This year’s Independence Lecture in Lviv was delivered by Vitaly Portnikov, a publicist, writer, journalist, member of PEN Ukraine, Shevchenko Prize winner (2023). The meeting was titled “Independence, War and the Future”.
The event took place on the occasion of Ukraine’s Independence Day on August 25 at the Heavenly Hundred Heroes Memorial in Lviv. It was organized by the Cultural Strategy Institute with the support of the ЗMIN Foundation and the Lviv City Council.
So how does war change Ukrainian identity and society? What conclusions should be drawn from the military danger and the probable persistence of the threat in the future? What are the options for the development of the state and how to build a global Ukraine?
Here is the text version of the lecture.
Yuliia Khomchyn, director of the Cultural Strategy Institute: Glory to Ukraine! Welcome to the Independence Lecture of the Cultural Strategy Institute. We launched this initiative as an opportunity to reflect on our Independence together. We are holding the lecture for the fourth time. We see it as an opportunity to record our values and current moods, as an opportunity to mark the most important things that happened to us in the past, and also try to look into the future.
Today’s speaker, Vitaly Portnikov, will reflect on this. The title of our lecture is “Independence, War, and the Future.” We plan to spend today’s meeting reflecting on where we are now. We will try to talk about our own identity and how to build a global Ukraine.
The Fourth Independence Lecture is a joint effort of the Cultural Strategy Institute and our partner ЗMIN Foundation. ЗMIN Foundation has been with us from the idea of this event to the present day. We would also like to thank the Lviv City Council for their constant support and this year’s platform “Your City” [Tvoie Misto] for the live broadcast.
And, of course, the biggest, most sincere, brightest gratitude today goes to those who defend our sky, who keep us at the front. To each and every one of you in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, thanks to whom we have the opportunity to live, to hear each other, to see each other and to communicate.
If you have such a will and such a good intention, there is a small QR code on your chairs or next to your neighbors. This is a collection for the 68th separate hunting brigade named after Oleksa Dovbush, for means of radio-electronic warfare for the warriors, including our colleagues from culture, who are now at the front.
I would like to welcome Mr. Vitaly Portnikov to the Independence Lecture. Vitaly Portnikov is a publicist, journalist, analyst, and political commentator. I don’t know about you, but his daily vlogs on YouTube keep me from getting lost in the information reality and keep my head sober and cool. Mr. Portnikov, I invite you to read, speak, and talk to us at the fourth Independence Lecture.
Vitaly Portnikov: First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of the event for the opportunity for all of us to meet today under this blue Lviv sky. I am even more sincerely grateful that we are meeting here, at the Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes. At the place of memory of the people who were the first in the modern history of Ukraine to give their lives for Ukraine to be free, sovereign, and for the Ukrainian people to have the right to choose their future.
Many say that the children of writers, publicists, and journalists are words. And the loss of words is a huge tragedy for each of us. But this is not true. A word is just a sound that you hear now. Inspiration can be lost — and will be found again after a while. You can choose the right word even if at some point you don’t feel it in your communication with the audience. But you can’t bring a person back.
The most important thing we have is you. I can say this on behalf of all those who speak, who write, who try to speak honestly with the Ukrainian people. The loss of each of you — our readers, viewers, listeners — is our greatest tragedy. There are many of those here (pointing to the photo of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes — ed.) with whom I have communicated personally, whom I knew before the Maidan of 2013-2014, with whom I talked or corresponded. Very young people who could have lived and built the Ukraine of our dreams. And they were gone on one cold day in 2014. And this is grief for anyone who loses their reader or viewer. It cannot be compared to the grief of a mother who loses her child. It cannot be compared to the grief of children who will not see their parents. But it is still grief because we work to help the Ukrainian audience build this country. We work primarily for living people, not for crosses in a cemetery.
And that is why every loss — the loss of the Maidan, the loss of the fight for Ukraine in 2014-2022, every loss during this great war — is a personal experience for me. When I see a person in a military uniform approaching me, I only dream that this person will return from the front so that I can continue to work for this person. After all, if they are not there, who will I work for? What was the point of all this? And this is my main emotion these days, these times, these years. I ask you to honor all those who have been fighting for our freedom and independence for the past ten years (minute of silence — ed.).
