9781529929287

‘Passionate, intimate, compelling’ PHILIPPE

SANDS

‘Original and perceptive’ ANNE APPLEBAUM

‘A must-read’

THOMAS PIKETTY

‘A vital book’ PETER POMERANTSEV

‘Invaluable’ FINANCIAL TIMES

Praise for On Freedom

‘We hear of freedom, but do we grasp it? In these hard times for liberty, On Freedom . . . makes the case that freedom, once explored and understood, is the way forward to good government. We are all fortunate that Professor Snyder has shown us the way’ President Volodymyr Zelensky

‘Snyder knows how precious and fragile freedom is because he has studied and, in Ukraine, even seen what happens to people when brutes take it away . . . His knowledge of tyranny is invaluable in analysing freedom’

Martin Wolf, Financial Times

‘Passionate, intimate, compelling – a clarion call for principle and commitment in a time of tumult and challenge’

Philippe Sands

‘The pace is breathtaking, the writing fluid, and the knowledge deep’ Spectator

‘A must-read. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading minds of our times. This new book draws from his work as an historian of central Europe, his travelling and moving encounters in Ukraine at war, and his thinking on how democracy, pluralism and wealth inequality will look like in 2076 United States and the world at large’

Thomas Piketty

‘Thanks to Snyder, the maps are drawn, and the direction is clear. We stand against tyranny, but we march for freedom. The work is ours to undertake for the sake of all who live today and all who follow’

Shoshana Zuboff

‘A vital book at a time when America and so much of the “free world” has lost its way. Just when the concept of “freedom” seemed to have been killed off by forces who abuse it as the “freedom” to hurt others, Snyder intervenes and brings you into a process akin to intellectual open-heart surgery to make freedom beat better than it ever has’

Peter Pomerantsev

‘Snyder’s work on German and Soviet history led him to write earlier books about how regimes in those nations eroded freedom. His deep political and philosophical examination of how to do the opposite, how to create and sustain freedom, provides a hopeful view for the future’

Los Angeles Times

‘In this magnificent meditation on the nature and meaning of humanity, Timothy Snyder rejects the idea that freedom is merely the absence of restraint, establishing instead that it is the presence of the conditions necessary for people to choose a better future. Snyder’s rich journey through his own life and the stories of others seeking freedom in former Soviet republics is engaging and inspiring. It illuminates how “freedom from” isolates us and locks us into a world in which little can be changed, while “freedom to” enables us to explore new ideas based in reality and empathy. Above all, On Freedom reminds us that freedom is about humanity, and that creating a better world is up to us’

Heather Cox Richardson

‘There’s nothing else like On Freedom. This time the acclaimed historian draws not just from global history but his own. The result is a wonderfully provocative and profoundly persuasive book. Snyder leads us away from our misconception that freedom is just the removal of what stands in our way and toward a project of liberty that, through active engagement and commitment to the common good, we can achieve together’

J. J. Abrams

‘Timothy Snyder puts to work his talent as a historian, thinker and activist to reexamine the meaning of one of the key human values which has been under attack on a scale unseen since the 1930s. Starting his journey in Ukraine, continuing it into the rest of Europe and the United States, he argues that there is no need to trade freedom for security, and to be free one should not only deny but also affirm. A powerful call for action when it is needed the most’

Serhii Plokhy

‘The excellence of On Freedom will come as no surprise to those who have already read Snyder’s books on the Ukraine and on those countries whose geography and history nailed them down in the past between Hitler and Stalin. He writes comprehensively and with great knowledge about the threats which liberal democracies everywhere face today from authoritarian states and from extremist populists. It deserves to be widely read by all who value democracy and the rule of law’

Chris Patten

‘Years ago, inside a prison in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, a man asked if I’d ever felt free while incarcerated. Snyder’s On Freedom reminds me that sometimes, in those cells, I was free as I’ll ever be, nurturing imaginative tomorrows, knowing the art of dreaming made those dreams more real than the handcuffs that then bound my wrists. What more can any of us want than a reminder that our freedom, in being the most powerful future tense we have, gives more deliberate meaning to our todays’

Dwayne Betts

‘A kind of philosophical novel about freedom, a Bildungsroman in which the narrator comes of age and loses his historical innocence . . . Freedom boomerangs between continents, histories and traditions in this book . . . exhilarating’

Lyndsey Stonebridge, New Statesman

‘Fascinating. Part deeply personal memoir, part political manifesto, part philosophical poem, On Freedom captures the voice of one of today’s most important Western public intellectuals’

Ivan Krastev

‘Pensive yet urgent, this meditation is itself an exercise of intellectual Freedom’ Booklist

TIMOTHY SNYDER

Timothy Snyder has been called ‘the leading interpreter of our dark times’. As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge towards counsel and prediction, working against authoritarians and populists. After a quarter of a century at Yale, he now teaches history at the Munk School in the University of Toronto and his books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries.

