If we are to believe Timothy Snyder, Russia's President Vladimir Putin should be placed in the same company with some twentieth century dictators, particularly Josef Stalin.
By profession Snyder is an historian, but what he writes in the New York Review of Books under the title "Putin's New Nostalgia" is not the mind of scholar at work. Rather, Snyder again demonstrates that he is actually worse than most western journalists writing about Russia and its role the world stage.
Snyder should know better.
Putin said something to a group of historians that rattled Snyder's cage: "The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, 'Oh, how bad.' But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?"
Indeed, Europe's two great totalitarian regimes joined in a temporary alliance and divided Eastern Europe among themselves.
It is common to come across the description of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as "immoral," but realistically it should have been expected. This is how realpolitik works. States are not moral institutions, but they do have geopolitical interests. After all, Washington and its allies secretly plot and fund the overthrow of governments,some democratically elected like in Ukraine, as a matter of course – very much like the Secret Protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact!
Let's recall real history and not Snyder's malpractice of it: Stalin very much wanted to make a security agreement with Britain and France. The Soviet Union understood very well Nazi Germany's territorial ambitions in Europe and it did not want to face Hitler alone. But the west resisted and hesitated.
Stalin didn't want a deal with Hitler, but at the same time he sought security guarantees and Hitler made an offer. Stalin only bought some time before the Nazi juggernaut destroyed a great part of the Soviet Union and inflicted unprecedented human losses. Stalin thought in terms of national security (and personal aggrandizement), morality was hardly a concern for him.
If we assume there is a moral dimension to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact as an historical event, then Snyder draws the wrong conclusion when he interprets Putin's words when he writes, "What it is about rapprochement with Nazi Germany that is so appealing just at the present moment?"
If Snyder took a moment to read some of Putin's speeches, he would learn Putin's Russia does not have any affinity with anything remotely do to with fascism. (At the same time Snyder and the U.S. State Department have no problem "palling around" with fascists in Ukraine).
Actually, what Russia sees (back then and today) is the West breaking international law, trampling on its own principles and gross hypocrisy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was only possible because of the west's cowardly behavior handing Hitler Czechoslovakia (aka "Munich Appeasement") on a silver platter a year earlier. Stalin's Soviet Union only participated in the carve-up of Eastern European later when the West would no longer honor its legal and moral commitments to its allies. When the international order collapsed, it was a free for all. Sadly this state of affairs witnessed small and weak states suffer greatly.
It should be remembered that the inter-war Europe the state system was weak and the Western powers that designed the geopolitical system for the continent in the wake of the First World War ultimately were uninterested in defending it when Germany felt strong enough to shred the terribly unfair Versailles Treaty.
While Germany was tearing up treaties, Stalin watched the western powers sign off on the destruction of the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia. Does Snyder find this historic event immoral? Can Snyder see how Stalin saw Western behavior and drew the conclusion trusting the West was a pipe dream?
Then there is Ukraine. Russia has watched the west under the leadership of Washington invade, bomb, drone, and destroy one country after another in the MiddleEast. All of this has been done in the name of democracy and security. The same strategy and rhetoric have been practiced on Ukraine. The results have been horrific.
The West's participation in the overthrow of a democratic government in Kiev is unconscionable. But why speak of morality? This is statecraft and geopolitics.Washington's neocons (and presumably Timothy Snyder) are overwhelmed with their good fortune. Ukraine is in crisis and the Russians will bleed for years coping with a failed state on its border.
Snyder's cynicism would be understood and welcomed by Stalin. Both appear to be cut from the same intellectual (and moral?) cloth.
Snyder's antipathy toward Russia is well known. Why does he dress it in empty and ahistorical moralism?
He should finally make up his mind whether he is a scholar or a hack.
