Russia is waging a genocidal war against Ukraine. Not just against its cities and people, but against the very idea that Ukraine exists. Libraries are bombed, museums destroyed, children deported and “re-educated.” Ukrainian language is banned in occupied territories. History is rewritten. The message is clear: there is no Ukrainian identity, there never was, and there never will be.
Except there’s a problem with that narrative. His name was Taras Shevchenko.
In 1847, the Russian Empire arrested this young Ukrainian poet for the crime of writing in his native language. His punishment was savage: ten years of military service with an explicit order from Tsar Nicholas I himself – “under the strictest surveillance, with a ban on writing and painting.” The empire understood what matters most: kill the culture and the people follow. Let them speak, write, remember – and no army can make them disappear.
Born into serfdom on March 9, 1814, Shevchenko died on March 10, 1861 – just 47 years of life. Yet his defiance created something the Russian Empire couldn’t destroy then and Putin’s war machine cannot destroy now: proof that a people exists when they refuse to be silenced.
His poetry, written in Ukrainian rather than imperial Russian, didn’t just preserve a language – it insisted that ordinary people, the colonized and oppressed, possessed inherent worth and deserved to tell their own stories in their own voices.
Shevchenko’s relevance today isn’t academic. It’s existential. Ukrainians defending their cities, teaching in bomb shelters, documenting atrocities – they carry forward what he began.
Putin’s propaganda claims Ukraine is a fiction, an invention, and a mistake of history. Shevchenko’s life is the rebuttal: Ukraine has always existed, has always resisted, and will outlast every empire that tries to obliterate it.
Let’s recall that almost a century before Shevchenko, the great French modern European Voltaire recorded in 1731 that Ukraine had always wanted to be free, using those very words.
The inversion is crucial. Putin insists Ukraine is an unacceptable aberration created by Lenin – a historical mistake that must be corrected. Shevchenko saw it exactly backward. Writing in the first half of the 19th century, he viewed the Russian Empire itself – its despotism, its imperialism, its suffocating grip on subject peoples – as the obscene aberration. Not civilization, but its negation.
The aberration wasn’t Ukrainian identity. It was the empire’s claim to possess and erase it. He opposed this anti-civilizational force not with armies but with a pen, insisting that what was real and enduring was the people Moscow sought to deny.
Shevchenko demonstrated that art isn’t a luxury to pursue after political freedom is won. It’s how freedom is imagined, demanded, and sustained. His poems didn’t just reflect what Ukrainians were – they created what they could become, giving scattered peoples a shared language of resistance and hope.
He was no arch nationalist, either. While standing up for his own people, this liberal patriot maintained cordial relations with liberal Russians and Polish patriots and spoke out in defense of Chechens and other peoples fighting against Russian imperialism, as well as victims of Russian anti-Semitism.
Right now, as Russia rewrites textbooks in occupied Mariupol and other occupied Ukrainian cities and still seeks through its mendacious disinformation to convince or confuse the world’s ignorant or gullible, Shevchenko’s choice to write in his own language despite exile and censorship and to stand up to foreign despotism becomes more than historical curiosity. It’s a blueprint.
His struggle hasn’t ended. Wherever people fight to preserve their languages and tell their own histories against forces that would erase them, the question he answered with his life returns.
When the powerful demand silence, assimilation, and disappearance – do we have the courage to remain ourselves and develop our own story? To stand up for our rights and those around us?
The answer still matters, now perhaps more than ever. And Shevchenko remains a moral beacon.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.