Several months ago I downloaded from Apple a free sample of the 2018 book by Timothy Snyder titled The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. On television I had seen Professor Snyder being interviewed about the topic of his latest book, and I had previously been engrossed by excerpts from his earlier works. But reading through the free sample of the first chapter my eyes glazed over. That first impression was wrong; I would now like to be an evangelist for The Road to Unfreedom.
My change of heart started with the latest issue of the PennStater alumni magazine. In the latest issue the new editor has put his stamp on the PennStater with an interview of a retired Penn State history professor. The interview article is titled Defending Freedom Is Not Easy.
The PennStater article includes a sidebar with a list of books for additional reading, among them The Road to Unfreedom.
Following that recommendation, I'm rereading the Snyder book from scratch. The words fascist or fascism appear 33 times in the first chapter of The Road to Unfreedom. The name Ivan Ilyin, a fascist philosopher, appears 125 times, thus the glazing over on my first pass through that chapter. After a second pass I now appreciate that, unlike philosophers whose ideas were later distorted to justify Hitler, there is no misunderstanding Ilyin's prescription of fascism for Russia. Snyder makes the case that the Soviet Union had already entered a politics of eternity
during the Brezhnev era, which prepared Soviet citizens for Ilyin's view of the world.
The Ilyin playbook is not just about Russia. The same plays (big lies about past and present, false and eternal crises, artificial enemies, loyalty to the immoral leader) are being used in other countries. For outrageous examples in Hungary, see Hungarian Spectrum and Hungarian Free Press. Putin and Orbán, birds of a feather.
