Contingent political hero

An insider’s take on Volodymyr Zelensky

Nick Hordern

Zelensky: A biography

by Serhii Rudenko Polity Press

$25 hb, 222 pp

A Message from Ukraine

by Volodymyr Zelensky Hutchinson Heinemann

$24.99 hb, 138 pp

It has been a long time since the West had a hero like Volodymyr Zelensky, who is frequently ranked alongside Winston Churchill as a wartime leader and orator, Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformer, and Emmanuel Macron as a political disruptor. However deserved these comparisons may be, they deflect attention from the murky post-Soviet environment which shaped his career. The collapse of the region’s communist economy has left a legacy of corruption which, together with the deep and he praises the Ukrainian president (elected in 2019) as a courageous and inspirational wartime leader. But the bulk of his book is about Zelensky before he became a hero – and before he became a vehement critic of Vladimir Putin. Zelensky now thunders against the Kremlin, but before he became a politician he avidly pursued a career in Russia’s television industry, long a mouthpiece for Putin’s regime. Zelensky has recently ruled out any ‘compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom and territorial integrity of my country’, yet he came to power calling for a negotiated solution with Moscow – a solution which, his opponents said, would have involved just such a compromise. intertwining of Ukrainian and Russian society, means that Zelensky’s case is not as clear-cut as it may seem to outsiders.

Zelensky, like many Ukrainians a native Russian speaker, got his start in a comedy team called Kvartal 95, named after a suburb in his home town, the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. Kvartal 95 served its apprenticeship in KVN (to use its Russian acronym), a comedy and entertainment game show which originated in the Soviet Union, then went international. In 2003, Zelensky founded a production studio, also named Kvartal 95, which became the platform for his successful film and television career, culminating in his starring role in the series Servant of the People, in which an obscure history teacher becomes president of Ukraine.

Prior to the 2022 invasion, there were two crucial moments in the country’s post-Soviet history: the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. These were mass protests aimed at stopping Moscow’s puppet, the sometime prime minister and president Viktor Yanukovych, from strengthening the Kremlin’s hold on Ukraine. Many protesters died in the Revolution of 2014, which drove Yanukovych into exile in Russia and triggered Moscow’s initial invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky remained aloof from the popular uprising. At that point, he still had a career in the Russian entertainment industry and he didn’t want to jeopardise it by identifying with the anti-Russian cause. Rudenko characterises Zelensky’s approach at this time as ‘nothing personal, just business’.

Journalist Serhii Rudenko is an insider. He finished writing Zelensky two months after the Russian assault of February 2022,

Similarly pragmatic was the relationship between Zelensky and the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, recently in the news when his home was raided by police as part of an anti-corruption drive. One of the richest people in Ukraine, he was at one time the owner of the country’s largest bank, PrivatBank. Kolomoisky also owned a television channel called Channel 1+1, which, between 2015 and 2019, was screening Servant of the People, starring Zelensky. During these years, Kolomoisky fell foul of Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko, who nationalised PrivatBank; Kolomoisky retaliated by derailing Poroshenko’s campaign for re-election. To do