Yet, caught in the sights of a gun barrel, nobody – not even the brave men and women who camped in their hundreds of thousands in the snow before Ukraine’s parliament – knew with certainty whether those changes had wrenched Ukrainians from the grip of fear and apathy. The success of their defiance shows the power of the idea that bewilders outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and his acolytes: that democracy means taking responsibility for one’s fate into one’s own hands.