Different strokes

Timely biographies of the principal adversaries in Ukraine pit a former comic actor against a brutally pragmatic strongman

- Gaby Hinsliff

Volodymyr Zelenskiy is perhaps the closest thing to a mythical hero modern politics has to offer. Ukraine’s courageous wartime president captured the world’s imagination with his haunting, straight-to-camera monologues delivered under bombardment. A comic actor turned leader of the resistance, his story is a political fairytale. But is it almost too good to be true?

Truth and fiction collide in the Ukrainian journalist Serhii Rudenko’s quirky and fascinating biography, describing how a man best known for playing a teacher who unexpectedly becomes head of state subsequently did something similar himself.

When Zelenskiy interrupted his own show on New Year’s Eve 2018 to announce his real-life presidential candidacy direct to viewers, many wondered if it was a joke. Even by the end of the campaign, Rudenko writes, there was still “no such thing as Zelensky the politician”; just a comedian fronting an essentially virtual movement, with no formal members and little ideology beyond appealing to Ukrainians’ exasperation with corruption. “I am not your opponent, I am your verdict,” he memorably told the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko.

As Rudenko points out, however, the idea of disrupting politics by starting a party from scratch potentially served a more serious purpose for Ihor Kolomoisky, the oligarch owner of the TV station behind Zelenskiy’s show. Kolomoisky’s lawyer became one of the candidate’s closest advisers, prompting suspicions about who was pulling the strings. Yet the new president would distance himself from his patrons, emerging from their shadow – at least in Rudenko’s telling – as the man we see today.