In the late 1980s — early 1990s, the main communist newspaper Pravda published an article by its correspondent in Ukraine entitled: “What kind of Ukraine do they want?” They mean you and me. What kind of Ukraine do we want? Of course, the person who wrote this text wanted no Ukraine at all. He wanted our state to remain the Moscow colony into which it was transformed after the Pereiaslav Agreement (Pereiaslavska Rada). And after the Bolshevik occupation of Ukrainian lands in the first half of the twentieth century. But this is a guiding question. A question that we have to answer and answer — what kind of Ukraine do we want? And, of course, each person answers this question for himself or herself. But we need a generalized opinion, a common view of what kind of Ukraine we want to see in the future — during the war and after the war. The kind of Ukraine that could survive, develop, that would be a strong, self-confident country in the family of European nations, in the civilized world. The kind of Ukraine that we would all be proud of and confident in the future of.
So, what kind of Ukraine do we really want? First of all, we want a sovereign Ukraine. A Ukraine that would decide its own future. A Ukraine whose people would choose their own path of development. Its own alliances, its own opportunity to develop on this land where it lives. If you think about it, the whole conflict, in the epicenter of which we have been living not even for the last ten years, but for the last century (since the time of Mazepa, since the time of Petliura, since the time of Bandera), is a conflict related to the fact that the Ukrainian people are not given the opportunity to develop the way they want to develop, that Ukrainians are constantly trying to prove that their free choice is in the way of someone else’s, that they do not have the right to their own civilizational and national voice in order to live in peace. And this is one of the most obvious manipulations that the Ukrainian people have faced throughout their history. I am sure, and this is what this war is about, that Ukrainians will prove their right to choose their own path in the future. And they will prove that what happened in the past was a preparation for this free road.
What kind of Ukraine do we want? I would say a Ukrainian Ukraine. This is also an important point that we should never forget. Ukraine for those who consider themselves Ukrainians. And this is not about ethnicity or religion. It is about the civilizational choice that everyone who lives on this land makes or refuses to make. So the future Ukraine should be a country of this Ukrainian choice. We are constantly, and I have heard this almost all my adult life, branded as some kind of nationalists. And I don’t really understand, first of all, why is it a shame to be a nationalist? Why, if you are a nationalist in any other nation, it is honorable, and nationalist parties win parliamentary elections in many countries around the world — and this is not an insult? And our neighbors have always used the word “nationalist” as an insult to the views of the people who live on this land. You are not supposed to be a nationalist in Ukraine. It turns out that you can only be a nationalist somewhere in Moscow.
A person who wants to speak his or her native language and wants the language that has been spoken here for centuries to be spoken in the land where he or she lives is not a nationalist. This is an ordinary, normal person. This is the case in all countries. In Poland they speak in Polish, in Russia they speak in Russian, in France they speak in French, in Italy they speak in Italian. Why is it that only in Ukraine do we not have the right to have the Ukrainian language sound on all the streets of the cities and towns of this country? Why do we constantly have to prove that this is a normal state of affairs? Why are we accused of being nationalists when we create a percentage standard for performing works in Ukrainian on our own television or radio? In fact, it should be the other way around! The norm should be for works of art in other languages. In the languages of foreigners. This happens in all civilized countries. They create special quotas for national minority languages so that these minorities can develop freely in countries where there is a national and linguistic majority. It was only in Ukraine that quotas were introduced for the national and linguistic majority, and we considered this to be our great achievement.
Ukrainian Ukraine is not just a country where people speak Ukrainian. It is a country where people remember what Ukrainian history is above all. For centuries, Ukrainians were convinced that their history did not exist at all. That their history is part of the history of other nations and other states. It got to the point where a neighboring country simply stole our history before stealing Ukrainian lands! And Ukrainian children in their schools were forced to learn not the history of Ukraine, but the history of Russia stolen from Ukraine. This is how we lived for many decades. Many people who are here were taught exactly this history. And that is why it is so difficult for us to return to the real Ukraine, especially in those territories that were part of the Russian Empire for centuries, where everything Ukrainian was deliberately banned.
