The Road to Unfreedom

In the winter of 2013, a young Ukrainian journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted a simple message on Facebook that would change the course of history. When President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union, Nayyem urged his friends to gather in Kyiv's Independence Square. "Likes don't count," he wrote. What began as a few hundred students protesting for a European future would grow into a revolution that exposed a fundamental battle for the soul of democracy itself.

This period reveals how quickly the comfortable assumptions of the post-Cold War era could crumble. The belief that history moved inevitably toward greater freedom and democracy proved to be a dangerous illusion. Instead, these years witnessed the emergence of a new form of political warfare, where authoritarian regimes learned to export their problems rather than solve them, using information technology to weaken democratic societies from within. The story of these crucial years demonstrates how the choice between freedom and unfreedom became a decision that each generation would have to make anew, as the very foundations of truth and democratic deliberation came under systematic assault.

The transformation began not with foreign invasion, but with domestic deception. In December 2011, when Russians took to the streets to protest blatantly falsified parliamentary elections, Vladimir Putin faced a crucial choice. The demonstrations revealed that the politics of inevitability—the assumption that Russia would naturally become more like the West through economic development—had reached its limits. Putin's response would be to embrace an entirely different political philosophy, one that would reshape not only Russia but influence elections and societies across the globe.

Putin found his intellectual foundation in the writings of Ivan Ilyin, a Russian fascist philosopher who had died in exile in 1954. Ilyin's vision rejected the very possibility of legitimate opposition, instead proposing that true leadership emerged from a mystical connection between a redeemer-figure and his people. According to this worldview, Russia was an innocent nation surrounded by enemies, requiring a leader who could transcend normal politics and law. Democracy was not just inappropriate for Russia but was actually a Western plot to weaken and destroy it.

This marked Russia's transition from the politics of inevitability to what became known as the politics of eternity. Where inevitability promised that tomorrow would be better than today through gradual reform, eternity offered the comfort of endless repetition, where the nation's struggles against its enemies provided meaning and purpose. This shift required Russians to stop thinking about improving their actual conditions and instead find satisfaction in the belief that they were defending their civilization against foreign corruption.

The genius of this approach lay in its ability to transform weakness into strength. Putin's inability to create genuine prosperity or establish the rule of law was reframed as spiritual purity. Russia's problems were not the result of poor governance, but evidence of foreign conspiracy. By 2012, Putin had successfully institutionalized this new framework, passing laws restricting civil society and redefining anyone who received foreign funding as a potential enemy agent. The politics of eternity had found its expression, setting the stage for a global confrontation over the nature of truth itself.

When Ukrainian protesters filled Independence Square in late 2013, they created something unprecedented in post-Soviet space: a genuine civic uprising that developed new forms of democratic politics. The Maidan became a laboratory for horizontal cooperation, where protesters organized themselves without traditional party structures, creating their own security forces, medical stations, and media based on voluntary participation. Most remarkably, they maintained linguistic and cultural diversity while united by a shared commitment to the rule of law and European integration.

For Putin, the Maidan represented an existential threat that went far beyond geopolitics. If Ukrainians could create a functioning democracy on Russia's border, it would expose the hollowness of his claims that such systems were impossible for Slavic peoples. The solution was characteristically brutal and innovative: if Ukraine could not be controlled through its government, it would be destroyed as a functioning state through a new form of warfare that targeted truth itself.

The Russian invasion began on February 24, 2014, with unmarked soldiers seizing control of Crimea. Putin's initial denials were so brazen they seemed almost comical—he claimed the soldiers were local self-defense forces who had bought their uniforms at surplus stores. But the lies served a purpose beyond mere deception. They created a new reality where truth itself became a weapon of war, forcing the world to debate obvious falsehoods rather than focus on the underlying aggression.

Russian media simultaneously launched the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare. This was not merely about justifying military action, but about fundamentally altering how people understood reality. Television presented viewers with contradictory narratives about events in Ukraine, each more dramatic than the last. Ukrainian protesters were simultaneously portrayed as Nazi stormtroopers and Western-funded degenerates seeking to corrupt traditional values. The goal was not to convince audiences of any particular version of events, but to create confusion where all versions seemed equally plausible, making moral responsibility impossible to assign and democratic deliberation impossible to conduct.

As war raged in Ukraine, Russia began systematically exporting its new political model to European democracies. The method was elegant in its simplicity: identify existing social divisions, amplify them through targeted propaganda, and support political movements that promised to destroy the European Union from within. The politics of eternity, which had already transformed Russia, now offered a template for undermining the politics of integration that had defined postwar Europe.

The refugee crisis of 2015 provided the perfect opportunity for this strategy. As hundreds of thousands of people fled conflicts in Syria and elsewhere, Russian media and internet operations worked to transform a humanitarian challenge into an existential threat to European civilization. Fake stories about refugee crimes spread faster than corrections, while Russian-funded political parties across Europe promised to protect native populations from foreign invasion. The goal was not simply to influence particular elections but to make Europeans lose faith in their institutions' ability to solve problems through democratic deliberation.

