Timothy Snyder's Top Book Recommendations

Timothy Snyder

In the end I think Havel will be remembered as the outstanding East European dissident writer, and he will be remembered as such above all for this essay. Its central point is that even a communist regime that controls the media and exercises a great deal of power depends ultimately on an almost visible collaboration with society – society meaning individual decisions taken by individuals, which accumulate to have a universal appearance. [source]

Steve Crawshaw

This is absolutely a human rights book, and it contains one of the most magical essays in political philosophy ever written, which pays tribute to the importance of what Havel calls ‘living in truth’. Imagine yourself back in 1978, ten years after Soviet tanks had entered Prague, when it seemed that nothing could change. Havel’s argument in The Power of the Powerless, roughly speaking, was that if everyone stood together at a certain point, and decided to live in truth, to say, ‘That’s not the case – this is the case’, then everything could change, even in the most repressive of contexts. Havel imagined a greengrocer, rearranging his potatoes and carrots on International Workers’ Day, and refusing to put an official, empty slogan in his window saying ‘Workers of the World Unite’. The tiny act of just saying ‘I don’t really want to go along with this’ could have disproportionate consequences. The greengrocer would risk losing his holiday, perhaps suffering much greater punishments. But if lots of people were to do that together, asked Havel, how much else could they change? ‘The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperor is naked!” – when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light.’ [source]

Timothy Snyder

The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European left-wing intellectuals or Labour in England. [source]

Ben Shapiro

A lot of people have read Orwell's 1984, he actually wrote a book that's better. It's this book. [source]

Guy Raz

The other reason I picked this book is that Orwell, like Dan Schorr, was an outsider. When he went to Spain, he was an unknown. He wasn’t Hemingway. He wasn’t a well-connected intellectual. He just had this amazing eye for detail. He was an amazing observer, and he could write so powerfully. This book, to me, is just one of the classics of foreign reporting. [source]

Timothy Snyder

Yes. Milosz tried to explain – as the title suggests – how thinking people could accept communism from inside the communist system. How does one not resist or just endure, but actually place one’s mind in the system? He points to a number of ways in which the mind can adapt. You can accept one larger truth that guides your interpretation of all of the smaller untruths, accept a vision of the future that is so bright that it drives away the shadows of the various dark acts of your own time and place. Or you can collaborate on the outside but preserve an inner core of yourself that does not collaborate on the inside. [source]

Anne Applebaum

The Captive Mind isn’t a straight memoir. Although Milosz is writing about his own life and his past, he is also grappling with a larger subject: How his generation of liberal intellectuals came to collaborate with, and work alongside, the Communist party. And he is trying to understand his own behaviour: Why did I act that way? [source]