The day after that, my family was allowed to go home. With the baby sleeping in a basket, I wrote two articles about Tomek: one an obituary in Polish, the other an account of the disaster in English that concluded with a hopeful word about Russia. A Polish president had lost his life hastening to commemorate a crime committed on Russian soil. I expressed the hope that the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, would use the occasion to consider the history of Stalinism more broadly. Perhaps that was a reasonable appeal amidst grief in April 2010; as a prediction, it could not have been more wrong.
Henceforth everything was different. Putin, who had already served two terms as president before becoming prime minister, announced in September 2011 that he wanted to be president again. His party did poorly in parliamentary elections that December, but was granted a majority in parliament regardless. Putin became president again in May 2012 after another election that seemed flawed. He then saw to it that discussions of the Soviet past, such as the one he himself had initiated about Katyn, would be treated as criminal offenses. In Poland, the Smolensk catastrophe united society for a day, and then polarized it for years. The obsession with the disaster of April 2010 grew with time, crowding out the Katyn massacre that its victims had meant to commemorate, indeed crowding out all historical episodes of Polish suffering. Poland and Russia had ceased to reflect on history. Times were changing. Or perhaps our sense of time was changing.
The European Union fell under a shadow. Our Vienna maternity ward, where inexpensive insurance covered everything, was a reminder of the success of the European project. It exemplified services that were taken for granted in much of Europe but were unthinkable in the United States. The same might be said of the quick and reliable subway that brought me to the hospitaclass="underline" normal in Europe, unattainable in America. In 2013, Russia turned against the European Union, condemning it as decadent and hostile. Its success might encourage Russians to think that former empires could become prosperous democracies, and so its existence was suddenly at risk.
As Russia’s neighbor Ukraine drew closer to the European Union, Russia invaded the country and annexed some of its territory in 2014. By 2015, Russia had extended an extraordinary campaign of cyberwarfare beyond Ukraine to Europe and the United States, with the assistance of numerous Europeans and Americans. In 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, as Moscow had long advocated, and Americans elected Donald Trump as their president, an outcome Russians had worked to achieve. Among other shortcomings, this new U.S. president could not reflect upon history: he was unable to commemorate the Holocaust when the occasion arose, nor condemn Nazis in his own country.
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.
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I wrote those two articles about the Smolensk disaster after years of thinking about the politics of life and death, on a night when the membrane between them seemed thin. “Your happiness amidst unhappiness,” one of my friends had written, and the first seemed as undeserved as the second. Endings and beginnings were too close, or seemed to be in the wrong order, death before life, dying before living; time was out of joint.
On or about April 2010, human character changed. When I wrote the birth announcement of my first child, I had to go to my office and use a computer; smartphones were not yet widespread. I expected replies over the course of days or weeks, not at once. By the time my daughter was born two years later, this had all changed: to own a smartphone was the norm, and responses were either immediate or not forthcoming. Having two children is quite different than having one; and yet I think that, for all of us, time in the early 2010s became more fragmented and elusive.
The machines that were meant to create time were consuming it instead. As we lost our ability to concentrate and recall, everything seemed new. After Tony’s death, in August 2010, I toured to discuss the book we had written together, which he had entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century. I realized as I traveled around the United States that its subject had been forgotten all too well. In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.
Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about “the end of history,” by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. 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 raised a millennial generation without history.
The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.
The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.
In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present. In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.