Crueler Than Fiction
How Volodymyr Zelenskyy's TV portrayal of an honest, defiant leader became his blueprint for a real one.
This piece is by Mariel Ferragamo, a journalist based in Washington, DC. She covers a range of topics on culture and foreign affairs.
“Do I look like a comedian?” The question, posed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is steeped in mischievous irony. He’s speaking to his minister of infrastructure, who’d just asked if Zelenskyy was “serious” about the billion-dollar budget he’s been given to repair Ukraine’s dilapidated roads, hoping to skim some off the top. “Yes,” the minister retorted, before excusing himself to call his next-in-command and report a smaller number, who did the same to his employee, and so on. By the end of it, the construction workers were asked to rebuild roads with no budget, no supplies, and no pay.
Such a moment could have just as easily played out in the Kyiv presidential halls, but this one in particular took place on a television set. The minister of infrastructure is not, in fact, in charge of Ukraine’s bridges and highways, but is an actor pretending to be. Zelenskyy, too, is an actor at this point, and has not yet assumed the presidency. The scene plays out in what became a highly popular political satire show, Servant of the People. In it, the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, plays an ordinary man who stumbled into the presidency–not unlike the way it played out in real life a few years later.
Zelenskyy’s character was a humble history teacher, Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko. After one of his students secretly filmed and posted a video of him on a colorful tirade to a colleague about the country’s leadership–”Who’s there to vote for?! It’s always the lesser of two assholes!”–it went viral and ushered him to the very office he was criticizing.
Servant is lighter than Scandal, more potent than Parks and Recreation, but not as scathing as Veep. Undergirding its satire is more a pointed commentary on Ukrainian politics than the others offered on the United States, however. What began as a populist critique of corruption evolved into a political reality, taking on an added tone of urgency as it transitioned from satire to real-life dystopia.
November will mark ten years since the show began airing. Servant of the People has since become one of the most significant time capsules on TV. Viewers who now only remember a beleaguered country and its weary president besieged by bloody war can watch a once-vivid land and its spry leader in a comparatively symmetrical world.
Ukraine has faced staunch criticism from its people for its string of corrupt leaders since its independence in 1991. The TV show flipped that script by asking what Ukraine would look like if the person seemingly least after status or wealth in the country took the helm. “Have a simple teacher live like a president, and a president live like a teacher!” Goloborodko exclaimed.
Complete with cold opens of oligarchs playing Monopoly with real Ukrainian landmarks, the show’s tongue-in-cheek humor isn’t roundabout about the government’s problems. Dropped right into the mania, Goloborodko is swimming upstream against officials accustomed to having votes–and money–flow right to their pockets. However, he immediately spurns the perks of presidential life and encourages those around him to do the same.
In 2019, the real-life Zelenskyy began a presidential campaign and a party with the same name as the title sequence, and won with a sweeping 73 percent of the vote. Servant became more than a satire, but a first draft of a new, more hopeful reality.
Zelenskyy’s acted presidency and his real-life one bear uncanny resemblance: Goloborodko opts to take the bus over the troupe of black magisterial sedans and remains living in his parents’ meager flat rather than an executive mansion. Zelenskyy is known to be similarly modest. His character’s first presidential speech has a striking resemblance to what he would say a few years later in real life. Goloborodko’s advisors prodded him into reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as his own, but the former history teacher could not bring himself to do so. He sets aside his approved talking points and starts speaking his mind, scorning the country’s inequalities with a brutal exposition of corruption.
“Please explain why I, as an average voter with a history teacher’s salary, can’t afford a fifty-year-old prefab flat when you, my subordinates, live in luxury mansions? Don’t you think that’s weird, or am I the only one who sees the anomaly? You’re public servants indeed!”
Looking out over his students embedded in the crowd, he said, “One should act in a way that doesn’t evoke shame when looking into children’s eyes... This is what I promise you, the people of Ukraine.”
His approach to appealing to the country is much like Zelenskyy’s today, of honest, direct messaging and shirking the pretentiousness of commander-in-chiefdom to appeal to the people’s persona, and similarly, evoking the Ukrainian children’s point of view.
“After my election victory, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelenskyy is the President … So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true,” Zelenskyy said in his 2019 inaugural address. “Because each of us is the President…It hasn’t been only me who has just taken the oath. Each of us has just put his hand on the Constitution and swore allegiance to Ukraine.”
Watching Servant ten years later comes with the disconcerting omnipotence that 2015 Zelenskyy or even 2019 Zelenskyy did not have. Twinges of sadness ring out between the self-deprecating jokes that weren’t there when they were filmed. What began as art imitating life turned into life imitating art, though the real-life events have far outpaced the scripted ones.
