Albert Einstein, who knew something about how the world works, believed that freedom “is only possible by constantly struggling for it.” In our popular conception of history, many of the touchstones of that struggle are far in the past. They are in Philadelphia (1776), Yorktown (1781) and Gettysburg (1863).
Many of the more recent settings of the struggle for freedom are far away. They are in Eastern Europe — in Budapest (1956), Prague (1968), Gdansk (1981) and, the latest, in Kyiv (2022).
Could it be that the lessons of freedom from our own founding, and from the great Civil War, have their analogues behind the old Iron Curtain? Might it be that while for generations, freedom-loving people — whether in Selma or Capetown, or in Birmingham’s jail or South Africa’s Robben Island — once took their inspiration from America’s difficult formative years, we in our peculiar mix of comfort and contention might look to the easternmost expanses of the European plain for fresh inspiration?
Could it be that Volodymyr Zelenskyy might be remembered as a modern Nathan Hale, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country, or that his compatriots might be recalled as modern-day Patrick Henrys, hurling into the unforgiving air oaths demanding liberty or death? Might it be that the faceless resisters to the intrigues and indignities of Vladimir Putin, their blue-and-sunshine flags unfurled, could be recalled much like Concord’s “embattled farmers,” firing their shots and hurling their Molotov cocktails heard, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “round the world”?
This month, we have been witnessing the uprising — the upswelling of the yearning for freedom — from, in the words Margaret Atwood employed in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “the people who were not in the papers,” those who lived “in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.” It wasn’t only those who stood and fought who made stirring statements, testimony in action of their desire for freedom. They also served who made for the borders, for theirs, too, was a solemn and unmistakable symbol of the irrepressible value of freedom.
On the other side of the border, in Poland, were scores — hundreds, maybe more — who offered safety and shelter. They had had their own struggle, their own Lexington and Concord, and it was the American ambassador, Mark Brzezinski — the son of a Polish-born American national-security adviser and the grandson of a Polish diplomat — who saw the unmistakable parallels in the struggles of Eastern Europe. “When we think of Poland,” he told the two top members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Democrat Gregory Meeks of New York and the Republican Michael McCaul of Texas, “we think of the Solidarity movement.”
In our lifetime, it repeatedly has been the Eastern Europeans who have taught us the importance of freedom, no matter how determined, how demonic, their oppressors. Rebellions spiked and died in Poland throughout the Cold War, but it was Solidarity that began the fatal crack in the Warsaw Pact. Those who saw Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago-born chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, speak at a dinner for Lech Walesa never forgot the sight of one of the most physically intimidating and politically powerful lawmakers of his time overcome with tears.
“Eastern Europeans have always understood that an authoritarian Russia, whoever rules it, has never tolerated a free state on its borders,” the public intellectual Michael Ignatieff, the onetime leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, wrote in the Globe and Mail newspaper this month.
“Mr. Putin’s brutality has a pedigree. He mirrors the brutality of the czars toward the Poles in the 19th century and the brutality of Joseph Stalin toward his empire’s national minorities. Like his predecessors, Mr. Putin crushes his foes at home and abroad. Blaming it all on his demonic, even demented personality misses the deep historical continuity in the use of Russian power within and beyond its frontiers.”
And that is why the example of Zelenskyy almost perfectly represents the ideal John F. Kennedy described in “Profiles in Courage,” written the very year of the Hungarian uprising, when the Massachusetts senator said that “a man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures — and that is the basis of all human morality.”
Whether in military gear — an image from 2019 — or in a gray T-shirt, and whether as a performer seeing truths in comedy or a president speaking truth to power, Zelenskyy electrified the world, perhaps even in corners of Russia where flickers of freedom, or at least the yearning for it, persist. He presents the ultimate contrast to Putin.
“Zelenskyy is a leader hired to do a job, a president who considers himself someone no better or worse morally from the people he leads,” said Michael Blake, a University of Washington professor of philosophy, public policy and governance. “That ideal is under assault, and to see him present himself as human — sometimes scared, worried about his family — reminds us that humans can be leaders. It provides hope at a time when democracy is under suspicion and in danger in so many places.”
The fulcrum of history often is irony, and so it cannot be ignored that this commitment to democracy among Ukrainians comes at a moment when democratic values are undermined and questioned around the world, even in places — places where we live — whose democratic example inspired others.
The American Constitution at one point was the model for the principal legal documents of 160 of the world’s nations. The democratic institutions created in the document of 1787 have been assailed many times — by the Confederacy, by Father Charles Coughlin, by Capitol rioters — and are under siege again today.
The ideas that undergirded American democracy once were so attractive, so irresistible, that much of the world came to agree with Benjamin Franklin’s prayer: “God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, ‘This is my Country.’”
Today, people around the world are declaring, in spirit though not in fact, that they are Ukrainians. As they do so, it is our responsibility — a glorious burden, you might say — to assure that in those sentiments, they are Americans as well.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
