From comedian to wartime leader – the inside story on Zelensky

The Zelensky Story ★★★★
Tuesday, SBS, 8.30pm

There are few, if any, major world leaders of whom it can be said that high-quality publicly available footage exists of them sitting on a toilet. But such is the shot that opens episode one of The Zelensky Story, a documentary tracing the strange and unlikely rise of Volodymyr Zelensky, comedian turned Ukrainian president.

Volodymyr Zelensky in The Zelensky Story: His popularity had been growing for years.Credit: SBS

The toilet scene is taken from the Ukrainian TV comedy Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played an ordinary man who finds himself unexpectedly elevated to the position of president. The parallels are quite clear, and some might even call them eerie, except for the fact that Zelensky’s real-life presidency, while not what anyone would have predicted early in his career, was by no means accidental: as the show illustrates, his election in 2019 was the culmination of a groundswell of popularity that had been growing for years, from even before Servant of the People gave the Ukrainian public a taste of how statesmanlike Zelensky could be when he got in front of the camera and spoke heartfelt lines about freedom and democracy.

It is indeed a weird and wonderful saga that unfolds in this program, with footage of Zelensky as a young man performing comedy with friends and colleagues, whose reminiscences of their time working with him form a key part of the talking-heads sections of the show. Admittedly, the performances we see lose a little in the translation, but the Russian and Ukrainian audiences lap it up – including Vladimir Putin himself, who back in the day attended recordings of the popular Russian comedy competition show KVN, on which Zelensky’s gang were top dogs. (There is, incidentally, a minor point to be made out of Putin’s ostentatious attendance at the shows, about how politicians appear on comedy programs to burnish their image – a point that numerous shows here and now could but won’t learn from.)

From the early KVN days, Zelensky went on to become a major movie star in Ukraine and Russia and one of the most popular personalities in both countries. Showbiz started to lean towards politics after 2010, when Putin’s crony Viktor Yanukovych rose to power and turned Ukraine into a kleptocracy, looting the country for the benefit of himself and his pals. After a popular uprising, Yanukovych fled and, coincidentally, Zelensky took on a role as an activist that got a lot of people thinking, including himself.

Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife Olena in The Zelensky Story: Exploring the complexities of the man.Credit: SBS

Zelensky is the main focus of course, but there is another story being told here, running parallel to the Ukrainian president’s: the story of the man seen laughing and clapping at his future enemy’s jokes a few decades back. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred when Zelensky was just a boy, but Putin was a KGB agent devastated by the dissolution of the USSR, an event that set him on course to devote himself to restoring the pride – and if he could have his way, the former territories – of Mother Russia. It’s that determination that led him to lock horns with Zelensky.

The documentary will be revelatory for many Westerners who know of the war in Ukraine and of Zelensky’s former career but have little detail about the background of either war or man. The fact that Zelensky was elected as the anti-war candidate, the one arguing against his opponent’s rhetoric of defiance against Russia, is a fine example of how the program, while taking a consistently pro-Zelensky line, is thorough in exploring the complexities and contradictions of the man.

The interviews with Zelensky himself, and separately with his wife Olena, are similarly enlightening: while he, though undoubtedly sincere and passionate, is very much putting on a performance like the showman he is, she is quiet, hesitant and even rueful. Olena is clearly not as convinced that her husband took the right career path as he is. Her admission that she had a “faint hope” that he would lose the election is a striking moment in a documentary that risks hagiography but avoids it through intelligence and meticulous historical context. The story of the comedian president would be a great yarn in any circumstances: the arrival of war turns it into something deeper and more urgent.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.