political crimes perpetrated in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s:
The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn't noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time. The question of the book was: 'How this could have happened?' We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.[27]
Bloodlands received reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous".[28][29] In assessing these reviews, Jacques Sémelin described it as one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history".[29] Sémelin noted that some historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors.[29]Omer Bartov wrote that "the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments",[30] and in a highly critical review Richard Evans wrote that, because of its lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use", and that Snyder "hasn't really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler's Germany", which "leads him into error in a number of places" regarding the politics of Nazi Germany.[31] On the other hand, Wendy Lower wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis",[32]John Connelly called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre",[33] and Christopher Browning described it as "stunning".[28] The journal Contemporary European History published a special forum on the book in 2012, featuring reviews by Mark Mazower, Dan Diner, Thomas Kühne, and Jörg Baberowski, as well as an introduction and response by Snyder.[34]
Later works
Snyder's 2012 book Thinking the Twentieth Century was co-authored with Tony Judt while Judt was in the late stages of ALS disease. The book is based primarily on material by Judt, edited by Snyder. It presents Judt's view on the history of the twentieth century.[35][36]
Timothy Snyder in conversation with Stephen Norris discussing and signing On Freedom, Cincinnati, 17 October, 2024
In 2017, he published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a short book about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny, with a focus on modern United States politics and on what he called "America's turn towards authoritarianism".[38][39] The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017[25] and remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021.[40][41]On Tyranny has been featured in a rap song[42] and in poster exhibitions.[43][44]
Although primarily a scholar of twentieth century Eastern European history, in the mid-2010s Snyder became interested in U.S. history, contemporary politics, international relations, digital politics, health, and education. He has said that the defunding of departments of history and the humanities since the supposed post-Soviet end of history have led to a society without the "concepts and references" or structural tools to discuss eroding factors such as modern forms of populism.[53] In interviews with The Guardian for the article "Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times",[39] Snyder described history as "a constant, exciting discovery of things that actually happened, which weren't anticipated and which were probably considered wildly improbable at the time. (…) And once you know that, then you can have the intuition that, well, maybe in this moment right now there's something happening which people aren't seeing." Drawing on the lessons of European history, Snyder brought into American political discussion the terms big lie, in reference to Donald Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election,[54][55][56] and memory laws, to describe Republican state legislators' bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past, in some cases affirming free speech while banning divisive speech.[57][58]
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the bombing of its energy infrastructure, Snyder has spoken and written widely on the history of Ukraine and its worldwide importance for democracy, on the disastrous geopolitical effects of the invasion, and on the need for other nations and individuals to stand for the protection of territory belonging to that state. Snyder has said "The fact that we have democracies at all is kind of remarkable", that democracy means that "the people have to rule, and they have to want to rule", warning against reliance on larger historical forces to bring democracy about.[59]
Snyder launched a $1.25m crowdfunding to upgrade Ukraine's air defense.[60][61] According to Snyder, the only way to end the war is for Putin's Russia to "win by losing", because only if Ukraine wins will it be possible for the dictator to leave the scene, and for the country to start a democratic process that will benefit Russia itself. Snyder is on the list of 200 Americans barred from entering Russian territory, under sanctions announced by the Russian government in November 2022.[62]
In 2015, Snyder delivered a series of lectures in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Kharkiv. The lectures, which were delivered in Ukrainian, were open to the public and focused on Snyder's historical research as well as the contemporary political situation in Ukraine.[63]
In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder argues that Vladimir Putin's government in Russia is authoritarian, and that it uses fascist ideas in its rhetoric.[64] In December 2018, during a discussion with a fellow historian of Eastern Europe, John Connelly, Snyder referred to this as schizo-fascism:
fascist ideas have come to Russia at a historical moment, three generations after the Second World War, when it's impossible for Russians to think of themselves as fascist. The entire meaning of the war in Soviet education was as an anti-fascist struggle, where the Russians are on the side of the good and the fascists are the enemy. So there's this odd business, which I call in the book "schizo-fascism", where people who are themselves unambiguously fascists refer to others as fascists.[65]
On June 20, 2017, a discussion on Germany's historical responsibility toward Ukraine was held in the German Parliament.
