On freedom: Timothy Snyder in Kyiv
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Timothy Snyder came to Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, to present his book on freedom. We have had several conversations about the ideas of this book before in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and you can find links to the podcast episodes featuring these discussions in the description. However, this was the first time we talked about this book after its publication.

We recorded this conversation on February 9th, 2025 at the Sense bookstore on Hreschatyk Street in the heart of the Ukrainian capital, very close to Maidan. Several hundred people attended with many staying despite the lack of available seats. Most of them were young. This demonstrates how important reading and critical thinking are for Ukrainians today. My name is Volodymyr Yelmolenko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine.

Ukraine World is a multilingual media outlet about Ukraine produced by Internet Ukraine, one of the country's largest media NGOs. The Ukrainian translation of this book was done by Chauvin Publishing House, translator Halina Harasym, with the support of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. The event was organized by Ukraine World, PenUkraine, Chauvin Publishing House, and the Sense Bookstore.

Before we begin, let me remind you that you can support our work at patreon.com/ukraineworld. We deeply appreciate your support now as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding.

You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas where we assist both soldiers and civilians, primarily by delivering vehicles for soldiers and books for civilians. Contributions can be made via PayPal at ukraine.resistinggmail.com. You'll find these links in the description of this episode. So, let's begin. My first question to you is...

Very, very, very short. How you feel in Ukraine? How you feel yourself in Ukraine right now? I'm very happy to be here. I'm very happy to be with my friends and my colleagues. I certainly feel better in Kyiv than I feel in most places, more connected to the world, but also in a place where things are happening and where bookstores are full and where there are lots of fantastic people

to talk to and more seriously where I feel that the presence of the real makes conversations more serious and more worth having.

So you are a historian who wrote a philosophical book. I'm a philosopher who is very interested in history. What kind of movement do you have from writing books about history to writing more books about philosophy? Which I think you wrote a very, very good book about philosophy because usually now philosophical books are about old philosophers and dead philosophers. You're really showing...

an example of thinking. But tell me a little bit about this journey and why you go with this journey. Well, first of all, thank you for making clear at the beginning that this is a philosophy book. It is very much a philosophy book. It's a book where I try to answer the question what freedom in fact is. It's not a history of ideas.

It's not a consideration of how we talk about freedom now. It is a philosophy book which, from the ground up, is trying to define what freedom is. So how do you get from history to philosophy? First, I think whether historians like it or not, there's always an element of the metaphysical in our subject. There's always an element of what humans, in fact, care about.

History can't be reduced to a series of predictable processes. History always has to include the things that people care about, the things that people make sacrifices for, the things that people value. And that's why at some point history crosses over from being a science into being an art, or it's always an art and a science at the same time.

And as an art, it's about interpreting things that you can't see. So all historians are philosophers to some extent. They just don't admit it, right? For me personally, it had to do with everyday politics. I wrote On Tyranny, Pro Tyrannio, in 2016.

as a response to what was happening in my country at the time. And I wrote it as a historian. I wrote, like, On Tyranny is a list of warnings or recommendations or lessons from the 20th century. So I was trying to bring to bear things that I understood about history as advice about how to recognize problems and how to behave in a situation of crisis. And then that book,

forced me to engage with the American public and other publics in different ways. And so I spent, you know, I gave maybe 150 lectures about that book. And one of the questions and one of the most fundamental questions, most reasonable questions was, if this is tyranny, what is freedom? Or a different way of

if we should defend something, what exactly is that thing that we should be defending? And I took that as a challenge, but it turned out to be a very difficult challenge. It's much easier to write about defending something than it is to define exactly what that thing is.

But I think it's worthwhile to define what that thing is, partly because it's philosophically interesting and morally necessary, but I think also it's politically necessary at the end of the day. Politically, you can't simply be defend-- you can't play defense the entire time. You can't defend the status quo the entire time. You have to have an idea of what's better. You have to have a vision of the future.

And that vision of the future has to contain ideas. It can't just contain pictures. It has to contain ideas, concepts, norms. It has to contain ethics. And freedom helps with all of that. So I think it was a logical journey. I think it made sense. But the entire time I was writing what I thought I had to write. I thought this was what I thought I had to do.

This was hard. This took me seven years, which is a long time for me. This book is, it's not a book about Ukraine. I would say it's a book where you basically talk primarily with Americans. And you can feel the American debate in this book. But you often talk about Ukraine. You often talk about Eastern Europe. You show your presence in Ukraine.

I know a little bit this story that you find it very important to finish this book in Ukraine. The preface is on your trip from Kyiv to Helm to Dorohusk. I think it was a few days after our previous conversation in Kyiv in September 23. Then we went with you in September 24 to Kharkiv and we had a big talk about this book even before it was published.

How does Ukraine fit in your effort to explain freedom to other nations, including to your own nation? So I think the most fundamental thing which isn't directly about Ukraine is the attempt to be honest in my method. So in my argument about freedom, freedom is not something that you can achieve on your own.

which seems at first very contradictory or paradoxical, because when we think about freedom, we often think of one person all alone, maybe on top of a mountain, having done some very impressive thing. And of course, freedom is about the one person and how the one person is special and unpredictable and unrepeatable. That is what freedom is about.

But how did that person get there? Who helped that person get to the top of the mountain? Who helped each individual become that individual? And something similar is true about knowledge. If you're free, that means you know who you are. But knowing who you are is actually incredibly difficult. It's very difficult to know who you are. It's something that it's incredibly easy to be mistaken about, in fact.

And in order to know who you are, you have to listen to other people. You can't do it otherwise. There are people who are very sure of themselves, who think they know everything about themselves, and those people are currently in power in my country, and they're causing lots of trouble. That's not the same thing as being free, right? To be free involves knowing who you are. And to know who you are, you have to listen to others.

And so this is, I think, true about freedom itself. And I tried to make it true in the way that I wrote the book. So as Volodymyr Yarmolenko knows, because he's one of the people I made read the book. Forced. Yeah. No, no, no. I was willing to do that. I showed it to a lot of people, not philosophers and historians, but also friends over a period of years and years.

