Five Questions with Professor Timothy Snyder, Author of On Tyranny

Joyce Vance Jan 25 ∙

You have probably seen Professor Timothy Snyder being interviewed on cable TV or read his seminal book, On Tyranny. Last week, I was fortunate enough to listen in on a talk Tim gave. In it, he mentioned the idea of having a shadow cabinet for Trump 2.0, but didn’t go into detail. I was intrigued by the idea and asked him to be our guest tonight so we could learn more about it together.

Tim is currently on leave from Yale where he is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, where he will begin teaching in the fall. He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the head of the academic advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative. A scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder speaks five and reads 10 European languages.

In On Tyranny, he provided a set of instructions for fighting back against autocracy, including “Do not obey in advance” and “Believe in truth.” They are rules for keeping a republic, and if you haven’t already read the book and his more recent work, On Freedom, they are balm for the soul right now.

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