Today we will talk about Vladimir Zelensky — likely the most popular country leader on the planet Earth.
He gets a standing ovation in any parliament, and every big official in the West strives to stand by and get a share of the magic of universal adorement.
Zelensky is an incredibly cinematic character.
Should we have seen his life not in the news but in a TV show, we would definitely say that the writers had gone too far — because such things don’t happen in reality.
But we are seeing it all with our own eyes.
And today i will tell you a story of a comedian who has become an entrepreneur;
an entrepreneur who made a TV show about a president, featuring himself, in his own studio;
and the president who has become a legend.
Vladimir Zelensky was born on January 25, 1978, in Krivoy Rog.
Zelensky comes from a Jewish family that barely survived during the Great Patriotic War.
The grandmother of the current president of Ukraine, a Jewess, managed to evacuate to Kazakhstan before the arrival of the Nazis in Krivoy Rog, and thus survived.
After the war she came back to her hometown.
The president's grandfather, Semyon Zelensky, went through the entire war, and was awarded the Order of the Red Star twice.
Three brothers of Semyon Zelensky died in the hands of Nazis.
Vladimir Zelensky often talked about thinking of himself as both the Ukrainian and the Jew.
The question of his origins was widely discussed shortly before the war,
when Putin started to openly say that Ukraine is governed by Nazis.
In doing so however, he sidestepped the fact that just a few years ago, the Ukrainians elected as their president a man
whose immediate ancestors were able to survive the horrors of the Holocaust and the World War too only due to a happy coincidence.
They call us nazis.
But how can people who sacrificed more than 8 million lives to defeat nazism can support it?
How would it possible for me to be a nazi?
Tell it to my grandfather, who went through the entire war as a Soviet infantry soldier, and died a colonel in independent Ukraine.
By the way, when he was 16, Vladimir Zelensky was offered a free higher education in Israel,
but under pressure from his father, Zelensky refused.
Zelensky's parents are classic representatives of the Soviet scientific and technical intelligentsia.
His mother worked for many years as an engineer.
His father is a doctor of science, a professor, and head of the Department of Informatics in the Krivoy Rog Institute of Economics, where Vladimir later studied.
Before that, Alexander Zelensky worked in Mongolia for 20 years, participating in the construction of a mining and processing plant.
For several years the future President of Ukraine lived with his family in Mongolia and went to school for the first time there.
And later returned to Krivoy Rog with his mother.
In school, Vladimir went for sports, music, dancing, but most importantly, he studied at the theater studio
and participated in amateur performances.
In the 11th grade, he organized a team of students and beat teachers in the school KVN competition.
Having received a certificate, Zelensky entered the law faculty of the economic institute where his father taught.
He has become a certified lawyer, but didn’t work as one a single day.
In his student years, KVN has become the prime focus of his activities.
Vladimir Zelensky was invited in the “Zaporozhye — Krivoy Rog — Transit” KVN team.
It was a very strong team by KVN standards.
It had regular performances in the Higher League, and in 97, shared the championship title with New Armenians,
thus becoming the last team from Ukraine to earn the title.
Immediately after that Zelensky and his friends have decided to create their own KVN team.
They named it District 95 - by the name of one of the districts in their hometown, Krivoy Rog.
Zelensky was the captain and the author of most scenarios.
In 2001, the team won in the League of Ukraine, and a year later reached semifinals in the Higher League.
- There are things that break off what is worth living for.
- Eating things isn’t tasty.
In 2001, the team won in the League of Ukraine, and a year later reached semifinals in the Higher League.
District 95 performed in KVN up until 2003, and then, after a conflict with the league’s leadership, left to create their own project —
District 95 Studio, again with Zelensky as the head.
District 95 Studio performed concerts that were shown on TV in both Ukraine and Russia.
What did you do?
What did I do?
Did I not give you money to build a democracy?
Yeah you did.
Where is the money?
The money?
District 95 Studio performed concerts that were shown on TV in both Ukraine and Russia.
The list of television projects of the studio includes several dozen items,
the most famous of them are “Evening Quarter”, “Make the Comedian Laugh”, “League of Laughter”.
