Chapter 1The Iron City

Foreword

I spent the better part of a decade reporting a war from below. My beat was the Donbas -- the trench lines, the shelled towns, the arithmetic of artillery and evacuation buses, the particular silence of a village that has been fought over three times. From that altitude, Volodymyr Zelensky was a voice on a phone screen in a dugout, a face on a television in a half-empty café in a frontline town, a name that soldiers said with affection or contempt or both in the same sentence. He was the war from above. I wrote the war from below. For years I believed that was a reason not to write about him.

It became, in the end, the reason I had to. Because a Ukrainian journalist has a complicated relationship with this president -- my profession spent his presidency arguing with him, over the consolidated broadcasts, over the narrowed space for questions, over the gap between the nightly address and the morning's casualty lists -- and I came to understand that the argument itself was the subject. The man who had made communication into a weapon of national survival had also made it harder for people like me to do our work. Both things were true at once. A biography that could not hold both was not worth writing, and no one had written the one that could.

The title of this book is not a joke, or not only a joke. Somewhere near the center of this story is a man filming himself on a phone, at night, outside a government building, while an army was moving on the capital with orders that included his death. Everything I wanted to understand is compressed into that image: the performer's instinct and the genuine courage, the calculation and the risk, the fact that the performance was the resistance -- that a selfie, of all the debased artifacts of our era, became a load-bearing structure in the defense of a European state. I wanted to know where a person learns to do that. The answer, it turned out, was not in Kyiv in 2022. It was in an iron-ore city in the dying Soviet Union, in a courtyard where a Jewish professor's son discovered that the boy who controls the laughter controls the room.

I expected to write a book about the war I knew. I kept being pulled backward instead -- into Kryvyi Rih, into the KVN stages and the Kvartal 95 studios, into the mechanics of a television empire and the oligarch's money that built it, into the campaign that turned a fictional president into a real one. I worked from the record, which in Zelensky's case is enormous and strange: a man who has lived on camera since his teens, whose every period is preserved in broadcasts and sketches and press archives and court filings and the memoirs of the people who watched him rise. He may be the most documented leader of his generation. He is also, I came to believe, one of the least understood, because the documentation is itself performance, and reading it requires the double vision that every child of the late Soviet Union learned before they learned anything else -- the ability to hear what is said and what is meant and to measure the distance between them.

That distance is the story. His comedy was built on it. His campaign promised to close it. His war leadership, in its first and best hours, actually did -- for one long moment the words and the man were the same thing, and the world could not look away. And then came the years, and the compromises, and the canceled election and the dismissals and the scandals, and the distance began to open again, and the question of what kind of man he was became harder rather than easier to answer. That is what makes him worth a book. Simple men do not need biographies. They need captions.

What follows is neither monument nor indictment. I have tried to give the admirers and the critics their strongest cases, because both are arguing from the same evidence, and because I have stood in the places where the cost of his decisions was paid and I owe the people there better than a myth. The reader should expect a book about power -- how a boy from the courtyards acquired it, what he did with it, what it did to him -- written by someone who watched from below.

— Ostap Bilyk, Kyiv

Chapter 1 · The Iron City

The city stretches for more than sixty miles along the Inhulets River, a tributary of the Dnieper that runs through the steppe of central Ukraine like a scar through skin. Kryvyi Rih -- the name means "crooked horn," after the shape of a peninsula at the river's confluence -- is not a city that anyone built with beauty in mind. It was built for ore. The iron ore deposits beneath Kryvyi Rih are among the largest on Earth, a seam of red-brown mineral wealth that runs beneath the city like a second circulatory system, and it was this accident of geology that determined everything: the shape of the city, the composition of its population, the texture of daily life, and the particular psychology of the people who grew up there.

In 1978, the year Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky was born, Kryvyi Rih was the tenth-largest city in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with a population of roughly 650,000 people. It was an industrial city in the most unromantic sense of the term. The air smelled of metal. The buildings were Soviet concrete -- five-story khrushchyovkas and nine-story brezhnevkas, identical blocks repeating themselves along avenues that had been designed for trucks, not pedestrians. The factories ran three shifts. The mines operated around the clock. The city's prosperity -- such as it was, measured in Soviet terms of full employment and adequate rations rather than in anything approaching comfort -- depended entirely on the continued extraction of iron from the earth.

