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ZOMBIE HISTORY
Timothy Snyder’s bleak vision of the past and present
by SOPHIE PINKHAM
T
imothy Snyder is a Yale historian
whose scholarly reputation rests on
his wide-ranging histories of Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe. Trained
at Oxford, Snyder demonstrated a
capacity for research in some 10 languages
and a willingness to engage with many dif-
ferent areas of specialization; his colorful
prose increased his work’s potential appeal
for nonacademic readers, as did his abil-
ity to cover large swaths of territory and
time. His most important early work, The
Reconstruction of Nations, mapped the devel-
opment of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian,
and Belarusian nationhood from 1569 to
1999, and was met with wide acclaim from
academic reviewers.
Capitalizing on his credentials as a his-
torian, over the past decade Snyder has
positioned himself as a public intellectual,
shifting from academic histories to morepopular works, writing for magazines like
The New Republic and The New York Review
of Books, and appearing often on the national
and international speaking circuits. His first
popular success was 2010’s Bloodlands: Eu-
rope Between Hitler and Stalin, which set out
to tell the story of the millions of people—
especially Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles—Sophie Pinkham is the author of Black Square:
Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She is
completing a dissertation at Columbia University
on contemporary Russia’s search for a national idea.
The Road to Unfreedom
Russia, Europe, America
By Timothy Snyder
Tim Duggan Books. 352 pp. $27ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON