Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 9: East European Dissident Thought

The victorious Soviet Union extended its empire westward after the Second World War. In addition to adding to its own territory, it created satellite regimes in much of eastern and central Europe. In both the Soviet Union and in central and eastern Europe, the death of Stalin in 1953 was a turning point, opening up the apparent possibility of revisiting Marxism; after 1968 and the Soviet (Warsaw Pact) invasion of Czechoslovakia this avenue was closed. In the 1970s and 1980s dissidents sought to redefine freedom as the daily practice of values, and saw small truths as shelters from the big lies in which no one really believed any longer. The "post-totalitarian" or the "post-ideological" or the "anti-political" approach offered tools and enabled meaningful resistance in the form of solidarity and civil society, as well as concepts that apply just as well to our own predicaments as to theirs. Readings: • Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, London: Vintage, 2018 (1978) • Leszek Kołakowski, "In praise of inconsistency," 1958. • Snyder, Bloodlands, 379-408. --- Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. 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. To see other videos in this course, please click on this playlist link: https://bit.ly/3SLpx4d Follow Professor Snyder: snyder.substack.com @timothydsnyder (Twitter/X; BlueSky & TikTok) @thetimothysnyder (Instagram) Learn more about the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/