Timothy D. Snyder

Snyder was born on August 18, 1969,[4] in the Dayton, Ohio area, the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian.[5] 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 graduated from 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, supervised by Timothy Garton Ash and Jerzy Jedlicki. He was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.[6]

Snyder has held fellowships at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris from 1994 to 1995, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1996, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University in 1997, and was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998 to 2001.

He has also been an instructor at the College of Europe Natolin Campus, the Baron Velge Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles, the Cleveringa Chair at the University of Leiden, Philippe Romain Chair at the London School of Economics, and the 2013 René Girard Lecturer at Stanford University.[7][8][9] Prior to assuming the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History, Snyder was the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University.

He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[10] On 25 September 2020, he was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group over Facebook.[11]

Snyder has written five books and co-edited two. His 2012 book Thinking the Twentieth Century was co-authored with Tony Judt while Judt was in the late stages of ALS disease.[12] sa Snyder has published essays in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, The Nation, New York Review of Books,[13] the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Eurozine, Tygodnik Powszechny, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Snyder in Lviv, Ukraine, September 2014

Snyder says that he has a reading and/or speaking knowledge of eleven European languages. This enabled him to use primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe in researching his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). 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. [14]

Bloodlands got mixed reviews.[15][16] In assessing the reviews, French historian Jacques Sémelin described it as one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history".[17] Brown University historian Omer Bartov was critical of Snyder's book, writing, "the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments."[18] In an overview of criticisms of the book, Jacques Sémelin writes that other 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.[17]

Snyder has stressed that in order to engage in such transnational history, knowing other languages is very important:

If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing. ... We can only see as much, and we can only go as far as our languages take us. I wrote this book in English, but there are very important conversations that are happening in German, Russian, Polish and so on among those historians, and the book is addressed to all of them.[19]

External video
Ukraine: From Propaganda to Reality, Chicago Humanities Festival, 57:35, November 14, 2014

Bloodlands has been translated into 20 languages.[20]

Snyder published Black Earth in 2015. The book received mixed reviews, with several harsh reviews.[15]

Snyder is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.[20]

For the academic year 2013–2014, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.[21]

Views on Putin

In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder argues that Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia is authoritarian, and that it uses fascist ideas in its rhetoric.[22] 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.[23]

On 20 June 2017, a discussion on Germany’s historical responsibility towards Ukraine was held in the German Parliament.

His view was questioned by Marlene Laruelle, Research Professor at The George Washington University: "Contrary to [Snyder's] claims, the Kremlin does not live in an ideological world inspired by Nazi Germany, but in one in which the Yalta decades, the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years, and the collapse of the Soviet Union still constitute the main historical referents and traumas."[24] Laruelle accused Snyder of "distortions, inaccuracies, and selective interpretations."[15]

Snyder teaches a two-part lecture course at Yale covering the history of Eastern Europe pre- and post-1914, a critical turning point in world affairs. In Fall 2020, he is teaching "Hitler, Stalin, and Us" using remote audio recordings. In the past he has also taught an undergraduate seminar on communism in Eastern Europe.[29]

Snyder speaks five and reads ten European languages.[30] In 2005 he married Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. They have two children together.[31] In December 2019, he fell gravely ill following a series of medical misdiagnoses. While recuperating through the coronavirus pandemic he wrote Our Malady, about the problems of the for-profit health care system in the US, and the coronavirus response so far.

• 2017 Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science,[32] the highest scientific honour in Poland
• 2015 The VIZE 97 Prize from the Václav Havel Foundation[33]
• 2015 Carnegie Fellowship[34]
• 2014 Antonovych prize[34]
• 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought[35] for Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010)
• 2012 Prakhin International Literary Award The Truth About Holocaust & Stalinist Repression for Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010)[36]
• 2012 Kazimierz Moczarski Historic Award for Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin[37]
• 2012 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding
• 2012 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters[38]
• 2011 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award by the Phi Beta Kappa Society
• Lithuanian Diplomacy Star[34]
• Polish Bene Merito honorary badge,[34]
• Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland[34]
• Estonian Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana Class III.[34]

• Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Co-edited with Peter Andreas.
• The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale University Press, 2003)
• Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale University Press, 2005)
• The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, 2008)
• Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010)
• Thinking the Twentieth Century With Tony Judt. (Penguin, 2012)
• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Penguin, 2015)
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2017) ISBN 978-0804190114
• The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Penguin, 2018)
• Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (Penguin, 2020) ISBN 9780593238899

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Timothy D. Snyder

• Official Youtube channel
• Yale University faculty page
• List of articles by Snyder in Eurozine
• "Hitler and Stalin - The Q&A: Timothy Snyder, historian". The Economist. 3 June 2011.
• On Tyranny: Yale Historian Timothy Snyder on How the U.S. Can Avoid Sliding into Authoritarianism. Interview with Democracy Now! May 30, 2017.
• Yale Historian Warns About the Rise of Tyranny in the US. Interview on Amanpour & Company February 18, 2020
• Historian Timothy Snyder warns that America is already in its own "slow-motion Reichstag Fire". Interview on Salon.