But I wanted just as a matter of honesty to my own argument, I wanted to I needed to listen to other people like as a part of my method. And so taking the book to Ukraine and rewriting it in Ukraine and talking to Ukrainians, which I did like to maybe two or well over 200 people. I asked Ukrainians, various Ukrainians, like, what do you think freedom is? And interestingly, people always had something to say, like,

I you know like no interest I mean no one seems surprised that I was asking like like in other countries if you just ask somebody you just met you know like oh what do you think freedom is they might you know look at you a bit funny but in Ukraine everybody seemed to have an have an answer so part of it was method and then part of it was part of it was like trying to be in the world so

Here I am writing this book about freedom, and as I'm trying to finish the book, Russia invades Ukraine a second time, and there is a struggle, without any kind of exaggeration, there is a struggle which has to do with freedom. And in this struggle, people are talking about freedom, and I think freedom...

only makes sense inside the world. So Ukraine isn't the whole world, but Ukraine was a place where something very intense and important was happening, and people were being very articulate about it. And I wanted, as far as I could, to have the book be in the world and not out of the world. I don't want people to have to read the book and work hard to see how it's connected to the world. I want them to think the person who wrote this was not disconnected from the world.

the person who wrote this was in some way in the world. And then the third part is that Ukrainians helped me to make the arguments of the book. So as Volodya says, there are many places in the book where I give voice to Ukrainians, but I'm giving voice to Ukrainians because Ukrainians are helping me to make arguments, like the argument for positive freedom, for example.

So the book is about freedom, but I'm arguing that freedom is always positive. And what do I mean by that? I mean that freedom isn't just the absence of evil, but the presence of good. And so freedom can't just be freedom from, it has to always be freedom to, or to put it a different way,

Freedom from might be important, but it's important as a first step towards freedom too. So naturally, "deoccupied territories" were a place to think about this argument because if a territory has been "deoccupied," is that the same thing as being "liberated"? And the gap between those two words, "deoccupied" and "liberated," is really helpful

And being in contact with Ukrainians who were able to return to their homes after Russian occupation ended was very helpful because, of course, a great evil has been removed. But that's not the same thing as people being entirely isolated.

free. People are free when the rubble is cleared and the houses are rebuilt and the buses are running and the trains are running and the kids can go to school. And I believe all of that belongs to freedom. And so even when the evil is very great, removing it isn't the same thing as freedom. And that like that's just there were several experiences that I had with Ukrainians that were helpful. But that was one of them that because this argument between positive and negative freedom, like it can seem

academic, irrelevant, but it's really not. If you think freedom is just negative, that it's only about pushing away the evil, then it's very hard to think about regeneration and creation and cooperation and solidarity and all these other things that you actually need for freedom.

If you're thinking that stopping the evil is enough, then you're going to be just looking for some other evil and you're not going to ever be taking responsibility for what you think is good. So a lot, really quite a lot hangs on getting this right, I think. How many of you already read the book? Please raise your hands. Okay, so that we...

People are laughing because Vadim Karpiak was actually doing the audio book. So you're not part of those who read the book. You not only read it, but you pronounced it. Okay. I will ask this question by the end of our conversation. I will repeat this question again. But I think your argument is also helping us a lot. Because your argument is...

is very good for Americans because we see it right now. We see kind of a strange combination in current American politics of the libertarianism which says negative freedom, we need to reduce government, and of kind of some kind of tyrannical elements. And you see very strangely how this libertarianism and tyrannical elements go together. But in our case, it is also important thought because

Yes, we will not be free unless we liberate ourselves from Russia, from the Empire. But liberating ourselves from the Empire is not enough. So you need to have something else. You need to have a very strong Ukrainian project, which will be something much more that Ukraine is just not Russia. Ukraine is anti-Russia, etc. And if this is true, then thinking about freedom from and freedom to Ukraine

is actually thinking that freedom is just a way to something else. If the positive freedom in your understanding is that freedom is a way to something else, to what you call values, the big values.

So why you keep saying that freedom is a value of the values, while for me it seems to me that this is libertarians who would say that freedom is absolute value and we don't have any other values, right? But you're saying no, freedom is a value of values because it makes possible other values. Can you explain a little bit to me this? I'm going to first just make a comment about empire because...

When I talk about positive and negative freedom, I'm trying to criticize all versions of negative freedom. So the American version is get rid of the government and you'll be free. And that's one version of negative freedom, that the problem, the barrier to your freedom is the government.

And as Volo just says, that's a very, that's an American problem. And we are seeing, I would suggest it's a logical conclusion, work itself out right now in American politics. If you allow people to come to power who sincerely believe that government is the problem and that they personally are the solution, you can pretty quickly find yourself without a government. But

I just wanted to pause on empire here because I think another version of negative freedom is the idea that you can just remove the empire and everything will be fine. And of course, anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism is very sympathetic. But if you just remove the empire, you can then build another empire, which happens all the time. The whole history of decolonization happens.

or a lot of it, is that a bigger empire is destroyed and a smaller empire is created on the same territory. So there has to be, as you say, there has to be a project where the word "project" always points towards the future, right? "Project" means to throw forward. A project is always about the future. So thanks for the question about value of values. What I mean... I chose that phrase very carefully.

Because what I wanted to say is this. There really are good things in the world. So we've been talking about positive freedom politically, but freedom's also positive philosophically. And what I mean is there really are good things in the world, like, I don't know, integrity or mercy or grace or beauty or

there really are good things, there really are values, they're real. So this is a book which, in philosophical terms, is morally realist. I believe that it's better for, I truly believe that it is objectively better for Volodya and I to have a good conversation than a bad conversation. And I believe there are values such as

toleration, flexibility, empathy, and so on, which lead to a good conversation rather than a bad conversation. And I also think that these values are in tension with one another. So there are many good things. For example, punctuality is good, right? It's good to be on time. It's

Ukrainians laugh at that, I'm not sure why. No, but today we proved that we can do it. Right. So punctuality is good. And friendship is also good. So let's say that Volodya has 10 friends that I should say hello to before I come up here. Well, maybe... I didn't abuse this, I didn't abuse this. A sense of humor is also a good thing in a conversation.