Many projects continue to be released to this day.
Aside from TV projects, the studio was making comedy movies and TV shows.
Almost every one of them had Zelensky participating in some capacity: as a screenwriter, director, producer, actor.
Two of the District 95 works are worth dwelling on in more detail.
The first of them is the TV show “Matchmakers”.
An absolute hit with 7 seasons and several spin-offs, which has won many awards.
“Matchmakers” throughout the years of its existence beat records in terms of views and invariably topped the TV ratings in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
In our country, the series was broadcast on the state channel "Russia-1".
Will you have some, Yuri Anatolyevich?
Not a chance? We try to avoid foods that are heavy on the stomach.
Why? Afraid to break? Have the cutlet, matchmaker, it's my girl’s signature dish.
Oh well!
Don’t “oh well” here. Don’t “oh well” here Yuri Anatolyevich! He cannot eat that.
The second hit is a TV show “Servant of the People”.
There, Vladimir Zelensky played the main role — a modest history teacher named Vladimir Goloborodkro, who suddenly became the President of Ukraine.
For Zelensky, this role has become a prophetic one: the series first aired in 2015, and in 2019 Zelensky himself has won the Presidential elections.
By 2019, former leaders had lost all their political capital and practically left the political scene —
like Yulia Timoshenko and Arseny Yatsenyuk.
At the same time, there was a strong demand in society for new faces —
and Vladimir Zelensky, who was never involved in politics before, became such a person.
And of course thanks to the “Servant of the People” Ukrainians had already become accustomed to seeing him as the President.
Zelenskiy's 2019 election campaign was refreshing, tech-savvy and media-focused,
which makes sense given the candidate's background.
As a matter of fact, Zelensky exploited the image of his own hero
from the series — a simple man with no ties in the elites,
who entered this political swamp and brought the wind of change with him.
It was especially apparent in his confrontation against
the main opponent — then acting president of Ukraine Petr Poroshenko.
Poroshenko is the flesh of the same old elite, an oligarch
who first became a member of the Rada in 1998, a participant in the first Maidan in 2004.
During his presidential campaign, Poroshenko recorded calm status videos,
where he was most often alone in the frame.
Against such a background, Zelensky's campaign looked fresh and advantageous:
a young team, interesting design, active work in social networks,
and most importantly, positive modern messages addressed to voters.
The third season of “Servant of the People”, which aired shortly before the vote, was a part of the campaign too.
but Zelensky had a two-fold advantage: he got 30% of the votes,
while Poroshenko only had about 15% — only two percent more than Yulia Timoshenko.
The main event between the two tours were the debates of the candidates,
who met face to face at the Olimpiyskiy Stadium in Kyiv.
The debates became the one most important political event in Ukraine,
and Zelensky's phrase “I am not your opponent, I am your verdict”
addressed at Poroshenko has become an aphorism.
In the second tour, Zelensky won confidently with 73% of the votes.
Pyotr Poroshenko managed to get the majority
of the votes only in one regions in the West of Ukraine.
On May 20, 2019, Vladimir Zelensky was sworn in and became the sixth president of Ukraine.
What is interesting is that the current hero of a country at war
came to power as the President of peace.
His opponents often reminded him of phrases like
“we just need to stop shooting” about the Donbass conflict.
And the situation in the country was not easy even before the Russian attack.
Coronavirus pandemic had hit the economy, and the conflict on Donbass,
along with internal political squabbles, could not be settled.
Critics blamed the President for being pro-russian:
his business and his career were mostly oriented to Russia,
This isn't true though.
By the time of 2019 elections Zelensky hadn't performed in Russia and didn't film TV series there.
His ties with Russia were limited to selling licenses to TV series and movies to Russian television companies.
and Zelensky himself barely spoke Ukrainian before he came into politics,
for which he was also blamed.
At the same time, Zelensky has always behaved very competently in public space.
He communicated with voters directly, without the mediation of journalists,
through his social networks.
