Nuria Fatykhova: Democracy Is Not a Paradise That Can Be Fenced In

In our post-Soviet school, huge white posters hung in the main entrance beneath the clock: the weekly schedules of all the classes. During breaks, children crowded around them, running their fingers over the Plexiglas, already clouded with age, searching for the next lesson or for changes. I remember standing in the middle of this crowd when, one day, three men suddenly entered through the main doors carrying a ladder and a large frame. We were sent away from the schedule. One of the men set up the ladder, climbed up, and took down the main school clock. He handed it to one of his companions and received in return a picture, which he hung on the very nail where the clock had previously been. Then all three stood beneath the picture for a long time, climbing back up the ladder now and then to straighten it. Inside the frame was a portrait of the first president of independent Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. It was the autumn of 1993, in the city of Tashkent. That was how authoritarianism returned to my childhood.

My consciousness had only just begun to grasp the words “democracy,” “independence,” “freedom,” which echoed everywhere after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my authoritarian country of birth. They were new, exciting, and at the same time incomprehensible. But we, little girls and boys from the neighborhood who were practicing telling jokes, still knew how to remain silent when someone dared to tell a political joke. I remember my friend whispering: “Quieter, quieter, don’t laugh, even the bushes and flowers are listening to us and will tell Gorbachev later.” I stared for a long time at the green stems of the flowers in the small front garden where we were sitting, trying to understand how they could transmit radio signals to Gorbachev. Perhaps the USSR no longer even existed at that moment, but just to be safe, we were afraid.

Mikhail Gorbachev later became a symbol of liberalism abroad. For us, however, he was a dictator who was listening in. Because it could not be otherwise. All those who led the country were tyrants. We were born under them, and so were our parents and grandparents. Tyrants demand silence and feed on our fear—that is what my peers and I learned along with Soviet powdered milk formula.

And then, after only a year in which it seemed one could finally stop suspecting roses and gladioli of being connected with power, everything returned. The portrait of a new dictator replaced the clock on the main wall of our school. Once again, they wanted to take our time from us at every level. Dictators do not need clocks. They want eternity.

A year later, my family would leave Uzbekistan. As I would later understand, not only for economic reasons. Until then, my father, after joining the opposition as a journalist, would work late into the night while my mother worried about his long absences. Fragments of news reached me about murdered journalists and persecuted professors, and I began to worry about my father. I prayed to God that he would return home safely. Then he would leave the country. I would come to know an adult feeling of deep melancholy.

I would see my father again only half a year later. He would meet my mother and me at a small airport, wearing a funny fur hat; its doors were hard to open because of snowdrifts. That is how we arrived in Russia, in the Urals, in the city of Magnitogorsk, where at the end of 1929 the then dictator Stalin had deported my grandparents. My first Russian spring would be white, cold, free, but also very sad. To escape authoritarianism, I had to leave my childhood and my beloved home in Uzbekistan.

A few years ago, I left Russia as well, again in the spring. Quickly, lightly. Like my father, I wrapped a few books in newspaper and took them with me. One of them still stands on my desk: Maria-Sibylla Lotter’s Shame, Guilt, Responsibility: On the Cultural Foundations of Morality. I never finished reading it, and the last bookmark remained at the chapter “Moral Liability and Other Forms of Moral Responsibility Without Blame.” When the Russian authoritarian regime invaded Ukraine, this question occupied me most of all. I fled authoritarianism once again, fled the violence it produces, saved my freedom, suffocated in feelings of guilt, and endlessly asked myself: Am I also to blame that authoritarians and dictators come to power in my country? Do I bear responsibility for the death of democracy and for Ukrainians now dying? Did democracy ever truly exist where I lived, where I was educated and dreamed?

And I can also recognize my former naivety and that of my parents. Like other people from Eastern Europe, I looked toward the West. I wanted so badly to get to know this West, where children look at daisies and gladioli as flowers, not as listening devices. Paradoxically, the time I spent under all forms of authoritarianism helps me today to understand that there is nowhere a pure democracy as a system of endless justice and transparency. Democracy is not a paradise into which only the good, those who deserve it, are admitted. Democracy is not a space protected by fences in order to exclude others, for example people like me who do not have enough experience with democracy. No, we all deserve political and economic justice, freedom, and respect, even if we were born and raised under the Taliban or Putin. Democracy is not the West, nor is it the East, South, or North. Democracy can be practiced anywhere, and its tools must be sought worldwide, free from stereotypes.

