Timothy Snyder: Ukraine, Russia, and Europe, Past and Future I

This event was recorded on 16 June 2015 at the IWM Library.
The crisis in Ukraine has provoked a number of unhelpful intellectual responses in Russia and the West, notably the resort to ethnic and linguistic definitions of identity and destiny that have long been discredited both in scholarship and in EU political practice. Yet the Ukrainian revolution might be seen instead as an occasion for broadening rather than narrowing the categories of our historical understanding. The view from just beyond the eastern border of the European project can help us to see what is historically exceptional about the European Union - and also its essential vulnerabilities.
Timothy Snyder is Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the IWM. He is the author of several prize-winning books including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953 (2014, edited with Ray Brandon) and Thinking the 20th Century (2013, with Tony Judt). His most recent book (at the time), Black Earth, was to be published in fall 2015. On 10 June 2015, Timothy Snyder gave a lecture at the German Bundestag.
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