But it's good for me to stop and say hello to friends, right? Friendship is good. But punctuality is also good. And that's a trivial example, but this is just the way the world is. It's good to be, to take a more serious example, it's good to be consistent. It's good to follow rules, but it's also good to be merciful sometimes.

And mercy always means making an exception to a rule. So there's tension all in the moral world. And that is what gives us a chance to be free, in my view. Because morals or ethics or values don't fit together the way that physical objects do. They don't fit together at all. And they don't lend themselves to an easy analysis. Like, I can't say...

consistency is better than mercy. That doesn't make any sense. I can't say that integrity or I can't say loyalty is better than honesty.

It doesn't make any sense. Sometimes you're loyal and sometimes you're honest and sometimes you find a way to be both. But there's no mathematical equation which can help you, which tells you that one is bigger than the other. You have to make human judgments. And those human subjective judgments make you who you are, but they also make you unpredictable. They make you different than other things in the universe. And I think that's very beautiful and it's very special and it's also...

It's a sign also of people who believe in negative freedom. People who believe in negative freedom will often say, or they won't talk about the moral world. They'll just tell you that you have interests. And when they say you have interests, what they mean is you are kind of like an object. You know, you're very predictable. I know what your interests are. I can tell you what your interests are. Or your interests are very simple. They're about pleasure and pain. They're about fear.

So in negative freedom, we become these very simple creatures. But in reality, we're these very complex moral creatures. So freedom is positive philosophically because it means the condition or the state in which we can make choices among all these good things and become the kinds of people that we want to become.

And so that's why freedom is the value of values, not because it excludes any other value, but because freedom is the name of that condition in which we can make choices among all the other values. So I try very hard not to say it's the highest value,

It's the value of values because it's the value that enables all of the other ones. And this is again very different, as you suggest, from an idea of negative freedom which says freedom or nothing. Because usually when those people, like when you start with freedom or nothing, you usually end up with nothing.

Because freedom can't be a hard choice between freedom and everything else. Freedom is the condition in which you get all the other things. And so the people who are constantly telling you to make this choice, freedom or nothing, that's usually a scam. Because freedom means you get all the other good things. I will ask a few more questions and you can start thinking about your questions.

There are five major words that you present like forms of freedom, which are sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity. In my plan, I wanted to ask a question about each of them, but we will not have time to do that.

But one very important thing that you start from sovereignty and you end with solidarity, and that's how you connect the individual choice and action with connection with other people. But let me start with this word sovereignty, because you definitely do not mean just national sovereignty. You mean individual sovereignty as well.

But there is the whole bunch of philosophy of sovereignty which goes into absolutely different direction. And in particular, I mean people like Carl Schmitt, who became very, very popular now in Russia and in China. And while I'm looking at the way how the American debates going on, this criticism of democracy in some of the MAGA circles going on,

It's precisely, I feel like it's going back to early 20th century ideas from which Carl Schmitt was born, is that democracy is bad because it goes too much into procedures, into solidarity, into discussions. Well, we need a strong hand. We need a person who decides. We need a kind of even monarchical power. And therefore, in America, you have such people like Trump

Curtis Yarvin who is basically saying that America should be a monarchy or something like that. So, and it's precisely this, when we're going here in the train, we were discussing Lesya Ukrainka and the way how you think about her. And I always share with you this phrase from Kamilnyi hospodar when Donna Anna says,

There is no freedom without power. And I have the feeling that we have more and more trends right now to think in that way. So tyrants think in that way. And when they think in that way, when they want absolute freedom for themselves, they think this is about sovereignty. But you suggest an absolutely different version of sovereignty. So can you tell me what it is? So I'm taking, I think, unlike...

Unlike the people that you've mentioned, I'm taking seriously that freedom is the value of values. And I'm not defining it negatively, I'm defining it positively. So all these visions, like a Schmittian vision of making an exception to a rule,

For me, that's negative. That is freedom defined by being against something else or breaking something else. And what's worse, it only belongs to one person. So I'm not sure all of you are going to be familiar with Carl Schmitt, and that's okay. Too many people are already familiar with Carl Schmitt. He was the leading thinker of Nazi Germany.

And he was a very intelligent thinker, but his whole philosophy is parasitical on the existence of the democratic people and institutions and law. His idea is that the sovereign is the one who makes an exception. And I will tell you why that's a horrible idea. It's a horrible idea because it's essentially adolescent thinking.

It's like power politics for teenagers. The notion in Schmitt is that there are rules out there, but those rules are artificial and they're imperfect and they're historically contingent, which is all true. But then the solution is, I show you that I can make an exception. I break the rules. And Schmitt's idea is that that makes you sovereign, but all it does is break things.

Right. And if you look, I mean, I don't want to just talk about Nazi Germany in one sentence. But if you look at what not what Nazi Germany did, Nazi Germany made exceptions and Nazi Germany broke things, lives, countries. That is the logical conclusion of that of that thinking. In my view, I don't think you're sovereign just because you break somebody else's rules.

whether you run a country or whether, you know, whether you run a country as though you were a teenager or whether you are a teenager, breaking someone else's rules doesn't make you sovereign. What I think makes you sovereign is having the ability to decide which rules you're going to follow yourself. I think that's what makes you sovereign. Deciding what things you in fact authentically care. If I'm, if I'm in the world of Carl Schmitt,

then all I have to do is decide what rules to break. That's childish. That's childish. That's immature. And it's dangerous. So I'm trying to take the word sovereignty and make it mean something completely different, where the question is, how do we become sovereign? How do we become the kinds of people who recognize values in the world?

How do we become the kinds of people who can make choices about values? How does that happen? How do we become sovereign? And here I'm working to make the case that freedom depends upon cooperation, which it does. Because if we accept that freedom is the value of values, and we accept therefore that people should become free,

then we have to think about what we have to do together to create individuals. And this is why so much of the book is about childhood, actually. It's about very young people. A lot of this book is about babies. And my point would be that if your book about freedom is not about babies, it's not serious. And I say that not only as a father, but also as a father.