This is important to understand about Zelensky's origins, because the mythology that would later attach itself to him -- comedian, entertainer, accidental president, improbable war hero -- would obscure a fact that explains more about his character than any of those labels. He grew up in a city of workers. Not artists. Not intellectuals. Not dissidents. Workers. People who went underground or into furnaces or onto factory floors and did hard physical labor in exchange for the Soviet state's guarantee of a place to live, food to eat, and the assurance that their children could aspire to something better. That guarantee -- and the specific form of discipline, endurance, and unsentimental pragmatism it produced in the people who depended on it -- is the psychological bedrock on which everything Zelensky later became was built.

His father, Oleksandr Zelensky, was the exception that proved the rule. In a city of miners and steelworkers, the elder Zelensky was an academic -- a professor of cybernetics and computer science at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics (the institution would later be reorganised as the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology), a man of considerable intellectual gifts who had managed to build a career of the mind in a place that valued the labor of hands. He had also applied his computing skills to industry: he was assigned in the late 1970s to Erdenet, in northern Mongolia, to help a Soviet-Mongolian team build the giant copper-and-molybdenum mining complex there, and the family lived with him in Erdenet for four years. The young Volodymyr, who was a toddler when the family arrived, spent the years before he started elementary school in a Mongolian mining town rather than in his own iron-ore city -- a small but real biographical fact that the later mythology of the boy from Kryvyi Rih tends to omit. He returned to Kryvyi Rih in time to begin school. His mother, Rimma Zelenska, was an engineer. They were, by the standards of Kryvyi Rih, solidly middle-class Soviet professionals -- the kind of family that kept books in the apartment, that expected their son to attend university, that understood education as the mechanism by which a person from an industrial city could escape the industrial city's gravitational pull.

They were also Jewish. And in the Soviet Union in 1978, that fact carried weight that an American or Western European reader must work to understand.

Soviet policy toward Jews was a thing of layers and contradictions. The official position was that antisemitism did not exist in the USSR, that the revolution had eliminated the old hatreds, that all Soviet citizens were equal. The reality was that Jews in the Soviet Union lived under a system of informal but comprehensive discrimination that affected university admissions, career advancement, housing allocation, and social standing. The word "Jewish" appeared in the nationality line of internal passports -- the fifth line, the famous "fifth paragraph" -- and that single word could determine the trajectory of a life. A Jewish applicant to a prestigious Moscow university faced quotas that were never acknowledged but always enforced. A Jewish scientist could be denied a security clearance that a less qualified non-Jewish colleague received without question. A Jewish family in a city like Kryvyi Rih could live a perfectly decent life by Soviet standards, but they lived it with the awareness -- never spoken about directly, understood in the way that weather is understood, as a condition of existence -- that they occupied a vulnerable and precarious position in the social order.

For the Zelensky family, this awareness was sharpened by history. Volodymyr Zelensky's paternal grandfather, Semyon Ivanovych Zelensky, had served in the Red Army during the Second World War, rising to the rank of colonel. He was one of four brothers. Three of them were killed in the Holocaust. The family came from the region around Kryvyi Rih, and the killing -- the mass shootings that the Einsatzgruppen carried out across Ukraine in 1941 and 1942, before the industrial extermination camps were even built -- happened close to home. This was not ancient history passed down through books. It was family history, carried in the specific silence of a grandfather who had survived what his brothers had not, in a country that did not acknowledge the particular suffering of Jews in a war it commemorated obsessively as the Great Patriotic War.

The boy who grew up in this household -- in a khrushchyovka apartment in the Saksahansky district of Kryvyi Rih, with a father who was an intellectual, a mother who was an engineer, a grandfather who was a war hero with three dead brothers, and a nationality line in the family's passports that marked them as different from their neighbors -- absorbed all of this. He absorbed it in the way that children absorb the conditions of their upbringing: not as information, but as atmosphere, as the texture of daily reality, as the things that are said and the things that are not said and the silence that separates them.

The language of the household was Russian. This requires its own paragraph of explanation, because the language question in Ukraine is not a question of preference. It is a question of history, identity, and political allegiance that has shaped every major conflict in the country's modern existence, including the one Zelensky would eventually lead.