ALSO BY TIMOTHY SNYDER

Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872–1905

The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (ed. with Peter Andreas)

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999

Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt)

Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (ed. with Ray Brandon)

Ukrainian History, Russian Policy, and European Futures (in Russian and Ukrainian)

The Politics of Life and Death (in Czech)

The Balkans as Europe, 1821–1914 (ed. with Katherine Younger)

And We Dream as Electric Sheep: Humanity, Sexuality, Digitality (in German)

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity

TIMOTHY SNYDER

On Freedom

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Names: Snyder, Timothy, author. Title: On freedom / Timothy Snyder. Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2024] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023058629 (print) | LCCN 2023058630 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593728727 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593728741 (paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593799048 (international edition) | ISBN 9780593728734 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Liberty. | Democracy—United States. | Political culture—United States. Classification: LCC JC585 .S556 2024 (print) | LCC JC585 (ebook) | DDC 323.440973—dc23/eng/20240529

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC and Curtis Brown Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Shield of Achilles” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1952 by W. H. Auden and copyright renewed 1980 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC and Curtis Brown Ltd.

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For those who wish to be free

Preface

“What do you think?” asked Mariia, smiling, in her bright dress, as I ducked under the doorframe of her orderly little hut and stepped back into the sunshine and rubble. “Everything as it should be?” It was. Her rugs and blankets, laid out in nice rectilinear patterns, recalled Ukrainian futurist art. The cords leading to her generator were tidily arranged, and water bottles were near at hand. A thick book lay open on her bed.

Outside her metal domicile, a temporary dwelling provided by an international organization, woolen sweaters were drying on a line. A pretty wooden drawer, lined in felt, rested on a bench, like an open Pandora’s box. When I complimented her on it, Mariia offered the drawer to me as a gift. It was a lonely relic of her house, just in front of us, a ruin after bombs and shells. She looked up nervously at a passing plane. “Everything happened,” she sighed, “and none of it was necessary.”

Like every house in the village, Mariia’s was destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Posad Pokrovs’ke, in the far south of the country, was at the edge of the Russian advance. It rests among fields of sunflowers in this fertile region. The Ukrainian army pushed the Russians out of artillery range in late 2022, making it safe to return, or to visit, as I am doing now, in September 2023.

Taking a seat on the bench and listening to Mariia, I think about freedom. The village, one would say, has been liberated. Are its people free?

To be sure, something terrible has been removed from Mariia’s life: the daily threat of violent death, an occupation by torturers and murderers. But is that, even that, liberation?

Mariia is eighty-five years old and living alone. Now that she has her neat little residence, she is certainly freer than when she was homeless. That is because family and volunteers came to help. And because a government has acted, one to which she feels connected by her vote. Mariia does not complain of her own fate. She cries when she speaks of the difficult challenges faced by her president.

The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and I are using in conversation, is more precise than the conventional liberation. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty. It takes work, after all, to get one older woman into a position where she can greet guests and perform the normal interactions of a dignified person. I have trouble imagining Mariia being truly free without a proper house with a chair and without a clear path to the road for her walker.

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

Sou T hern Ukr A ine is s T eppe; northern Ukraine is forest. Visiting a de-occupied town in the north of the country, I had similar thoughts about freedom. Having dropped off my children at friendly schools in New Haven, Connecticut, I made the journey to an abandoned school building in Yahidne, which Russian occupiers had transformed into a small concentration camp. For most of the time that the village was occupied, the Russians had packed 350 civilians, its entire population, into the school basement, an area of less than two hundred square meters. Seventy of the villagers were children, the youngest an infant.

Yahidne was de-occupied in April 2022, and I visited that September. On the ground floor, Russian soldiers had destroyed the furniture. On the walls, they left behind dehumanizing graffiti about Ukrainians. There was no electricity. By the light of my phone, I made my way down to the cellar, and examined the children’s drawings on its walls. I could read what they had written (“No to war”); my children later helped me identify the characters (such as an Impostor from the game Among Us).

By a doorframe were two lists, written in chalk, of the names of the perished: on one side, those executed by the Russians (of whom, best as I could tell, there were seventeen); on the other, those who died from exhaustion or illness (of whom, best as I could tell, there were ten).

By the time I arrived in Yahidne, the survivors were no longer in the cellar. Were they free?

A liberation suggests a woe that has dissipated. But the adults need support, the children a new school. It is so very important that the town is no longer occupied. But it would be wrong to end the story of Yahidne when the survivors emerged from underground, just as it would be wrong to end the story of Posad Pokrovs’ke when the bombing stopped.

The gentleman entrusted with the key to the Yahidne school asked for help to build a playground. It might seem like a strange desire, amid a war of destruction. Russians kill children with missiles, and kidnap them for assimilation. But the absence of these crimes is not enough; de-occupation is not enough. Children need places to play, run, and swim, to practice being themselves. A child cannot create a park or a swimming pool. The joy of youth is to discover such things in the world. It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.

