Four Ukrainian Women Who Reshaped Power

Their names were spoken in different tongues — Olga, Roxolana, Anna, Lesya — but the language of their will was unmistakably Ukrainian.

By Liubov Lavreniuk

Updated 12:49 am EDT, April 16, 2025

Published 12:44 am EDT, April 16, 2025

Images via Wikimedia Commons

From left to right:

Portrait of a woman, possibly Haseki Hürrem Sultan (Roxelana), follower of Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), oil painting, 16th century.

Lesya Ukrainka, unknown, 1886, photography

Holy Princess Olga, Polovko Sergey Nikolaevich, 2021, photography, Tithe church (Desiatynna Tserkva), kyiv, Ukraine

Anne of Kyiv, Queen of the Franks; François-Séraphin Delpech, lithograph, circa 1820-1840, British royal family collection

They were not symbols. Not satellites of male greatness. They were architects of their own authority. Their names were spoken in different tongues — Olga, Roxolana, Anna, Lesya — but the language of their will was unmistakably Ukrainian. A Ukrainian tradition few have dared to name out loud. From throne to manifesto — this is not a timeline; it’s a pulse.

They say history remembers only the victors — but what if the victors wore silk and carried scrolls instead of swords? What if power wasn’t shouted from a battlefield but whispered into the architecture of empire, chiseled into letters, braided into love, or burned into verse?

Across a millennium of shifting borders and names, Ukraine gave rise to women who moved empires without commanding armies. In the 10th century, there was Olga — a widow-turned-regent who ruled with fire and foresight. In the 16th, Roxolana, a girl taken captive from the steppes, became the most influential woman in the Ottoman court. By the 11th century, Anna of Kyiv was signing royal decrees in France — in her native Slavic script. At the turn of the 20th, Lesya Ukrainka was carving new political languages through poetry as empires crumbled around her.

These Ukrainian women did not ask to lead — they simply did, in ways history often underestimates: through diplomacy, religion, literature, and quiet subversion. Their legacy is not a straight line but a series of sparks — flaring in unlikely places, resisting erasure.

Olga of Kyiv:

Fire, Widowhood, and the Birth of Strategy

Before Machiavelli wrote about power, she was already wielding it

In the 10th century, long before Ukraine had a name that echoed in global headlines, there was Kyiv — a flourishing city-state in the heart of medieval Europe. The year was 945. Somewhere in the fog-wrapped forests of early medieval Europe, a woman sat still — not mourning, but calculating. The messengers had brought news: her husband, Prince Ihor of Kyiv, had been brutally killed while collecting tribute. Torn limb from limb by a rival tribe. No war, no warning — just a savage end to a ruler and a throne suddenly empty.

His son was too young to wear the crown. So they looked to the mother. But they didn’t see what she carried — not just grief, but a fury centuries deep, sharpened by royal blood and the silence of every woman ever told to wait, obey, endure. Olga did not. She answered with rituals of fire. She invited her husband’s killers to Kyiv under the guise of diplomacy — and had them buried alive in a trench.

The second group she welcomed with gifts — and then set their boats ablaze. The third, she locked inside a bathhouse. When the steam rose, so did the flames. To outsiders, it looked like revenge. But to Olga, it was architecture. Yes, she torched diplomacy. Literally.

But she also did something subtler and far more lasting: she organized the first system of governance that resembled a proto-taxation model in the region — a rare moment of bureaucratic clarity in a medieval world run on swords and blood debts. Where her husband ruled with force, Olga ruled with structure.

Later, she would convert to Christianity — not as an act of piety, but as a power move. She sensed what was coming: the age of empires that justified conquest through religion. By aligning with Byzantium, she placed Kyivan Rus on the map not just as a trading post but as a spiritual player. She played the long game. Always.

There’s something almost cinematic in imagining Olga: a woman in a fur cloak standing over burning wood while already drafting administrative reforms in her mind. A mind that saw revenge not as an end but as a prologue to order. In legend, Olga burns hot. In history, she burns cold. But beneath both, there is clarity: she was not just a woman who ruled. She was a woman who rewrote what ruling meant.

Roxolana:

Silk, Captivity, and the Empire Rewritten

They called her the Sultan’s favorite. She became the Sultan’s partner

The story begins, like so many do in Eastern Europe, with a girl taken. Around the early 16th century, a teenage girl from what is now central Ukraine was captured by Crimean Tatars and sold into slavery. Her name was lost in the smoke — maybe Anastasia, maybe Alexandra.

But in Istanbul, she would become Hürrem, “the cheerful one,” and eventually, Roxolana — the woman who would rewire the Ottoman Empire from inside its golden cage. The harem was not a place of softness. It was a battlefield with no visible weapons — where knowledge of poetry, law, and timing could kill more effectively than a sword.
And Roxolana thrived, not by seduction alone, but by understanding power as language, and speaking it fluently.

She did what no one expected — she married the Sultan. Legally. Publicly. That alone broke centuries of Ottoman tradition. But she didn’t stop there. She advised him on foreign policy, kept up correspondence with European monarchs, and maneuvered through palace intrigue with the elegance of someone writing in six dimensions.

Some historians believe she had a hand in the death or exile of political rivals — but unlike many others, her influence was never hidden behind a veil. It was worn, boldly, like embroidered silk.

Power, for Roxolana, didn’t arrive with a crown — it seeped through architecture, letters, and lullabies. If her Ukrainian roots taught her anything, it was that the world rarely gives power to women — so you build it around them. She did so not by force but by permanence: foundations, alliances, heirs. Her femininity wasn’t a disguise — it was an operating system.

