The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010… — Timothy Snyder

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.

[A] turning point of the twentieth century: the Nazi-Soviet alliance... In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland... In April 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered 21,892 Polish prisoners of war... shot in the back of the head at five killing sites, one of them the Katyn Forest... Only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 could historians clarify... the mass murder had been deliberate policy, personally approved by Joseph Stalin. ...On February 3, 2010... the Russian prime minister made a surprising proposal: a joint commemoration... on the seventieth anniversary of the crime. On the seventh of April a Polish government delegation... arrived in Russia.

Two days after that, a second Polish delegation set out... One of its members was my friend Tomek Merta... April 10... Tomek boarded an airplane. It crashed... short of a landing strip at the Russian military airfield at Smolensk. There were no survivors.

The twentieth century was well and truly over, its lessons unlearned. A new form of politics was emerging in Russia, Europe, and America, a new unfreedom to suit a new time.