Americans and Europeans face a rising threat of dictatorship, and should take lessons from Eastern European countries' experience in resisting authoritarianism, writes political analyst Mykola Riabchuk. Citizens and politicians must have the courage to say 'no' to dictatorship, just as Ukrainians did during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-2014.

Demonstrators rally against US President Donald Trump during a protest, dubbed "Resist the Dictator," to mark President's Day on February 17, 2025, in New York. Photo: David Dee Delgado / ANP / AFP

From time to time, international friends apologize to me for their governments' statements, actions, or policies concerning Ukraine. Most often, these apologies come from Hungarians, sometimes Poles or Slovaks; the apologies even came from a Swiss person and a Japanese person, who explained that their governments preferred to destroy outdated weapons rather than transfer them to Ukraine. Lately, I've begun to receive such apologies from Americans, too.

I feel a bit perplexed, because I am not in any position to accept or demand such apologies. Nor are my colleagues and friends obliged to apologize, since none of them, I am confident, cast their ballots for the incumbents and therefore bear little responsibility for their questionable actions. Responsibility, however, does not equal accountability; an exemption from the former does not waive the latter.

I had a similar feeling in 2010, when my fellow-countryman used free and quite fair (by Ukrainian standards) elections to bring to power Viktor Yanukovych, a former convict with a proven criminal record and unproven but evident ties to the mafia from Donetsk region. Ironically, he won the presidency even though he received half a million votes less than he received in the previous elections, in 2005, when he lost to his pro-European ('orange') opponent Viktor Yushchenko at the end of the Orange Revolution, with 44 percent to 53. In 2010, he won (50 percent to 46) against his new 'orange' rival Yulia Tymoshenko, because two million 'orange' voters simply did not appear at the polling stations or cast protest votes against both candidates, signifying their dissatisfaction with the 'orange' team that had initially raised such high expectations.

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

Human agency and failed institutions

It might be too simple and self-indulging to claim I did everything I could. In fact, we do not know. We can assess our own capacity for action with some objectivity, but not our capacity for cognition: to speak of 'everything I could' is too nebulous, because we cannot know with due clarity and precision what else could have been done and which option should have been chosen from a multitude of possibilities. It might be even easier to assert (following Montesquieu) that people generally have the government they deserve, but again, the devil is in the details. This seemingly wise, quasi-philosophical formula over-generalizes, overlooking the simple fact that people are vastly different: some may ‘deserve’ a better government, while others may ‘deserve’ much worse.

Luckily, most of us live in democracies which, however imperfect, make our voices meaningful far beyond the voting booths. Rights imply duties, and possibilities entail responsibilities. All governments tend to misuse power and resources if they are not properly checked. They allow themselves to overstep the rules as much as people allow them.

I was not responsible for Yanykovych’s victory, but I was accountable for it

For thirty years I observed the postcommunist transformations in Eastern Europe, also teaching a course on the topic and writing a book ultimately published in Warsaw in 2021. Two things impressed me from the very beginning: first, how the communist system was installed in the region after WWII, and how within a few years all the promising sprouts of 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 penetrated local societies in very different ways, and how it was ultimately uprooted with very different speed and depth.

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

Mykola Riabchuk

Politiek analist en schrijver

Mykola Riabchuk (1953) is a Ukrainian political analyst and writer, honorary chairman of the Ukrainian PEN Center. Visiting research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.

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 of '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. The new American president’s sympathy toward authoritarian rulers, including the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, is well-known; his attacks on American institutions, the judiciary in particular, resemble to many the infamous German Gleichschaltung of the 1930s, even though carried out on a different scale, in a different manner and under different circumstances. Within this context, Karolina Wigura maintained, the 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 the consolidation of dictatorship in Germany: businesses were rather compliant with national socialists or even supportive of them; the same held true for the German judiciary, inclined traditionally to favor conservatives and biased against leftists and liberals; conservative parties tacitly accepted Hitler’s advance, believing they would be able to find a modus vivendi with him; the leftists were divided and preoccupied with internal struggles, projecting their hostility also onto trade unions; and the church was not only parochially divided, but also focused almost exclusively on their parishes rather than on broader developments in society.

The analogies with today’s America might be far-fetched, but the anxiety is palpable, fueled recurrently by highly dubious presidential orders and, not least, by his extraordinarily brutal attacks on disobedient courts and judges.

Brenner’s speech largely replicated, consciously or incidentally, in 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'. 

Missed warnings

A 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'. He argued that the signs of forthcoming disaster were increasingly obvious since 2015, but that Americans are drifting 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'.

Senator Mitt Romney, one of Republicans who 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'. 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 something all party dissenters could afford. It appears Trump’s loyalists are increasingly turning to bullying and blackmail as instruments against would-be defectors from their camp.

'A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable'

Critics of Trump and Trumpism do not claim that they are carbon copies of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead, today’s conservatives, primarily Republicans, have a similar choice to make as the conservatives of the 1930s did: 'whether they will serve as enablers of or a bulwark against the danger of an authoritarian government', as Jeffrey Herf writes in his article for Persuasian. Both then and today, 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'.

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'.

Silver lining

The prospects of such developments in the world’s leading democracy are quite disheartening. 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 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, she recognized that it was a very difficult decision: for three months she tried to adjust to the new political line, until she 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'.

'I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded, and children killed with impunity'

A week later, in an interview with PBS News, she added several new points, diplomatically evading a direct answer to a 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'.

'One swallow does not make a spring', as Ukrainians say. Ambassador Brink’s demarche will not change the narcissist course of Trump’s international politics nor entice many other servants and politicians to follow suit. But it demonstrated at least two things. First, that it is not necessary to rely on geopolitical gurus equipped with ‘realist’ theories to understand the developments in Ukraine; it is enough to approach them first-hand, on the ground. And second, that the US political system is not thoroughly petrified, but there are (and will probably always be) honest and courageous people within, who are capable of speaking, acting, and maybe ultimately of ‘bringing spring’.

Ambassador Brink’s demarche will not change the narcissist course of Trump’s international politics

This was, in fact, 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 corruption and cooptation rather than coercion; manipulation and disinformation instead of 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 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 tell them no', as our mentors, the old Soviet dissidents, taught us when we were students.

And, crucially, try to overcome partisan divisions and unify the opposition for the common good. Democracy’s resilience and resistance is a good thing. But it might also be useful to think about its assertiveness.