BOOKS ON SECURITY: MARCH 2025

Describing the first Gulag at Solovetsky,

‘The prisoners worked cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet. According to Kiselev, Potapov kept these ‘pearls’ preserved in a large pile and showed them to visitors, to whom he also bragged that he had personally murdered more than 400 people with his own hands.’

That passage is drawn from Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, A History of the Soviet Camps, (BCA, 2003), and offers long context for current affairs. A leading authority on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Applebaum (St Antony’s, 1986), formerly a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, is more familiar for her latest book Autocracy, Inc. (Allen Lane, 2024) which makes a much broader point that the dictatorship represented by Stalin and his predecessors has morphed today into a sophisticated web of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies and information control. The one thing that hadn’t happened when Autocracy, Inc. was published was the re-election of President Trump but his Presidency of the US is so far revealing itself to be the same narrative: a desire for power, wealth and impunity, and a scorn for democracy.

Next we turn to Timothy Snyder (Balliol, 1991), also a former Marshall Scholar who completed his DPhil at Oxford, today the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University.

Snyder’s most recent book is On Freedom (Bodley Head, 2024) in which he critiques negative definitions of freedom to reformulate a more positive definition, and the fact that to get it you have to fight for it – it’s not just the absence of big government, for example. Snyder is a prolific writer, but drawing from his back catalogue hauls up one gem in particular, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). In this book, he draws on historical examples—particularly from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—to provide 20 lessons on resisting authoritarianism. We believe this work is overdue a re-edition in 2025.

A third superstar in this neighbourhood is Jason Stanley, whose latest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (Atria/One Signal Publishers, September 10, 2024). Currently Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Stanley was a stipendiary lecturer at University College in 1995, following a PhD at MIT. In this book Stanley considers the nearness of the USA to fascism in the 1930s, the fact that Hitler admired America for its embedded racism, decades before the Civil Rights Movement; and devastatingly that suddenly in 2025 the country has taken a decisive lurch towards what he argues is a modern proxy for the more familiar Nazi fascism we are so used to thinking of as relegated to such dark shadows of our history that it couldn’t possibly be reenacted. Think again, he says, noting recently how difficult it was to

publish his book in Germany last year, where you have competing narratives right now about what fascism looks like, a red flag in itself, or as Carole Cadwalladr (St John’s, 1985) asked Jason in a recent podcast about fascism and America: ‘is this what this is?’ He replies at length but essentially saying ‘yes it is.’

Three books to conjure with briefly: Oxford University Press has just published Thane Gustafson’s Perfect Storm, Russia’s Failed Economic Opening, The Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future. A professor of government at Georgetown University, the author is a lifelong Russia-watcher and contends that one day, as history’s wheel turns again, so Russia ought to be reintegrated in the broader economy, ushered in again from the cold, after Putin has gone. That might seem offensive at the current pass but there is much of sense in the book. It explains why Russia under Putin became so angry towards the West and America especially. It doesn’t take account of Trump’s swing towards Putin however.

Another OUP contribution, out in April, is A Measure Short of War by Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth. While the world was fairly stunned to learn that Russian had meddled in the 2016 US election, the authors contend that it should not have been. The book subtitle, ‘A Brief History of Great Power Subversion’ is exactly what the book does, and meddling is not new – but the speed and reach of social media is.

The third brief mention here is Charles Stephenson’s Mussolini, Mustard Gas & the Fascist Way of War (Pen & Sword, 2023). Not strictly speaking new, but new to us and pertinent as a reminder about how easily one leader can drag a nation to unspeakable atrocities against innocents. War correspondent George Steer wrote in 1936, of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, ‘Modern war is not won by courage: it goes to the man with the most powerful material. Caesars do not trick the enemy, as they in the Gallic wars, by stratagem or speed. They are heavier creatures: they roll over him and crush him.’

Penultimately let’s come back to one of Oxford’s major figures, Timothy Garton Ash who is Professor of European Studies Emeritus. His book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Vintage, 2023) has been translated into more than 20 languages and in it he vividly recreates the great upswing and hope of Europe as it emerged from the rubble of World War Two – only to falter again in the twenty-first century. We would also note his recent article for QUAD and that he chronicles the  ‘History of the Present’ in a Substack newsletter to which you can subscribe for free.

Finally, there is John Gray’s The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism (Allen Lane, 2023), which led to a fantastic alumni seminar held in Oxford in September of the same year. Via a re-reading of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the great master of political science and history (Exeter, 1968) punctures our evergreen but naïve belief that liberal, peaceable progressivism had somehow banished their opposites once and for all. Alas, they did not. In sketching episodes drawn from the recent barbaric past he has in mind the increasingly barbaric present. Instead of China and Russia becoming more like the West with economic prosperity and flourishing democracy, Gray contends that the West became more like China and Russia with massive inequalities of wealth and power and weakening democratic traditions. Gray is especially insightful about Russia’s past and present. He notes how during phases of politically orchestrated Soviet famine ‘cannibalism showed itself in public markets in human flesh, with prices varying according to whether the bodies were newly killed or retrieved after death.’ That’s for starters in a slender, easily read and devastating book that commands out attention as an almost apocalyptic warning not to be seduced by false thinking and empty optimism leading inevitably towards catastrophe.