Democracy is certainly not a state, but a process within the context of other processes in our societies, including authoritarian ones. It is very fragile because it is built on trust: trust that those who come to power will respect democratic institutions. But if we do not trust one another—and if we do not trust the institutions we have created—then democracy itself breaks down. What else has life under authoritarianism taught me? To recognize authoritarianism. It appears everywhere, even in countries with the strongest democratic institutions. This book contains numerous examples of that. I know exactly this: female dictators—but mostly male dictators—do not like the diversity of our identities and quickly try to restrict the visibility of our differences. Because our diversity, and the possibility of being different without extraordinary courage and of recognizing the otherness of others, ultimately help us cooperate, show solidarity, and connect. That leads to coexistence and acceptance. I am deeply convinced of this. But if in a society it is dangerous to belong to an ethnic minority, to preserve the language of one’s ancestors, to practice religion, or to speak openly about sexual and gender identity, then most of us become closed off, cautious, silent. Not very free, not very happy. Authoritarianism does not need a solidary society; it needs a divided and polarized one.

That is why they quickly declare someone dangerous. Usually those who are different—by religion, gender, ethnicity, skin color, citizenship. Everywhere I have lived, LGBTQIA+ people were persecuted through strict laws, people of different ethnic backgrounds were viewed with suspicion, migrants and refugees were humiliated and populistically turned into scapegoats for economic problems or crime. Those who strive for authoritarian power always spread disinformation, rewrite history, attempt to destroy oversight institutions, ignore laws, and fight media freedom. Authoritarianism also loves wars. In the end, many people lose freedom, home, rights, sometimes even their lives under authoritarian regimes.

This is the most difficult of all the questions I know. Sometimes there is no way left to resist authoritarianism without risking one’s own freedom—and flight is the only option. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev describes this phenomenon very well in his book Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest, calling it “Exit,” and also uses it to explain rising global migration.

Sometimes the authoritarian takeover happens so quickly that we are left speechless. A striking example in 2025 is the policy of Donald Trump in the United States. He acts just like the dictators under whom I have lived—only at breathtaking speed. He tries to remove everything he does not like, such as critical journalists from the presidential pool; he attempts to abolish the oversight authority for state spending or to dismiss a governor on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve so that she does not stand in the way of his economic plans. And he sends the army, without sufficient legal basis, “to fight crime” into cities governed by his political opponents. His statement “Migrants eat dogs and cats” is a classic example of propaganda and disinformation—the attempt to defame a social group and declare them enemies. In doing so, he joins the antisemitic legend “Jews eat children,” which since the Middle Ages has provoked pogroms, or the fabricated story of the “crucified boy,” with which Putin in 2014 justified the war in eastern Ukraine.

Today’s “hunts” for migrants in the United States and the prisons specially set up for them recall the monstrous practices of Stalinism, National Socialism, and the colonial era. But many European practices in dealing with refugees—including camps and their conditions (for example, the project of a refugee camp initiated by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Albania), which violate European law (see Judith Kohlenberger)—also belong to this series of inhumane, authoritarian decisions and remind me of the internment camps of the twentieth century in which, for example, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany found themselves.

Live and practice democracy ourselves—in our communities, in our circles of friends. Remain vigilant when politicians try to polarize society and divide us. Check statistics, look critically—even at our own words about social processes. This is a simple series of actions we can take. Nothing new. But perhaps we must go even further and rethink concepts such as the “nation-state,” to which right-wing populist politicians so longingly wish to return. Are monoethnic states even possible in today’s globalized world? Of course not. But why do we allow our politicians to decide as if Austria, for example, were a country of a single ethnicity?

We can initiate projects that make the language of politics and democracy understandable even for kindergarten children. Then it will be easier for them—and also for us—to understand what is happening. Dictators do not like civil society. Our solidarity with one another is dangerous for them. So let us not be just a society, but a deeply humane and solidary society—regardless of whether we are fifth-generation citizens of this country or people marked as migrants. Let us do everything in our power to ensure that functioning clocks hang on our walls—and not the portraits of dictators.

Nuria Fatykhova was born in Navoi (Uzbekistan) into a Tatar family, moved to Russia with her family in the 1990s, and thus had her first experiences of forced emigration. She studied journalism, literary studies, Slavic studies, and philosophy in Chelyabinsk, Tübingen, and Berlin. She is currently an expert on civil society processes in Russia and Program Coordinator for Democracy and Gender Equality at Dialogbüro Vienna. Among other things, she curates educational programs focusing on critical thinking, decolonial perspectives on Russian and European history, democratic theory, gender equality, and non-discriminatory discourse.