I c A me T o Ukr A ine during the war while writing this book about freedom. Here its subject is palpable, all around. A month after

Russia invaded Ukraine, I spoke with some Ukrainian lawmakers: “We chose freedom when we did not run.” “We are fighting for freedom.” “Freedom itself is the choice.”

It was not just the politicians. Talking in wartime Ukraine to soldiers, to widows and farmers, to activists and journalists, I heard the word freedom over and over. It was interesting how they used it. With much of their country under genocidal occupation, Ukrainians would seem to have good reason to speak of freedom as a liberation from, as an absence of evil. No one did.

When asked what they meant by freedom, not a single person with whom I spoke specified freedom from the Russians. One Ukrainian told me, “When we say freedom, we do not mean ‘freedom from something.’ ” Another defined victory as being “for something, not against something.” The occupiers had gotten in the way of a sense that the world was opening up, that the next generation would have a better life, that decisions made now would matter in years to come.

It was essential to remove repression, to gain what philosophers call “negative freedom.” But de-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself. A soldier in a rehabilitation center told me that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war. A veteran awaiting a prosthesis said that freedom would be a smile on his son’s face. A young soldier on leave said that freedom was about the children he would like to have. Their commander in his hidden staff room, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, told me that freedom meant a normal life with prospects.

Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.

In T his book, I aim to define freedom. The task begins with rescuing the word from overuse and abuse. I worry that, in my own coun-

try, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.

To be sure, it is tempting to think of liberty as us against the world, which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

“Stone Walls do not a Prison make / Nor Iron bars a Cage”—said the poet. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it. In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility. A school basement, as in Yahidne, can be a concentration camp.

Early Nazi concentration camps, for that matter, were in bars, hotels, and castles. The first permanent one, Dachau, was in an abandoned factory. Auschwitz had been a Polish military base meant to defend people from a German attack. Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp where Polish officers were held before their execution, had been a monastery—the one where Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?

No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more.

We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

The structures that hinder or enable are physical and moral. It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.

When we A ssume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. To this way of thinking, freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naïve.

Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissi-

dent Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called deoccupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”

Freedom is A bou T knowing what we value and bringing it to life. So it depends on what we can do—and that, in turn, depends on others, people we know and people we don’t.

As I write this preface on a westbound night train from Kyiv, I know how long I have before I reach the Polish border. I have a bit of

security in that knowledge, and a bit of freedom to work—thanks to the labor of other people. Someone else laid the rail lines and repairs them when they are shelled, someone else built the carriages and looks after them, someone else is driving the train. When the Ukrainian army de-occupies cities, it raises the flag and shares the photos. But Ukrainians tend to regard cities as liberated when rail service has been restored.

Russian propagandists claim that there is no right and no good, and so everything is permitted. The consequences of that view are all around me in de-occupied Ukraine, in the death pits I saw at Bucha, in ruined settlements such as Posad Pokrovs’ke, in concentration camps such as Yahidne. Russian soldiers in Ukraine speak of cities they destroy as “liberated.” And indeed: all barriers, from their perspective, have been removed. They can bulldoze the rubble and the corpses, as in Mariupol, build something else, sell it. In that negative sense of free, they are free to murder and steal.

The wheels and tracks beneath me are not making me free, but they are carrying me forward, creating conditions for my freedom that I could not create myself. I would be a less free person right now were there no train, or had Russia destroyed the Kyiv rail station. People in Ukraine were not freer when Russia destroyed public utilities and public schools.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government. And so this book begins with an introduction about freedom, and ends with a conclusion about government. The five chapters in between show the way from philosophy to policy.

How does freedom figure in our lives? The connections between freedom as a principle and freedom as a practice are the five forms of freedom.

The forms create a world where people act on the basis of values. They are not rules or orders. They are the logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals. The forms resolve two apparent conundrums: a free person is an individual, but no one becomes an individual alone; freedom is felt in one lifetime, but it must be the work of generations.

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

The labor of freedom begins after the labor of a mother. A baby has the potential to evaluate the world and change it, and it develops the requisite capabilities with the support of and in the company of others. This is sovereignty.

Coming of age, a young human being learns to see the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. A sovereign person mixes chosen virtues with the world outside to make something new. Thus unpredictability is the second form of freedom.

Our bodies need places to go. We cannot as young people create for ourselves the conditions that will allow us to be sovereign and unpredictable. But once those conditions have been created, we rebel against the very institutions that made them possible and go our own way. And this mobility, the third form of freedom, is to be encouraged.

We are free to do only the things we know how to do, and free to go only to places where we can go. What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us. Freedom’s fourth form is factuality. No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.

We are free to do only the things we know how to do, and free to go only to places where we can go. What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us. Freedom’s fourth form is factuality.

