On hope and democracy

How a legacy of 'hopeless hope' shapes Ukraine’s fight for freedom

This text was written for the 2025 Ukrainian Studies Hub Conference: ‘Revolutions of Hope: Resilience and Recovery in Ukraine’, held on 6-8 March 2025 at the University of Notre Dame. The conference was hosted by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame. The recording is available on YouTube, and you can find the link at the bottom of the text. Should you choose to spend an hour of your time watching the recording, you'll have the opportunity to hear the discussion between myself and Michael Pippenger, Vice President and Associate Provost for Internationalisation at the University of Notre Dame, which followed the talk.

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Is hope a blessing or a curse?

Pandora, according to Hesiod, was the first human woman. She was gifted with curiosity and a box that she was forbidden to open. A rather cruel combination of gifts. Infamous for giving in to temptation, she opened the container that was meant to remain sealed, thereby unleashing every imaginable curse upon the world.

For this, Pandora has been vilified for eternity, a lasting warning against the dangers of curiosity—particularly when practised by women. But there’s one detail of the myth which is often overlooked: one thing remained trapped inside the box after all the evils had escaped. It was hope.

Was this an act of mercy: to leave humanity a hidden source of resilience? Or did Pandora, by not letting it escape, manage to spare us the final curse?

Image by Craig Schreiner.

Elpis was the name of the remaining item in Pandora’s box. It can be translated from ancient Greek as hope or as expectation. Perhaps this ambiguous interpretation can speak to the dual nature of hope as both a blessing and a curse. If hope can give us fuel to keep going, poorly managed expectations can set us back, dishearten, and disappoint.

While ancient Greeks were cautious about Elpis’ ambiguity, the Romans turned out to be more hopeful. They worshipped the goddess of hope, Elpis’ Latin equivalent, known as Spes.

I got to know her Latin name indirectly at a very young age. The first Latin phrase I learned as a child was ‘contra spem spero’—against all hope I hope. A little gloomy for a kid, I admit. But I was born in a period that was a little gloomy. Gloomy and hopeful. My childhood coincided with the childhood of my country. In 1991, when Ukraine was reborn as a sovereign state, I was seven. In 2004, when the Orange revolution happened, I turned 21. We came of age at the same time, my country and I, and gradually matured together making our mistakes, enjoying our victories, grieving our losses, and hoping against all hope.

Contra spem spero, which was responsible for my first encounter with the goddess of hope, is the title of a poem by Larysa Kosach, better known by her pen name, Lesia Ukrainka. Born in 1871 in the part of Ukraine ruled by the Russian Empire, Ukrainka’s writing and civic position—her very pen name means ‘Ukrainian woman’—contributed vastly to undoing the effects of imperial oppression on the Ukrainian people.

Ukrainka, however, did not live to see the empire fall. When she died in 1913, her coffin was carried by women only, underscoring her legacy for the emancipatory movement, and the procession was filled with those who supported her civic ideals. But the tsarist authorities permitted no speeches at her funeral. Fearing unrest, the police trailed the mourners on horseback. The soviets also feared the power of Ukrainka’s writing, awkwardly trying to co-opt her struggle for Ukraine’s freedom to serve their own agenda.

A defiant and curious woman remains dangerous, even in death.

Contra spem spero, with its regular rhyme, was an easy poem for a child to remember. Here are the first two verses:

Гетьте, думи, ви хмари осінні!
То ж тепера весна золота!
Чи то так у жалю, в голосінні
Проминуть молодії літа?

Ні, я хочу крізь сльози сміятись,
Серед лиха співати пісні,
Без надії таки сподіватись,
Жити хочу! Геть, думи сумні!  

Away, dark thoughts, you autumn skies!
Springtime is here adorned with gold!
Shall youth be lost in grieving sighs,  
Am I, in sorrow, to grow old?  

No, through my tears I want to smile  
Amid disaster sing my song,  
It’s hopeless hope, but it is mine,  
I want to live! Dark thoughts, be gone!

I took some liberties with my translation of these verses. Namely, translating ‘against all hope I want to hope’ as ‘it’s hopeless hope but it is mine’. The choice is partly driven by my wish to give you the taste of Ukrainka’s hypnotic rhyme, but also by my desire to give you a sense of the variety of hope that, in my view, has sustained Ukrainians for generations.

Image by Craig Schreiner.

As a historian, a scholar who is meant to rely on empirical evidence, I might struggle to explain Ukraine’s independence. Torn between empires, subjugated and oppressed, even the most hopeful nation in the world would struggle to survive, not to mention to thrive. But as someone who grew up watching history out of my window, I have no problem explaining Ukraine’s independence.

I grew up in an old tenement building in the heart of Lviv in the 1980s and 90s. The view from my window overlooked a kitschy soviet fountain with disco lights. Many years later, I learned that it had been a place where a mikvah—a Jewish ritual bath—once stood, which explained the name of my street: Lazneva, or Bath Street. But when I sat on my windowsill to watch the country’s history pass by, the knowledge of my local history—that of once thriving Jewish Orthodox district—was buried deeper than the waterpipes that had once supplied the ritual Jewish bath and were now being used for the soviet fountain.

