Mykola Riabchuk

Occasionally, I receive apologies from my international friends for their government’s statements, steps or policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. Most often these friends are Hungarians, sometimes Poles or Slovaks, once it was even a Swiss and a Japanese – because, as I have learned, their government preferred to rather destroy the outdated weapon than to pass it to Ukraine. And lately, I began to receive such statements from Americans.

I feel bewildered a bit because I am not in any position to accept or demand such apologies, nor my colleagues and friends are obliged to apologize since none of them, I am confident, cast their ballots for the incumbents and therefore hold barely any responsibility for their unremarkable deeds. Responsibility, however, does not amount to accountability; an exempt from the former does not give us a waiver from the latter.

I happened to feel it acutely some time ago when my fellow-countryman used a free and quite fair (by Ukrainian standards) elections to bring to power a former convict with proved criminal records and unproved but manifest ties with a regional mafia. Ironically, he won even though he got half a million votes less than he received in the past elections, in 2005, when he lost to his pro-European (“orange”) opponent Viktor Yushchenko 44 per cent to 53. Five years later, in 2010, he won (50 to 46) against his new “orange” rival Yulia Tymoshenko because this time two million “orange” voters simply did not show up at the polling stations. Or came just to cross off both candidates – protesting thereby against inefficiency of the “orange” team that raised initially so high expectations.

I was not responsible at the time for Yanykovych’s victory but I was accountable – as both the citizen and an author. Had I done enough in the past five years to discipline the “orange” government, to temper their internal bickering and make them finally work? Could I do more to persuade my fellow-Ukrainians that the “no vote” is not a solution, especially in the hybrid regimes that vacillate between unconsolidated democracy and unconsolidated authoritarianism, and the stakes therefore are high and the balance is very shaky?

Human agency and failed institutions

It might be too simple and self-indulging to say “I did everything I could”. In fact, we do not know. We can assess more or less objectively our capacity for action but not capacity for cognition: “everything” is too nebulous because we cannot know with due clarity and precision what else could have been done and which option be chosen from the long list of possibilities. It might be even easier to say (after Montesquieu) that people usually have the government they deserve but again, the devil dwells in detail. The seemingly wise, quasi-philosophical formula generalizes too much, ignoring the simple fact that people are very different: some of them may “deserve” a better government while others may deserve much worse.

Luckily, most of us live in democracies, however imperfect, which make our voices meaningful far beyond the voting booths. The right implies duty, the possibility entails responsibility. All the governments tend to misuse the power and resources if they are not properly checked. They allow themselves to overstep the rules as much as people allow them. For thirty years I observed the postcommunist transformations in Eastern Europe, teaching also the course on that topic and writing the book that was ultimately published in Warsaw in 2021. Two things impressed me from the very beginning: how the communist system was installed in the region after WWII, how within a few years all the sprouts of nascent democracy, rule of law, civic rights and liberties were gradually extinguished by coercion, blackmail and covert operations by the Soviet security services and their local allies. And, secondly, how the same system very differently penetrated local societies, and was ultimately uprooted with very different speed and depth.

“Path dependence” had obviously played a role: countries with some democratic traditions or at least some traditions of statehood and rule of law in the past appeared to be more successful in transformations at present. Civil society was the key to the changes but the agency of the government actors played the role also, – this largely explains, for example, a much higher Polish resilience against authoritarian tendencies if compared with Hungary, even though the both countries (along with Czechoslovakia) featured prominently in anti-Soviet resistance and much-vaunted “return to Europe”. Post-Soviet trajectories of Ukraine and Moldova vis-à-vis Russia and Belarus might be also exemplary in this regard.

A few days ago, I attended the Podiumdiskussion at the German Historical Institute in Washington, where a Polish, a Hungarian, and two American experts discussed the topic “Resilience and Resistance in Fragile Democracies”, with the subtitle “Historical Perspectives from Germany, Hungary, and Poland”. The main focus of the discussion, however, was on the United States. Sympathy of the new American president to the authoritarian rulers, including Hungarian Viktor Orban, is well-known;ⁱ his attacks on the American institutions, judiciary in particular, resemble to many the infamous German Gleichschaltung of the 1930s, even though carried out on a different scale, in a different and under the different circumstances.ⁱⁱ Within this context, Karolina Wigura maintained, Polish experience of resistance to similar tendencies might be helpful for both Americans and Europeans who reject authoritarianism.

Michael Brenner, professor of history and chair in Israeli studies at American University in Washington, pinpointed five institutional failures that facilitated state capture and consolidation of dictatorship in Germany: business was rather compliant with national socialists or even supportive of them; the same was with German judiciary, inclined traditionally to favor conservatives and biased against leftists and liberals; the conservative parties accepted tacitly Hitler’s advance, believing they would be able to find a modus vivendi with him; the leftists were divided and preoccupied with the internecine struggle, projecting their hostility also onto trade unions; and the church was not only divided parochially but also focused almost exclusively on their parishes rather than on a broader picture.

The analogies with today’s America might be far-fetched but anxiety is in the air, fueled recurrently by highly dubious president’s orders and not the least by his extraordinary brutal attacks on disobedient courts and judges. Brenner’s speech largely replicated, consciously or incidentally, professor Jeffrey Herf’s article “We Are Uncomfortably Close to 1933” published earlier in March in Persuasion. “The evolution of executive power in Germany under the Hitler dictatorship”, professor Herf contended, “remains the most famous case in modern history of the use of the mechanisms of democracy to destroy a democracy. The relationship between Hitler and the conservative political parties was at the core of that history of democratic failure. The events of the past six weeks raise the issue of similarities and differences between the erosion of the power of parliament in Germany then and the response of Republican Senators to Donald Trump in power in the United States today”.ⁱⁱⁱ

Missed warnings

Year and a half ago, the Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan published a gloomy article with a clear, unambiguous message in its very title: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”.^iv He argued that the signs of forthcoming disaster were increasingly obvious since 2015 but Americans drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course: “Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge… We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy”.