Because realistically, if you've had a child or lived with children, you know that it takes a huge amount of cooperative work to create that individual.

And that means that if you care about individuality, you also have to care about that cooperative work. And you have to work together in order to give that child the chance to become free. So I'm trying to turn sovereignty around to mean something which I think is much more legitimate, the project of creating individuals who are sovereign in a moral sense. And as you say...

That requires solidarity. Like adults, and not just parents and grandparents, but everyone looking in on the situation has to say, "The one thing we have in common, literally the one thing we have in common, is that we were all born." I'm looking out there for exceptions. Well, there is a risk that there will be exceptions soon. Right. Well, then we'll see.

But we were all born, right? Like that's the concrete, very specific thing that we share. And some of us will give birth and some of us have given birth. But like that very specific situation of being born and being helpless helps one to see realistically what it means to become free. And obviously it requires solidarity. I will ask the last question about one more word and

And for you to understand that this is probably the fourth conversation between me and Timothy Snyder on this subject. And if you want more, there are three podcasts on Ukraine world. One was from 2022, one is from 23, one is from 24, now it's from 25. So I suggest to continue this tradition.

My question is about the second word, unpredictability. And correct me if I'm wrong, I see here kind of maybe the influence of Hannah Arendt and her idea that basically what helps us from tyranny is that there are newborns, that we always in this time of newborns and new people and new generations, and they always create something new.

While on the other hand, like the teaching about democracy that we quite often hear is that democracy should be predictable, that you should have rule of law, you should have equality, you should have this and this. And my impression that democracies right now are losing the battle to far right, to far left.

Precisely because there's so much predictable in the discourse. So as if they say, okay, but we know all the answers. And we right now see that unpredictability is the strength of the forces who challenge democracy, right? Everybody is saying about this.

But your unpredictability is a little bit different. And this unpredictability, I think it goes precisely in this direction of creativity of unexpected.

So how we can find this equilibrium between unpredictability and a certain kind of repetition, without which we can't have also societies running, right? So before I answer this, I just want to say thanks to Volodya for leading this conversation.

I think, without exaggeration, we're very lucky to have Volodymyr Malenko as a conversation partner. I'm very lucky to have you as a conversation partner. It's not only... Yeah. Yay. It's not only the fourth or fifth or sixth time we've talked about this book, it's the second time this week, because...

Was it yesterday or the day before? The day before yesterday. The day before yesterday, we were both in Paris in this very extravagant hall in the Sorbonne having a conversation about this book with Sylvie Kaufmann, the wonderful French journalist. So I wanted to say that as far as predictability and unpredictability, we started this conversation by my saying that I was testing the method of the book by bringing the book to Ukraine.

I'm going to start this answer by asking you to do something a little bit similar, which is to imagine another situation where I was reading the book, teaching the book, in fact, which is inside an American maximum security prison. So I taught this book inside an American maximum security prison in the spring of 2022, which was interesting in many ways. One of them

was the conversations that we had about Ukraine inside that American prison because the guys there were...

coming from a very specific experience of America and and they were able going back to colonialism like they were able to understand Ukraine in an in an anti-colonial framework like that's the one that they actually understood and that led to some really interesting conversations but

They had an objection to the book, which is like Volodya's question. They were really upset by the notion of unpredictability because what they said was, look, our lives were totally unpredictable and that's why we're here.

We didn't have housing, we didn't have parents, we didn't have a government that looked after us. And yeah, we did bad things, but the fact that our lives were so incredibly unpredictable is bad. So why are you advocating unpredictability? And that was very helpful to me because it helped me clarify the answer to the question, which is that it's the people who I want to be unpredictable.

Like, I want all of you to be having different thoughts and different reactions to this conversation. I want all of you to have, like, your own weird eccentric things that you care about. I want all of you to go home and have different conversations about this. That's what I mean. The unpredictability is inside the people. And in order to create people like that, you have to have a predictable outside world. And that's what I was trying to say about sovereignty and babies.

right? You don't want to create a lot of unpredictability around babies. You I see the young mothers, you know, they're like, who are about to go to sleep, wake up to nod at that. Very nice. You don't want to have a lot of unpredictability around babies, like you want them to sleep, you want them to eat, you want them to be hugged. You don't want them to have an unpredictable life, you want things to be very predictable for them.

And that's the beginning of a longer story. Like we all need certain things to be predictable as far as we can. We want to be warm at night. We want to have roofs over our head. We want to get food regularly. We want the roads to be flat, right? We need a certain amount of unpredictability. Sorry, we need a certain amount of predictability to allow us to become unpredictable. That's the point. If there's too much unpredictability around us,

then we become predictable. Because if there's too much unpredictability, then we're afraid. And when we're afraid, we become very predictable for those who want to rule us. Which leads to the last point I want to make, which is human unpredictability is essential to freedom. It's essential to keeping democracy going. And it's because when you're predictable, then you can be easily ruled.

And that's how social media work, by the way. Social media make you more predictable, and they generate data about how you're predictable, which makes you much easier to rule, which is one of the reasons why democracy is failing because of that. So democracy, now getting to the last part of your question, democracy has to be about procedures that make things predictable.

But it's about predictability in order for us to be free, and therefore unpredictable. And that is the element of democracy which I think has gone

has been neglected, has been underemphasized. The point of all these procedures is to create conditions where we can be, you know, where we can learn to play the guitar, where, you know, we can go on trips, where we can decide to live in a commune, like, whatever. The whole point of the political predictability is to create individuals. And I think that part has gotten lost.

And I think that does help the kinds of developments you were talking about, because when people have the procedures and they feel predictable themselves, they start to look for some unpredictable hero. And what we have now, especially U.S. politics is a great example, you have a few people who are, as it were, monopolizing politics.

the unpredictability, right? All the unpredictability in the entire country is put into the form of one or two people who run it. And then everyone else is supposed to predictably worship them as heroes.

So democracy is about procedures and democracy should be about creating predictable conditions of life. But the point of it isn't the procedures. The point of it is to create us. The point of it is to make us interesting, to allow us to be interesting. Thank you. And I will pass the mic to the audience. I have wonderful colleague Katya who will give you the mic, those who want to ask questions.

