The book then ends with a plea for us all to be nice to each other. He then unloads a lot of information about Russian and Ukrainian history, before moving onto detail Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and then finishing as an attack on Donald Trump, with a few jabs at Brexit along the way. He begins with an explanation of the influence of Ivan Ilyin on Russian political thought. Snyder contrasts what he calls the politics of eternity versus the politics of inevitability. The book is also awkwardly structured and slightly frustrating, with interesting content interspersed with information dumps and many bold and unsupported assertions. Well that’s just a little bit obvious, because the different parts of the book don’t gel at all. In the acknowledgements, Timothy Snyder says that he intended to write a book about Russia and Ukraine, but then decided that the story was also about the UK and the US as well. Unfortunately, some of the ideas are much better thought through than others and the author knows much more about some of the subject areas he covers (Russia, Ukraine) than others (the EU, Brexit). It actually feels like it’s based on ideas for three or four different books – or more likely three or four different articles – that have been uncomfortably cobbled together into one. The Road to Unfreedom is an awkward and ungainly book with an appropriately awkward title.
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