An Email from a Bomb Shelter Teaches Lessons on Freedom

T he images from Ukraine in recent weeks are some of the most disturbing the world has seen in years. At a time of such destructive conflict, it is hard to imagine positives coming from the unconscionable behavior of Russian president Vladimir Putin. However, one thing that has become clear as the invasion plays out is the role freedom plays in inspiring and galvanizing a nation.

Freedom is a simple word; one common definition is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” Since declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukrainians have largely enjoyed the freedom to chart their own course over the last 30 years. This freedom has permeated their souls, and it shows in how they are standing up to unfathomable Russian aggression.

Freedom can have humble beginnings. Starting in 1950 and throughout the Cold War, Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) were used to deliver uncensored news and information to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Today, in a sense, the Internet serves as a much more powerful 21st-century version of these radio programs. By way of a labyrinth of cables underground and underwater and satellites in the upper atmosphere, Western ideas reach smartphones, tablets, and computers of people everywhere.

Earlier this month, The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) — the educational organization I lead that has been teaching the ideas of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic freedom to young people in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since the 1980s — was contacted by a young woman in Ukraine. Her email is unlike any we’ve ever received.

The young woman said she had a question about one of our academic programs that takes place in Prague each summer. The student noted that she was unable to finish her application because she is “in a bomb shelter in Kharkiv” and wondered if the application deadline could be extended. She also noted in a beautifully understated way that “the current situation has affected the application process.”

We see in the attitude of this young woman and the Ukrainian people generally what happens when the principles of freedom take hold and reverberate throughout a nation. Freedom comes to people through simple tools like the Internet, books, radio, student-exchange programs, educational opportunities, cultural initiatives, and direct person-to-person contact. From there it emboldens their spirit, shapes their worldview, and shows them the possibilities of a different way of life.

Unfortunately, that these tools of freedom are not widely available — or at all — in places like North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Syria has dark results. But they are available in places like Ukraine, where we see the response of a free people when threatened. Taiwan is another place where people have experienced freedom for decades: China should take that as a warning not to follow Putin’s example.

Without question, Putin and Russian government officials need to be punished in extraordinary ways. Economic sanctions and ostracizing them from global organizations are essential and appropriate courses of action for the West to take. That said, punishing the Russian people, limiting their exposure to the free exchange of ideas, and creating a second Iron Curtain is not the proper course.

The path to eventually welcoming Russia back to the civilized world will be long: only once Putin is gone, which could take years. If it is ever to happen, it must start with making the ideas of freedom more available to the Russian people, so they may eventually see Putin and his government (as surely many already do) for the totalitarian and barbaric regime that they are. If Russians remain walled off in an information desert, in a sense we are condemning them to joining the ranks of unfortunate nations with no exit strategy from authoritarianism.

This should be the North Star of American foreign policy toward the people of Russia, but also toward those who cower under authoritarian rulers anywhere: that our adversary is always the corrupt regime and not its people who may seek freedom, though it may evade their grasp. Freedom is the oxygen that fills the lungs of an opposition fighting against tyranny, no matter if they are Ukrainian citizens defending their homeland from foreign soldiers or Russian citizens being jailed for protesting their government in the streets. That is one big lesson from the Cold War, as well as from what is happening today.

Another lesson is that occasionally arbitrary academic deadlines and rules are made to be broken. The young Ukrainian woman interested in attending TFAS Prague will be admitted on a full scholarship. We can’t wait to meet her this summer.