Hitler and Stalin Today: Timothy Snyder’s new U of T course explores legacy of authoritarian regimes

The idea, above all, is to help us make sense of the present. So we're bombarded with very rapid phenomena: regime changes, ideologies, the changing role of technology in politics, surprises from your southern neighbor. And as we confront all of this, I think we all may have a vague sense that some of it's happened before, or there's a way in which the past might help us, but we generally don't have time to sort that all out. So the point of this class is to make sense of the 20th century in a way that will help us in the 21st. So it's a history of Stalin, the Soviet Union. It's a history of Hitler and Germany in the broader context of a decolonizing world. It's a history of the globe in the 20th century, with particular attention to the two worst versions of what you might think of as new forms of imperial politics. And the idea is not just to have that history right. The idea is also to come to terms with some of the thinkers who emerged out of the struggle against Nazi Germany, the struggle against the Soviet Union, and the struggle against colonialism in general, with the thought that there are insights there which might help to ground us where we are now.

This particular material is important because the 20th century was a time when people were contemplating what we now call globalization and thinking about different versions of globalization. The 20th century was a time when the imperial world, which had been built from Europe outside and against for the previous half millennium or so, was coming apart. It was a time when both the Germans and the Soviets had a notion of how to remake empires inside Europe, learning from and trying in certain ways to revitalize the imperial experience of the previous 500 years. And that was accompanied by ideologies which are worth knowing about. None of those ideologies are exactly like the present, but in both cases, Stalinism and Nazism, you have ideas about how people should comport themselves in public. You have ideas about a one-party state. You have ideas about the leading role of technology and how efficiency is more important than humanity. You have ideas of struggle which have echoes today. It can help us think about the people who are trying to remake the world now, what they might have in mind, what resources they themselves are using. I'm often asked, like, why are you so obsessed with the 1930s? And I think, well, it's partly because the people who are trying to remake the world are also obsessed with the 1930s. Whether or not we draw lessons from the 1930s, people who wish to bring about tyranny, bring down the rule of law, and so on, are certainly thinking about the 1930s and are certainly drawing lessons from that period.

It's meant to be a very broad class where a lot of the work, a lot of the coverage, is going to be done in the lectures. So a lot of explaining major events like famine in Ukraine, or terror in the Soviet Union, or the Holocaust, this is going to be done in lecture. The reading is going to focus on primary sources, which are first-person accounts of experience of these events, and also reactions to, analyses of, prescriptions that arise from these events. So I'm going to focus on the tableau essentially in the lecture, and then in reading and discussion we're going to focus on the people who lived through things or experienced them, because sadly they didn't all live through them to the end, and people who analyzed from within, with the hopes that there'll be a combination of both, like orientation of the big events, but also the analytical or the conceptual tools that one can get out of it. Because one, I mean, one of the impressions I have all the time now, as we're facing the problems that we're facing, is that we have this very rich set of sources in front of us coming from the 20th century, right? Coming from all kinds of thinkers, anti-colonial, anti-Nazi, anti-communist, dissident of various kinds, and that there are gems in there, right? There are things that we ought to be using, but in the crush of the present, we forget about them. We don't use them, right? We don't take that. And there's a sadness to that because there are quite a few people in the 20th century who were writing, not even necessarily for publication, for the drawer, they couldn't publish, leaving behind some trace in the hope that it would be used precisely, right, in the hope that it would be used. And part of the tragedy of our position is that our information world is so hyper-focused on the present, on what seems to be happening right now, not even on what is happening, but on what seems to be happening right now, and that is in fact an essential element of the downfall of democracy. This sense that we're overwhelmed with information, the sense that we're overwhelmed by people trying to do things, and that very sense of being overwhelmed makes us feel powerless. But there are these quiet voices who wrote coherent things who are there for us. And part one of the purposes of the class is for us all to pause from the phones, pause from the overwhelming rush of information, read some things that might be powerful and meaningful and a source of guidance.

What excites me about teaching a larger class is that I think the things that we ought to be learning about history ought to be learned on a very large scale. I mean, I had an experience of this a few years ago where I taught a decent-sized class at Yale on the history of Ukraine, but that class happened to be recorded. And so then I ended up having an audience quite literally of millions of people. So that I could then, you know, then when I traveled around the world, like I was visiting Odessa in southern Ukraine, and like I was stopped on the street by a family who just wanted to tell me, you know, who recognized me from the course and wanted to tell me how much I liked the class. And that's happened all over the world. And that's kind of brought my attention to the fact that if you're going to go to the effort to teach a class, right? Like it's work to make sense of big events like totalitarianism. And if you're going to do it, why not teach it to quite a few students, right? Why not do it all at once? But also, I'm very, I mean, I'm very happy, like with quantity comes quality in the sense that the more students you have, the more different kinds of students from different kinds of places and backgrounds and attitudes and orientations you're going to have in the classroom. And that's also very helpful because the more you're teaching to the world, the more it demands that you think about where other people are coming from, and the more you do that, the more general and accessible the class becomes.