5 minute read
A front-row seat to history
By Igor Novikov (LH 97), former advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky
29th of August 1997 was my first day at Uppingham.
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As I write, exactly 25 years later, it’s day 187 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there’s good news: our government has updated its official airraid notification app. Now, in addition to warning us about incoming Kalibr missiles and heavy artillery, the app includes distinct alerts for chemical attacks, street fights and nuclear bombs. It makes a different sound for each of them, but there’s no way to hear the sounds in advance, as you would in a fire drill. You won’t know what they’re like until they’re real.
Maybe that’s grim, but we Ukrainians have to laugh about it. We thrive in chaos. Tumult is our norm. We treat our country like a small village. Sure, there are 40 million of us, but there’s always somebody who knows somebody. Forget the rule of six handshakes. It’s one handshake here. That means we don’t do things the way they’re supposed to be done. We do them in whatever way makes us comfortable and gets the job done. We’re self-conscious about this – we think of ourselves as a third-world country – but we’re way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of our adaptability. The future of the planet is being born now, here, in a country fighting a devastating war of attrition.
I’ve always been fascinated with change, so I say this as someone who’s been called a futurist, a label I readily reject. When people ask me if I think that the future is bright or bad, I tell them: it’s anything but boring. For proof, I only need to look at the last four years of my life.
In November 2018, I hosted a comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky for a oneday educational program. That day upended my life; I wound up joining his administration managing his relationship with the US. I’ve sat in a sumptuous, stuffy room of the presidential office, tape recorder in hand, listening to Rudy Giuliani on speakerphone as he pressured my colleagues to investigate Hunter Biden. At a cheap restaurant next to a KFC on the outskirts of Kyiv, I’ve chewed on the worst steak of my life as Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame, tried to convince me to let him finance a ten-billion-dollar aviation consortium in Ukraine. I’ve been on the Tonight Show with my doppelgänger, Jimmy Fallon. And I’ve visited a hotel conference room near the UN headquarters in New York, where I subjected myself to Donald Trump’s famous tug-of-war handshake and, to his genuine surprise, emerged victorious.
At that point, I didn’t think my life could get any weirder. But it has: I’ve now lived in a major European capital under rocket fire. Earth-shaking explosions have put cracks in my ceilings and loosened every window in my house. I’ve seen pure happiness and pure tragedy in the same spot; a fancy new coffee shop opening mere blocks from the site of a cruise missile explosion. I’ve talked my way into getting a Kalashnikov and watched a YouTube tutorial on how to use it. A Russian soldier, separated from his unit and pretending to be Ukrainian, has come wandering into my neighbourhood as if he lived here.
Our uncertainty is extraordinary. The world is changing faster than we can prepare for the new reality. People talk about the next five years as if the reality we know might not completely collapse before then. We appreciate the fact that although something seems improbable, even impossible, it might still happen. And in some situations, you don’t get a second try. Imagine if January 6th, when Trump’s supporters stormed the United States Capitol in Washington DC, had gone the wrong way. Everyone’s reality would be shattered.
Igor with President Volodymyr Zelensky
A few years ago, I gave a presentation to some airline executives and asked them, “What if the planes don’t fly tomorrow? Do you have a plan?” They laughed. Three months later, the pandemic grounded their fleet.
As I write this, Kyiv hasn’t been bombed in more than two months, but surely the missiles will come again. Today I’ve cut myself some slack and spent some time pointlessly wandering the streets.
Alone. Just me and my Google playlist. I don’t know why, but I’ve never seen my city as beautiful as it is now, and I’ve never experienced an energy like this anywhere. My best guess is that it’s what New York felt like after 9/11.
There’s mutual respect between people, total equality, no prejudice, no hypocrisy. The people who made the city worse seem to have fled, and those who remain are enjoying every sip of coffee, every breath of air. And that’s the most beautiful atmosphere to be in – it’s nearly addictive, nearly utopian. I sat at a restaurant in central Kyiv and just let the world go by in all its gorgeous anarchy.
These public displays of resilience have convinced me that Ukraine will stand, that Kyiv will stand, and the energy of this city, even under countless air-raid alerts a day, is the energy that needs to be shared with the world.