What kind of Ukraine do we want? We want a democratic Ukraine. But democracy is not just the ability to vote. It is free media controlled not by the wealthy, but by those who truly consider honest information for their fellow citizens to be their vocation and business, not an element of protection of the businesses and resources they have accumulated in the first decade of Ukrainian independence. Without honest media, there can be no democracy because then a citizen votes not for the person he or she really chooses as a leader, but for the one offered by the oligarchs. And in Ukrainian history, there has been a lot of evidence that the vast majority of the population made suicidal choices not because they were properly informed, but because they were processed in the right way for those who were trying to retain power and influence in the state in an illegal way.
Democracy is also a competition of concepts, not just an attempt to vote for someone you like: someone who looks nice on an election poster, someone who can make promises that will never be realized. In order for democracy to really start to exist, we need a society of responsible citizens. That is, citizens who really invest in this country. Citizens who are interested in their own development in this country, and not because they are part of this post-Soviet economic infrastructure that was built here and made it possible to dispose of this country not to those who work in the sectors of our economy, but to those who privatized these sectors in the 90s of the last century. Democracy always relies on responsible owners. And I really hope that this is exactly what Ukraine will be like, because we want a European Ukraine. And this means completely different standards of behavior: the behavior of the authorities, the behavior of those involved in business, and the behavior of those working in the economy. European society is a society of conscientious taxpayers. It is not a society of people who are trying to solve something to make their lives different from the lives of their compatriots. It is, first and foremost, a society of solidarity.
We often see how our compatriots show this solidarity in times of crisis. And we can only be proud of this: our volunteer activity, our willingness to raise money for all the needs of our army, our willingness to help people. But if we were a country with a civilized economy and a country where taxes were distributed fairly, it would be the state itself, not society, that would be doing all this.
Quite often, Ukrainians remind me of people who have created a ship with numerous holes in it. And then they constantly try to plug those holes either with their own money or with their own bodies. And you and I need the intact ship Ukraine, you know, the intact ship. Which will never sink again. In which we will feel safe. And this is the most important thing we need to be sure of. This should be the obvious result of this war, in which we are now and may be for a long time to come. But this time should also be used to make us realize what the Ukrainian state should be like, how it should function and develop, and how it should be close to everyone who is a citizen. And we must realize a very important thing: Ukraine and Ukrainian is a choice. It has always been so, not only during this war. People who were involved in Ukrainian culture chose Ukrainian because they always had another choice before their eyes.
When people talk to me about the multilingualism and multiculturalism of the Ukrainian lands, I have nothing to object. There have always been people on the Ukrainian lands who worked for Russians and Poles, for Hungarians and Germans, for anyone. But those who worked for Ukrainians always knew that if they worked for some other environment, in our near future, primarily for the Russian-speaking environment, they would be much more comfortable, they would not have any major problems, they would have a much wider environment than the Ukrainian one, geographically, culturally, and politically. Each of those whom we are proud of in history today could have made a completely different civilizational choice and lived a much more comfortable life.
Taras Shevchenko could have simply been an outstanding Russian artist and published Russian works in the leading magazines of the empire of that time. He probably would not have become a soldier, he probably would have lived a longer life, and his portraits could probably be seen in Russian art academies today. But what would have happened to Ukrainians if Taras Shevchenko had made such a comfortable choice? It turned out that his willingness to create a Ukrainian soul was to a large extent a journey to Calvary. But he made this choice, which is done only out of love. Maybe it is not even a choice, maybe it is a vocation that you cannot refuse, but in any case, we know that each of these people I am talking about had their own option.
Ivan Franko could have been a prominent Polish publicist or an Austrian politician, as was the case with many of his contemporaries in what was then Lviv, in what was then Galicia. They became deputies and city presidents. They wrote Polish-language works. But what would have happened to Ukrainians if Ivan Franko had made this choice? What would modern Galicia and modern Ukraine have looked like if we had not had Shevchenko and Franko?
Olga Kobylianska could have become a German ballet dancer. However, her choice of Ukrainian literature created the image of Bukovyna that we all know very well. Mykola Lysenko could have written operas to Russian-language librettos. He was offered this by composers who are now much better known in the world than he is. And if he had made this choice, his operas would have been staged on the stages of the most important theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow. But if Lysenko had made that choice, we would not have had Ukrainian opera.
This list can go on and on for hours. That’s why I always ask us to appreciate those who chose Ukraine. They chose the Ukrainian world as their civilizational reference point. He gave us all the opportunity to develop and be proud. He gave us the opportunity to understand that this country exists not just as a territory, but as a civilization project. As a real land whose inhabitants have common social, national, and cultural interests.
