From the archive: Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times

The profile, written by Robert P. Baird and published in 2023, traces the intellectual and personal journey of Timothy Snyder, a 53-year-old Yale historian who grew up in a Quaker family in southwestern Ohio. Snyder made his academic reputation through books like 'Bloodlands' (2010), which examined the mass murder of 14 million people in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945 under Nazi and Soviet regimes, and established him as a leading historian of the region. His public profile exploded in 2017 with 'On Tyranny,' a bestselling short book written in response to Trump's election that sold over half a million copies and became a totem for center-left anti-Trump resistance.

Snyder's relationship with Ukraine is central to the piece. He visited Kyiv last September, seven months into Russia's full-scale invasion, attending the Yalta European Strategy conference and holding a two-hour private meeting with President Zelensky — during which they discussed Shakespeare, Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, and the concept of freedom. Snyder had predicted Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea when most Western analysts dismissed the possibility, and his warnings about Putin's neo-imperial ambitions had long been a feature of his public writing. He raised over $1.2 million for an anti-drone defense system for Ukraine through the United 24 crowdfunding initiative, a decision that drew criticism but which Snyder says was guided by what his Ukrainian friends said was most needed.

The article details Snyder's intellectual formation: his undergraduate studies at Brown University where he became fascinated with Eastern European history following the fall of communism, his DPhil at Oxford supervised by Timothy Garton Ash, and his eventual appointment at Yale in 2001. His wife, historian Marcy Shore, offers personal insights into his character — describing his 'save-the-world impulse,' his deep confidence, and his 'strange composure' under criticism. Friends like philosopher Jason Stanley describe him as extremely competitive, while his Ukrainian rock star friend Svitoslav Vakarchuk calls him not a romantic but an idealist.

The piece extensively covers criticism of Snyder from multiple directions. On the left, historians Samuel Moyn and David Priestland accused him of 'tyrannophobia' and argued his Hitler analogies were hyperbolic and historically naive. Cultural critic Lee Siegel called him 'a one-man industry of panic.' Political scientist Daniel Drezner described 'On Tyranny' as overwrought. From the realist international relations camp, Emma Ashford argues that Snyder overemphasizes ideas and ideology as drivers of Russian foreign policy at the expense of strategic security calculations — a dispute with real-world implications for how Western nations should respond to the Ukraine war.

Snyder's methodology as both historian and public intellectual is examined closely. He regularly draws analogies between past and present, makes predictions about future events, and insists on calling Putin a fascist — arguing this is not hyperbole but an accurate description that credits Putin's agency as a reader and thinker of ideas. He believes that history is shaped by individual human choices rather than predetermined structural forces, and that making predictions serves to emphasize the unpredictability of the future and people's capacity to change it. The article concludes by noting that in tying himself so completely to Ukrainian self-defense, Snyder has staked his reputation on the outcome of a messy, ongoing conflict in a way rare for a public intellectual of his standing.