No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.

The solution to the problem of freedom is not, as some on the Right think, to mock or abandon government. The solution is also

xviii

not, as some on the Left think, to ignore or cast away the rhetoric of freedom.

Freedom justifies government. The forms of freedom show us how.

This book follows the logic of an argument and the logic of a life. The first three forms of freedom pertain to different phases of life: sovereignty to childhood; unpredictability to youth; mobility to young adulthood. Factuality and solidarity are the mature forms of freedom, enabling the others. Each form has a chapter.

In the introduction, I draw on my own life, beginning with the first time I remember thinking about freedom: during the summer of 1976, the American bicentennial year. I will try to show, on the basis of five decades of my own mistakes, how some misunderstandings of freedom arose, and how they might be corrected. The conclusion describes a good government, one that we might create together. There I imagine an America that has reached the year 2076, its tercentennial, as a land of the free.

The chapters are divided into vignettes. Some of them include memories that sprang to mind as I was trying to address a philosophical issue. The flashes of recollection enable some reflection. They allow me to apply a humble version of the Socratic method to my earlier self: questioning the sense of words and the habits of life, to awaken what is, in some sense, already known. The point is to elicit truths about this country and about freedom that were not evident to me in the moment—and that would not be evident to me now had I not passed through those earlier experiences.

This is a philosophical method (I hope) fitting for a historian, which is what I am. I rely on historical examples and know more about the past of some regions than others. This is a book about the United States, but I draw comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.

I am in discussion here with philosophers ancient, modern, and contemporary. Sometimes I leave the references implicit; those who care will catch them. I do cite explicitly five thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kołakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil. These figures are not American and are not well known in the United States; with minor exceptions, they neither resided in the country nor wrote about it. A prodding from another tradition (or a term from another language) can shake us free of misapprehensions. I adapt from each thinker a concept that advances the argument; I do not claim that they agree with one another (or with me) on every issue.

This book is conservative, in that it draws from tradition; but radical, in that it proposes something new. It is philosophy, but it cleaves to experience. A few phrases in this book are text messages that I wrote to myself in intermittent moments of consciousness in a hospital bed, during an illness that nearly took my life. Arguments were conceived while teaching a class inside an American maximum security prison. I wrote much of what follows during three journeys to wartime Ukraine.

The fundamental questions were posed by readers. My books Bloodlands and Black Earth, studies of mass killing, led to public discussions that moved me toward the ethical subject of this book. If I can describe the worst, can I not also prescribe the best? After I published the political pamphlet On Tyranny and a contemporary history called The Road to Unfreedom, I was asked what a better America would look like. This is my answer.

Defining freedom is a different sort of ambition from defending it. I interrogate my former self; I interrogate others; and others interrogate me. The method is part of the answer: there may be truth about freedom, but we will not get to it in isolation or by deduction. Freedom is positive; getting words around it, like living it, is an act of creation.

This book is meant to exemplify the virtues it commends. It is, I hope, reasonable, but also unpredictable. It is intended to be sober,

but also experimental. It celebrates not who we are, but the freedom that could be ours.

The sun rises outside my window. The border approaches. I begin my reflection on a summer day.

T.S.

Kyiv-Dorohusk train

Wagon 10, Compartment 9

6:10 a.m., September 10, 2023

Introduction Freedom

Jubilee

It is summer 1976, a sunny afternoon on an Ohio farm. Wisps of cloud flit across the sky; gravel presses underfoot. A boy of six, going on seven, stands in line next to a farmhouse to ring a bell: the me that I once was, full of futures.

A gravel lane winds upward from the country road. It bends as the hill crests, between a maple tree that extends across the first few rows of a cornfield and an old sycamore that shades the farmhouse. On the maple hangs a swing, slowly oscillating now from my leap to earth. Past the house, the lane continues to two round corncribs and an old wooden barn, then fades into a path sloping downward to a pond. On both sides of the lane are fields of fossils and arrowheads, as I think of them, covered now in rising stalks of corn.

A gravel lane winds upward from the country road. It bends as the hill crests, between a maple tree that extends across the first few rows of a cornfield and an old sycamore that shades the farmhouse. On the maple hangs a swing, slowly oscillating now from my leap to earth.

Past the house, the lane continues to two round corncribs and an old wooden barn, then fades into a path sloping downward to a pond. On both sides of the lane are fields of fossils and arrowheads, as I think of them, covered now in rising stalks of corn.

I am on the farm with my mother’s family, to celebrate summer birthdays and commemorate two hundred years of American independence. Each cousin, in line from the oldest to the youngest, is taking a turn at the bell. Its distinctive double ring resounds through my childhood: a nice high peal, followed by an awkward lower one, as the bell’s clapper meets the lip an unintended second time. The bell has a flaw.

