What I like about Snyder’s analysis is that he rejects the tired old canard that the mass murder perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler was a result of their regimes’ supposed embrace of modernity.
Stalinism and Nazism initially fed off revolutionary modernizing impulses to consolidate their power. But as soon as they were securely ensconced in power, Stalin and Hitler began the work of destroying modernity and all its manifestations. In all his personal preferences, Stalin was a deeply conservative man who brought back all the trappings of tsarism and Russian Orthodox religious formulae the moment he could do that.
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