“I come today with an appeal to all citizens of Russia. Not as president. I am appealing to the citizens of Russia as a citizen of Ukraine.”
In the very first days of the war, Volodymyr Zelensky made a speech in his native Russian, rather than Ukrainian, and posted it on social media channels. He had by then posted multiple updates from the frontlines, dressed in military fatigues. His fellow Ukrainian citizens were also posting, talking about the jobs and lives they would return to once the invasion had been repelled: “I will go back to work in marketing soon, but for now I am a bartender, with a speciality in Molotov cocktails,” wrote one young woman. Ukrainians might not have had masses of raw, centrally directed state power, but they could draw on something else: the distributed, decentralised power of citizens self-organising, inspiring one another to ever-greater feats of bravery and defiance.
The Ukrainian government had already been leaning into this approach, recruiting hundreds of thousands of volunteers to man a digital army which has since taken out major Russian websites and servers, as well as helping to share an air raid siren app. This crowdsourcing of "hacktivists" is something we simply haven’t seen governments do before.
Zelensky’s speech marked the moment this strategy turned outwards, not just to Russia but to the world. He was effectively inviting us all—wherever we were—to share his speech and other updates on the war, so that such information might evade state censorship and make its way into Russian discourse. This invitation was swiftly taken up. That same day, the globally-distributed Anonymous hacker collective picked up on the spirit of Ukraine’s IT Army and declared cyberwar on the Russian state, swiftly taking Russian websites and global propaganda offline (including, in the UK, the website of state-owned TV channel Russia Today). Ordinary citizens of anywhere and everywhere began finding ingenious ways to share information with the Russian people, including posting updates as Google Map reviews of popular restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg. Soon, over 1.5m people had signed a petition against the war set up by a Russian political activist, and a new energy infused the anti-war protests already stirring across the country. Catalysed by Zelensky’s invitation, this conflict was becoming the people—not just the people of Ukraine, but also the people of Russia, and indeed the people of the world—against Vladimir Putin.
What all this represents is not just a contrast in strategy—with Zelensky and the Ukrainians finding a way to turn their comparative weakness into strength—but a contrast at a much more fundamental level: that between stories of the role of the individual in society. There are three such stories in play here: those of Subject, Consumer and Citizen.
Putin’s attack can be understood as a pure expression of the resurgence of the Subject Story, as in “subjects of the king.” In this story, strongman leaders offer us protection from a dangerous world in return for our submission. This story has been in the ascendant all over the world in recent years, and remains a major threat in the form of creeping authoritarianism in the UK, US and many other places. The logic here says: “do what the leader says, and all will be well.”
The west’s sanction-led response comes from the Consumer Story, the story that has been dominant for the last 80 years—or since the last time we reinvented the institutions of human society in the aftermath of the Second World War. In this story, we are homo economicus: rational creatures motivated by material self-interest. Trade is the route to peace, and the role of the state is to facilitate that trade rather than command obedience. The logic here says: “pursue self-interest, and all will be well.”
The alternative, the story Zelensky and the Ukrainians are tapping into, is the Citizen Story. This reflects a deeper truth about humanity. We are creative, collaborative and caring creatures. What we need is neither strongman leadership nor material wealth, but agency. What we want most is the opportunity to contribute. This logic says: “all of us are smarter than any of us—put meaningful power in people's hands, and we will use it well.”
Understanding the power of the third story matters in the immediate term and also in the broader context. Some western leaders are attempting to follow in Zelensky's footsteps directly: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Boris Johnson have both recorded their own addresses to the Russian people, with differing levels of authenticity and impact. But understanding the deeper story could unlock so much more.
The real difference with Zelensky is that he sees his people primarily as citizens, and that is what western governments need to do. The Citizen Story is not just taking shape in the heat of battle in Ukraine. It has been emerging everywhere for some time, and it represents the only response that is truly commensurate with the scale not just of Putin’s invasion, but of the challenges of climate emergency, pervasive inequality and societal breakdown that were threatening us long before the first tank rolled over the Ukrainian border.
This story is gaining purchase in our politics, with demands for a truly participatory democracy. Citizens’ assemblies, open policymaking and civic crowdfunding are spreading like wildfire. It’s happening in the business world, with a drastic shift from profit to purpose as the measure of success. Milton Friedman’s Consumer Story dictum that “the social responsibility of business is to maximise its profits” has fallen from its perch; the best businesses now aim, in the words of Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, to create “stakeholder value” not just “shareholder value.” And it’s happening in local communities across the world, not just in Ukraine: the long simmering of “community power” is unmistakably approaching boiling point.
The crisis in Ukraine demands a different, deeper response than the leaders of the west have yet found—but Zelensky and his people offer us a vision of what could be. The Citizen Story is taking hold. All of us have a role, and we can—and must—start right now.
