Back Story Zelensky’s lives

Back Story The lives of Zelensky

A book about Ukraine’s president measures the gulf between before and now

Fate turned on a comedy show televised from Moscow in December 1997. In the grand final of kvn, an improv contest dating to Soviet times, a group of Armenian comics took on a team from Ukraine. The Ukrainian troupe brought together Volodymyr Zelensky, some of his future business partners and a writer of “Servant of the People”—the tv satire in which he would play a teacher who accidentally becomes president, a hit that was the launchpad for his reallife election victory. If not for that night in Moscow, who knows?

So wonders Serhii Rudenko in “Zelensky”, the first book in English about Ukraine’s comedianturnedpresidentturnedwar leader. Along with such twists of fate, his account highlights the overlap between showbiz and politics, and, above all, the way the emergency of war can clarify people and priorities.

Ukraine was already a battlefield state when Mr Zelensky took office in 2019. Besides the Russian landgrabs in Donbas and Crimea, his country lay on the front lines of a series of 21stcentury struggles: between democracy and authoritarianism, elections and oligarchy, the rule of law and corruption, facts and fakery. Dark money and propaganda coursed through the body politic; too many politicians saw the state as a cash trough, their aim being to gobble what they could before being shunted aside. As Mr Rudenko observes, Mr Zelensky and his novice crew faced these challenges with more memes in their armoury than policies. Then, this February, came a war of national survival.

Yet he also had assets, which dipped in value before rising sharply again. “An ordinary person can’t become president in this country,” says his character Holoborodko at the start of “Servant of the People”. He was right: in a cliquish system payrolled by billionaires, the barriers to entry were high. Perhaps only an alist star could have levitated over them (if with a boost from the network behind the show, controlled by Ihor Kolomoisky, a controversial tycoon). Celebrity leaders carry risks, as America has learned, but on the upside, they can appeal across divides, regional or political. Mr Zelensky won 73% of the vote in a fractious electorate, even more than his tv alter ego.

“I am not your opponent,” he told Petro Poroshenko, the predecessor he would defeat. “I am your verdict.” In office, his talent for zingers and impish charm soon seemed meretricious. That is, until the war. Mr Zelensky, notes Mr Rudenko, may or may not have told Washington that he needed “ammo, not a ride”. Either way, it is an immortal line. Alluding to Churchill in his speech to Britain’s Parliament, or to Martin Luther King when he was beamed into Congress, he displayed the same actorly feel for audience and mood as in his stoical messages to his compatriots.

These are a performer’s gifts. But in a deeper sense, the show is over. Before the invasion, says Mr Rudenko, the president’s “pauses, facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures” recalled his screen persona. These days he speaks to and for his nation in khaki, weary and unshaven, without makeup or lighting. Wartime leaders rely on rhetoric and bravado; yet with its lifeanddeath stakes, war is the coldest, hardest of realities, and calls for virtues that are the opposite of acting. As Mr Rudenko reflects, Mr Zelensky’s is “unembellished courage”.

Billed as a biography, this book is really a jumble of vignettes, often involving factions or grudges that readers may find baffling. Mostly written before the war, it has been hastily updated and translated from Ukrainian. That, though, is its main service: to measure the gulf between before and now.

The prewar disparagements of Mr Zelensky as a creature of Mr Kolomoisky and even of the Kremlin; the splits in his entourage, gripes about his economic amateurishness and alleged cronyism— all these seem as relevant as treaties made by 17thcentury tsars. Like Holoborodko, Mr Zelensky was in the past accused of vices he had pledged to abjure; but if you watch “Servant of the People” today, these lifeimitatesart ironies seem petty, and you are struck instead by the lovely, heartbreaking opening sequence in which the hero bicycles through a sunny, peaceful Kyiv.

War is a rupture—in a country’s life and a leader’s. Amid the calamity, Ukrainians have proven lucky in theirs. As Mr Rudenko writes at the close, the man who was “visibly nervous” in his early bouts of diplomacy, the ingénue and clown, now has an experience of statecraft that no modern Western leader can match, nor would wish to.

pers on how evidence for the invisible force field might be found. If it existed, he wrote, there should be a particle associated with it, a massive boson. The “Higgs boson” was born, and the shy physicist it was named after became a permanent fixture in the world’s scientific headlines.

The account of the decadeslong search for the boson is one of the best parts of “Elusive”. A former particle physicist and then a member of staff at cern, the European particle physics laboratory, Mr Close offers a pacey insider’s story of the ups, downs and international politics of building cathedralsized, cuttingedge scientific machines that cost billions of dollars in public money—and have no immediate benefit beyond curiosity. He also describes a transformational time in particlephysics research. Mr Higgs and his theorist colleagues had worked with paper and pencil to come up with the mathematics of the boson, but it took almost half a century of continual effort from thousands of scientists and engineers across the world to find the particle itself. Lone geniuses, if they ever existed, were no more.

The machine built to find the boson, the Large Hadron Collider, was first mooted at a meeting in 1976. It started collecting data in 2010 and, on July 4th 2012, confirmed the existence of the muchtrailed boson. Mr Higgs was in the audience of the seminar at cern on the day and shed a tear. Fifteen months later came the morning that the Nobel committee decided to award him the most prestigious prize in physics, alongside François Englert, the only other surviving theorist of the six who had originally come up with the massgiving mechanism back in 1964. Mr Higgs got up early to take a walk. n