Another thing I saw very clearly out of my window was a hotel called ‘Lviv’. An ugly thing made of concrete. The two buildings—a beautiful Austro-Hungarian tenement, with its large apartments divided into small flats, in one of which my family lived, and a concrete soviet monstrosity across the road—stood on parallel streets and existed in parallel worlds. They were separated by a space of destruction and oblivion: the space where the old mikvah was turned into a new fountain.

From the parallel world my family inhabited, I watched the official world, whose existence we were meant to believe in but in which we had no faith.

When during Victory Day parades the tanks rolled past the soviet hotel and onto Lenin Avenue, the central street of Lviv, I cautiously watched them from the safety of our living room. My family did not join the parades. Did they hope that their quiet resistance would lead to the collapse of the USSR? I’m not sure. What I do know, is that it was a way for them to practice freedom in a society largely devoid of it.

We did march along that street, but that was in the early 1990s when red banners made way for the blue and yellow standard, and the central street that used to be named after Lenin was renamed Svoboda Avenue. Svoboda in Ukrainian means freedom.

That was the time when I watched my parents, alongside other fellow Ukrainians, beginning to practice their freedom not as dissent but as citizenship.

One such display of freedom in action is firmly etched in my memory: it was on 21 January 1990. Ukraine was not yet independent. Millions of citizens, without yet having a state, took to the streets to form a human chain. It was to mark the historic signing of the Unification Act which took place seven decades prior, in January 1919, and which signified the merging of western and eastern Ukrainian lands into one polity. In the 1990s, this demonstration of unity was as much a tribute to the past as an expression of hope for the future.

I remember that human chain on a physical level: I contributed the warmth of my hands to the energy that travelled not only in space but also in time. It united generations who had planted the seeds, knowing they wouldn’t live to enjoy the harvest, with those who cared for the delicate shoots and sustained them with their hopeless hope.

Where there are citizens, there will be a state.

On 24 August 1991, the Parliament proclaimed the independence of Ukraine. A few months later, on 1 December 1991, the citizens were asked to confirm their support for the declaration of independence in a referendum. The turnout was 84%. Over 90% of the 30 million people who voted said ‘yes’.

This was the moment I added a Greek word to my one Latin phrase: demokratia, people power. I wasn’t the only one learning the meaning of this word; the whole country had to learn it as it began to live it. On this learning curve, it was Elpis, the ambiguous Greek goddess of hope who made an appearance more than once: what had been hope for independence turned into an expectation of democracy, and with it, freedom, prosperity, and security. All of them regularly slipped away, and when they did, just as in the 1990s, people took to the streets.

The energy I felt in the human chain as a child flared brightly again in 2004 during the Orange Revolution and erupted into a real fire in 2014 with the Revolution of Dignity, so much so, that the neighbouring autokratia—another useful Greek word—began to worry it might be set ablaze by it.

That same energy was there in January 2022, when people across Ukraine held hands once again to mark the Day of Unity while their country was encircled by Russian troops. That same energy has sustained us through the darkness of the full-scale war.

Image by Craig Schreiner.

Ukraine’s independence sprang from a hopeless hope. But it is a potent kind of hope—the kind that gives you the wisdom to plant your seeds with faith and love, even when there’s no certainty of ever reaping the fruits of your toil.

But ‘uncertainty is the space of hope’, says Rebecca Solnit in her Hope in the Darkness. ‘To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk’, explains Solnit.

‘What gives you hope?’ Maria Tumarkin, an Australian-Ukrainian writer, asked Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in a recent interview for the London Ukrainian Review. She continued: ‘I see you speaking every day and really doing this work that might sometimes feel utterly despair-inducing. And I think, maybe, of your brand of hope as […] ‘hope without optimism’, where you may be profoundly pessimistic about institutions, or the current balance of power, or the decision-makers, etc., but nonetheless, you act out of a place of hope because you love justice, and because you believe in it.’

Oleksandra Matviichuk responded that what resonated with her was Václav Havel’s vision of hope: ‘hope is not a conviction that everything will turn out fine, but the certainty that everything you do has meaning’, she explained. She admitted ‘that while we have a chance of succeeding, there is no guarantee. This means we have to do everything in our power to make the most of the chance we have.’

Tumarkin’s is a pessimistic hope. Matviichuk’s is a cautious hope. I think they make good sisters for my hopeless hope.

Rebecca Solnit also describes hope as ‘an axe you break down doors with in an emergency’. It is an image that speaks to the Ukrainian experience.

Maybe this idea of hope as an emergency tool, makes it neither a blessing nor a curse, and perhaps it makes sense for it to remain in Pandora’s box. And maybe it is curiosity that can serve as the key to that box. Curiosity for the future that is uncertain, but, in its uncertainty, full of hope.

I finished writing this text on Lesia Ukrainka’s birthday, 25 February. The world she was born into in 1871 could not even imagine—let alone hope for—an independent Ukraine. But this Ukrainian woman created that world in her dramas and poems and breathed her hopeless hope into it. Contra spem spero. Her birthday falls just one day after the start of the full-scale invasion, and it is to her writing that I turn when I need to replenish my hope.

I shall leave you with her line that is the ultimate source of hope for me when it comes to Ukraine’s ability to weather any storms now or in its uncertain future:

‘Хто не жив посеред бурі, / той ціни не знає силі’—'Those who have not lived amidst the storm / do not know the value of strength.’

May these words be a source of hope for you as well.