My turn comes. The bell weighs as much as I do, but it is well mounted, and I know how to move it. Hands clenched around the rope, eyes closed, I lean back to make a lever of my body. Gravity does my work. The bell rings out, unmistakable and imperfect. I open my eyes, still leaning back, and see only blue. I am thinking about freedom.

After every kid has rung the bell, we all tumble through a whitewashed screened-in porch, where a mastodon tusk hangs on the far wall. I pause there for a moment to find my sneakers, then tread into the kitchen, the last to join a circle formed for silent grace. I catch a glimpse of the basket of outgoing mail, mounted on the wall behind me. The Liberty Bell stamps cite the biblical injunction inscribed on the bell itself: in a jubilee year, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.”

The Liberty Bell is cracked. The fissure was right there on the stamp. The bell in question was forged in 1752 for the Pennsylvania Statehouse in Philadelphia for a different jubilee, the half-century of the colony’s Charter of Privileges. The flaw we see now appeared when it was rung on George Washington’s birthday in 1846.

The next words of that biblical verse suggest a way to interpret the crack: “ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (Leviticus 25:10). In the nineteenth century, abolitionists read those words as a call to end American slavery. They took the bell at the Philadelphia statehouse as their symbol and gave it the name we know today. Later the Liberty Bell was used by the woman suffrage movement.

In 1976 the stamp codified a patriotic legend: that a Liberty Bell was rung as the Declaration of Independence was declaimed in Philadelphia in July 1776. Neither was the bell rung then, nor did it bear that name. The Liberty Bell was named in reference to those who gained no liberty. It was used to claim a better future, not to commemorate an ideal past.

The bicentennial was a tricky idea for a child. It called me to a world where freedom had been achieved two centuries before because something, a British Empire, had been removed. We, the Americans,

were then supposed to be liberated eternally. As a bicentennial symbol, the Liberty Bell was stripped of its reference to women and Black people, suggesting a perfect achievement of freedom long ago complete.

It might at first seem logical that freedom is an absence and seem fair that the government should leave each of us equally alone. This intuition draws its plausibility from a history of exploitation. Traditionally, some people have regarded themselves as free because they exploit the labor of slaves and women. Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government, because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise the women. The conflation of a Liberty Bell with the American Revolution dodges the issue of what freedom is, and for whom that bell tolls.

As a boy of six going on seven, I had heard the phrase underground railroad and had wondered what it would be like to hide in the farmhouse cellar. But it would not have occurred to me to ask whether American independence meant freedom for everyone. Black kids my age would not have needed to ask, since the answer was out there, in life itself.

f ligh T s

The bell rings. Time for freedom. Time for dinner. Since my birthday is closest, I jump to the head of the line. The buffet starts by the door that leads from the porch, then follows the counter around the perimeter of the kitchen: sweetcorn (still boiling in the pot) first, then meat and vegetables and mashed potatoes, then casseroles and bread, and desserts and coffee. For those who want it, there is a watermelon on the porch, to be sliced later and eaten outside.

One table is set in the kitchen, others are spread through the ground floor, some under portraits of ancestors. Amid the portraits is a framed deed to the property and a certificate from the state of Ohio confirming a century of continuous ownership. My mother’s family

lived here through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the First World War, and the Great Depression. My mother was born here in the middle of the Second World War. My father was born on the other side of the county, in another farmhouse.

My mother gave birth to me in a hospital named after an Ohio inventor, in the midst of the Vietnam War, a few weeks after the moon landing of 1969. The Wright Brothers’ projects for heavierthan-air flight had been realized a few miles north, in their Dayton bicycle shop.

Dayton was a great American center of innovation and industry. It was the site of the first commercial cargo flight and the first helicopter flight. It became a rail hub in 1900, with dozens of stops at its Union Station each day. Charles Kettering, the hospital’s namesake, invented the electric starter for the automobile. He started work at National Cash Register (today NCR), founded DELCO (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company), and headed research at General Motors.

Along with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, these three companies were the major local employers in the 1970s, when I was a boy in southwest Ohio. Workers were unionized. The farmers called National Cash Register “the Cash” and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base “the Field” (while the city kids said “NCR” and “Wright-Pat”).

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was from Wapakoneta, Ohio, north of Dayton. As kids we visited his museum there and met him in person. My maternal grandmother had a signed photograph of the astronaut. Her younger brother was a pilot and engineer who worked on the space shuttle; the launch of the Columbia was the ecstatic moment in my childhood. I watched it on television and then went outside to look up at the sky. Heavier-than-air flight in 1903, a moon landing in 1969, a space shuttle in 1981: this trajectory promised a future of adventurous mobility.