Snyder has drawn the parallel between Hitler's rationale for territorial expansion and that of Putin. He predicted Russia's invasion of Crimea, outlining specific threats of an invasion in the New York Times op-ed "Don't Let Putin Grab Ukraine" on February 3, 2014, and said that Putin's rhetoric resembles Hitler's to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.[66]
On March 14, 2023, Snyder briefed the United Nations Security Council in a meeting called by Russia to address Russophobia. Snyder said that the term "Russophobia" was used by Russia to justify its war crimes in Ukraine, and that harm done to Russians and Russian culture is primarily due to Moscow's own policies and actions, which resulted in driving Russian emigration following the invasion, suppression of independent media, attacks on cultural assets and landmarks, and mass killings of Russian speakers and citizens. After he was challenged by the Russian representative, Vasily Nebenzya, for sources, Snyder referred to Putin's statements denying the existence of Ukraine.[68]
Views on Ukraine
Snyder has written six books on Ukraine[69] and in 2022, to explain the origins and course of the Russo-Ukrainian war, he made his Yale lecture series The Making of Modern Ukraine available to the general public on YouTube[70] and as a podcast series[71] along with the syllabus and reading list.[72] The course had been viewed by millions by November 2022.[73] He has spoken[74] and written about the war in the press and he publishes history and commentary on his Substack platform as "Thinking About…"[75]
Olena Zelenska, First Lady of Ukraine, met with Snyder to discuss the mental health and resilience of Ukrainians at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting in September 2023.[76]
Views on Donald Trump
Asked in early 2017 how the agenda of the Trump administration compared with Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Snyder said that history "does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance".[77] Elaborating in 2021 on the resonance of Nazi history within Donald Trump's claim to a landslide victory, Snyder recalled the German Reich's "stab in the back" lie that its army did not really lose the First World War, but rather, Jews and left-wingers betrayed "true Germans" on the home front, leading to defeat. This lie, when repeated and expanded by Hitler to a claim that Jews were responsible for everything that is wrong, fueled anti-Semitism and led to the Holocaust.[78] Trump's "big lie" tears the very fabric of factuality, said Snyder, echoing Hannah Arendt, by denying verifiable reality and forcing believers to accept an illogical premise that Democrats rigged the 2020 election only for the presidency and not for members of Congress. It requires adoption of a conspiracy theory in which everyone is against the believer, and the high stakes of the lie demand action including violence.[79]
In a May 2017 interview with Salon, he warned that the Trump administration would attempt to subvert democracy by declaring a state of emergency and take full control of the government, similar to Hitler's Reichstag fire: "it's pretty much inevitable that they will try".[80] He repeated the warning in Commonweal on November 2, 2020: "The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power some other way."[81] According to Snyder, "Trump's campaign for president of the United States was basically a Russian operation."[82] Snyder also warned that Trump's lies would lead to tyranny, as democracy is impossible in a society divided between true believers and everyone else, asserting that the only cure is truth.[82][83]
In January 2021 Snyder published an essay in The New York Times on the future of the GOP in response to the siege of the United States Capitol, blaming Trump and his "enablers", Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, for the insurrection fueled by their claims of election fraud, writing that "the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump's big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact, he observed, a big lie can survive the liar, and in the case of Cruz and Hawley, it expresses a wish for Trump's political death."[84][85]
Snyder’s September 2024 essay Trump’s Hitlerian Month explains that the American taboo on comparisons with Hitler functions as a shield for perpetrators.[86] He argues affirmatively for invoking the past: "Democracy… depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past….’Never again’ is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.” He analyzes Trump’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric and statements about the country’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.” By implying that Zelens’kyi himself, rather than American arms manufacturers, gets the money and avoiding reference to personal courage shown in the face of Russian aggression and war crimes, says Snyder, Trump suggests that the war and Zelens’kyi’s role in it are a scam and invokes stereotypes that Jews are cowards, never fight wars, stay away from the front, cause wars that make other people suffer, and then make vast amounts of money from those wars. Trump’s statement that if he were to lose in 2024, "Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss,”[87] in Snyder’s view, also echoes Nazi propaganda themes: Jews must be singled out as a group, must pass a loyalty test, have unusual powers, make a left-center coalition illegitimate, and stab you in the back.
