The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I think often about the historians who, decades or centuries hence, will make sense of the moment we experience now. What will we leave behind that they will be able to read? “Information” in the digital sense is infinite, knowledge ever scarcer, and wisdom fleeting. I expect that the prose of honest investigative journalists, perhaps even in paper form, will provide a starting point. Certainly my own very contemporary history depends heavily on reporters who took risks to understand. The Road to Unfreedom is dedicated to them.

At a certain point, I thought I was close to finishing a book about contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, only to realize that its subject was much more British and American than I had thought. Research on the Russian and Ukrainian aspects was supported by a Carnegie Fellowship. At the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna in 2013–2014, I learned from Ukrainian and Russian colleagues, and from the directors of the program “Ukraine in European Dialogue,” Kate Younger and Tatiana Zhurzhenko. I owe a great deal to exchanges among my colleagues Krzysztof Czyżewski, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and the late Leonidas Donskis at a summer school that took place at the Borderland Foundation in Krasnogruda, Poland, in 2016.

In late 2016, I wrote a political pamphlet called On Tyranny and spent much of 2017 discussing American politics with Americans (and trying to explain America to Europeans, while reminding Europeans of the basic similarity of certain problems). Many of the concepts developed here arose in these public discussions. Since I was speaking constantly between the publication of that book and this one, I cannot acknowledge each forum: but I can acknowledge that I was inspired to think by others’ determination to work. Throughout this busy and complex time, I have been very fortunate to have the support of my agent, Tina Bennett, and my editor, Tim Duggan.

This book was begun in Vienna and revised in Krasnogruda, but it was completed in New Haven, Connecticut. It was in preparation for a discussion with undergraduate students at Yale, at a lecture organized by Declan Kunkel, that I thought of the concepts of “inevitability” and “eternity” that frame the argument of his book. I thank Yale’s Department of History, Jackson Institute, and MacMillan Center for a perfect setting for thought and writing. My extraordinary assistant Sara Silverstein created the environment, intellectual and logistical, in which my work of these last three years could be accomplished. I wish her happiness and success as she continues her career as a historian at the University of Connecticut.

I had the assistance of a fabulous group of researchers: Tory Burnside Clapp, Max Landau, Julie Leighton, Ola Morehead, Anastasiya Novotorskaya, David Shimer, and Maria Teteriuk. Friends and colleagues were kind enough to read chapters. They include Dwayne Betts, Susan Ferber, Jörg Hensgen, Dina Khapaeva, Nikolay Koposov, Daniel Markovits, Paweł Pieniążek, Anton Shekhovtsov, Jason Stanley, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Andreas Umland. Oxana Mikhaevna shared with me transcripts of interviews with Ukrainian separatists and Russian volunteers fighting in eastern Ukraine. Max Trudolyubov and Ivan Krastev got me thinking about the ideas that became chapters 1 and 2. Paul Bushkovitch kindly shared thoughts about the history of succession in Russia, and Izabela Kalinowska helped me to see connections between contemporary and classical Russian culture. In their own encounter, Nataliya Gumenyuk and Christine Hadley Snyder helped me see connections between Ukrainian and American preoccupations.

I would not have become the historian who wrote this book without my doctoral supervisor, Jerzy Jedlicki (1930–2018), who died as I was writing these final lines. He survived the worst of the tyrannies of the twentieth century and became an exemplar of an east European historiography that was both rigidly analytical and morally engaged. He was one of the few in Poland or elsewhere to be completely untouched by what I call here the politics of inevitability. It grieves me that we will not discuss this book in his Warsaw apartment.

My debts to Marci Shore are many and grow by the day; here they are chiefly philosophical.

Responsibility for this book and for its flaws is my own.