Цитаты из книг — Тимоти Снайдер

Если мы участвуем в выборах и уверены, что полноценные выборы будут и в дальнейшем, то мы знаем, что в следующий раз сможем исправить свои ошибки. Таким образом, демократия превращает в политическую предсказуемость свойство людей ошибаться и помогает нам ощущать время как устремление вперед, в будущее, на которое мы…

Демократия гибнет тогда, когда люди перестают видеть ценность в голосовании. Вопрос не в том, проводятся ли выборы, а в том, свободны ли они, честны ли. Если да, то демократия порождает ощущение времени, ожидание грядущего, примиряющее с настоящим. Смысл каждых демократических выборов – в надежде на следующие выборы.

В 1976 году Стивен Кинг опубликовал рассказ “Я знаю, что тебе нужно” – о молодой женщине и ее поклоннике, умевшем читать мысли. Она не знала об этом: он просто давал ей то, что она хотела в настоящий момент (например, земляничное мороженое). Постепенно он изменил ее жизнь, сделал ее зависимой, поскольку она не имела…

What happened to states in 1939, 1940, and 1941, in other words, was crucial for what would happen to Jews in 1942, 1943, and 1944. The Germans could not exploit the psychological, material, and political resources created by Soviet occupation in places where there had been no Soviet occupation.

Factuality was replaced by a knowing cynicism that asked nothing of the viewer but the occasional nod before sleep.

In Ilyin’s sensibility, adapted by Putin, time was not a river flowing forward, but a cold round pool where ripples flowed ever inward towards a mysterious Russian perfection. Nothing new ever happened, and nothing new ever could happen; the West assaulted Russian innocence over and over again. History in the sense of the…

Thus citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy hindered the Nazi drive to have all European Jews murdered.

The Holocaust began as mass shooting campaigns in lands where the state was destroyed twice in quick succession, first the prewar nation-state by the Soviets, then the Soviet apparatus by the Germans. The techniques developed in the zone of double statelessness—the recruitment of locals, the use of multiple German…

Bombing civilians was a tactic that Europeans generally saw as legitimate when used in colonial possessions; it was now applied in Europe itself.

Хотя Ильин вел хронику сталинского террора, его отношение к закону и праву по сути сходно с отношением тех, кого он считал преступниками. Андрей Вышинский, гособвинитель на сталинских показательных процессах, считал, что “революционная законность требует гибкого и, так сказать, свободного”, “творческого” отношения к…

Страх перед будущим – малоприятное ощущение, которое в форме внешней политики можно передать другим. Настоящий враг тоталитаризма – сам тоталитаризм, и эту тайну он оберегает, нападая на других.

Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention…

Despite Warsaw’s new relationship with London, the conspiratorial track of Poland’s Palestine policy remained operative in spring 1939. Polish authorities maintained their friendly relationship with the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who after Kristallnacht had hoped for an evacuation of a million Jews in…

Coordinating this utopian colonial image with twentieth-century political reality in the middle of Europe required not just the subjugation of people, but also the destruction of the institutions that were, in fact, present. The bulk of Germany’s imperial work in Poland would involve not so much the creation of something…

Hitler decided to eliminate Poland as an object of international relations. The sudden necessity he felt to invade Poland had tremendous implications for Hitler’s plans. With Poland as an ally or benign neutral, Germany might have avoided the traditional problem of encirclement, its doom in the First World War.

Generous people took humane decisions, yet still failed. Probably most men and women of goodwill who were able to take the initial risk failed after a month, a week, a day. It was an era when to be good meant not only the avoidance of evil but a total determination to act on behalf of a stranger, on a planet where hell,…

The German concept of a Rechtsstaat, a state that operated under the rule of law, was without substance. As Carl Schmitt explained, law served the race, and the state served the race, and so race was the only pertinent concept. The idea of a state held to external legal standards was a sham designed to suppress the strong.

The Soviet republics that bordered Poland, Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, lost a considerable part of their Polish minority to murder and deportation: some 59,903 people in Ukraine, some 61,501 people in Belarus. Stalin’s rationale for the mass murder of Soviet citizens of Polish nationality was not racial but…

Hitler’s diplomatic misfortune with Warsaw was good luck in domestic politics. War was not popular with Germans in 1939. But a war against Poland for border territories, now apparently in the offing, was far less unpopular than a massive ideological war of aggression in alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union would…