Ukraine in the Soviet period was officially bilingual, but the reality was more complex. Russian was the language of power -- of Moscow, of the central government, of the military, of science, of prestige. Ukrainian was the language of the countryside, of the western regions, of cultural identity, of resistance to Russification. In cities like Kryvyi Rih -- industrial, eastern, heavily Russified -- the overwhelming majority of the population spoke Russian at home, at work, and in daily life. Ukrainian existed in schools as a required subject, in official signage, in the performative bilingualism of a Soviet republic that was supposed to have its own national character while being absorbed into the larger Soviet whole. But in the private sphere, in the kitchen, in the family, in the language of emotion and intimacy and argument and love -- Russian was the language of Kryvyi Rih.

The Zelensky family was no exception. Volodymyr grew up speaking Russian as his mother tongue. He would learn Ukrainian later, as a second language, and would speak it throughout his political career with an accent and occasional grammatical constructions that marked him, unmistakably, as a Russian speaker. This fact -- which in any other country would be a minor biographical detail, the equivalent of noting that a British prime minister grew up speaking a regional dialect -- became, in the context of Ukraine's political evolution and the war that Russia would launch in 2022 under the pretext of defending Russian speakers, one of the most consequential details of his life.

A Russian-speaking Jew from an industrial city in central Ukraine. This is who Volodymyr Zelensky was before he was anything else. Before the comedy, before the television, before the presidency, before the war, before the world learned his name. He was a boy from Kryvyi Rih whose family spoke Russian, whose grandfather's brothers were murdered in the Holocaust, whose father was a professor in a city of miners, and whose nationality line said "Jewish" in a country where that word meant something specific and heavy and never entirely safe.

The apartment where he grew up was small -- Soviet apartments were, by design, small -- and the building was unremarkable, one among hundreds of identical structures in the Saksahansky district. But the interior life of the family was richer than the architecture suggested. Oleksandr Zelensky's academic work in computer science placed the family in contact with a world of ideas that most Kryvyi Rih families did not access. The books in the apartment. The conversations at the kitchen table. The understanding, transmitted from parents to child without ever being stated as a formal lesson, that intelligence was a form of capital, that the ability to think clearly and express yourself well was a tool more valuable than any physical skill, that words -- chosen carefully, deployed precisely -- could do things that muscle could not.

This understanding would prove to be the most important inheritance of Zelensky's childhood. Not the Jewish identity, though that would matter enormously. Not the Russian language, though that would become a political fact of overwhelming significance. Not the industrial city's ethic of hard work, though that would sustain him through years of grueling effort. The most important thing Kryvyi Rih gave Volodymyr Zelensky was the conviction -- absorbed in a professor's household, in a city where most people's power ended at the factory gate -- that the ability to communicate was itself a form of power.

He discovered this early. As a child, Zelensky was -- by every account, including his own -- a performer. Not a quiet, studious child in his father's mold, but an energetic, charismatic boy who was always the center of attention, always telling stories, always making people laugh. In a khrushchyovka courtyard in Kryvyi Rih, surrounded by the children of miners and factory workers, the son of the professor was the one who could hold the group's attention. He could make them listen. He could make them laugh. He could, by the sheer force of his personality and his instinct for what an audience wanted to hear, make himself the most important person in any group he entered.

This was not an accident. It was not simply a gift of temperament, though temperament played its part. It was a practiced skill -- the ability to read a room, to calibrate your performance to your audience, to understand what people needed and to give it to them in a form they could receive. Zelensky developed this skill in the courtyards of Kryvyi Rih the way other boys in the city developed their skills underground or on the factory floor: through practice, through repetition, through the feedback loop of success and failure in front of an audience that did not care about your intentions, only about your results.

The city itself was his first stage. And the city was hard. Kryvyi Rih in the 1980s was not a place that rewarded softness. It was a place of industrial discipline, of Soviet conformity, of long winters and hot summers and air that tasted like iron. The courtyards between the apartment blocks -- the shared outdoor spaces where children played and adults smoked and argued and drank -- were governed by the informal hierarchies of any urban working-class community: physical toughness, social standing, the ability to hold your own in an argument or a fight. A Jewish professor's son who couldn't fight and didn't want to had exactly one option for survival in those courtyards: be funny. Be so funny that the boys who might otherwise single you out for being different -- for being Jewish, for being the professor's kid, for being small -- decide instead that you are valuable, that you are entertaining, that you are worth keeping around.

