European democracies collapsed into and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europ… - Timothy Snyder

If we don't have access to facts, we can't trust each other. Without trust, there's no law. Without law, there's no democracy. So, if you want to rip the heart out of a democracy directly -- if you wanna go right at it and kill it -- what you do is, you go after facts. And that's what modern authoritarians do. Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it's your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says "What is truth? There is no truth." And then resistance is impossible and the game's over.

The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn’t noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians – civilians and prisoners of war, not soldiers on active duty! – were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time... We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.

Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raise a millennial generation without history.