Views on threats to democracy and pursuit of freedom
Snyder's book, On Freedom, launched September 17, 2024, answers questions asked of him by readers of On Tyranny, "What exactly is that good thing that you're defending, what is the opposite of tyranny?" In the book, he asserts that Americans tend to think of freedom as absence of something, the removal of occupation, oppression, or even government. While agreeing with the need to remove bad systems, Snyder offers a positive notion of freedom that puts the focus on human aspirations, values and how these can be realized in the world, also explaining how proper notions of freedom allow good government to exist.[88][89]
Snyder responds to media questions about democracy’s connection to the 2024 kitchen-table concerns of voters in his essay Autocracy and Poverty, offering Russian and Hungarian illustrations of law bending and law breaking to the benefit of a few and the detriment of most. A Trump-Vance electoral win would destroy the American economy, he predicts, as the result of Project 2025 and other campaign promises including the firing of forty thousand federal employees who execute federal laws. Outcomes potentially resulting from an autocratic regime, says Snyder, are an end to taxes on the very rich with increases for the middle class, bank collapse in the absence of financial regulation with bailout subsidized by average taxpayers, loss of Social Security and other benefits dependent upon a functioning federal bureaucracy, stock market crash absent uniform enforcement of laws preventing insider trading and other abuses, and job loss from the failure of businesses dependent on interactions with the federal government.[90]
In an essay Fantasy-Impotence-Fascism: The Trump-Vance Political Theory[91] and interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark,[92] Snyder describes how the Springfield pet eating hoax and other fascist lies are used to turn Americans on each other and combine with actual powerlessness and highly performative masculinity on the part of leaders. Snyder’s characterization of the Trump-Vance ethos is: “I'm not actually going to do anything. I'm going to fail at everything, but I'm going to be large while I'm failing.” He contrasts Project 2025 calls for the expulsion of civil servants who know how to keep things working with good government efforts to promote progress, stability, and prosperity.
In the first chapter of his book On Tyranny, Snyder elaborates "vorauseilende Gehorsam," the concept of obedience that hurries out ahead, dating from 1933 Germany[93] and expressed most clearly in public haste to comply with Hitler shortly after his election, enabling him to seize additional powers, and during the 1938 Anschluss when Austrians were quicker to accommodate the joining of their country to Germany than even Hitler himself expected. Snyder’s formulation of “anticipatory obedience” and the exhortation: “Do not obey in advance” have become part of international discourse. Says Snyder: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given…In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Following decisions by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from endorsement of a presidential candidate including the Post’s refusal to publish already drafted remarks[94] on the same day that Donald Trump spoke with leaders of Jeff Bezos-owned aerospace company Blue Origin,[95] many news outlets, historians, lawyers, political strategists and commentators employed Snyder’s words to explain the decisions. Snyder also applied the concept of anticipatory obedience to the Naval Academy’s disinvitation of pro-democracy historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat to lecture there on the topic of armed forces under authoritarian rule.[96] Among publications citing Snyder were The Baltimore Banner, The Bulwark (website), The Columbia Journalism Review, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Salon; individuals crediting him for their understanding of media outlet decisions not to endorse Kamala Harris and the threats to democracy they signal include Ian Bassin, Andy Borowitz, Dahlia Lithwick, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Jonathan V. Last, Tim Miller, Maximillian Potter, Heather Cox Richardson, Charlie Sykes, and Mary Trump.[97][98][99][100]
Snyder likened NBC's pre-2024 election hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to the anticipatory obedience he described in his book On Tyranny: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked." In an interview with NBC's sister station MSNBC, he cited McDaniel's role in trying to disassemble our democracy and said: “What NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ’24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down,’" adding, "If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them."[101]
On April 10, 2024, Snyder joined with over 35 musicians, actors, thinkers, historians, entrepreneurs, and diplomats in an appeal[102] to Congress for aid to Ukraine in defense of democracy and in the fight “for our safety and for everyone’s freedom.” The open letter states that Ukrainian resistance to Russian dictatorship protects the international order, makes other wars in Europe impossible, and supports American interests, deterring China without provoking Beijing.