Marine Le Pen's National Front in France exemplified this new approach. Funded by Russian banks and promoted by Russian media, Le Pen offered French voters a simple choice: surrender to globalization and immigration, or return to an imagined past of national greatness. Her message resonated not because it offered practical solutions to real problems, but because it provided the emotional satisfaction of eternal struggle against clearly defined enemies. Similar movements emerged across Europe, from the Alternative for Germany to Austria's Freedom Party, all sharing the same basic template of victimhood, nostalgia, and promised redemption.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 demonstrated how effectively these techniques could be deployed against even established democracies. Russian bots and trolls amplified existing divisions within British society, promoting content designed to weaken the United Kingdom regardless of the specific outcome. When Brexit narrowly passed, it represented not just a victory for Euroscepticism but a proof of concept for the global application of Russian political warfare techniques. The European project, which had seemed inevitable just a few years earlier, suddenly appeared fragile and reversible.

The 2016 American presidential election revealed how deeply Russian political warfare techniques could penetrate even the world's most powerful democracy. Yet Russia's success was not simply a matter of superior tactics or technology. It reflected fundamental vulnerabilities in American society that had been building for decades: extreme inequality, social fragmentation, and the collapse of shared institutions capable of distinguishing truth from fiction.

The opioid crisis provided perhaps the clearest example of these vulnerabilities. Beginning in the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies had convinced doctors that powerful painkillers were safe for routine use, creating millions of addicts in communities already devastated by economic decline. By 2016, overdose deaths exceeded combat deaths in Vietnam, while life expectancy actually declined for the first time since the early twentieth century. These communities, trapped in cycles of addiction and despair, proved especially susceptible to political messages promising simple solutions to complex problems.

Russian operatives understood these vulnerabilities with remarkable precision. Through social media platforms, they created fake accounts that amplified existing divisions around race, religion, and economic anxiety. They organized rallies for opposing causes, promoted contradictory content, and spread conspiracy theories that made productive political dialogue nearly impossible. The goal was not to promote any particular candidate but to make Americans lose faith in their democratic institutions' ability to address their problems.

Donald Trump's candidacy provided the perfect vehicle for these efforts. His campaign's connections to Russian business interests, combined with his willingness to embrace conspiracy theories and reject factual truth, made him an ideal partner for Russian political warfare. His victory, despite receiving nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent, demonstrated not just the effectiveness of Russian interference but the deeper structural problems that made such interference possible. The techniques perfected in Ukraine were now being deployed in the heart of the Western world, with devastating effect.

The events of 2016 marked the global triumph of what Russian strategists called "strategic relativism"—the idea that if Russia could not become stronger, it could at least make everyone else weaker. By exporting its own problems of corruption, inequality, and authoritarian rule to other countries, Russia had succeeded in making its own failures seem normal rather than exceptional. The politics of eternity, which had begun as a response to Russian domestic challenges, had become a global phenomenon threatening the foundations of democratic civilization.

The success of this approach revealed the fragility of the political assumptions that had dominated the post-Cold War era. The belief that free markets would automatically create free societies, that technology would naturally promote democracy, and that historical progress was inevitable had all proven false. In their place emerged a new form of politics based on permanent crisis, where leaders maintained power not by solving problems but by convincing their populations that they were under constant threat from enemies both foreign and domestic.

This transformation had profound implications for democratic societies worldwide. Traditional political institutions, designed for an era of shared facts and good-faith debate, proved inadequate for an age where truth itself had become a battlefield. The same technologies that had promised to democratize information and empower citizens could just as easily be used to spread lies and sow confusion. Citizens who had grown up taking democracy for granted discovered that it required constant vigilance and active participation to survive.

Yet the triumph of strategic relativism also contained the seeds of its own limitations. By making truth itself seem impossible to determine, authoritarian leaders had created conditions where their own authority could be questioned just as easily as their opponents'. The challenge for democratic societies was to recognize that they faced not just political opposition but a fundamental assault on the concept of truth itself. Responding effectively would require not just better cybersecurity or election protection, but a renewed commitment to the institutions and values that make democratic life possible.

The transformation of global politics between 2010 and 2016 reveals a fundamental shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Where the former promised gradual improvement through democratic institutions and market mechanisms, the latter offered the emotional satisfaction of permanent struggle against eternal enemies. This shift began in Russia as a response to domestic political challenges but quickly spread to democracies worldwide, exploiting existing vulnerabilities around inequality, social fragmentation, and the collapse of shared truth.

The success of this new political model demonstrates that democracy cannot be taken for granted. It requires active maintenance of the institutions and values that make democratic life possible: independent media capable of distinguishing truth from fiction, economic policies that prevent extreme inequality, and civic education that prepares citizens to participate in democratic deliberation. Most importantly, it requires recognition that the choice between freedom and unfreedom is not made once but must be renewed in each generation through the daily work of citizenship and the constant vigilance required to protect democratic institutions from those who would destroy them.