Тимоти Дэвид Снайдер «The Road to Unfreedom»

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Автор Тимоти Дэвид Снайдер

Published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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TIM DUGGAN BOOKS and the Crown colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Hardcover ISBN 9780525574460

Ebook ISBN 9780525574484

International Edition ISBN 9780525575405

Cover design by Christopher Brand

Maps by Beehive Mapping

This page: photo of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin c. 1917: Universal History Archive/Getty Images; (right) photo of Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin c. 1920: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

This page: image of two flags: Konstantinks/Getty Images

v5. 2

For the reporters, the heroes of our time

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE INDIVIDUALISM OR TOTALITARIANISM

CHAPTER TWO SUCCESSION OR FAILURE

CHAPTER THREE INTEGRATION OR EMPIRE

CHAPTER FOUR NOVELTY OR ETERNITY

CHAPTER FIVE TRUTH OR LIES

CHAPTER SIX EQUALITY OR OLIGARCHY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

PROLOGUE (2010)

My son was born in Vienna. It was a difficult delivery, and the first concern of the Austrian obstetrician and the Polish midwife was the baby. He breathed, his mother held him for a moment, and then she was wheeled to an operating room. The midwife, Ewa, handed him to me. My son and I were a bit lost in what happened next, but we stuck together. He was looking upward with unfocused violet eyes as the surgeons ran past us at a dead sprint, footfalls and snaps of masks, a blur of green scrubs.

The next day all seemed well. The nurses instructed me to depart the ward at the normal time, five o’clock in the afternoon, leaving mother and child in their care until the morning.

I could now, a little belatedly, send out a birth announcement by email. Some friends read the good news at the same moment that they learned of a catastrophe that took the lives of others. One friend, a fellow scholar whom I had met in Vienna in a different century, had rushed to board an airplane in Warsaw. My message went out at the speed of light, but it never caught up to him.

—

The year 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.

I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.