My parents grew up on farms in Clinton County, Ohio, before making the leap to Ohio State University. I spent a good deal of my childhood on those farms. During the summer, my paternal grand-

father put me and my brothers to work and took us to the county fair. He kept his old baseball bats and gloves by the porch door, as though a game might break out at any moment. I brought my own glove and found ways to practice baseball in the barnyard. The Cincinnati Reds might be playing on television inside while I was playing an imaginary game outside. My paternal grandmother taught me not to cook the sweetcorn too long, shared her historical novels, and was thoughtfully critical about how one spoke. She had taught my father in a one-room schoolhouse.

On the other side of the county, in my maternal grandparents’ house, the one with the bell, I liked to take refuge upstairs. Amid my maternal grandmother’s fossil collections, I immersed myself in her books about the past, the present, and alternative futures: paleontology, zoology, A Wrinkle in Time.

On New Year’s Day 1982, that attic was cold and drafty as I read about the imposition of martial law in communist Poland. In the newspapers, Americans worried about instability and nuclear war, but I had the sense of something lively and interesting. In the photographs in magazines, the gray of armored personnel carriers and dirty snow contrasted with the bit of red ink for the banners of the suppressed labor union, Solidarity.

h oloc A us T s

In my childhood, the Soviet Union always seemed close, a few minutes’ flight by intercontinental ballistic missile. Reader’s Digest featured articles on Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. The obsession with the superpowers’ destructive capacity was a way to ignore the people who suffered directly in the Cold War, such as the Latin Americans we kept invading and the east Europeans the Soviets kept invading.

In the 1980s, as social mobility in the United States slowed, talk of nuclear confrontation grew. In 1984 I answered the phone—a landline,

of course—and took a survey. The pollster asked me two questions: “Is it safe to work in convenience stores?” and “Are you afraid of nuclear war?” I found nothing strange about that.

American nuclear missiles were called “Minutemen,” after the militias of the Revolutionary War. In the 1970s and 1980s, the vision of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was an element of everyday life. Behind our house (to the west) a meadow stretched all the way to railroad tracks a quarter-mile away, where freight trains passed at sunset when I was a small child. A stream ran through the meadow, watering a little copse where we tried to fish. To the south of our house, across the road, a cornfield rolled uphill to a seminary. A siren atop its bell tower practiced tornado warnings, but the local kids associated it with air raids. Looking up from the creek (“crick”) where we were trying to catch crayfish (“crawdads”) in Styrofoam cups, we thought of mushroom clouds and knew that it was midday.

It was a shock when my maternal grandmother, Lucile, told me that danger doesn’t come from afar. For the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in 1984, a teacher sent me to interview her about the Second World War. Sitting across from me at the kitchen table, Lucile suggested that researching relatives was not the way to understand the war. Herself a teacher, she had taken my school assignment as an opportunity to make sure I learned. She always laughed and offered gumdrops; at fourteen, I scarcely knew what she looked like with a serious expression. That day I found out. Her eyes were wide open, and her cheek muscles taut, as she remonstrated with me about where my thoughts should be. If I was to write about the war, I should remember “all those Jewish people.” She sighed and then smiled again.

The Holocaust of the Jews had happened not so very long before. I had read Anne Frank’s diary, found by chance on a school bookshelf in fifth grade. Yet at the time when I interviewed my grandmother, the mass murder of the Jews was a smaller part of the memory of the war than it later became. The word Holocaust in this sense came into

broad American use after a 1978 television series, but in the 1980s the term was still ambiguous. The Day After, a 1983 made-for-television movie about nuclear holocaust, was watched by one hundred million Americans. One December afternoon in 1985, sitting on an orange couch in the local public library, I listened to some older kids expound upon their plan for nuclear war: get a six-pack, drive to Wright-Pat, and die in the flash rather than from the radiation.

Perhaps that hypothetical nuclear holocaust drew attention away from what the Jewish Holocaust might have taught us. A possible catastrophe involving long-range missiles overshadowed the recent demonstration of how easily a partially democratic system like ours could collapse, how quickly big lies could create restive alternative realities, and how callously humans could kill one another. During the Cold War, American and Soviet propaganda relentlessly associated the other side with the Nazis; the decades of mutual accusation perhaps hardened everyone to the actual risk, which was that fascism might arise at home.

I did have the idea, as a teenager, that fear was making the country less free. When I went to college in 1987, I planned to become a nuclear arms negotiator. Though there was nothing ignoble in this career aim, I was turning away from American reality. I was ignoring the sources of fear that were right in front of me.

b ells

In the late 1980s, as a college student, I was fascinated by people who had found a politics beyond fear: the east European dissidents. Andrei Sakharov, one of the founders of the Soviet nuclear program, was urging Westerners to think less about nuclear intimidation and more about human dignity. I remember raising my eyes from his text and looking up at the sky as the point came home. We should remove the causes of fear if we can; we should also take responsibility for our fears. Freedom cannot be just an absence; it must arise from us and grow into the world.

