This column is not a jukebox, but several readers requested an episode about Volodimir Zelensky, President of Ukraine. It was already featured in this column, in one of the first episodes, on April 12, 2019. That was less than three years ago, but you can rightfully claim that we lived in a different world then, and that was true. for none more than Zelensky. Who was this man in 2019? A cunning actor-producer-businessman who directs the TV series Servant of the People had thought of. In it, he played an open-minded teacher from the province who denounces corruption in a video that goes viral, and then ends up in the presidential palace. Zelenski, born in 1978, has always denied that Servant of the People was a covert election campaign. The fact is that the creator-leader was inundated with requests from viewers: we want a president like you play in real life.
In April 2019 went At Second Sight about the differences between the teacher from Servant of the People and the man who played it. It had a very different curriculum. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was successful in no time at all Quarter 95a Ukrainian equivalent of the Comedy train† After that he was both a much sought-after actor and a TV producer with a thriving business, several houses, bank accounts and shares in a company in Cyprus. “If there is one thing that can be assured about the former Soviet world, it is that no honest teachers reach the top there,” I wrote in April 2019. The revelations from the Pandora Papers were yet to come. Last fall, Zelenski’s name was among those of Tony Blair, Andrej Babis, and other cunning men with letterbox firms.
The epitome of courage
In the spring of 2022, the same man has become an example of courage and, by extension, the personification of the values and dignity of the Western world. The effigy of the unshaven man with bags under the eyes who speaks to the world in an army green T-shirt from a besieged Kyiv is on the way to becoming as iconic as Che Guevara’s: Zelenski is the underdog who won’t resign himself to his fate . As Putin’s gaze is cold and contemptuous, so is his tormented yet fearless. In many Hollywood films, the contrast between the hero and the villain is less striking.
We live in visual times. Anyone who doubts the importance of Zelensky’s appearance should imagine that Putin had timed his war differently and Petro Poroshenko had still been president of Ukraine. Had a man with a typical oligarch appearance also touched a large international audience?
Zelensky, the dream hero of every casting agency, also has the gift of touching an audience with a lecture. You can just speculate that years on stage have sharpened his intuition to which a particular audience is sensitive. The American president they called the “great communicator” also started out as an actor. Theater director Robert Falls watched Zelenski address Western parliaments in army green and saw a “talent to radiate both anger and vulnerability.” It has probably been rehearsed, and yet it seems to come spontaneously and on the spot.’
Zelensky, many say, has risen above himself since Feb. 24. People who rise above themselves: you read about that more often in film and stage reviews than in political analyses. In April 2019, this column ended with the prediction that, provided the roulette balls didn’t roll strangely, Ukrainian voters would write off Zelensky just as quickly as his predecessors. They did, and then everything changed.