History

There is a date that ought to be carved into the memory of anyone who cares about how nations come to terms with their own crimes: the twenty-fifth of February, 1956. On that day, at the close of the Twentieth Party Congress, a leader of the Soviet Union stood up and told the assembled delegates the truth — or at least a usable fraction of it — about the man whose portrait they had all worshipped. The hall listened in a silence that has been described, again and again, as deafening. When he finished, the session chair proposed that no discussion be opened and no questions be permitted. The reason was obvious: a discussion would have detonated. The report was approved, then quietly buried — distributed only inside party organizations, kept out of the open press. Even the act of telling the truth was conducted as a half-secret. ...

A dictator cannot shoot lasers from his eyes. He cannot personally pull every trigger, sign every death warrant, or stand over every soldier as the order is carried out. He is one aging man in one body, and yet at his word entire armies march, entire populations fall silent, and people who fear nothing in battle suddenly lose the will to resist. This is the puzzle that sits underneath every tyranny, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a lazy one. The lazy answer is that some nations are simply born servile, that obedience is written into their blood. I want to argue the opposite. Obedience is not a national trait. It is manufactured, deliberately and methodically, by a machine that any sufficiently ruthless regime can build — and that almost any nation, however cultured, can be made to feed. ...

There is a particular reproach I hear again and again, and it always arrives dressed as common sense. If you analysts live in a “probabilistic world,” the reader asks, then what is the point of your analysis at all? What can you actually predict? Or is probability just a convenient hiding place — a way of saying, after the fact, that the world is fifty-fifty, the forecast didn’t pan out, and nobody is to blame? It sounds devastating, and it is meant to. But underneath the sarcasm lies a misunderstanding so deep that untangling it tells us almost everything worth knowing about how to think about the future, the war, and our own helplessness before events. ...

There is a word that historians reach for whenever a great power decides it would rather feed an aggressor than fight one, and the word is Munich. In 1938 the leaders of Britain and France handed a slice of a sovereign country to a dictator in exchange for a promise of peace that was worthless before the ink had dried, and they came home waving paper and calling it triumph. We learned, supposedly, what that paper cost. And yet I find myself watching the present moment and reaching for the same word, with one unsettling difference. What is happening to Ukraine is not a single conference, not one signature on one afternoon. It is a betrayal in slow motion. It arrives not as an event but as a fact, accumulating quietly while everyone insists that nothing of the kind is taking place. This is a creeping Munich, and the most important thing to understand about it is that it cannot be finished. ...

Here is a question I keep returning to, because I cannot make it stop being strange. How does a man who rules a country responsible for roughly one and a half percent of the world’s economy keep bending to his will a coalition of states that outweigh him, militarily and economically, by dozens of times? Right now we are watching it happen again. A war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court refuses an ultimatum, sends a delegation of clerks to a meeting designed to talk peace to death, and somehow it is the rest of the world — Europe, the United States, even the country he is bombing — that ends up rearranging itself around his calendar. You can call this many things. Strategy is not one of them. The honest word, the word that has followed this man across three decades, is luck. ...

There is a recurring question that comes up whenever people try to take the measure of the men who currently dominate the headlines: can a figure like Putin, or like Trump, actually change the course of history the way a Lenin or a Genghis Khan once did? The instinct is to answer by ranking personalities — to argue that these two are smaller men than the world-shakers of the past, or that the historical conditions simply aren’t ripe. I think that instinct, while not entirely wrong, misses the decisive point. The scale of a personality matters, yes. But what truly separates the man who reshapes the world from the man who merely disrupts it is not raw force of character. It is whether he carries an idea in his head — a developed picture of a future he intends to build. And it is precisely here that both Putin and Trump are empty. ...

Every so often I receive a letter that is really an indictment dressed up as a question. The symbols a free Russia might one day claim, the writer says, are compromised goods. One of them helped build the hydrogen bomb. Another was tainted by ugly prejudice. So what kind of freedom is it, the writer concludes, that produces such soiled emblems? Behind the sneer there is a genuine and serious problem, and it deserves a serious answer. The problem is this: we want our heroes clean. We want the people who fought tyranny to have been free of every stain, and when we discover they weren’t, we feel cheated, and the cheated feeling slides quickly into contempt. I think this demand for purity is one of the most corrosive habits of the moral imagination, and I want to explain why. ...

There is a mood that settles over you if you read the news for long enough. It is the conviction that the world is sliding backward, that whatever decency the twentieth century managed to assemble after its catastrophes is now coming apart, and that we are entering an age of cynicism and brute force from which there is no return. I feel the pull of this mood as much as anyone. When cities are bombed and children are buried, when liars are rewarded and the brave are imprisoned, it seems almost obscene to suggest that humanity is, on balance, becoming gentler. And yet I want to argue exactly that. Not as consolation, and not by closing my eyes to the horror, but because I think the despair is partly a trick of perspective, and that the genuine direction of history, seen across centuries rather than weeks, is the slow and stubborn deepening of humanism. ...

There is a question I keep hearing from thoughtful, frightened people, and it always arrives in roughly the same shape. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, is constitutionally too soft. It grants a platform to every voice, including the voices openly committed to its destruction. It plays by rules its enemies cheerfully ignore. We now live in a post-truth world where authoritarian regimes flood the public square with so much falsehood that the truth cannot keep pace. So how can such a permissive, slow-moving system possibly survive the onslaught? Surely, the despairing conclusion runs, the West is writing its own death sentence, and the only honest thing left to say is farewell to it. I want to answer that question directly, because I think the despair behind it, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how history actually moves. ...