In the autumn of 1989, during my junior year in college, my planned career in nuclear disarmament was taken away from me. Communism in eastern Europe came to an end, and arms control negotiations with the USSR proceeded quickly to treaties. It was thrilling to read the dispatches of American reporters from eastern Europe. Thanks to a student job at the Center for Foreign Policy Development at Brown University, I met some of the dissidents as they came to power.

I was responsible for the Czechoslovak foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier during some meetings in Washington, failed to get him to any of them on time. He paid no attention to the schedule and kept pausing to have a smoke. We made the vice president and the secretary of state wait. My idea of freedom at that point was all about efficiency, and I was a little flummoxed that his was so different.

I had written a senior essay on nuclear arms control as a sophomore; as a junior, I focused more on economics, starting projects that would become senior theses on Soviet defense reform and Soviet monopoly. In November 1990, the autumn of my senior year, I was invited to Moscow to present some of my work. It was my first transatlantic flight, following the trajectory of all those imagined missiles. As the aircraft descended, I looked down at a patchwork of collective farms.

This was deep into Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s period of reform, I was feckless and twenty-one, and I treated the Soviet capital as a place to explore. I dropped the heavily fobbed room key at the reception desk of the Hotel Akademicheskaia and took the fast escalators down to the deep metro platforms that were meant to double as bomb shelters, memorizing station names and asking strangers for help. The hurried glances of fellow passengers, the empty shelves in the stores, the unkempt farmsteads: these impressions confirmed what I had written in my paper, which was that this country would not go on for long.

People did give me directions, which was good; the city was large, the days were cold and short, and the buildings seemed to repeat from

district to district. A Russian scholar at the conference kindly took me in, and his two children, about my age, gave me better tours of Moscow. When I spoke tactlessly about the coming collapse of the USSR, their faces showed a simple sadness. They did not doubt it, if the young American scholar said so. But the post-Soviet Russia that they imagined was an empire with a tsar. In the apartment, they showed me treasured relics of the Russian Empire, of a pre-Soviet past.

It was snowing the day the three of us visited the Kremlin. The flakes melted on a bell of improbable size: the “Tsar Bell.” It was about as large as the family’s apartment and weighed about two hundred tons. Meant to glorify an absolute ruler, the ferrous enormity rested on the ground and did nothing. The songless object got me thinking about the disproportions in the Soviet economy that I was meant to address at the conference in Moscow.

e quilibrium

In the language of physics, a bell that hangs on a post on a farm is in equilibrium: the force of gravity pulling it down is matched by the force of the ground pushing back on the structure. Getting a bell in the air so that it can be rung requires some careful work. Not every equilibrium is the same. The Tsar Bell is in an equilibrium in which it cannot be rung.

Economists also speak of equilibria. They like situations when things seem to be in balance, as the result of an aggregate of human actions that can be characterized as a larger, impersonal force. For example: supply, the amount of stuff, is supposed to balance demand, how much people want that stuff. An equilibrium is like a happy ending: everything turns out right. We don’t have to think about people as individuals with purposes: markets do the thinking for us. We do not have to ask how people come into the world, why they want what they want, or what it means to be free.

In autumn 1990, when I traveled to the Soviet Union, I was working on projects in economics, but that semester I was also taking graduate

classes in history and had applied for a fellowship to continue those studies in a doctoral program. I liked history’s inexhaustibility—a surprise awaited in each new book, behind each half-understood event, within each new language. The past is full of wild possibilities that were actually realized, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, or the American one. The east European revolutions of 1989, unpredictable as they had been, made me wonder whether other surprises might be coming.

In Moscow in November 1990, history gave me a common language with Soviet scholars. We talked about the Russian economy in the late imperial years, before the revolution, and about the crash industrialization of the 1930s. I could agree with Soviet participants that the problem of transforming their planned economy into something else was not foreseen in textbook economics.

In the cold and drafty conference room, my mind wandering, I doodled little bells in the margins of my notes. In the Russian Empire, in 1591 and 1771, bells had been sentenced to Siberian exile, on the theory that they precipitated public gatherings. In 1510, after Moscow conquered the town of Pskov, the new rulers did away with the bell used to call public meetings.

I drew some manacles around the bells. In the Soviet Union, as I knew from my own research on Soviet monopoly, Pskov was where they made all the handcuffs. (In 2014 troops from Pskov invaded Ukraine; in 2022 they murdered civilians at Bucha.) The rest of the Soviet economy was similarly centralized: critical products were made in a few sites or even in a single factory. Natural gas and oil were also extracted and distributed in a very centralized way.

As an initial condition for a market economy, I was trying to say, monopoly was unpromising. Capitalism’s radical critics (Vladimir Lenin) and radical supporters (Friedrich Hayek) agreed that monopoly meant oppression. Markets are supposed to enable competition, spread information, and separate economics from politics. But what would happen when giant Soviet enterprises came into private hands?