Humor as survival strategy. Humor as social currency. Humor as the mechanism by which a vulnerable boy transforms his vulnerability into power. This is the first chapter of the Zelensky story, and it is a chapter that the world would not fully understand until February 2022, when a comedian who had learned in the courtyards of Kryvyi Rih how to hold an audience turned that skill to the task of holding a nation together, and then holding a coalition together, and then holding the attention of the entire world while his country burned.

But that is getting ahead of the story. In the 1980s, the story is a boy in a khrushchyovka courtyard, learning that words are weapons, that laughter is a shield, and that the person who controls the room is the person who controls the story.

The Soviet Union was dying, though the boy did not know it yet. The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 -- which occurred at a reactor roughly 450 kilometers north of Kryvyi Rih -- was the first crack in the facade that was visible even to an eight-year-old. Not because the radiation reached Kryvyi Rih in dangerous concentrations, though fears were widespread and the Soviet government's lies about the disaster's severity were eventually exposed. But because Chernobyl was the moment at which the distance between what the state said and what was actually true became too large for even the most compliant citizen to ignore. The state said everything was fine. The state was lying. Everyone knew the state was lying. The state knew everyone knew the state was lying. And everyone continued to act as though the state's words had some relationship to reality, because the alternative -- acknowledging that the entire system was built on a foundation of official falsehood -- was too frightening to contemplate.

This experience -- of living inside a system in which the gap between official language and actual reality was so vast that navigating it required a particular kind of intelligence, a mordant kind of humor, a double consciousness -- shaped the Zelensky generation in ways that no Western biography has adequately captured. These were children who grew up understanding, at a level deeper than ideology, that words and reality were separate domains, and that the people who survived and thrived were the people who could operate in both simultaneously. The people who could say one thing and mean another. The people who could decode the gap between what was said and what was meant. The people who understood that all communication was, in some sense, performance.

This is the cognitive environment that produced Volodymyr Zelensky. And it is the environment that would eventually make him -- of all things, of all the possible outcomes for a Jewish professor's son from an iron-ore city in the Soviet steppe -- a comedian.

The fall of the Soviet Union arrived in Kryvyi Rih not as liberation but as collapse. When the USSR formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, Volodymyr Zelensky was thirteen years old -- old enough to understand what was happening, young enough to have his entire adolescence shaped by its consequences.

The consequences, in Kryvyi Rih, were severe. The iron ore industry that had sustained the city for a century was thrown into chaos. The planned economy that had guaranteed employment, however inefficiently, was replaced overnight by a market economy that nobody understood and that functioned, in its early years, as a license for the strong to take everything from the weak. Factories closed. Mines reduced their workforces. The social safety net -- the Soviet system of subsidized housing, guaranteed employment, free healthcare, and cheap food that had made life in Kryvyi Rih tolerable if not comfortable -- disintegrated.

What replaced it was the specific nightmare of post-Soviet transition: inflation that wiped out savings overnight, privatization schemes that transferred state assets to a new class of oligarchs, organized crime that filled the vacuum left by state authority, and a pervasive sense of disorder and insecurity that affected every aspect of daily life. In Kryvyi Rih, the iron ore mines -- which under the Soviet system had been state property, operated for the benefit of the state, with the profits (such as they were) distributed through the apparatus of central planning -- became prizes in a violent competition among newly minted businessmen, many of whom were indistinguishable from gangsters.

The privatization of Ukraine's industrial assets in the 1990s was one of the great thefts of modern history. In Kryvyi Rih, the process was particularly stark. The mines and metallurgical plants that had employed hundreds of thousands of people became the personal property of a handful of men who had positioned themselves at the intersection of state authority and private capital. The most prominent of these was Rinat Akhmetov, who would become Ukraine's wealthiest oligarch, but the pattern repeated itself across the city and across the country: state assets, built with public money over decades, were transferred to private hands for fractions of their value, through mechanisms that ranged from the technically legal to the blatantly corrupt.

