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BOOK RECOMMENDATION
The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder: 4 Points That Left Me Impressed
I never liked history lessons in school. Despite the prevailing opinion that our teachers were great, I felt bored and burdened by memorizing dates and each of the Soviet 5-year plans. Stories lacked connection with one another, and history was confined within a book, disconnected from reality.
Another sort of crime was the separation of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) from the Second World War (1939–1945). Focusing on the first, the events before 1941 were only briefly considered. The Soviet Union was heroized, and the horrific fact of its invasion of Poland in cooperation with Hitler was never emphasized and often neglected.
History is written by the victors; only I feel as if I lost.
In 2014, Russian law made it a criminal act to suggest that the Soviet Union had invaded Poland, occupied the Baltic States, or committed war crimes between 1939 and 1941.
* Here and further all citations are from The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered a profound change in my perspective on history and politics. From “I’m out of politics” I turned into an advocate for basic civic awareness. Fortunately, I’m not the…