Volodymyr Zelensky could become the country’s next real-life leader. If his show is any guide, Ukrainians should be worried.
Alexander Motyl
Ater this weekend’s first round of voting in Ukraine’s presidential election, Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular actor, and Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s current leader, have emerged as front-runners. Ukraine’s next president, though, will be either Poroshenko or Zelensky’s alter ego, Vasyl Holoborodko.
Holoborodko is the incorruptible television president Zelensky plays in the hit series Servant of the People, now in its third season. A simple schoolteacher, whose tirade against corruption is filmed by a student and goes viral, Holoborodko catapults to the presidency. In real life, Zelensky has kept his campaigning to a minimum. He has let Holoborodko do the work for him, which may mean that the only way to guess at the real man’s views may be totakeseriouslythefake one’s.
Like Zelensky, who never showed much of an interest in government until he decided he’d like to run one, Holoborodko knows little about politics, economics, or international affairs. In the show, he sets aside the stirring inaugural address his handlers have written to state that he won’t make any promises because that would be “dishonest and I don’t know enough.” He does assure the public, though, that he will “act in such a manner that I won’t be ashamed to look children in the eye.” His next two seasons in office are marked by a series of oftentimes funny confrontations with an intractable bureaucracy, slimy advisors, and corruptioneers galore.
If the show is, as one Canadian supporter of Zelensky has written, a “playbook for reform,” then his backers should be worried. At best, they can expect nothing but setbacks for two years. At worst, they might see their country dissolve and their leader go to jail. At the end of the second season, Holoborodko’s efforts win him enough enemies that he loses a rigged election. In the third season, crazed Ukrainian nationalists (with the slogan “Freedom, Surname, Country”) stage a coup that leads to his arrest.
As one of the usurpers says while asking prison inmates to reveal their last names (and, hence, their nationality), “Ukraine is not for everybody”—so much so, apparently, that even “Ukrainian prisonswillonlyhold patriots.”
By the time the latest episode of the third season rolls around, the country breaks up into close to 30 statelets. In the far west is the Kingdom of Galicia; in the far east, the SSSR, which stands for Union of Free and Self-Reliant Republics but also happens to be the Latinized version of the Cyrillic acronym of the USSR. In the middle, there’s even a Jewish state centered on the city of Uman, the home to Hasidism. Fortunately for Ukraine, Holoborodko stages a comeback, is re-elected president, appoints a new cabinet of reformers, and is so successful that the breakaway statelets are persuaded to rejoin the nation. The economy booms, foreign direct investment returns, start-ups take off, migrants return home, and Ukraine even embarks on a space program.
Alas, two statelets refuse to come home—Galicia and the SSSR, whose elites insist they can’t coexist in a unified Ukraine. The people save the day, however. A fire breaks out in a Lviv mine, threatening the lives of the miners trapped in the shafts. The SSSR leadership refuses to help, but a troop of Russian-speaking rescuers from Donbass rushes to Lviv and saves their Ukrainian-speaking comrades. Both regions rejoin the nation, and Ukraine is whole once more.
But Holoborodko isn’t finished. He attends a meeting of Western countries in Brussels, where the Westerners admonish Ukraine for challenging their economic and political primacy. Holoborodko proudly walks out. Back in Ukraine, he tells a graduating class that he envies them for being able to live in this new Ukraine. But there’s one enormous problem that will affect them and their children for decades to come: Ukraine still has $163 billion in debt. He calls on Ukrainians to pay it back “so that we will never again be second-rate people.” The final scene of the episode (and, depending on Zelensky’s political fortunes, possibly of the series) shows Maidan square, the site of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, respectively, piled high with gold. The people have come through. The show ends with a transparent campaign message to vote for Zelensky for president.
Servant of the People gets a number of things wrong. Most of the characters speak Russian most of the time. In reality, in Ukraine, Ukrainian is spoken publicly at least as often as Russian. The vast majority of Ukrainians who speak out for the Ukrainian language and culture are hardly radical putschists. Corruption is widespread, but it’s not quite the monster that Holoborodko—and Western journalists—imagines it to be. And rather than chide Ukraine, the West would be delighted if it took off economically and politically. These inaccuracies may be forgiven as campaign hyperbole.
Unforgivable is the absence from the show of Russia or Russian President Vladimir Putin. In its alternate universe, Crimea and Donbass are not occupied. There is no war. There are no deaths. There is no mention of Russian attempts to quash Ukrainian independence since 1991. This curious absence suggests either that Zelensky, who serves as the show’s executive producer, has no idea how to deal with a very real existential threat to Ukraine or, far worse, that he doesn’t believe that there is one. At best, then, a President Zelensky would be prone to serious mistakes in his relations with Putin; at worst, he might be willing to make concessions that would hollow out Ukrainian sovereignty.
The absence of Putin’s Russia has another implication. It’s impossible to understand Ukraine’s war in the eastern Donbass region—the inspiration for the show’s own civil conflicts—without an appreciation for Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea; his support for separatists in Ukraine’s southeast; his continued basing of several thousand soldiers there; his stationing of tens of thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and artillery units along Ukraine’s border; and his blockade of Ukraine’s ports on the Sea of Azov.