The New Year's addresses of the President of Ukraine deserve special mention:
instead of the dull muttering about “it was a difficult year” that we are all used to,
Zelensky made real mini-movies, touching and inspiring at the same time.
Let every one of us ask himself
and answer fairly
on an important question:
who am i?
The President of Ukraine,
a successful lawyer,
an ordinary housewife
a philosophy student from Mogilyanka,
an agronomist from Cherkassy.
who am i?
Right now we will not dwell into Zelensky’s politics, into what he had done before the war.
If you are interested in the subject, check my video with Varlamov
that we’ve made before the war, it is covered in detail there.
Here let’s just say that by the beginning of 2021,
Zelensky’s ratings and the ratings of his party “Servant of the People'', had hit the floor.
President had become involved in a hard political struggle
against his main opponents, primarily Victor Medvedchuk and Pyotr Poroshenko.
Ukraine started slowly entering the new presidential campaign:
the next elections should’ve taken place in 2024,
Zelensky’s prospects in these elections were unclear,
Ukrainians aren’t too happy about electing presidents for a second term.
But it all changed on February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine,
and Zelensky became the president of a country at war.
In the first days, everyone thought he would flee Ukraine and evacuate,
but he kept making inspiring short videos almost every day.
Let’s see an excerpt from one of them.
Good evening everyone.
The faction leader is here,
the head of the presidential office is here,
Prime Minister Shmigal is here,
Podolyak is here,
the President is here.
We all remain here,
our soldiers are here,
our citizens are here,
we are all here.
Protecting our independence, our country.
And it will remain so.
Maybe not the prime, but still the important motive for Putin to unleash aggression
was the figure of Zelensky that we described today.
Zelensky is the symbol of generational change of politician in the post-Soviet space,
literally the symbol of the future.
The future that cannot be allowed to prevail,
for it will otherwise destroy the past in which Putin lives.
Once, in the distant pre-war times, i explained,
why Putin’s generation and the generation of those who witnessed
the collapse of the Soviets at the age of around 40, is the most Soviet of generations,
why it is this particular stratum of 65+ clings for the past so much and tries to drag all of us there.
For Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the USSR came at approximately 40 years.
40 years is a terrible age to witness global change.
It is the half of life.
It is the age when, on one hand, you are no longer young,
you have life, limitations both social
(marriage, profession and career, children, elderly parents, an apartment, a car)
and physical: at 40 you cannot study as fast or work as much as 20-30 year olds;
you are no competitor to them.
On the other hand it is still not 50, you can’t just let it all be and say,
like, i lived a nice life, raised and taught children,
have a roof under my head, in 5-10 years i will retire
and after that who cares under which socio-political system to fish and walk with grandkids.
In short, you are too old to really compete in the new world,
and too young to avoid such competition.
But this is not even the most important thing.
The main thing is that at the age of 40 you had already become someone:
a foreman, a school director, a respected father of a family,
a sought-after specialist, or maybe a KGB colonel.
And the world in which you were someone, stopped existing in a moment:
your career is done for, your education doesn’t matter,
and your VAZ-2107 that used to be everyone’s ultimate dream just recently,
is now a shame to even drive.
The new masters of life see you, recently a respected person, as nothing.
It is the generation of Vladimir Putin, people who were 40 in the nineties
and who are now 70, suffer from this trauma more than the rest of the people.
All the good in their life that they wanted and could achieve,
was left in the country that no longer exists,
and it stopped existing so long ago that people who were born after it are now grown ups.
And those who’ve witnessed the end of the Soviets as a teenager
have no warm feelings for it, they are already a part of the political elite,
they are already being elected as heads of major states.
It is here that one can find the reasons for resentment towards Vladimir Zelensky.
Resentment so strong that it becomes possible to start a war,
only so that he doesn’t succeed.
With all the previous Ukrainian leaders, as with all leaders in the post-Soviet space, Putin speaks one language.
There can be any kind of personal relationship between them. (It is clear that with Lukashenko w
ho lived for 30 years by deceiving his sponsors from the Kremlin, the relations cannot be warm).
But what is important is that they are understandable to one another.
