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The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Robert P. Baird. I'm the author of Putin, Trump, Ukraine, how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of Our Dark Times, which was published in the Guardian Long Read in 2023.

This is a profile of Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe, who grew up in the United States, now those in Canada.

He made his name as an academic, and in 2016, he published a book called On Tyranny, which made him kind of a hero of the liberal anti-Trunk resistance.

I was drawn to Snyder in the first place because he deals with ideas, and I'm very interested in the way that ideas interact with the world through politics and other means.

Snyder was particularly interesting to me because he's a polarizing figure, both in terms of the left and the right, and I was interested in looking at the ways that his work was received and treated among all those different groups of people.

When I finished the piece, Snyder, and a lot of people thought that Trump's time in office was

more or less effectively over, especially after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

Snyder was very prescient in recognizing that Trump was the start of something, not the end of something.

But I think

in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, he thought that it would be other people who carried

along Trump's legacy.

What's been interesting now is to watch, of course, the Trump back in office, how Snyder

and others have dealt with the fact that Trump is around in some ways even more unrestrained

than he was the first time during his first term.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture,

politics, and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to

the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

Putin-Trump Ukraine. How Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our Dark Times. By Robert P. Baird. I'm Last September, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine,

the Yale historian Timothy Snyder took a 16-hour train ride from Poland to Kiev. Snyder knew the city well. He'd been visiting since the early 1990s when he was a

graduate student and the newly post-Soviet Ukrainian capital was dark and provincial. In the decades

...