The show’s title sequence weaves in B-roll of Ukrainian landscapes as it follows Zelenskyy biking to work, clothespin nipping his pant leg and all. The stretches of forests, skyscrapers dotting the skyline, trains rumbling across the screen, and historical architecture feel strikingly normal. But watching today, with the lens of a horrific war unfolding, feels eerily tragic. Ten years later, Ukraine’s buildings are singed black and crumbling, the skies are gray with ash and smoke, and debris is strewn across the ground.
For Ukrainians today, bombings are a common occurrence. This year alone, Russia averaged 120–185 strikes on Ukraine per day. Many residents, like Anna Borysova, who works as a humanitarian officer in Kyiv, describe the sounds of shelling, air raid sirens, and military action routinely filling the air through the night. “People who live their daily life now understand they live in a war. Every night could be one with shelling, or it could be calm.” When we spoke on the phone last month, it was luckily one of those quiet nights. But in some places where she works, like Zazyphoyizia, shelling happens routinely; her team there sleeps only an hour or two a night.
Even unluckier ones, like Liubov Marchenko, a resident of Mykolaivka in the Donetsk region, have been woken up to strikes shattering the windows and damaging their homes. “There was a scream. I got up, the windows flew out, something flew past me, I thought it was a shell,” she recounted during a strike last September. “I was shaken. The house was full of smoke.”
As Ukraine closes in on four years at war, the country has lost more than 14,000 civilians, and estimates of between 60,000 and 100,000 personnel. CARE International estimates that 14.6 million people need aid in Ukraine, and at least 2.6 million have been displaced, fleeing the conflict. Russian drones and strikes have not discriminated, decimating energy infrastructure, schools, homes, and children’s playgrounds. “Mariupol used to be a beautiful city,” Yevhen Tusov, native of the once-vibrant metropolis, said. “Now, there’s just rubble left of it.” Nationwide, reconstruction efforts are estimated at $524 billion.
Borysova said that life in the small town of Sumy, where she is from, just forty kilometers from the Russian border, has completely changed. “People need hygiene kits, they need food, they need fuel,” she told me. Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of humanitarian nonprofit Hope for Ukraine, also works in communities just shy from the border. Three and a half years later, “nobody was thinking that we would still be doing emergency response,” he added. “Right now, delivering aid is still very dangerous.”
Some of the quips in Servant become harder to endure, knowing they sting more viciously in today’s reality. Jokes about Goloborodko’s safety as leader are agonizing now that Zelenskyy is staring death in the face. A bit in which he gets a call about Ukraine being accepted into the European Union, only to find out it was a mistake, feels cruel to watch today given that ten years later, Ukraine is still desperately vying for the same outcome. Still far from reach, the real Zelenskyy is repeating the same lines about EU accession three years into having applied: “We are fighting for our freedom, for our land. We are fighting to be equal members of Europe.”
Anton Kuchukhidze, cofounder of the Kyiv-based think tank United Ukraine, said that since the war has broken out, he’s seen EU partners “drastically change” their understanding of the threat of Russia to Ukraine and Western allies, and have increased support. To date, EU membership, however, remains elusive.
Kyiv’s aggressor, Russia, is never overtly brought into the TV show, but its presence looms over the entire series. The dialogue is mainly in Russian, and Goloborodko and his colleagues make jabs at Vladimir Putin, from the watch he wears to comparing him to certain body parts. His signature tactic to get the attention of bickering parliamentarians and angry protestors is to yell, “Putin has been deposed!”
The Russian leader, famously not fond of satire, has never commented on the show publicly, but Russian television channels with ties to the state have tellingly pulled the show from the air. He has, however, questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy as a leader, calling him a “toxic figure” and saying there was “no chance” he’d win reelection.
Kuchukhidze said that the warning signs of Russia’s invasion were evident long before 2022 or even 2015, coincidentally both when Servant began running and around the same time he entered the policy world.
“I have not only a professional vision, but I also have the personal observer experience of Russian aggression since 1993.” Kuchukhidze was three years old when he could first recall Russia posturing its military aggression toward post-Soviet states, including Ukraine, and where he grew up, in Georgia. Now, he lives in Kyiv, where “all people who live in the circumstances of war have some impact from the war, from shelling, from bombing,” he said.
Today, in Russian-occupied cities in Ukraine, citizens live in fear of Russian surveillance. The entire country is rife with Russian propaganda, but the Ukrainian identity and efforts to combat it persist stronger than ever, Kuchukhidze said. “Ukrainians, even at the level of blood, they have bravery, they have unity, they have power.” Our interview was cut short as Kuchukhidze told me he heard warning sirens of an impending raid and had to take shelter midway through.