I have a question, a very obvious question about the bell. Can you tell us more about the cover, the bell on the book? I think for Ukrainians, the bell from Philly is not a very known story. And who decided to put it on your book and do you think it's... I see that numerous conversations have started.

So, I mean, a bell can mean different things to different people. I was just today in the bell tower of of Sofia at the Bell Tower of San Sofia. And the the so a very general thing about bells is when you when you ring a bell, it's you can seem like you're doing something like very grand and individual. Like, here I am. I'm ringing a bell. Right.

But the purpose of ringing the bell is almost always to bring people together in defense or to come to a meal or whatever it might be. And I think that in that general way, a bell captures some of the tensions that we've been talking about. The person ringing the bell could be all alone. But the reason you're ringing the bell is because you need help or you're trying to do something together. So in that way, I like the bell as a symbol. But

The book, as Volodya said a couple of times, it is very much about the U.S., and it relies on some experiences of my life. And this bell comes from a bell that I rang when I was six years old and my country was 200 years old. And the bell has to do with the idea that your nation is perfect in the past, which is something you can believe when you're six years old. And the...

the fracture in the bell has to do with learning that this isn't true. So there was an authentic incident in 1976 when together with my cousins and my brothers, we rang a bell and the bell was meant to remind us of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, which is one of the major American symbols. But like a lot of national symbols, it's more interesting when you look into it. So

The idea was that the Liberty Bell was rung on the 4th of July, sorry, 1776, which is when the United States or the colonies declared their independence. But first of all, that didn't happen, like most historical things that you learn in school. And secondly, the bell, interestingly, the bell wasn't called the Liberty Bell at that time.

The bell was later called the Liberty Bell by people who wanted to abolish slavery and by people who wanted to give women the vote. And so in 1776, it wasn't called the Liberty Bell. And this is important because national symbols call you back to some moment where everything was supposedly perfect.

But that can't be freedom, right? Freedom has to be about the future and things getting better. And so if you learn a little bit about this symbol, you know, things I learned after I was six years old, I recognized, okay, maybe something important happened when my country declared independence, but

it was only the first step towards something which has to continue into the future, right? That liberty can't be something achieved in the past. It has to be something which is achieved step by step

into the future. Thank you very much for many thought-provoking ideas you shared with us today. So I was really interested, you mentioned something about the occupied territories and about babies and about understanding who you are. And so for me as a person who

met war in 2014 and then in 2022 in Mariupol and met with many people who were young when my village was occupied in Mariupol when they were already grown up and fighting on the other side. So for me, hoping that my occupied village will

return and I will return back home. So I was thinking how can we as a nation that values freedom above all else exercise our freedom in the project that is Ukraine without depriving others from exercising their freedom when we go back into the territories that are now occupied. Because those children that grew up

They already grew up understanding freedom and understanding themselves in a totally different way. And for us, without building a new empire, well, the other empire was removed. So how can we exercise freedom in that kind of ecological way, I would say? So, Yulia, I want to say that is an incredibly generous and thoughtful question. I mean, the question is going to be better than any answer that comes to it because you've already...

the question recognizes the difficulty of it all, that freedom isn't an abstraction. Like, the easy way to think about freedom is you just wipe away everything and you start again, right? A little bit like the earlier question about the bell, you know, the notion was the American Revolution started everything again, and we were free from all the bad stuff of the past. But one of the things we weren't free of was slavery.

And that's what, you know, that's what the cracked bell is about. You can't get free of the past. The past is always there. And so your question frames everything correctly in any situation, even when something that's very beautiful and that you very much want to have happen happens, like your village being deoccupied after 10 years or more.

Even in that there's always going to be some kind of positive challenge as to what it will take to bring freedom and There's no there's no easy answer right? Negative freedom is the reason why negative freedom is so popular is because it's easy like it's easy to imagine we just defeat something we crush something we push it away and then everything is gonna be fine and

Positive freedom is hard because it accepts that sometimes you have to push away something evil and then you have to create the new things afterwards. That the reason why you pushed it away was because you were trying to create something else. And you can only create something else on the basis of what's already there. And what's already there includes the experiences of people who have lived for a long time under Russian rule.

So that's a complicated question to which I'm just going to, like, I'm going to, so far I'm cheating just by saying, like, really good question. And the answers to how you deal with situations like that are sort of at a technical level, but they largely have to do with, A, listening to people,

Even when you completely disagree with them because you can't figure out who they are without doing that and also you can't figure out how you sound to them, right? So I just I was in I was just in Berlin and the West Germany East Germany thing

hasn't really worked out the way that people had hoped it would, where 35 years after unification, a huge amount of people in East Germany are voting for the far right.

And that, in my view anyway, partly has to do with West Germans not being able to listen and being sure they were right about everything. And maybe they were right about 75% of things, but they weren't right about everything. So part of it is...

Listening in order to figure out not only where people are coming from but also how you sound to them and the other part is teaching like teaching about the past in a way which involves various points of view and various experiences because you're not like you're never going to get those

you're never going to get those places back by just teaching a history about how everything was great in Galicia in 1848. There has to be a history which accepts that there's lots of variety and lots of different experiences, and which is truthful. And with time, you can gain back loyalty with truth.

There are other technical things like that you have to be able to recreate like an economic reality, which is very different than the previous reality. But I should stop here because we need to do some other questions. Thank you.

Hello professor, my name is Julia and well, you're a huge fan, I think as many people here. I already read your book "On the Road to Unfreedom" as well as the last book and I think those words are genius and give us so many guidelines on how we can navigate this life.

especially in this very difficult period. So my question is a bit about predictability and unpredictability, but maybe like in a different sense. As you mentioned many times in your books, history is recurring. So we are this or that way coming through the same stories all the time.

And I'm wondering if what is happening now in the US and in the world overall, if you can compare it like to something that already happened. And what is like, what can be our contribution to make it less predictable? So like not basically like making the same mistakes or, you know, the same path, going through the same path. Yeah, I mean, history...

