The danger of this doctrine of “explanation” is that it lends itself to making the Holocaust a tool of contemporary politics with different persons and groups twisting it or invoking it for what will inevitably be unsuitable or even trivial purposes. This danger applies to political uses of memory in many contexts, including Israeli as well as European discourse.

Given Snyder’s self-confessed approach, it becomes relevant to look to his own political attachments and statements as public intellectual for a key to understanding the probable impulse behind Black Earth.

Following doctoral research at Oxford supervised by the Euro-confederalist Timothy Garton Ash, Snyder has become closely linked with a number of pro-EU, anti-Russian bodies. He wrote a book with the terminally ill Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Judt and is married to another anti-Zionist Jewish scholar, Marci Shore. For the past decade, he has led a project at the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) to create a united European history. The institute is funded by the Austrian and Polish governments as well as by George Soros. The stated aim of the institute’s history project is to create what it calls a “synthesis that embraces various points of view”. This must include the input of the Baltic states admitted to the EU a decade ago. According to the IWM: “The new member states generally bring to the EU a common interest in comparative totalitarianism, born out of their experience of especially brutal German occupation practices during World War II, and then of four decades of communist rule thereafter. An experience that is unknown to the West European members of the European Union.”

As Snyder said in a lecture on May 15,  2014 to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, “Europe itself becomes the way we think about the past.”

Unfortunately, this project involves giving weight to the strongly anti-Semitic cultures within some of these newly admitted EU members. I was constantly confronted with this (alongside much personal kindness) when I spent time in the Baltics advising two of their governments on anti-corruption policy on behalf of the EU as part of their preparation for admission as members. The attempt of Snyder’s project to “produce a new sort of history of Europe that addresses subjective problems indirectly, by way of a synthesis” smacks of social engineering rather than free and plural academic pursuit. It asks us to integrate unacceptable aspects of Eastern European culture into our own historical understanding.

In a June 2015 statement in Slovakia, Snyder declared that “[t]he EU is essentially the best way of life ever offered in the history of the West.” In a strongly anti-Russian speech at the European Parliament, he called for a “European model of coming to terms with the past”. The problem he faces is that at least part of this “model” oozes with anti-Semitism and with stated or implied Nazi-Soviet parity of horror.