Zelenskyy plays the role of his life

Ukraine’s leader uses on-camera skills to rally country, world

Shortly after his surprise election as the president of Ukraine, Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko gets a Pygmalion-like makeover and an introduction to his retinue of staff. There is his stylist. There is his psychologist. There is his “personal motivator.” And there is … himself ?

An identical, slightly cross-eyed version of Holoborodko stands before him. It’s your body double, the prime minister explains. He’s available to appear at ceremonies, to meet with foreign dignitaries … or to take a sniper’s bullet. Of course, the prime minister adds, it probably won’t come to that.

Holoborodko is the character played by Volodymyr Zelenskyy in “Servant of the People,” the Ukrainian TV satire that debuted in 2015 and set up Zelenskyy, in 2019, to be elected president of Ukraine in real life. Since the Russian invasion, the series has been picked up to air in several countries; subtitled episodes are available on YouTube.

To watch it now is to experience, like Holoborodko, a chilling sense of double vision.

There, on one screen, is Zelenskyy confronting the prospect of assassination for laughs. And there — on TV news, on monitors before world leaders and in his handmade videos from war-torn Kyiv — is the real man in real life, staring down real death.

Americans, of course, know a thing or two about electing presidents who have played leaders on TV. Reality does not always measure up to the prime-time myth.

But as Zelenskyy has used his on-camera skill to rally his country and the world, he hasn’t just imitated his art. He’s improved on it.

More satirical than “The West Wing,” less caustic than “Veep,” with higher stakes than in “Parks and Recreation,” “Servant of the People” is a what-if fable about an ordinary citizen vaulted into power. Holoborodko, a history teacher, is caught on camera ranting about the country’s rampant corruption and cynicism.

“I wish every common teacher lived like a president,” he storms. “I wish every president lived like a teacher!”

The video goes viral, and Holoborodko wins the election in a landslide. Suddenly he is a teacher living like a president, with all the job’s headaches.

Much of “Servant” is broad and slapstick; in one scene, the president scampers Marx Brothers-style around the executive offices as a Swedish banker chases him for a loan repayment.

But “Servant of the People” is also stranger and more profound than its fish-out-of-water premise suggests. It’s insightful about the pressures on a fledgling democracy with more-powerful neighbors. While Russia is not central to the plot, consciousness of it is everywhere. Holoborodko’s trick for getting a raucous audience’s attention is to yell, “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin has been overthrown!”

Ultimately, Zelenskyy’s show is an argument about the true source of political legitimacy. In its perhaps idealistic telling, power comes from being proximate to the people, not elevated above them. It comes not from being invincible but from knowing people’s precarity and sharing in their inconveniences. After his election, the new president continues living in his parents’ cramped flat.

Zelenskyy ran for president in a social-media-savvy campaign so tightly bound up with his fictional persona that his political party was also called “Servant of the People.” Like Holoborodko, he was, before the war, criticized as being in over his head.

But through the lens of his show, which argues that good leaders should share their citizens’ experiences, his response to the attack has seemed almost inevitable.

Zelenskyy’s appearances throughout the war, from handmade videos to interviews, have had a personal feel. He wears fatigues, not a suit. This tells his people that he knows what they’re going through, and it reminds Western leaders that they can scarcely imagine what he’s going through.

Now he finds himself opposed to a larger world power, not only on the battlefield but also in the mediasphere, the one place where he has air superiority.

Over the decades, Putin has also played a character in the media, one that embodies very different ideas: strength and authority. He has been photographed riding horseback, shirtless. He has posed riding a motorcycle and doing judo and going spearfishing.

The pandemic, however, isolated and changed Putin, and his imagery changed with it.

Ultimately, Putin made himself a pariah not through his pictures but through his actions. Still, set-designing himself as a Bond villain hasn’t helped. It is a contest that Russia seems to know it is losing. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, complained that his country was facing a “Hollywood” narrative of “absolute evil and absolute good.”

In the case of Ukraine, Zelenskyy has personalized the struggle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism in the contrast between himself and Putin and pushed the world to choose a side.

Could a different leader have done this? We may never be able to prove whether a sitcom changed world history. But certainly Zelenskyy the performer has given Zelenskyy the president some of his most powerful weapons.