History doesn't repeat. If it repeated, then your question wouldn't really make sense, right? If history repeated, then there wouldn't really be anything we could do about it. It would be like music that you just play a second time. But you're right that there are patterns that sometimes we can notice. And the period 1890 to 1935 is a little bit similar to the period...

1990, you know, to 2035, it's at least so far where you start with, at least in Europe, you start with this tremendous confidence that things can only get better. And you have this notion that thanks to economic growth, people will automatically become more free. And then you have a few crashes along the way, and that confidence is lost, and you end up with a lot of one-party states.

That, you know, I think that there's some broad similarity in there. And there are lessons, like one of the lessons is economic, that you shouldn't-- that we now have political tools to intervene so that the economic crashes aren't so great.

We probably should have intervened more in 2008 than we did, or at least intervened in different ways that were more favorable to average human beings than they were to the banks. I look back at the way the United States reacted to the financial crisis of 2008, and I think we could have rescued whole industries

We could have rescued the newspapers for the next hundred years for a tiny amount of the money that we spent rescuing the banks, that there was something wrong about the way we approached that economic crisis. And I think we're still in a way paying the price for that. And then so, and more specifically, there's a lesson about the late 1930s, which has to do with appeasement. Very specifically,

czechoslovakia very specifically um supporting the czechs and the slovaks which the democracy democracies didn't do but also very specifically that the czechs chose not to fight and so my the the analogy about the late 1930s which i pushed the most i think it's the most helpful is that ukraine is a bit like czechoslovakia except that ukraine chose to fight

And by fighting, Ukraine has kept the rest of us out of a Second World War, out of a world war for multiple years. And of course, the lesson from that would be that you have to, you need to help

you need to help that country to win so you don't get into a much worse conflict. And I don't have time to go into all the details of the analogy, but that's one lesson that I draw in this particular circumstance, that the democracies have a chance to stay out of a world war, and they're not really, so far they're not really taking it. They're not really doing all the things that they can do. And then one very broad thing to say as a historian, going back to things not really repeating,

There are always a whole range of possibilities that we don't see, but which are nevertheless there. And some of them are bad, right? Not everyone foresaw that, you know, one half-trillionaire could take over the United States by employing a bunch of Nazi hackers, you know, like that. Not everybody foresaw that. But there are also good things which we don't foresee. And that is politically very important.

Volodya referred to Hannah Arendt and her concept of natality, like that new things are born and that they're new and that they're unpredictable. That's very important too, that possibilities are being born all the time and we might not see them all the way to the end, but they're still there. My name is...

My name is Andrew and the question is: if we speak about freedom as a value of values, we think that a person can be only happy if this person is free. And in this way we think about a person as an individual human, as himself.

And what about the person who believes himself to be a part of a society like in Northern Korea or communist China? And can this person feel himself free and be happy if from our point of view he's obviously not? So let me try to be specific about something. Because there is a Marxist idea of freedom, which is not irrelevant to the North Korean example.

And in that idea of freedom, we are all essentially similar, that we basically have the same human nature, and therefore we can all be liberated in the same way, which is by getting rid of private property. And I have a very specific approach to that, which is that I think Marxism is one more form of negative freedom.

Because what Marxism says is that there's a bad thing and you take it away and then everything's fine. And so I'm actually in this book, I'm grouping Marxism in with other forms of negative freedom, saying that it makes the same fundamental logical mistake.

What I think is that there is no one human nature, right? That we all value different things and we should value different things. And therefore, we can't liberate ourselves just by doing one thing for all of us. That can't really happen. What we can do is create conditions where all of us can explore in different ways, and that's freedom. Now, getting to happiness, happiness is not exactly the same thing as freedom.

And I don't think it's right for someone in Kyiv to say to someone in Pyongyang, you're happy or you're not happy. We don't know. But I do think that freedom and happiness go together and that happiness can be a clue to freedom because in my view, you can only be happy by being true to yourself and yourself is weird.

It's not like other selves. See, when I said yourself is weird, you smiled because you knew what I meant. Um, like each person is different than each other person and you can be happy when somehow life is in balance with that. I think it's very hard to be happy when you're conforming with everyone. Um, I think that makes people very anxious. But the other thing I wanted to point out is that, um,

I think that freedom positively understood does make people happy. Like, it's not a simple program. Like, it's not a book that you read, like, "Make sure to water your plants and get up early in the morning." It's not a simple thing like that. But I think people who treat freedom as positive, like, as having to do with their own particular values and as having to do with relationships, I think they do tend to be happier

And when you look at people who think that freedom is negative, that it's about being alone, that it's about your impulses, that it's about opposing things, I can't help but notice that those people don't seem as happy. And so I've shifted from North Korea to the White House, but I just can't help but notice that even if you're an incredibly wealthy person and you're running the United States of America, you still seem really unhappy.

Right? No, I feel like everybody in this room pretty much is happier than the people running the United States. And that's a problem for the people running the United States. Like, here you are, like, you're a hero of negative freedom. Like, you've opposed everything. You've destroyed everything. You're standing on the ruins of the mountain you climbed or whatever. And you're not happy. You're still yelling at everybody. You're still complaining. You're still whining. And for me, like, the fact that

Like that is now the tip, like that's the stance. You stand up and whine even though you have hundreds of billions of dollars and you're running the world, you still stand up and complain. Like that's a sign of the bankruptcy of negative freedom in my view as a route to happiness. And they can prove me wrong tomorrow by stopping complaining about everything.

Hello everyone, my name is Olga and going back to your question, answer for the question about the necessity of listening to people. For now we live in the world of social networks and we see how it changes the social landscape and that

Unfortunately, many times we can hear not who is saying something most valuable, but who is saying something most popular, trending, whatever, and it's not always good things. So how in this situation really listen to each other and not just for those who are most noisy? Thank you.