Her power wasn’t loud. It was layered — a braid of pragmatism, beauty, and the unspoken code of survival she carried from home. She gave the empire buildings, stories, and blood. It gave her immortality. Centuries later, she remains a paradox: a slave who ruled, a foreigner who defined the empire’s aesthetics, a woman who never once returned home — and yet reshaped it from afar.

Anna of Kyiv:

Ink, Language, and the Crown Abroad

She signed in Cyrillic, ruled in Latin, and thought in a language France had never heard

In the 11th century, when France was still clawing its way out of feudal fragmentation, a royal bride arrived from the East — riding not only with gold and furs but with books, manuscripts, and literacy. Anna, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, had been raised in Kyiv, a city with libraries, embassies, and stone cathedrals, when Paris still paved its roads with mud.

Her marriage to King Henry I of France was political — they always were — but what Anna brought was something France didn’t expect from a woman: governance, literacy, and self-possession. She signed documents in Cyrillic, a script the French couldn’t read, but respected. She introduced names like Philip to the royal line — a name that would echo through centuries of European kings.

She wasn’t just a queen consort. She was a foreign mind in a Western court, a Slavic intelligence dropped into Latin politics. And when her husband died, she refused the role of passive widow. She became regent — a woman ruling in her own name — and later scandalized the court by marrying a count beneath her station.

That decision nearly cost her reputation, but it cemented something deeper: her refusal to be ornamental. Unlike many women of her time, she left not only children, but records — letters, signatures, policies, and traces. She wrote herself into history, not waiting for a monk to do it for her.

Centuries later, France remembers her only in fragments. But in Kyiv, she remains a reminder: we’ve always exported more than grain and soldiers — we’ve exported intellect.

Lesya Ukrainka:

Ink, Language, and the Crown Abroad

Fire in the Bone, Light on the Page

Lesya Ukrainka was born into comfort. Her mother was a celebrated writer. Her father — a nobleman, businessman, a man of books and principles. The family estate echoed with poetry and politics, philosophy and piano.

She learned to read by age four and was writing fluently by eight. By twenty, she knew nine languages — reading Dante and Heine, translating Shakespeare, writing letters in French, and studying Marx in German. She could have chosen ease. She could have stayed soft, musical, married, pretty, noble. But she didn’t. Instead, she chose to fight.

From the age of ten, she was living with tuberculosis of the bone — a disease that disfigured her, kept her in casts and crutches, and pulled her out of schools and into long winters of pain. But exile became education. Her mind wandered where her legs could not.

She studied philosophy by candlelight in rural Volyn, political science in Yalta, literature in Geneva, and art in Egypt. Her writing wasn’t therapy. It was resistance. Every poem, every drama was a battle report — a dispatch from the frontlines of pain, empire, and gender. She didn’t just create characters — she became them. Prophetesses, rebels, heretics, queens. Women who disobeyed quietly, then set worlds on fire.

Was it the illness that gave her this clarity — or would she have been just as defiant in health? Was it the luxury of birth that gave her the tools — or the guilt of privilege that made her refuse comfort? What does it take for someone to burn so brightly through so much dark?

She never called herself a martyr. But her body broke slowly while her mind only sharpened. She wrote with a fever. She wrote in exile. She wrote between injections. She wrote with a kind of energy that some people don’t touch in five lives, and she did it in just one. Her final act wasn’t a scream — it was a whisper of precision:

“I will speak, even if my voice is cracked.
I will think, even if my body fails.
I will write — because no silence will save me.”

And maybe the question she leaves us with is this: What would you do if the world tried to break you softly, every day — and you chose to create instead?

Epilogue:

From Throne to Manifesto

And what do we call power when it doesn’t look like it at all?

They wore crowns, some of them. Others — chains, silk, linen wraps over fevered skin. Some are ruled by fire, some by architecture, some by language. But none of them asked for permission. They did not belong to one century, or even to one country.

They belonged to every moment when silence was expected and speech happened anyway. Every time a woman chose action over ease, clarity over comfort. Every time history forgot her — and she kept writing. They didn’t roar. They didn’t need to. They endured. They invented. They chose the harder path — not because it was heroic, but because it was true.

And now I understand something I didn’t expect to find here: this wasn’t just an article. It wasn’t even a tribute. It was a letter. A letter to Lesya. A mirror of her energy, carved in my language, my pain, my questions. I have never lived more deeply in therapy than I did in this writing.

Somehow, through her story, I met myself. And I cried not only for her bones — but for mine. Were they extraordinary? Or were they simply the early versions of what we now carry?

There is a certain pain that lives in us — Ukrainian women.
It’s not always dramatic. Often it’s inherited.
It slips into our gestures, our silences, our drive to keep going.
It lives in the jaw set too tightly, the spine held too straight.
It isn’t just ours — it’s ancestral.

I did not know how much of it lived in me until I started writing this piece. And maybe that’s why those words of an American actress won’t leave me: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” Maybe that’s what they all did. Maybe that’s what I just did.

Maybe that’s what you’re doing now, reading this — feeling it — remembering.
These were not stories of women near power. They were stories of women rewriting what power meant. From throne to manifesto — still pulsing.

Liubov Lavreniuk

Editor, Culture

Dedicated entrepreneur from Ukraine. Experienced tutor and successful business owner emphasizing up-to-date methods, the importance of high-quality and targeted content. Motivated professional bringing a 12-year career in small business ownership, business development, and education, who quickly masters new concepts and technologies. A happy mother.

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