Freedom and the good life

On November 9 it will be 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The exhilaration of that moment was followed by high hopes for the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, then in Russia itself when the Soviet Union imploded.

- GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

Gradually hope gave way to frustration, disappointment and then dismay. Russia did not become a liberal democracy, and nor did a number of its former satrapies.

Few people have had more opportunity and reason to ponder this than Timothy Snyder. Before he became a Yale professor and a prominent historian, he spent several years in Central and Eastern Europe, where he came to know one country after another, learn one language after another, and meet many people, among them those who had been brave dissidents against communist rule in its last decadent phase.

His scholarly work includes his formidable and harrowing book Bloodlands, which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and 1940s when as many as 14 million people perished one way or another at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a particularly awful mass grave. When he published that book 14 years ago, he must have hoped — didn't we all? — that such large-scale bloodshed wouldn't be seen there again.