Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is an American historian

whose canvas has broadened over decades of research and writing. Professor Timothy Snyder

established his reputation as one of the great historians of totalitarianism and the Holocaust.

His primary focus was on the geographical area of Eastern Europe, which in the first half of the 20th century experienced devastation at the hands of Hitler and Stalin.

The Bloodlands was his name for the vast territory in which more than 13 million people lost their lives

during war and occupation. His later book on the Holocaust, Black Earth, focused on the degree

to which the extermination of the Jews, driven by Hitler's ideology, was also a reflection of

broken states descended into chaos. Those were works of history,

but of late he's used history to comment on contemporary phenomena, in particular the rise of

modern day tyranny. He cites Putin's Russia as an example, and the extraordinary rise of Donald Trump in the United States.

He's been dubbed the profit of totalitarianism, but is he in danger of pushing historical parallels

too far in his determination to engage with the politics of today?

Well, Timothy Snyder joins me now on the line from Vienna. Welcome to

Hard Talk. Glad to be with you. You are a world-renowned historian, but increasingly you seem to be

engaged with the politics of the present. And I'm wondering why that is. Is it for the simple reason that you

do not believe the lessons of history are being learned? I think a lot of it has to do with

demand. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that whether you're in the U.S. or in the UK or in

Europe or other places, there have been a lot of surprising events.

And historians are specialists in surprise.

And most of the things that happened

that were supposed to remember from history,

the First World War, the Second World War, and so on,

...