Timothy Snyder: Thinking about freedom in wartime Ukraine

The following lecture was delivered in March 2023 at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy as part of a benefit conference to raise funds to establish a Center for Civic Engagement at Kyiv Mohyla Academy.
The subject I have chosen for myself is thinking about freedom in wartime Ukraine. The basis for this title is a conference I ran with some friends and colleagues in 2014, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began — the first Russian invasion, in the spring of 2014. I brought people from North America and Europe to Kyiv and ran a conference called “Thinking Together.” Although that’s a very simple idea, I like to think it’s a useful one. And when I speak about philosophy in Ukraine, I won’t be explaining how philosophy might be applied to Ukraine. Instead, I will be thinking together with Ukrainians and others about what I take to be the central subject of this conflict, which is freedom.
That said, I’m very glad to be here with Margaret Atwood, my Ukrainian friends and colleagues Volodymyr Yermolenko and Mychailo Wynnyckyj, and philosophers. I understand that the general framework we’re supposed to talk about is: “What Good Is Philosophy?” I’m going to aim for something slightly different: namely, how we might think better, or how philosophy might be better, if we think together during this war.
My subject is freedom, and my method is going to be very simple. I’m going to begin with what philosophers or colleagues might call a speech act. I’m going to begin with an utterance of two words and think together with the person who uttered them. My subject is freedom, and I’m going to break it down into four parts: freedom and speech, freedom and risk, freedom and obligation, and freedom and security.
The two words are “президент тут,” which means “the president is here.” Those words were uttered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 25, 2022, just as the full-scale invasion had begun, two days in. I want to use those words to talk about freedom — specifically, freedom and speech. I want to treat Zelensky’s act of stepping out of his office, going onto the street, and filming a selfie at the beginning of this invasion as a paradigmatic act of free speech. That might not be the first association people have, and if it’s not, I’m going to suggest it’s because of our bad habits: in politics, and perhaps even in philosophy, we tend to treat freedom of speech as an empty concept. We don’t pay attention to the substance of what’s said, the setting where something is said, or the semantics. How something is said seems to matter less. All that matters in our everyday portrayal of freedom of speech is the lack of restriction.
What I want to suggest is that this has it backward. The reason we care about the lack of restriction is because of the substance, the setting, and the semantics. The substance, setting, and semantics matter very much. And they matter very much because of the purpose of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech isn’t an empty concept, a reflexive concept, or a kind of habit. Freedom of speech has a purpose: to allow people to speak truth to power. That’s not an original observation of mine. There’s a tradition of this that goes back to Euripides, and it has been reinterpreted more recently by Foucault.
I want to suggest that when President Zelensky said, on Feb. 25, 2022, “I am here, the president is here,” he was, of course, speaking the truth. He was saying something true — he was in Kyiv at that moment. He was where he said he was, doing what he said he was doing. He was speaking the truth against a background of lies. One of the reasons he was there saying what he was saying was that, three days into the war, at a time when many thought the war was about to end, the Russians were claiming he’d already left Kyiv. Again, he was speaking the truth against a background of lies.
He was also speaking truth to power. Teams of assassins were nearby, probably in Kyiv itself. Tanks seemed to be on the way into the city. They’d gotten very close at that point. Bombs and missiles were falling. He was speaking truth to power. And this is an interesting third part of freedom of speech. The truth he was speaking was true because he made it true. It was true because of what he was doing with his body. What he was saying was risky, not just because it was true, but because it described a risky state of affairs. And because in the very act of speaking, he was taking a physical risk — a corporeal risk.
There’s another tradition of freedom of speech, I think closely related, associated with the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka and the Czech political thinker and dissident Václav Havel, which says that truth is something you assert, avow, or avouch. It may describe the external world, but it becomes true the moment you avow it, the moment you invest in it, the moment you associate it with your bodily existence. This notion of freedom of speech, I think, is the correct one. Freedom of speech has a purpose — to allow people to speak truth to power. Given that purpose, freedom of speech will involve, as Havel and Patočka suggest, a certain amount of risk. We can see the power of this notion of freedom of speech when we contrast it with our everyday way of talking about freedom of speech as a lack of restriction.
If we contrast Zelensky’s speech act with the kinds of things we usually put into our category of freedom of speech, we notice some important differences. We tend to worry about situations where powerful people speak untruths to maintain power. Against this background, that doesn’t seem so important. We often fret about free speech on campus, by which we mean something like people coming to campus to say the most annoying thing they can and then fleeing in their limousines. That doesn’t really seem central. It doesn’t seem to be what freedom of speech is truly about.