That's a great question and it goes in a deep way back to predictability and unpredictability because the way social media work is to find the things about you that are going to make you feel pleasure or feel fear. Social media are actually designed on the basis of experiments on animals

in the middle of the 20th century, where it was discovered that if you can make an animal, give the animal pleasure, pleasure, and then deny it pleasure in an unpredictable way, you can make the animal terrified, and you can make the animal basically easy to control. And so that experiment, which would be illegal as an experiment on a human, is actually carried out on all of us constantly all the time.

the way that social media are designed are to give you something that you like, like, like, and then to make you afraid. Like, like, fear, pleasure, fear, fear, fear, pleasure, pleasure. And that holds our attention, but it also makes us more predictable, like predictable animals. Like we are animals who can be made more predictable. We are also humans who can become more unpredictable, but we're also animals who can be made more predictable. I just want to say that because even before we get to the question of how we listen,

there is the fact that social media is essentially not a human environment. It's an essentially inhuman environment created by things that are not human and with goals, in my view, that are essentially anti-human. Like the goals are to make us less human, to make us more predictable, more like parts of a network or more like scared animals. And it has the effect of making us more like scared animals. And that's one of the reasons why democracy is hard. Because in a democracy, you have to believe like,

we kind of trust each other, we're one part of one group, maybe there's a future. And if we behave like scared animals, then that's a much harder thing to believe in. So, I mean, the answers, like, they're policy answers, like, social media should be regulated and taxed a lot, and the taxes should be used to pay for local journalism and education. And another policy answer is,

And I don't know where Ukraine has gotten on this. I suspect, well, you can tell me, but it's really important to get the screens out of schools.

and to use-- like, if you're gonna use screens in schools, use them to teach computer programming, but try to have human-to-human interaction in schools, because we're getting to the point where schools are the only places where young people have a chance to interact with other humans, because they spend so much of their time otherwise on social media. And young people, by the way, like, generally understand this. Like, they understand that they have been-- we've brought young people into a world

where they are confronted by, they're thrown into a world in which there's already this addictive technology around them. And they didn't create it, right? That world is just there. And so we have to, like we who are adults, have to create spaces and times where they simply don't have access to it. And school is pretty much the one chance for that. And like the schools, or to give an anecdote, all the people who created this world for us

They send their kids to schools that don't have screens. All of them. All of them. They all do because they know what they've done to the rest of us.

They know very well what they've done to the rest of us and they don't want it for their own children. And so I can see there's now a reverse trend. Like in Norway, they've just pulled phones out of classrooms. There's a reverse trend and that's a very good thing because it helps us have a chance to develop our minds. But to answer your direct question,

I think there's just no substitute, really no substitute for making sure your own life contains face-to-face conversations. And also if you are reading online,

make a habit of reading people online who were themselves in the real world. And that's very simple. Like read the journalists. There are investigative journalists in Ukraine who do great work. Follow them. Don't follow commentators or influencers. Follow the people who actually go and do the reporting on corruption, on the war, on whatever it is. If you're not in the world,

at least try to be only at one remove from the world by reading the journalists. That's my best advice. There's chapter four of the book is actually, I'm not trying to advertise, but chapter four of the book is all about this. That's actually the continuation of the previous question. My name is Yehor and you provided the whole action plan for the regulation of social media. And I would support each step of this plan

but I wonder where it should start. So, because politicians, they benefit so much from social media. So how to start this regulation? Because I truly believe that without regulating social media, we're doomed. What was the last word? It's always crude. I'm not going to ask again because it's getting more dramatic.

But I agree with, I know, but I actually, you said we're done the first time, right? Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I have a very dark view about all this. Like, I think that we are, like, I think we're in a world with, where there are things out there thinking against us, so to speak, right? Where we've created this huge network, which is non-human and essentially anti-human. And it is working against us. I mean, if our humanity means our intelligence, for example, right?

There's bad news. There's bad news, which people generally don't want to hear. And the bad news is that the internet has made us stupider. And it's made us so much stupider that we generally don't want to hear about how it's made us stupider. And that itself is a bad sign, right? When you say like the internet's making you stupid and people like, wait, no, that's... So I mean, I agree with you. I think we've created, we've thoughtlessly created this world that

Which is first of all consuming physical energy like it's it's it's taking the coal out of the ground in Africa You know like in order to do an AI thing you're basically burning coal in Africa, you know in some random air-conditioned server farm like it's it's like we're melting glaciers in order to use AI we're literally burning the world for this stuff and

And it's destroying our own neural networking, it's destroying our neurological patterns. And it's not that I think that, I mean I'm not quite so paranoid to think that there's like an overall intelligence behind it, but it's taking more and more away from us. Like artificial intelligence, just to stay on that, artificial intelligence plagiarizes, like that's how it works. It plagiarizes, it takes things that humans have made

And then it makes them stupider. And then we read the AI-generated answer to questions and we become stupider ourselves. Like, some very nice, well-intentioned people wanted to create an AI version of me, and they thought it would help me because I don't have time to answer everybody's questions.

And then, and that's how I read some of the output. And it was just so horrifying because suddenly I had become a creature who says, on the one hand, some people say this, and on the other hand, some people say this.

And perhaps the truth is in the middle, right? Which is what you might have noticed that's what AI generally does, right? And then you read enough of that AI-generated stuff and you become an idiot yourself, right? So I'm with you, and I understand the difficulty, and I think we can't...

First of all, we have to try to handle it conceptually. We have to have big conversations about what this stuff is actually doing to us. Because big conversations are one way to deal with all the small addictions, which most of us have in some form. There has to be a big conversation. We have to recognize this. We have to say things like...

it's making us stupid. We have to say things like it's ruining childhood, right? Like the younger people get, the worse this is. It gets really bad when you get really young. I mean, it's really terrible. We have to say things like this is getting out of our control, I think. So that's part of it. Another part of it, I think, is, yeah, I mean, one appeal you can make in European countries, at least, is that if you want to be sovereign...

You have to cut this off at some point because the social media is creating the kind of informational power which can make elections close to impossible. Ours was very much messed with in this way. But also it's creating particular wealthy people who might also try to prevent you from having a normal election in your own country.