In response to a request from the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Timothy Snyder provided written and oral testimony[103][104] for the April 17, 2024, session: “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part I.” Snyder urged Congress to understand political warfare as "someone else trying to get you to do something you ought not to." He emphasized the role Americans play in the efforts of hostile foreign powers to exploit domestic weaknesses using divisive propaganda intended to show that democracy is impotent, hypocritical, and not worth defending. These messages are successful only when echoed by politicians, billionaires and other citizens, some unknowingly, but against their own self-interest. Financial vulnerability of politicians is an opening for psychological operations by hostile actors as it renders targets susceptible to manipulation by their foreign patrons. Political warfare conducted by authoritarian regimes where corruption is normal promotes messages that aim to normalize corruption externally in America and elsewhere.
Snyder asserted the centrality of the war in Ukraine to the general problem of political warfare. In this war, international order, the reputation of democracy and alliance structures are all at stake. While Americans may not see the connections, Beijing and Taiwan are clear that Ukraine’s self-defense deters Chinese aggression in the Pacific.[105] He described the increasing conformity of Chinese propaganda methods and themes with those used by Russian disinformation campaigns designed to promote American inaction and interfere with elections, backing candidates most likely to support authoritarian regimes. Common tropes in the Russian information war against Ukraine are: Ukrainians are Nazis, the Ukraine war is all about NATO enlargement, Ukraine is corrupt, democracy is powerless to do anything about Ukraine, Americans should pay attention to the border and not do anything about Ukraine, and Joseph Biden has accepted bribes.[106]
In written testimony and during the oral hearings, Snyder and members of Congress gave examples of Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump publicly promoting foreign propaganda tropes. Snyder responded directly to Greene’s oral testimony suggesting significant Nazi influence in Ukraine with the fact that no far-right party in Ukraine has ever gotten more than 3% of a national vote.[107] Snyder explained that availability of propaganda memes and messages from outlets like X (Twitter) obviates the need for direct contact between the Americans who spread them and the foreign actors and their media outlets who source them originally. When government or self-policing of hostile foreign propaganda by social media has been attempted, it is successful, but X (Twitter), notably, has refused to self-regulate.[108]
Personal life
In 1994, Snyder married fellow academic Milada Vachudova, with whom he also collaborated on scholarly work.[109][110] Snyder's second marriage was in 2005 to Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. The couple have two children together and reside in New Haven, Connecticut.[111][112]
In December 2019, Snyder fell seriously ill following a series of medical misdiagnoses. While recuperating through the coronavirus pandemic he wrote Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, about the problems of the for-profit health care system in the USA, and the coronavirus response so far.[55][113]
Charity
On November 2, 2022, Timothy Snyder became the tenth ambassador of UNITED24,[114] where he completed a fundraiser to collect donations for a system to counter Russian unmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine, thereby protecting Ukraine's critical infrastructure.[39][115] On August 18, 2024, joined by Mark Hamill, he launched the United24 Safe Terrain Initiative funding mine clearing robots to rid Ukrainian lands of explosive ordnance, reduce risks for sappers, and allow people to return to their businesses and farms.[116][117]
Through the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, he leads the "Documenting Ukraine" project to support journalists, scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and archivists based in Ukraine in their efforts to create a factual record of the war.[118]
Starting in November 2023, Snyder began leading 90 scholars in the "Ukrainian History Global Initiative" to study Ukraine and its history. The initiative is a charitable foundation that will include disciplines beyond history and sponsor three major academic conferences, various publications, and archaeological excavations.[119][120]
Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Co-edited with Peter Andreas. ISBN978-0-7425-0178-2
^"Timothy David Snyder". Academic Board V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. November 2, 2022. Archived from the original on October 8, 2024. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
^Котвіцька (Kotvitska), Катерина (Каterina). "Історія для майбутнього" [History for the future]. Україна Молода (Ukraine Young) (in Ukrainian). Retrieved December 22, 2021.
^Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak: The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Ukraine. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Ed. Jens Rydgren). Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 862, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.30.
^"Marriages/Unions"(PDF). Friends Journal. Vol. 41, no. 3. March 1995. p. 38. Archived from the original(PDF) on May 21, 2023.
^Vachudová, Milada Anna; Snyder, Tim (1996). "Are Transitions Transitory? Two Types of Political Change in Eastern Europe Since 1989". East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures. 11 (1): 1–35. doi:10.1177/0888325497011001001. ISSN0888-3254.
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