The main problem with Trump as the president with enormous power, in Kagan’s view, is that he “will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law… Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries… A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual [in the past] is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has? … Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers”.

Senator Mitt Romney, one of Republicans that voted to convict Trump during the 2021 impeachment trial, recognized in a conversation with his biographer McKay Coppins that “physical threats from Trump’s base were a factor in the decision of some of his colleagues to vote to acquit”.^v Quite a few politicians, in his words, worried not only about their careers but also about physical security of themselves and their families. He confessed that he was spending $5,000 a day(!) on security services for himself and his family, – hardly all the party dissenters could afford. Bullying and blackmail seem to increasingly become an instrument of Trump’s loyalists against would-be defectors from their camp.

The critics of Trump and Trumpism do not claim that they are not carbon copies of Hitler and the Nazis, they rather question today’s conservatives, primarily Republicans, by analogy to the German conservatives of the 1930s “whether they will serve as enablers of or a bulwark against the danger of an authoritarian government”. Both then and today, they two worrisome developments are observable: “the willingness of elected representatives to abandon their prerogatives in the face of invented emergencies and an authoritarian leader with a base of loyal supporters”; and “the absence of a political firewall against the authoritarian right”.^vi

Trump’s portended dictatorship, as Robert Kagan predicts, will certainly not be “a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care”.^vii But the prospects of such developments in the world’s leading democracy are quite disheartening.

Silver lining

In this gloomy context, however, one may be encouraged by the news from Kyiv about the resignation of a few officials in the American embassy, including the ambassador Bridget Brink who served for nearly 30 years under five presidents, starting her career in the last years of Bill Clinton. In her statement, published in the Detroit Free Press,^viii she recognized that it was very difficult decision: for three months she tried to adjust to the new political line until gave up for both political and moral reasons.

“Unfortunately”, she said, “the policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia. As such, I could no longer in good faith carry out the administration’s policy… For three years I heard the stories, saw the brutality, and felt the pain of families whose sons and daughters were killed and wounded by Russian missiles and drones that hit playgrounds, churches and schools. Over a career spent in conflict zones, I’ve seen mass atrocities and wanton destruction first-hand but we have never seen violence so systematic, so widespread and so horrifying… I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded, and children killed with impunity. I believe that the only way to secure U.S. interests is to stand up for democracies and to stand against autocrats. Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement”.

A week later, in the interview with PBS News,^ix she added several new points, evading diplomatically a direct answer to the question about the “other people in the embassy in Ukraine, other people in the Foreign Service who share your concerns, who talk to you about this”. “I think”, she said, “right now, especially after a lot of the cuts in government and the way in which those have gone about, it’s made debate less, and it’s made people afraid to speak out. To me, that’s very dangerous. I haven’t seen this kind of atmosphere in our country in my professional lifetime. I have seen it a lot overseas… But I think to have that happen in our country, a democracy, the biggest, strongest, in my view, best democracy in the world, is quite disconcerting”.

She also clarified an important issue that is often misunderstood in the West and elsewhere – that the Russian war in Ukraine is not a war of territory but a war of identity: Russia strives to change the very fabric of Ukrainian culture and identity. And even worse than that – “I think, horrifyingly, that Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine off the map as a country, as a people, as a culture. And, to me, this really hearkens back to some of the darkest periods of Europe. And this is why I never thought I’d be in a position to resign and then speak out publicly. But I think the stakes are so high, not just for Ukraine, not just for Europe, but for the United States. And we must be on the right side of history”.

Sure, one sparrow does not make a spring, as Ukrainians say. And Ambassador Brink’s demarche will not change the narcissist course of Trump’s international politics nor entice many other servants and politicians to follow the suit. But it demonstrated at least two things. First, that it is not necessary to rely on geopolitical guru equipped with ‘realist’ theories to understand the developments in Ukraine,^x suffice to approach them first-hand, on the ground. And second, that the US political system is not thoroughly petrified but there are (and will always be probably) the honest and courageous people within, able to speak, to act and maybe ultimately to “bring the spring”.

This was actually the conclusion that the Polish speaker Karolina Wigura made at the end of Podiumdiskussion in the German Historical Institute. She drew essentially on Robert Kagan’s description of “conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies” – soft dictatorships that employ rather corruption and cooptation that coercion, rather manipulation and disinformation than censorship. Relative softness is their advantage, a mimicry that makes dictatorial tendencies almost undiscernible. But it is also their weak point because they cannot apply large-scale repressions and persecute the opponents openly. They have to operate in the shadows, in the aisles, to exert their pressure covertly and silently. So, the recipe for resistance is basically the same as it was long ago under the late (and largely “soft”) communism: switch on the light, turn on the sound, avoid any informal talks with “them”, make public all their overtures, all their attempts at bribery and blackmail. Just say them “no”, – as our mentors, the old Soviet dissidents taught us, when we were the students.

And, crucially, try to overcome the partisan cleavages and unify opposition for the common cause.

Democracy’s resilience and resistance is a good thing. But it might be useful to think also about its assertiveness.

Mykola Riabchuk