It might be that de facto those sorts of things would have to be protected by any reasonable law. But actions like speaking untruths to maintain power or deliberately abusing the notion of free speech in the name of free speech have to be treated with suspicion rather than valorized. No one is showing valor when they provoke needless, mindless controversy in an entirely safe situation. No one is showing valor when they already hold power and lie to preserve or magnify that power. What should be valorized is the person who takes risks to speak truth to power.
It might be that de facto those sorts of things would have to be protected by any reasonable law. But actions like speaking untruths to maintain power or deliberately abusing the notion of free speech in the name of free speech have to be treated with suspicion rather than valorized. No one is showing valor when they provoke needless, mindless controversy in an entirely safe situation. No one is showing valor when they already hold power and lie to preserve or magnify that power. What should be valorized is the person who takes risks to speak truth to power.
The notion of the person here is important. I’ve been trying to say “freedom of speech” rather than “free speech,” and that is for a reason. I may have failed, I may have fallen into the cliché of saying “free speech,” but I think “free speech” is a cliché that leads us in the wrong direction because it suggests the thing that is free is speech, as opposed to the person.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not. A huge percentage of the utterances we’re confronted with every day are produced or magnified by algorithms. They’re produced by entities that aren’t human and don’t have rights. It’s important that we organize our conversation around the freedom of speech by making sure the utterance is connected to a person. If it’s not connected to a person, if it’s just some digital agglomeration, it doesn’t have any rights. There’s no person connected to it. There is no truth because the algorithm doesn’t care about truth. It can’t be spoken to power because the algorithm has no attitude to power. Or, put more simply, there isn’t a speaker.
“Freedom of speech” is the right term because it implies the freedom of the speaker. That’s the crucial concept. The speaker, in Zelensky’s case and in others, displays freedom and embodies freedom by taking a risk. This leads me to the second category of freedom, or the second association with freedom, that I want to talk about: freedom and risk.
So, we’re done for now with freedom and speech. Now, I would like to talk about freedom and risk. And as I do this, I want to recall my method. I’m staying with the two words spoken on Feb. 25, 2022, by President Zelensky: “The president is here,” президент тут. As I move forward, I’ll also slowly move into my own engagement with him about those words when we talked about them.
In order to think about freedom and risk, I want to step back from those two words, президент тут, and the setting in which Zelensky spoke them, and move into a more American setting to reflect on my thoughts and experiences in February 2022. In the weeks and days before the war, I felt isolated in my publicly recorded claim that Zelensky would remain in Kyiv. That was my view, and it was certainly a minority one. I felt strange saying it, the way you feel strange when everyone else is saying the opposite. But I said it, and it was broadcast on an important Sunday evening American television show, 60 Minutes. My claim that Zelensky would remain aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 20. Again, this was before he did remain and before he said those two words. This was five days before that. It was the Sunday.
On Monday, Feb. 21, the next day, I was sitting right where I am now, in my office at Yale, to take part remotely in the doctoral defense of a history student defending a dissertation in Lviv, in Western Ukraine, at the Ukrainian Catholic University. The student passed and then immediately joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defense.
On Tuesday, Feb. 22, I participated as a guest in a class taught by a Yale colleague who had convened security advisers from both the Trump and Obama administrations. Among other things, he asked them the same question that I had been asked: Would Zelensky stay if there were a Russian invasion of Ukraine? To my recollection, all of them said Zelensky would flee. They were very polite in their disagreement with me, but they said, “Zelensky is going to flee.”
This is the setting I want to recall. I guess I want to ask why we all thought that and what it says about us. There’s a simple answer to this, which is that Americans had just experienced a painful withdrawal from Afghanistan, and people tend to remember the last war. So, everyone was applying the analogy of Afghanistan to Ukraine. While I don’t want to discard that, I can’t help but notice that the notion Zelensky would flee, and the associated notion that Ukraine would fall, went well beyond the United States. It was broadly shared.
There is something to the Afghanistan analogy, but I think something more fundamental was happening, which has to do with freedom and risk, or more broadly, with what freedom actually means. I think it has to do with something that, in my other writings — first, in “On Tyranny” and then in “The Road to Unfreedom” — I call the “politics of inevitability” after 1989.
That is the sense that sometimes goes under the name of “there is no alternative” or the “end of history.” The sense — the very powerful, very broadly shared sense — that all that was going to happen in the future was a kind of general convergence toward democracy and freedom. Underlying that analysis was the assumption that democracy and freedom are the results of larger forces. The larger forces people had in mind were usually capitalism or maybe American exceptionalism as an example for everyone. But some larger force was going to ensure freedom and democracy.