In the end, I want to remind you that there were plenty of people who perceived Ukraine exclusively as a place to build wealth in the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. Franko wrote about this: “You love Rus’ like bread and a piece of bacon.” Just as a territory where you can get rich, where it is convenient to get rich, where you can solve problems. A territory where it is convenient to deceive people, but Ukraine is not about that.
In every country, people want to live better. In every country, well-being is an absolutely normal part of the development of citizens — from the United States or Canada to European countries. But above all, people are united by common values. The people who left Great Britain and sailed from Plymouth to the shores of unknown America on a rickety ship were in a hurry for religious freedom, for the right to believe as they saw fit. If the main thing for them was simply to get another piece of land where the vast expanses of the future United States were, then I want to ask you, who would be helping us now? Who would have supplied us with weapons? Who would have stopped Russia? Yes, maybe not at the pace we would like, obviously, but would they still be willing to spend their own taxpayers’ money to make sure that you and I survive? If it was just about wealth, about another skyscraper, about another house with a car, would American society be the way we know it? No, it wouldn’t. It’s the same with European countries. People were ready to sacrifice themselves and their future for the sake of their countries rising from the ashes, even when it seemed that nothing could revive them from history.
Our neighbors the Poles rose up in revolt even when their territory was divided between several empires, and these empires were ready to fight their national struggle together. Wasn’t it the same with Ukrainians themselves? Were there not many uprisings on this territory that seemed hopeless but engraved the Ukrainian spirit? And were these uprisings exclusively about land, about the opportunity to enrich themselves, about the opportunity to build a better future? No, it was primarily about dignity. And dignity is also an opportunity to remain a Ukrainian when the whole world seems to be against it, the whole world denies you this. When did it start? In one of the chronicles of Kyivan Rus a thousand years ago, when they reported the death of one of the princes of Pereyaslav, they wrote that all of Ukraine was grieving for him. This is the first mention of the word “Ukraine” in the history of our future state.
A thousand years ago, the land that was Kyiv, that was Pereyaslav, that was Chernihiv, was already perceived by contemporaries as Ukraine. Why? Because, unlike all the surrounding lands, it was a country. It was the center of statehood. It was the center where the future nation was nurtured. So long ago that we can’t even imagine it. And so long ago that it was always hidden from us. And our neighbors always explained: “What do you want? Ukraine is simply because it is our neighborhood.” No, sorry, you are our neighborhood. And this is the center — it was, is, and will be. Why is it the center? Because it was a land where the culture of discussion has always been part of development.
In Kyiv and Velyky Novgorod, which had not yet been destroyed by Moscow, in Chernihiv and Pereyaslav, people gathered for a viche (meeting) and were ready to express their opinions to the princes at a time when this tradition had long been lost throughout medieval Europe and replaced by the full right of the sovereign. We think of the English Magna Carta as the highest achievement of civilization, as an agreement between the nobility and the king that limited the arbitrariness of royal power, but this was after Kyivan Rus, which later became Ukraine, had begun to lose its viche tradition. It was this tradition that enabled the lands of Kyivan Rus to develop. That is why later on these lands became statehood, in which Ukrainians were participants and which also implied an exchange of thoughts and positions between those who were concerned about this statehood.
The statehood of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and even the statehood of the Crown (the Kingdom of Poland — ed.) have always been those where there were opportunities for discussion between society and the government, between the sovereign and those who determined the future development of the countries. And what about those of our neighbors who are now trying to destroy us? From the first days of the colonization of northern Russia, from the first days of the creation of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality, which later became the Moscow principality, and then the Moscow kingdom, and then the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union, and then the Russian Federation… What was there in the first years of the development of this land? A dictatorship. The man who essentially created the statehood of Vladimir-Suzdal, and thus Moscow, which was a border fortress in this principality, Andrei Bogolyubsky, was a dictator who was killed by his own subjects, who were tired of his dictatorship and who threw his body to the dogs. And only because there was some random person from Kyiv in this principality, that prince was buried with dignity, because this Kyivan, as the ancient Russian chronicles also tell us, believed that one should treat the institution of power with respect. And there, in these lands, it was very simple: as long as you are a lord, we obey you and do whatever you want, but as soon as we kill you or get rid of you, let the dogs eat you. This is the kind of statehood — the statehood of servants who dream of revenge, not the statehood of free people.