The teenager Volodymyr Zelensky watched this happen. His family was not among the winners. Oleksandr Zelensky continued to teach at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, but a professor's salary in post-Soviet Ukraine was a cruel joke -- sometimes paid months late, sometimes not paid at all, always insufficient to keep pace with inflation that reduced its value daily. The family survived, as millions of Ukrainian families survived, through a combination of resourcefulness, informal economic activity, and the kind of quiet endurance that does not make for dramatic biography but that constitutes the actual lived experience of post-Soviet transition.

The boy who had learned to perform in the courtyards of a Soviet city was now learning a second lesson: that the systems you depend on can collapse, that the guarantees you've been given can evaporate, that the people who end up on top are not necessarily the most talented or the most deserving but the most ruthless, and that the contradiction between what a society says about itself and what it actually is can be not just large but obscene.

This lesson would reappear, transformed, in almost everything Zelensky later created and everything he later did. His comedy would be built on the gap between pretense and reality. His television show would be built on the gap between what politicians say and what they do. His presidential campaign would be built on the promise to close that gap. And his wartime leadership would be defined by the moment at which he chose to close it himself -- to be, for once, exactly what he appeared to be, to make his words and his actions the same thing, to stay when every rational calculation said he should go.

But first, he had to get out of Kryvyi Rih.

For a bright, ambitious, performatively gifted teenager in 1990s Ukraine, the path out of an industrial city was not obvious. The traditional routes -- university in Kyiv or Kharkiv, a career in one of the prestige professions -- were available but unappealing to a boy whose talents were not academic. Zelensky enrolled in the law faculty at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, his father's institution, and eventually completed a degree. He never practiced law. The degree was a concession to parental expectations and post-Soviet practicality -- you got a degree because you got a degree, because having credentials was better than not having credentials, even if the credentials bore no relationship to what you actually intended to do with your life.

What Zelensky intended to do with his life had become clear to him by the time he was fifteen. He wanted to perform. Specifically, he wanted to do KVN.

KVN -- the Russian acronym for Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh, the Club of the Funny and Inventive -- was a Soviet and post-Soviet television institution, a comedy competition that was to the Russian-speaking world what Saturday Night Live was to America, except more popular, more culturally central, and more dependent on improvisational skill. Teams from universities and cities across the former Soviet Union competed in a televised tournament of sketch comedy, improv, and musical parody. The show was performed in Russian, broadcast across the former Soviet space, and watched by tens of millions of people. For a young comedian in Ukraine in the 1990s, KVN was the only game in town.

Zelensky threw himself into it. He joined the Kryvyi Rih KVN team as a teenager and quickly became its most prominent member. His gifts -- the quickness, the timing, the ability to read an audience, the physical energy, the specific charisma that made audiences want to watch him even when other performers were technically more skilled -- were immediately apparent. KVN rewarded exactly the skills Zelensky had been developing since the courtyards of his childhood: the ability to think fast, to improvise under pressure, to connect with an audience through humor, and to do it all in front of a camera.

The Kryvyi Rih team merged with the Zaporizhzhia team to compete as Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit -- "ZKR-Transit" in the KVN shorthand -- and the combined squad won the KVN Major League championship in 1997, sharing the title with an Armenian team. That same year, Zelensky and a group of fellow Transit members formed their own KVN team, which made its official debut at the Sochi festival in 1998. They named it Kvartal 95 -- Quarter 95, after their neighborhood in Kryvyi Rih, the residential micro-district of khrushchyovka apartment blocks where Zelensky had grown up. The name would follow him for the rest of his life: from KVN team to production company (Studio Kvartal 95 was incorporated in September 2003) to political empire. It was a name rooted in a place, a neighborhood, an iron-ore-city courtyard. It announced, from the beginning, that wherever Zelensky went and whatever he became, he carried Kryvyi Rih with him.

The power thesis begins here, in the iron city, in the courtyard, in the gap between what the Soviet Union said it was and what it actually was, in the space between a professor's ambitions for his son and the son's own understanding of where his real power lay. Volodymyr Zelensky learned, before he learned anything else, that the person who controls the story controls the room. He learned it in Russian, in a Jewish family, in a dying empire, in an industrial city built on iron ore and organized around the extraction of wealth from the earth.

He would spend the next twenty years refining that lesson into an art form.

He would spend the twenty years after that applying it to the exercise of political power in the most consequential circumstances imaginable.

The iron city made him. Understanding it is the beginning of understanding everything that followed.