Now, this way of thinking about freedom and democracy has a lot of problems. It verges on being logically contradictory because, after all, if you’re living in a world of inevitability, it’s hard to imagine how you can be free. If you’re living in a world where everything is guided by larger forces, where are the people who rule? Where is democracy? How is that possible? More practically, this kind of passivity about democracy and freedom breeds bad habits. If you assume things are going to go your way, you don’t get in the habit of struggling, as Frederick Douglass said you must. You don’t develop the habit of struggling for the value of freedom or the value-laden system of democracy. Those muscles grow limp. Those reflexes die.
But the relevant consequence here, when we think of February 2022, is this: If you’ve gotten used to thinking that democracy and freedom are the result of larger forces, then what do you do when those forces are arrayed against you? This is a question that doesn’t apply only to a war in Ukraine. It also applies to an attempted coup, a financial crisis, a terrorist attack — any number of things. If you think your freedom and democracy depend on larger forces, and then you meet a shock where it turns out that the larger forces aren’t going your way, what do you do? What can you do? You run. That’s all you’ve got left. You run.
I think the fundamental reason why — and I say this with shame, but also in the hope that recognizing it will help us — so many people in North America and Europe assumed Zelensky would run is that’s what they would have done. Because, from their point of view, if they had been in Kyiv, they would have thought the larger forces were against them. What else is there? Democracy, freedom — the results of objective forces? Suddenly, the objective forces are turned against us. You run. What else are you going to do? But he didn’t run. He stayed. He chose to remain on Feb. 22. The two words, “The president is here” — президент тут — he uttered three days after the invasion. He’s remained in Kyiv ever since, and he and many others who behaved similarly have led a Ukrainian resistance that involves not only the Ukrainian state but also Ukrainian civil society.
Looking upon this from the outside, I think it’s fair to say we have been divided into the astonished and the cynical. People who are not somehow impressed by this are those who like Putin or subjugation or being lied to. They’re living in a cynical, nihilistic world. Essentially, they’re behaving as if nothing happened. If Zelensky remaining in Kyiv doesn’t make an impression on them, it’s because nothing could. They’re living their political life in a land of cynicism or nihilism.
Then there are the astonished. I’m struck by this. The astonishment comes with uncertainty about how to characterize what Zelensky has done. People know it’s impressive and know that, for them, it was unexpected, but they’re not sure how to describe it. People who are astonished seem to me to be those who still have some kind of value commitment to freedom, but they’re unsure how to characterize freedom as a matter of taking risks, which is what this behavior demonstrates. It shows that freedom can’t just be a matter of objective laws about our three-dimensional world. It has to involve a commitment to values, which then brings about a corporeal or bodily commitment.
Freedom and democracy have to be about taking risks. Not just any risk, not taking risks on purpose, not taking risks for the sake of it, but taking thoughtful risks. There’s always going to be this element in freedom and democracy. Larger forces may push this way or that way, but if you’re going to be a free person, you have to confront the larger forces, alter them, find exceptions to them, sublimate them, trick them, do something with them besides expecting they’re going to be on your side. You’re going to have to take some kind of risk.
This brings me to something I discussed with Zelensky, which seems to be an interesting but solvable problem for freedom. I’m going to characterize this as my third point, or my third concept: freedom and obligation. What I’m concerned with here is a situation in which it seems to you that a person is free, yet the person says there was nothing else they could have done.
On the one hand, when I spoke to Zelensky about all this, I had the impression I was talking to someone who was quite free. Even though we were behind checkpoints, behind sandbags, even though we were talking during an important battle, even though he had been working incessantly for months, he was relaxed. He seemed to be without complexes, open to talking about whatever. I told him I wanted to talk about philosophy, and he said, “Let’s do that.” Then we talked about philosophy for a couple of hours — for the better part of the afternoon. So, on one side, judging by his comportment, as far as one can judge, Zelensky seemed to be very much a free person.
On the other hand, when we talked about his decision to remain in Kyiv, and his explanation for it, he circled around the same point over and over again. He said, “I could not have done otherwise.” He said, “I would not have been myself had I left.” He said, “I would not have respected myself if I had left.” Here, we seem to have something of a paradox. I am going to call it the “Zelensky paradox.” How can someone who seems to be free feel as though there was nothing else they could have done?
I think there’s a way to resolve this little paradox, this Zelensky paradox. If we think about freedom in the right way — as a kind of pluralist engagement with values over the course of a life — this apparent paradox dissolves. If we imagine freedom as the highest value, because freedom is what allows us to engage with, choose among, and realize all the other values, and then if we think about our life in its stages, in the correct temporal order, as practice in making such choices, we remember these choices will involve subjective evaluations, unpredictable circumstances, and irreconcilable values. You can’t always get everything you want at the same time. You have to play tricks, try to combine, or do one thing now and another later. These choices are always going to involve imperfect outcomes, but imperfect outcomes are laden with values and have
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published as part of a special issue of “Studia Philosophica Estonica” entitled, “Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War.” A copy of the original article can be found here. The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.