And so the question always arises: “How do we coexist on the borders with a state where dictatorship and slavery have long been symbiotic?” And here again I have to answer the question: “What kind of Ukraine do we want?” And we want a Ukraine in which we would not remember Russia at all. I still hear all the time from my compatriots that the situation with the Russian-Ukrainian war and the future of Ukraine will change exactly when Russia changes: it will collapse, Putin will die, or maybe there will be democracy there.
Of course, it is much better to have a neighbor who does not fire missiles at you than a neighbor who wants to destroy you at any time. But the Ukrainian people cannot depend on what happens in Russia for its entire history. All of the fundamental decisions of the Ukrainian people throughout its modern history, throughout at least the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have always been a reaction to what is happening in Russia.
The February Revolution of 1917 proclaimed the autonomy of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The October Revolution in Petrograd in 1917 — we declare the independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Russian Federation adopts a declaration of its state sovereignty, and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopts a declaration of its state sovereignty. The Russian leadership declares that it has defeated the Soviet center and that the president of the Russian Federation will now be the main figure in Moscow, and the Ukrainian parliament adopts the Act of Independence.
Putin decides that he can attack us and annex Crimea and start a war in Donbas, and a large number of our compatriots realize that we need decommunization, a stronger army, and our own independent life. Russia starts a big war with us, and a large number of our compatriots switch from Russian to Ukrainian. And they believe that they no longer need monuments to Pushkin in every city park. Putin is not going to stop the war — the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine eventually decides that there should be no churches in Ukraine with their center in Moscow.
How long can we go on, please? How long can we live in a situation of this eternal dependence? No, we need to live like our neighbors in the West, so that we are interested in how the Russian Federation is developing only as tourists.
Democracy is great. Dictatorship again — we sympathize. Eaten each other — we are surprised. We launched a satellite into space — great scientific potential. But we don’t care. We have our own language, our own history, our own decisions, our own satellites. We need a country that is no longer afraid of an attack from Russia and that would make decisions about its future without paying attention to the processes that are taking place in the state that our territories have been part of for so long. We have to depend on our own capabilities, not on how Russian history changes.
And for this, of course, I have been saying this for years, but I think in the last two and a half years more actively, we must convince our allies in the West that our place is in the North Atlantic Alliance. The cost of seizing our lands for Moscow must become so high that it must give up this ambition once and for all. This is the main meaning of this war in which we are now living. Yes, when our troops hold the front in the east, when our troops enter the so-called sovereign territory of the Russian Federation, when citizens live here in Ukraine in an atmosphere of air raids, drone flights, infrastructure problems, and economic crisis, we do so precisely because we believe that we must be reliably protected. We deserve this reliable protection because we are, to a large extent, the first country in Europe in the twenty-first century to defend the principles of international law that were established after World War II at the cost of the lives of our own citizens: the inviolability of borders, respect for human life, the ability to solve problems between countries not through war, but through diplomacy and negotiations. All that modern Russia has trampled on. So why, then, should we be between the world that follows these rules and this country that spits on them? This is not a rhetorical question, this is a question that our politicians, our diplomats, representatives of our civil society, our journalists should constantly ask our friends in the West.
Why does Ukraine have to defend all these values that are common to us virtually alone (if we are not talking about weapons, money, but people, because people are the most valuable)? Only because Western countries fear the threat of World War III? But if you are not able to defend your values, and this is evidenced by the experience of all world conflicts, a world war will definitely break out.
Western politicians in the late 1930s were incredibly afraid of a repeat of World War I. They made some agreements with Hitler, made some agreements with Stalin, sought alliances, thought about how to establish a dialogue so that a new war would not begin. So what did they, excuse me, “get along” with Hitler and Stalin to? That Hitler’s army came to Warsaw, and the Soviet army came to Lviv. And the Second World War began. To a large extent, if we are talking about the competition of values, all this continues today. And I am sure that the outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war will determine what the world of the future will look like. And this is not some kind of megalomania or a desire to put Ukraine at the center of world politics; you know that I never use such rhetorical devices. This is just a cold statement of facts: if the democratic world fails to prove that it is able to protect its own values and those countries that choose democracy and their development, it will prove the strength of dictatorships and strengthen their ambitions in Europe, Asia, and on all continents.