These are all Soviet people through and through, bearers of the resentment, brought up in the same wretched logic,
where opposition to the West is combined with worship of it.
Where the hatred towards the American military and the dream of saving up for used American jeans can easily coexist in one head.
Between leaders that were raised by the Soviet government, who went all the way from the tie of a Pioneer to a party card,
who studied in soviet schools, who, like all soviet people, went to dig potatoes during their times in university,
who like all soviet people waited in lines to get that Yugoslavian cupboard, between these people the role of NATO as a potential enemy canot even be doubted.
They won’t be asking questions like: so when exactly did NATO threaten our countries?
What is it we have against NATO if NATO countries are the prime consumers of our goods and services,
if it is their money that allows us to pay for our armies?
All these questions sound like child’s mumbling for those who were raised on seeing NATO as a threat.
This is all because we and America are dividing the world between us.
Who is Vladimir Zelensky to Putin’s usual circle?
Zlensky, who finished the school in 1995, precisely a year before Putin,
as Sobchak's deputy and head of his campaign headquarters, failed the gubernatorial elections in St. Petersburg.
When all the most dramatic, most tragic events for Putin’s generation were taking place
— Zelensky and his classmates crashed into the head teacher at recess.
What is a bleeding wound for them, is nothing but the tales of old for him
just some conversations he accidentally heard from his parents.
None of it is part of his personal biography.
He is not just alien to them, he is much worse.
He is like a future Christmas ghost.
Here you are, a big soviet functionary.
You look at Zelensky and not only you see that your times are passing, but you see your literal death.
You see the leader of the state, who could be your son and for whom all your values,
everything that you built, fought against and aspired to is an empty phrase.
It is especially symbolic that Zelensky is the same age as Navalny, navalny is only 1.5 years older.
They are the people who come to replace you.
Those are coming to turn your rule into dust.
Who will simply say: damn it, friends, everything that TV has fed you for decades,
from wonderful Soviet ice cream to confrontation with NATO, all this obsession with pseudo-history,
all the restoration of bygone states and analysis of the comparative advantages of the dead
this is such unbearable nonsense, let's just forget it all.
Let us start pretending that Stephen Bandera and Joseph Stalin
are candidates to the parliament from the Pecheneg party.
Let’s stop commemorating the victory in WW2,
that none of us has anything to do with, in our every phrase.
Let us stop inventing the past, believing our own invention, and trying to bring it back.
We shouldn’t worry about Estonia being in NATO.
We need to worry about the fact that in tiny Estonia, without oil,
gas and with a domestic market for a million people,
the average salary is three times higher than ours.
That their corruption level is lower than that in Belgium, and ours is higher than in Angola
this is the real problem, this is what we should be concerned with,
this is what we should be ashamed of, and not the inexistent threat of NATO.
Even if Putin didn’t have a clue about the speeds at which the future is replacing the past,
even if it was blissfully ignorant, then the crisis in Kazakhstan would have shown him once again:
the most loyal, the most nondescript, the most controlled successor can nullify
a Elbasy in two weeks and leave no trace of him.
When your internal enemy is the future, then you can poison them, you can send them and their followers
to prison for years, and beat the protesting youth in the streets.
It could even work as a short-term solution.
But right across the border, in the second-largest slavic Russian-speaking country after Russia,
a President rules, who by the very fact of his existence is signing your death sentence.
You will be gone, quite soon actually, be it for political or natural reasons, you will be gone.
And we will keep living and leave no trace of you.
Oh you wanted to be written in history textbooks?
Well you will.
The eighth-graders of the future will laugh loudly and indecently in the classroom over your reasoning about the Slavic roots of Rurik.
And everything else besides the fiery quotes in a textbook, will be long forgotten,
there will be nothing left to remind of you.
You came to Russia with a quarter of schools with no warm toilets — and left it this way.
In the mind of a dictator who’s been in his position for so long, such a picture should instill horror
and the natural desire to avoid this horror, by literally physically destroying the future.
But because the past in which Putin lives is completely artificial and powerless,
even that physical destruction didn’t work and will never work.
Till tomorrow!