So if one appeal that can be made to politicians has to do with the sovereignty of the state, that the sovereignty of the state is undermined from below by this, but also from above. And, you know, competitiveness, like you're going to need to have educated populations to be competitive in the future. That's another argument. And another argument is that you can tax this stuff and you can do a lot with it. But you're right, like,

It's hard to find a place to start. I think a good way to make arguments is to start small by saying, okay, look, in this school it worked, in this region it worked. I'd like to think the example that all the tech billionaires send their kids to different kinds of schools should count for something.

but looking for positive examples of how it works to go without this. But I agree with you. It's a really good question of how to start. I think it's something we have to think all about. So thanks. Hello, my name is Alex, and I want to ask what values can unite Ukrainians wanted by war and Russian propaganda? And why these values? First of all, it's freedom, and what else? I mean, I think the...

So where I start on freedom is that we are all a little bit mysterious. So the things that we truly like are a little bit elusive. And so, I mean, I'm drawing from East European thinkers who tended to value authenticity as against conformity, right? As against doing it, but trying to know what you actually care about yourself. And that's a challenge.

And it's not something, I don't mean to dodge your question, but it's not something that somebody else can actually do for you. I can't tell wounded Ukrainian soldiers what they really care about any more than I can tell the people in the front row what they really care about or should care

My idea of freedom is that we do all have things that we really care about. And of course, in the case of Ukrainian veterans, there's special kind of evidence that they care about things. And that the way to be free is to live consistently with those things and to try to build up a moral character over the course of your life.

And the way they were free together is that we create institutions that allow that, to allow individuals to do that. So for me, it's not freedom plus other things. I think I see freedom as being the thing which enables all of the other things. Like, the reason why it's legitimate for people to agree that freedom comes first is not that it's better than something else. It's because it enables all the other things, right? It's like...

It's like if life is an ocean full of many beautiful things underwater, that's wonderful. And the one thing we can agree on is that we should all swim. It's a little bit like that, right? It's not that swimming is better than all the things in this beautiful ocean. It's that swimming allows everyone to have access to various things. So it's not freedom plus. It's like freedom as enabling everything else.

I mean, but I'm talking to Ukrainian soldiers. The thing that's important to say is that, which I think people from the West don't say enough, is that I recognize that

the normal life that we've been able to live these last three years is because of sacrifices that Ukrainians are being asked to make for the rest of us. And that this is unfair and this has been unfairly proportioned and that we don't respect it enough. That's something I find it important to say. We are a little bit approaching the end of conversation and I cannot leave you without the big question that

that you are really caring about right now and this is a question how we rethink the Ukrainian history from the global perspective and uh well you will have only about seven minutes to answer this question but

I will tell you my version and I will ask you to say if you agree with this or not. Because it's directly related to the question of freedom. My version of the Ukrainian history, which goes very, very deep into centuries and millennium, but it's always a question how we fight for freedom despite the environment which makes it impossible. And by saying this,

I don't necessarily mean only empires, but of course empires is a very important thing and the Russian Empire is like quintessential of that. But it also means geography, which probably not makes freedom so much possible as in some other geographies.

And in this way, this Ukrainian fight makes it so much globally valid because it shows that freedom is possible in places where it seems to be impossible. How do you answer to this? So Volodya is very kindly referring to a project that I'm helping with called Ukrainian History Global Initiative, where we are actually trying to take

several years and about a hundred researchers to do a deep history of Ukraine. And I will answer the question in three very general ways. The first is that I think history itself is liberating because there's always so much more in it than you thought. And like a lot of things, this is true for everybody, but it's true for Ukrainians as

more so than for other people. Ukrainian history is just unbelievably rich, unbelievably rich, including the prehistorical parts of it. It includes all kinds of things which no one knows about and all kinds of things that Ukrainians maybe know a little bit about, but like...

Viking magic and, you know, Scythian female archers and, you know, Greek tragedies, so much of, like, the human inheritance of creativity

is connected to these territories. And the peoples who lived on these territories are the peoples who then create the layers of human life which lead to you. So you have so much in the past that can help you see the variety of human life. That's part of it. And then a second part of history is, as you say, there's a reason why these lands are so important.

And that is that there's a reason why their location, the agricultural productivity, there's a reason why these lands have attracted both success and a lot of attention from the outside for literally thousands of years. And so there are patterns one can see here.

from prehistoric times to the 21st century of forms of resistance and of attempts to define what it means to be one's self at the same time one is confronting an outside world. And to close with the point you're suggesting, which you've made to me before, one thing which is interesting about the word "volia," and I think about the word "freedom" in English too, is that it includes things that you don't know are possible.

So freedom isn't just a value. Freedom is also a way of changing the world around you. So if you recognize that some things that you don't see are possible and you act in that way, like I'm not saying you should do things that are crazy or obviously impossible, but if you add freedom to the world, then the world responds by creating possibilities which hadn't been there before, something like that.

And that's not... So history isn't just one thing happening after another. History includes the way people...

increase possibilities for themselves and for others by acting in the name of freedom. And without pushing the point too much, this is something which is true about Ukrainian resistance. So Ukrainian resistance may be about Ukrainians wanting to live in a certain way, but by resisting the Russian invasion, Ukrainians also opened possibilities for other people that wouldn't have been there. Thank you. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

First, I would like to apologize to those people who didn't have an opportunity to ask the question. Really sorry for that, but we have so many people here. And to those people who stood throughout the whole conversation, thank you so much. You have a great willingness and sorry for not having all the places for you.

I would like to thank Knyharnia Sands and the wonderful team of Knyharnia Sands. I would like to thank our team of Ukraine World and PEN Ukraine for making this conversation possible. I'd like to thank the US Embassy for supporting the translation of this book, and the translator and the publishing house, Chauvin, please. And I would like to thank Timothy Snyder for being with us.

This was a conversation about his book on freedom.

which took place on February 9, 2025 at the Sands Bookstore on Hreschatyk Street in the heart of the Ukrainian capital, very close to Maidan. Let me remind you that you can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. We deeply appreciate your support as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding.

You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas where we assist both soldiers and civilians, primarily by delivering vehicles for soldiers and books for civilians. Contributions can be made via PayPal at ukraine.resistinggmail.com. You'll find these links in the episode description. Thank you for staying. Thank you for listening. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.