You and I are well aware that Russia, which could crush Ukraine, would not stop with Ukraine. It would definitely try to create a so-called Soviet Union within the 1991 borders, and most importantly, it could frighten Europe so that Europeans themselves would vote for politicians who would promise them to reach an agreement with Putin. And such a Europe, by the way, may emerge, may still emerge, if we lose this war. And it will not be the Europe of the 1930s, it will be the Europe of the 1930s. We will go back 100 years. History will simply go backwards. It happens, it happened many times in human history, when history went backwards, and so fast that no one could even understand what was happening.
And what will happen if Ukraine wins, manages to defend its sovereignty, and becomes a member of NATO and the European Union? If the civilized world forces Russia to end the war, we will live in a world of triumphant democracy. In a world where the parallels between development and democracy will be obvious. In a world where the ambitions of dictatorships will be effectively nullified. And not only will Putin no longer try to climb somewhere and conquer something else, but Xi Jinping will stop dreaming that he can destroy democracy in Taiwan by military means. And the Iranian ayatollahs will not think that they will destroy Israel and create opportunities for a new war in the Middle East. Everyone will realize that an attack on democracy leads to the opposite result.
And this is the choice between worlds. In which world do we want to live in the end? In the world of democratic development of the 1930s? Or in the world of populism, agreement with Russia, and right-wing radical dictatorships of the 1930s? Do we want to go back or do we want to go forward? The development of the civilized world as such depends on this. And the fate of those who are helping us in the war today is linked to this, not just our fate. That is why I am confident in saying that the future of the whole of Europe and even North America, the strength of Europe and North America, and the ability of democracy to defend itself will depend on how the war in Ukraine ends. You may remember that since February 2022, I have been saying and writing that if we fail to stop the war in Ukraine and fail to stop Russia, this war will definitely globalize. I even named specific cities that would be bombed after Ukrainian cities. I said that the tragedy that Kharkiv or Mariupol is experiencing could be repeated tomorrow in Qiryat Shemola and Metula. My readers in Israel didn’t believe me, but now they do, because these cities are in the epicenter of rocket attacks; and today it was a massive rocket attack. And I talked about this in February — March 2022. And now I repeat once again: if this war does not end, it will become even more and more globalized, and there will be more and more wars, because this is the logic of the confrontation between democracy and dictatorships.
I have repeatedly quoted a text written by the then Speaker of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, when she arrived in Taiwan (in August 2022 — ed.), that she believes that it is in the epicenter of conflicts between democracies and dictatorships. And this is the essence of what is happening. And that is why it is globalizing and becoming a very serious challenge for the world we live in. That is why it is not only our job to stop this war with a Russian defeat and a Ukrainian victory. Since 2022, I have been saying that if this war continues, it will definitely come to the territory of Russia itself. And everyone was skeptical about this, too, saying that this could not happen. Ukraine cannot fight on Russian territory. The US president used to say that he did not want the war to come to Russia, that Russians would suffer from the war. And now he doesn’t say that anymore. And now they are fighting with Western weapons on the territory of the Kursk region of the Russian Federation. Now German leopards are driving around the territory of the Kursk region of the Russian Federation, and not a single German politician says: “Mein Gott! This cannot happen after the Second World War.” It turns out that it can.
This is the logic of a long conflict. But we are not just hostages of this conflict, we are participants in it. And we have to tell the world, tell all those who think about the future of the modern world, that this is not just our war, as many people continue to believe. This is a common war, the outcome of which depends on the survival of all those who would like to live in a democratic and civilized world, who would like to have rights, who would like to have their lives not encroached upon by those for whom the very value of life is negligible. After all, in dictatorships, the value of life is always negligible. The life of only one person at the top of the dictatorship is valuable, while everyone else is just material. Yes, it always has to start with someone.
After all, we are with you in the city where Ukrainian freedom began in the 80s and 90s of the last century. You remember this very well. People from other regions of Ukraine used to come to Lviv to breathe this air of Ukrainian freedom. To see people who still remembered what a free society could look like and voted for those political forces that defended the idea of a free society, while most of our compatriots voted for the Communist Party of Ukraine. You can hear the Ukrainian language on the streets. How can it be that Ukrainian is spoken on the streets of a big city? “They probably don’t know any other way.” You remember all this well. It was the beginning.