In Kherson, which falls in occupied territory, Borysova remembers distributing aid to an apartment complex that once fit 100 families and now has only 10 living there today. “I asked the complex manager, ‘Why do you stay here? It’s dangerous.’ We were distributing aid under shelling. And she answered. ‘If everyone leaves the city, where will Ukraine be? Ukraine is not territory, it’s people.’”
Borysova feels this compulsion herself. “Almost every day, I ask myself the question, is it worth it to stay here and continue my work and let my daughter stay here under shelling and stress?” she told me. “It should be my priority as a mother [to leave]. But also I have my priority as a Ukrainian to all the Ukrainians who live here.”
Zelenskyy, for his part, has hewed to this Ukrainian mythos of unity, sincerity, and anti-elitism, as he governs during Ukraine’s most challenging moment—with all its old problems he once made light of on TV, too. Corruption has been rampant in the Ukrainian presidency. A scene like the one with the minister of infrastructure scheming to embezzle public funds was not drawn up out of thin air.
But Goloborodko did not tolerate the graft–firing the minister and many of his counterparts–and neither did Zelenskyy. The president sacked dozens of his own officials since taking office over corruption allegations, and has struggled to launch effective anti-corruption measures, stating that the country’s agencies need to be stripped of “Russian influence.”
Zelenskyy relies on honest messaging, appealing to the people as one of the people, perfectly in tune with his role in Servant. When the war broke out, the Ukrainian leader rebuffed comforts. Just like his character passed up a luxurious living situation, Zelenskyy was living in a spartan room offshooting his office, so he could be ready to respond to whatever updates came through. Only a bed, sink, and a few simple furnishings, enough to get through the day until the next.
Famously, Zelenskyy’s closet is mostly stocked with military clothes. He took off his suit for good when Russia invaded in a mark of solidarity with those on the frontlines, and hasn’t put one back on since. He keeps a select few suits in his office-turned-bedroom, taking one out of its protective plastic sheath to show journalist Dmytro Komarov in the documentary “Year,” which chronicles the first year of the war. “This is a symbol,” Zelenskyy said. “We will win soon, so we will wear suits again.” By wearing military attire, Zelenskyy is making a statement to his people and the world that life in Ukraine is not normal; dressing otherwise would be a disservice to his country.
In one scene in the show, Goloborodko’s cabinet, unbeknownst to him, fakes a meteor hurtling toward Ukraine to distract from controversial reforms. On the steps outside his office, Goloborodko’s foreign minister swerves up in his car, gets out, and says,” You’re still here?! I thought you’d fled the country!” The president’s reply, aghast, was simply, “Where to?”
Watching this scene ten years later, one can’t help but think of his address to the country on February 24, 2022. A few hours after Russia invaded, Zelenskyy filmed a video on his smartphone from the shadowy streets of Kyiv. His message is simple, but cogent: Ukraine’s leaders are with its people. “The leader of the party is here, the head of the presidential administration is here,” he begins, pointing to the men in the shot behind him. “The president is here,” referring to himself. “We are all here.”
His daily “selfie” videos became a tactic that Zelenskyy employed in a series of his own, by showing the world the real toll on the landscape behind him and demonstrating that he truly was there to stay. No teleprompters, no official government branding, nothing fancier than streetlamps providing light for his phone camera. While the Zelenskyy government wasn’t perfect at the beginning, Boyechko said, his biggest strength is this communication. “He gets every day in front of the people and records a message, religiously for three plus years,” which speaks volumes for Ukrainians. “They understand that he did not abandon them.”
Ukrainians are largely not optimistic about a “happy end” in the coming months, (let alone a twenty-four-hour resolution), Borysova said. At the time of writing, Russia is seemingly reinvigorating its campaign, targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and now sending drones to neighboring European countries like Poland and Romania. Boyechko expects this will be the hardest few months yet, as energy infrastructure continues to be pummeled and drone warfare only ratchets up. “If they survive through this winter, that’s going to be a miracle, as far as I see it.”
All of the Ukrainians I spoke to told me some version of how this war is bigger than Ukraine alone. The best hope for Ukraine, Borysova added, is understanding their fight is a global one in the name of democracy, and to “keep talking” about Ukraine so it doesn’t get forgotten.
Zelenskyy, both as Goloborodko and himself, has never relented in that fight. But whether on the TV set, the UN dais, or the streets of Kyiv, he’s never made it about the spotlight he’s been given, casting it instead toward his country. “I’m not iconic,” he said. “Ukraine is iconic.”