Monopolists would seek to prevent competition, own media, and

corner political power. Once the Soviet Union began to come apart (I was arguing), its industrial concentration would accelerate the process of disintegration, because locals who seized control of valuable assets would seek to protect their new holdings by trying to control new states.

So any shift to capitalism in the Soviet Union had to be understood as part of a longer political history, not as a clearing of the slate that would generate perfect markets. From the starting point of the Soviet reality around me in November 1990, laissez-faire was not going to lead to the right result. Oligarchy, rule by the very wealthy, is also an equilibrium. A heavy bell can just stay on the ground.

I don’t think I managed to get much of this across in Moscow: the huge meeting room turned all utterances into echoes; men in scarves shivered during the presentations; the secondhand cigarette smoke was uncannily warmer than the air.

No one was thinking much then about the non-Russian nations. Americans said “Russia” for the USSR and “Russians” for Soviet citizens. I was little better, though I knew the geography from studying military sites and big factories. Half of the population of the Soviet Union was not Russian, and a quarter of the territory was in the nonRussian republics. The Russian republic itself was described as a federation because of its tremendous variety: it contained, for example, the Tatars, one of the largest Soviet nationalities. Ukraine was, after Russia, the second-largest in population. In Moscow, American conference participants saw the opera Mazepa, about the Ukrainian hetman and his break with Tsar Peter; during the intermission, the economists in the group asked the Russia hands whether Ukraine was a separate country. Not really, was the consensus.

Jet-lagged and reading at night for a college seminar on Marxism, I thought in Moscow about the uncanny similarity between the prophets of communism and the prophets of capitalism. Capitalists knew that communist societies would automatically right themselves once private property was restored, just as Marxists had once known that capitalist societies would automatically right themselves once private

property was abolished. I felt the draw of the first view: Would it not be nice to simply start again, free of the past? But the appeal was just too similar to the confidence of Marx and Engels, or for that matter that of Lenin and Trotsky when the Soviet experiment began.

I worked as a student at the Center for Foreign Policy Development between spring 1989 and spring 1991, in Washington at Foreign Policy magazine in summer 1990, and in Washington again at the Institute for International Economics in the summer and autumn of 1991. I had a sense of the elite consensus between the end of communism in eastern Europe in late 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Very few of the wise heads expected either. The George H. W. Bush administration supported Gorbachev to the very last moment. U.S. policy was to hold the Soviet Union together. President Bush went to Kyiv on August 1, 1991, but only to urge Ukrainians not to declare independence.

On August 18, 1991, I went to bed early in my Georgetown sublet. I had worked all day on Russian economics and German language, then made a meal for some friends to celebrate my twenty-second birthday. A Russian friend awakened me with a telephone call: “Massive revolution!” He meant the coup attempt against Gorbachev that would be the beginning of the end of the USSR. Ukrainian communists declared the independence of their republic on August 24. A month later, I finished my study of Soviet monopoly and departed for graduate study in history at Oxford. The formal dissolution of the USSR in December found me in Czechoslovakia. Right after New Year’s, I took the night train from Prague to Warsaw. When I presented a paper on Soviet monopoly in Vienna in April 1992, the economists from what had been the USSR now represented newly independent states.

As the Soviet Union came to an end, American anxiety yielded to an odd euphoria. Americans hadn’t expected revolution and disintegration. And yet many were now speaking with confidence about what must follow: a durable capitalist equilibrium would bring with it democracy and freedom. In fairness, the better economists were concerned about structures. But negative freedom set the tone: once the

barriers of Soviet central planning and state ownership were cleared away, only good things could follow. This odd confidence about the future was one reason I decided to study the past.

e xcep T ion A lism

The Cold War had been a moral challenge for the United States. Anticommunism led to the denunciatory excesses of McCarthyism. It also became a justification for supporting right-wing dictators, invading Caribbean and Latin American countries, and overthrowing democratically elected rulers.

I was brought up in this knowledge. My parents had been serving in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic when the United States intervened in 1965. They were then transferred to El Salvador. A Salvadoran girl spent six months at our home when I was small, taking care of my brothers and me. My mother kept visiting Latin America throughout my childhood, and she taught Latin American studies at a local university.

The Soviet challenge had also pushed America toward some strengths. It led to the moon shot of 1969 and to important technological spin-offs. It encouraged Americans to engage with European and Russian culture, and it brought government investment to universities, including in languages and the humanities. American universities taught classes on Russia and the Soviet Union (though rarely on eastern Europe and almost never on Ukraine). Avant-garde American art, music, and literature were propagated abroad, to show that democracy could be hip and vibrant. Soviet reminders of American inequality bolstered the American welfare state and helped the civil rights movement. So long as Marxism was a present alternative, Americans tried to justify their own system with ideas and safeguard it with structures.

The disintegration of the USSR in 1991 was like a judo move, turning the United States against itself. Arguments gave way to verities: capitalism would replace communism and bring democracy to the

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