And I always have a question to which I have a clear answer. What would have happened to Ukraine if there had been no such beginning? If there had been no Galicia, which was ready to remind Ukrainians that they were Ukrainians, that they were free Ukrainians, and that they were Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians? What would have happened to our history and our state? I will tell you what would have happened. There would have been Belarus. That is all that would have happened. And we must always remember this. If we did not have a territory in our state that understood what Ukraine was and what freedom was when most people who lived in the Ukrainian SSR did not realize it, we could have lived a completely different life. In general, I would say this was Stalin’s fatal mistake. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Galicia. Well, let him roll over a few more times in his coffin, he is embalmed there, so he can roll over.
But why am I reminding you of all this? Because the fight for freedom always begins with something, even in a hopeless situation. The people of Lviv believed in this freedom even when you were kicked out of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for wearing a blue and yellow pin, remember? They just kicked you out. The people of Lviv believed in this freedom when there was no referendum on the renewed union in the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions, and the majority of citizens of the Ukrainian SSR voted for this renewed union, hoping, probably, that it would be some kind of new state where they could find their place together with the Russian people. But, of course, they did not. And now they probably already understand why.
And so it is now. Maybe this struggle for freedom in the world we live in, maybe this struggle against dictatorships and the realization of how dangerous they are, begins with Ukraine? With the willingness of the Ukrainian people to fight, to endure, to find non-standard solutions? And maybe later in history this period will be associated with the realization that it all started in Ukraine. And so in the future, someone will definitely ask at the same meeting, but not in Ukraine: “Please tell me, what would have happened if Ukraine had succumbed? If it had agreed to Russian terms? If it decided to live according to the Russian plan for the future? What would have happened to all of us?” No, this question will not be asked for one simple reason: dictatorships do not ask questions.
And if Ukraine had succumbed, it would have been the first step toward the defeat of democracy in the entire civilized world. And now I am absolutely sure that this defeat will not happen. That is why I am sincerely proud of all those people who were ready to defend Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022. I am proud of the people who feel that they are the Ukrainian people. People often of different ethnic origins, different religions. People who look at Ukraine differently and who have a different image of Ukraine, because it is different in Lviv, Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Uzhhorod. And it is from these different images that Ukraine for which people are ready to fight, for which they are ready to die, which they do not want to leave, emerges.
Over the past 33 years, many events in Ukraine’s history and life have surprised me, to be honest. Some events surprised me positively. I remember the enthusiasm of the Maidans. I remember people who flocked to the Maidans like a river to avoid being dispersed. I remember the queues at arms stores, at the Territorial center for recruitment and social support here in Lviv and in other cities of Ukraine in the first days of the full-scale war. I remember many events that frankly surprised me. Both during the elections and when society responded to the challenge in a strange way. But at the same time, unlike Vladimir Putin, I want to tell you one important thing: so far, everything is going according to my plan. The plan that I outlined for myself on August 24, 1991, when I saw the numbers on the scoreboard for Independence. And I believed, even though we were all not ready, that it would happen so quickly, that Ukraine would develop, that Ukraine would change, that Ukraine would become a European state. Most importantly, I believed then that Ukrainians would become Ukrainians. Although it was not easy to believe, I did. And so it happened, is happening and will continue to happen with our participation and before our eyes. Glory to Ukraine!
This text appeared on August 27 on ZaxidNet, which traditionally publishes our Independence Lectures in text format.
The text was prepared by Iryna Panchyshyn and Iryna Shutka.
Photo: Vitaliy Grabar.
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The Independence Lecture is a project of the Cultural Strategy Institute, launched in 2021 to mark the anniversary of Ukraine’s restoration of independence on August 24. It is an attempt, together with invited lecturers, to capture the moods and values of Ukrainian society, particularly during the war, to identify the most important events of the past and the period of modern history, and to reflect on how we see the future of our country. Traditionally, the event takes place at the Heavenly Hundred Memorial.
The first lecturer was Taras Lyuty, whose speech was entitled “Culture: Where is my/our independence?”. In 2022, the Independence Lecture by Halyna Kruk entitled “A Man Against War” was held. And in 2023, Yurko Vovkohon delivered the lecture “Independence is the only way to be yourself”.
Translated by Yana Kryzhanivska, participant of the First Career Step program
