World-renowned historian Timothy Snyder has brought his University of Toronto course "Hitler and Stalin Today" to a global audience via YouTube .
A scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust who has authored or edited more than 20 books in 40 languages, Snyder is a professor and chair in modern European history, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy .
He taught the Hitler and Stalin course in person for the first time at U of T during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Over the course of 10 lectures, he explored the connections between the Nazi and Soviet regimes, examining the forces that made the unthinkable possible. He also carefully defined concepts such as communism, fascism and even history itself. The course seeks to define the place this dark historical period occupies in contemporary memory and politics.
Faculty of Arts & Science writer Cynthia MacDonald recently spoke to Snyder, formerly a professor at Yale University, as he prepared for the launch of the online lecture series.
Why is it important to you to make "Hitler and Stalin Today" freely available to the public?
It's the mission of a public university to reach the public, and I'm very glad and appreciative that the University of Toronto has allowed me to take this flagship class and turn it from something that was big for one term into something that can be much bigger and for everybody, all the time.
The class was set up on the basis of some familiar reference points and it's meant to take those and lead the audience - whether they be U of T students or anybody else - into a broader place where we'll be in a position to understand some of the roots of our problems, but also some of the ways that we can resist.
Why is it so critical that we also pay attention to the past, especially now?
The past helps us to be active. If we're only in the present, then we don't have any sense at all about what we can do. All of our power, all of our agency, all of our ability to change the world depends on being able to make a connection between a past of things that actually happened and a present of things that might happen. If we don't understand the past, we can't put ourselves in that central position. So even if we were purely pragmatic, we should care about the past.
But of course, there's something else, too, which is that the past is wonderfully interesting. Even if you're just looking for serviceable material to help you change the future or to get out of the rut of the present, along the way you're going to find out things that are surprising and beautiful, as well as true.
Is there evidence that education and critical thought can prevent the onset of totalitarianism?
Yes. It's very much a question of what sort of education, of course, because these ideologies also attempt to exploit large-scale public educational systems in order to inculcate certain ways of seeing the world.
Far more than we generally recognize, the Nazis were very concerned with what we would think of as K-12 education. The Leninists and Stalinists, likewise. They were very concerned that their way of seeing the world be transmitted from the earliest ages, so that it seemed commonsensical. And long after the Germans were defeated in 1945 - or long after the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991 - one still notices or feels the effects.
With respect to history, the crucial thing is for people to know enough to defend themselves against simple stories about innocence and guilt, and also that people become critical enough to recognize that history always imagines multiple sides of the story, that history always involves different kinds of sources that you don't know about yet, that history requires one to be empathetic, and that history is always going to be full of surprises. If we can get that far, if we can do those four things, then yes, it's quite clear that the right kind of education can make a political difference.
How have students reacted to Hitler and Stalin Today?
It was a big class, so I can't say I interacted with every single student, but I was delighted by the people who came to me with some terrific questions. And I was also delighted by a general reaction, which was something like this: "I now see why history is relevant to today." And that's what we were after. Not to say that things repeat, not to say everything today is like everything at another moment, but that the more you know about history, the less surprising things are today. And the less surprising things seem, the more empowered we become.
With "the Making of Modern Ukraine," a Yale Online course, you've previously made your lectures accessible to millions of people across the world. How have you found this form of teaching?
There are two things that I'm really known for above all, and those two things are the little book on tyranny [ On Tyranny ] and those public lectures on Ukraine.
I made that course at Yale available in 2022 because I was hopeful that I could reach some Americans about a country that we didn't know very much about. But it turned out that all over the world, including in Ukraine, it was helpful to have a basic set of ideas and a basic chronology about the country, its longer history, and all of the things that might have had to do with the war.
And maybe even more importantly, while it's wonderful that the course reached so many people, and it's wonderful that when I'm in Ukraine people remember me for the course -maybe most important for me, most validating for me, was that people used the course to start to think historically. They used the course to take a little bit of distance from the things that were happening every day. The course, in general, had not just an intellectual but maybe a bit of a psychological calming effect in that it allowed people to keep some things in perspective.
