Oleksandra Matviichuk made an urgent appeal as keynote speaker of the 2023 Revolutionale in Leipzig. She is a Ukrainian lawyer, human rights defender, women activist and civil society leader based in Kyiv. Oleksandra the founder and permanent head of the Center for Civil Liberties, the first-ever Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (2022). According to Financial Times she is one of the 25 most influential women in the world.
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“States that experienced totalitarianism have a common characteristic. They may have a large population, but still a small number of citizens. Living in fear produces a certain way of thinking, like “I’m an ordinary person, nothing depends on me, and anyway these are not us who take any decisions”. This is a “learned helplessness syndrome” in action. A person voluntarily renounces his or her subjectivity. The person turns into a control object, “a simple cog in the mechanism” as Soviet propaganda said. A person becomes a citizen not upon receiving a passport, but when the area of responsibility begins to encompass broader categories than him- or herself or the family. The countries in transit can be an example of the consequences of this. An active minority, if it is organized, determines the direction of the country’s development. However, the speed of this movement depends on the passive majority. Therefore, it is not enough to pass the right laws or create formal institutions. The values of society will be stronger anyway.
Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights are again about a way of thinking, about a certain paradigm of world perception, which determines the way a person thinks and acts. Therefore, knowing or hearing that they are important is not enough, convictions are formed through actions. It is necessary to practice democracy daily, and not only by the citizens of the countries in transit.The problem of our region – of Europe – is not only that the space of freedom in authoritarian countries has narrowed to the level of a prison cell. The problem is that even in developed democracies, the powers that cast doubt on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights get stronger. There are simple reasons for it.
The coming generations replaced those ones that survived the Second World War. They inherited the values of democracy from their parents. So, they began to take rights and freedoms for granted. People are increasingly manifesting themselves not as carriers of these values, but as their consumers. They understand freedom as choosing cheeses in the supermarket. Therefore, they are ready to exchange freedom for economic benefits, promises of security or personal comfort.
Values lose their sense in case their protection is left only to human rights defenders and diplomats. Therefore, a few years ago, I set as one of my priority tasks the creation of simple entry points for ordinary people in order to involve them in human rights activity. During this period, Ukraine experienced several major upheavals., and I would like to share our experience. A and tell you these stories.
Story one. Euromaidan
Nine years ago, the Revolution of Dignity took place in Ukraine. Millions of people bravely stood out against the authoritarian and corrupt regime. They took to the streets across the country demanding the regime to continue moving towards the European civilizational space. They fought for the opportunity to build a state where the rights of every person are protected, the government is accountable, the courts are independent, and the police do not beat peaceful student demonstrations. They paid the ultimate price for it. The police, then still using their post-Soviet name “militsiia”, shot more than a hundred peaceful demonstrators on Kyiv’s the capital’s central square – the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. People died under the flags of Ukraine and the European Union.
At the time, I was coordinating the Euromaidan SOS initiative, which united several thousand people to provide legal aid and other assistance to persecuted protest participants across the country. All these months we worked around the clock, hundreds, and hundreds of beaten, arrested, tortured, accused of fabricated cases passed through our hands. Then we were alone against the entire state machine that wanted to destroy us. Physically. Titushky – thugs paid by the regime – collaborated with the militsiia, the militsiia coordinated their actions with the prosecutor’s office; the special service, the courts, the government, and the vast majority of the parliament – all were against us. Under such conditions, it was easy to give up and say that nothing could be done. Nevertheless, our lawyers and our volunteers fought honestly and devotedly for every person, for each procedural means, as if the law existed. After all, it produced an unexpected result. We started at the legal level but reached a kind of symbolic level, where ideas and meanings were born. Everyone in Maidan knew that no one was immune to anything, that you could be beaten, abducted, or jailed, after all, you could be even killed, but there were people who would fight for you, who would not abandon you and your family under any circumstances. It gave strength. It helped to overcome fear. This experience has taught me one important thing.
I know that in different countries worldwide every day many people also fight for freedom and human dignity. Sometimes this fight may seem to be senseless because the enormous power opposes them. However, the total history of humanity convincingly proves that people should not give up. Even, when we have no tools, our own opinion and personal stance always remain. Eventually, it is not so little.
Story two. Russian war against Ukraine
When the authoritarian regime collapsed, Ukraine got a chance for democratic transformation. In order to stop Ukraine on this path, Russia unleashed this war in 2014, the Crimean peninsula and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and 2022 extended this war to the large-scale invasion. For all these years Russia is deliberately inflicting harm on civilians aiming to stop our resistance and occupy Ukraine. Russian troops intentionally destroy residential buildings, churches, schools, hospitals, shell evacuation corridors, put people in filtration camps, carry out forced deportations, kidnap, torture and kill people in the occupied territories. But Russian can’t break the country.
Authoritarian regime perceives the world through a specific prism. Putin thought that he would occupy Ukraine in 3-4 days. Because Russia had much stronger military potential, Russia had a many times larger population, and was considered the 11th largest economy in the world. But Russian officials didn’t believe in solidarity and power of ordinary people. That’s why they misjudged. Democratic countries also failed to understand this. Unlike the developed democracies, Ukrainians have never enjoyed the opulence of effective state institutions. This is the reason why, since the full-scale invasion, the points of crystallization started appearing on their own in different sectors of the society.
Immediately after the invasion, international organizations evacuated their personnel, and so it was ordinary people who supported those in the combat zone; who took people out of ruined cities, who helped to survive under artillery fire; who rescued people trapped under the rubble of residential buildings; who broke through the encirclement to deliver humanitarian aid. Ordinary people started to do extraordinary things. And then it became obvious that ordinary people fighting for their freedom are stronger than the second army of the world.
This experience proved one important thing. We are used to thinking within such categories as states and intergovernmental organizations. Nevertheless, ordinary people have much more impact than they think. The voice of millions of people in different countries can change world history faster than the intervention of the United Nations.
Instead of a conclusion
Our world has become fast-paced, complex, and interconnected. Technological development, climate change, invasions of privacy, growing inequality, the devaluation of knowledge and expertise, and other global challenges demand answers that cannot be found in the past. Decades of relative comfort and a growing desire for simple solutions changed the optics of developed democracies. They no longer realize that peace in Europe cannot be preserved without efforts equal to the level of the threat that is posed.
Peace, progress and human rights are inextricably linked. A state that kills journalists, imprisons activists, or disperses peaceful demonstrations poses a threat not only to its citizens. Such a state poses a threat to the entire region and peace in the world as a whole.
Therefore, the world must adequately respond to systemic violations. In political decision-making, human rights must be as important as economic benefits or security. This approach should be applied in foreign policy too. It is not only a question of how we will protect human beings in the 21st century. Thanks to its multiculturalism and its complex history, Europe has the potential to rethink what humanism means in an era of rapid technological progress and to give new dimensions to the meaning of humanity. Civic solidarity can play a key role in creating an international system of cooperation that brings together developed democracies and states that are on the path to democracy. This union should be determined not by a shared past, economic development, or geographical continents but by common values and attitudes.
We must respond to the challenges of today’s world. It is the determination to act that gives a society a future.
This original text is based on a keynote from October 10, 2023 at Revolutionale in Leipzig.