Eternity and Dictators: Discussing Protests in Belarus with Prof. Timothy Snyder

Eastern Europe is full of instructive examples of how democracy should not be taken for granted. There is always a benevolent autocrat who claims to know better, a president who wants to stay for just one more term, oligarchs with their hand politics.

Sometimes people push back against it hard enough to make a difference. Ukraine is a great example of this: it had two revolutions against the corrupt government in 2005 and 2013. There is also Russia and its Bolotnaya Square protests in 2011, and, more recently - the 2020 protest movement in Belarus which has reinvigorated its democratic opposition to the country's dictator Aliaksandar Lukashenka.

Despite this democratic show of force, overcoming autocrats is more difficult than embracing them. Putin isn't going anywhere, neither are the Ukrainian oligarchs, and Belarus' Lukahsenka has  ...