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- Herausgeber: Canbury
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
- First major biography of Ukraine's leader written for a Western audience - Topical, up-to-date covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine - 'Start here' book for those interested in the Ukraine war and inspirational leaders
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ZELENSKY
Ukraine’s President and His Country
Steven Derix and Marina Shelkunova
Translated by Brent Annable
Contents
Introduction
Vladimir Putin rarely underestimates his opponent. At the KGB Academy in Leningrad, he learned the meticulous art of profiling ‘targets’ of the service, whether they were Russian dissidents or East German Communist apparatchiks.
Before meeting with anybody, Putin first analyses their strengths and weaknesses. During his first visit to the United States, he wound President George W. Bush around his little finger, with pious tales of his christening in the Russian Orthodox Church. Afterwards, an obviously charmed Bush told of how he had looked into the ‘soul’ of the former KGB officer. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Sochi in 2007 to discuss energy policy, Putin had his black labrador Konni brought in. Merkel – who is terrified of dogs – dared not budge an inch, and Putin dominated the conversation.
Vladimir Putin also carefully considers way he talks about people. The Russian President is only too aware of the political appeal of Alexey Navalny, and will therefore never allow the name of the opposition leader to cross his lips – not even since Navalny’s incarceration in January 2021. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, consistently refers to Navalny as ‘that blogger.’
In April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected as the sixth President of Ukraine, with nearly three-quarters of the vote.
One month later, the Russian President attended the World Economic Forum in St. Petersburg. It had been five years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea but daily skirmishes between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists were still commonplace in eastern Ukraine.
‘Why did you not congratulate Volodymyr Zelenksy when he became President?’ asked the interviewer.
Putin breathed a heavy sigh. The Russian officials and business magnates in the room playfully nudged one another: this was going to be good.
‘You know,’ said Putin, ‘he is still pushing a certain rhetoric. He labels us “enemies” and “aggressors.” Perhaps he should think about what he really wants to achieve, what he wants to do.’
Putin had still not once uttered the name ‘Zelensky.’
‘You are the President of a world power,’ the interviewer fawned, ‘and right now, he is incredibly popular in his country. Both of you could start with a clean slate. Even a small gesture might completely change the course of world history. Why not simply arrange a meeting?’
‘Playing the President’:Volodymyr Zelensky, formerly an actor, became Ukraine’s President in May 2019. Ukraine Government
Putin gave the enormous hall an almost pitying look, and waited until the sniggering from the officials and businesspeople had died down.
‘Did I say “no”?’ replied Putin. With a snide grin, he added: ‘Nobody has invited me.’
‘Are you prepared to meet with him?’
Putin now looked genuinely amused. ‘Listen, I do not know this man. I hope that we can meet one day. As far as I can tell, he’s amazing at what he does, he’s a marvellous actor.’
Laughter and generous applause filled the room.
Putin continued: ‘But seriously: it’s one thing to play a person, but quite another thing to be that person.’
The blue-suited officials knew exactly what Putin meant. The Ukrainian President had started his career as a comic actor and comedian. From 2015-2019, Zelensky was the star of the Ukrainian hit series Servant of the People. He played history teacher Vasyl Holoborodko, who after a long day of teaching launches into a tirade against all of the injustices in Ukraine: corruption, broken election promises, stagnation and poverty, and the tax privileges, dachas, and motorcycle escorts enjoyed by the political class.
A student secretly films Holoborodko’s damning speech, and puts the video online. The tirade goes viral, and the young history teacher – who still lives with his parents – is invited to go into politics. He wins with a landslide victory, becoming the first ever Ukrainian head of state who cycles to work. Holoborodko turns the political world upside-down, steering the country towards a glorious future. The series tapped into a classic populist theme, that of the political outsider who makes short work of the ‘old regime.’ In 2019, the final season of Servant of the People blended seamlessly into a slick election campaign for the soon-to-be President. Servant of the People (Sluha Narodu) became the name of Zelensky’s political party, which won an absolute majority later that year in the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Putin was right about one thing: until that time, Zelensky had only ever played the President.
The former showman was now placed at the helm of a bankrupt country – a nation at war with a political and administrative system that was corrupt to the core. In the 30 years of independence since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had been unable to disentangle itself from the chaos that gripped the country in 1991. Zelensky promised to solve all the problems within a single, five-year term.
Many thought that he would fail. Within months of his election, Zelensky’s reform programme had ground to a halt, resulting in a life-and-death battle with the all-powerful oligarchs. To survive within the Ukrainian House of Cards, Zelensky resorted to unconventional means. Human rights organisations expressed concern for his autocratic tendencies. Ukrainian patriots feared that the new President would sell out Crimea and the Donbas to secure peace with Moscow. The Public Prosecutor’s Office in the Netherlands was outraged when Zelensky exchanged a key witness with Russia during the investigation into the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.
In September 2019, Zelensky became unwittingly embroiled in a scandal surrounding the potential abuse of powers by the American President, Donald Trump.
During a telephone conversation on 25th July, Trump supposedly put pressure on Zelensky to launch a criminal investigation against Trump’s opponent in the imminent presidential elections, Joe Biden. According to unfounded rumours circulating in Trumpland, while working as Vice-President under Barack Obama, Biden had insisted on the dismissal of Ukraine’s Prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, in order to suppress an investigation into his son, Hunter Biden and his employer, the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
During his telephone conversation with Zelensky, Trump denied any wrongdoing. As proof, the White House published a transcript of the conversation between the two Presidents.
Zelensky came across as a spineless sycophant. ‘We are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country,’ the Ukrainian President said, parroting Trump’s own election slogan. ‘We brought in many, many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government. You are a great teacher for us.’
The Russian state television service – under the Kremlin’s control – branded Zelensky a clown. In the summer of 2021, during a major press conference held for the Russian people (broadcast under the title of A Direct Line with Vladimir Putin), Putin was asked whether he would now be prepared to meet with Zelensky. Putin replied that it would be of no use whatsoever, since Zelensky had ‘placed the governance of his country squarely in international hands. It is not Kyiv that calls the shots in Ukraine, but Washington.’
It is altogether possible that Putin really believed what he said.
On 24th February 2022, Putin launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Russian troops attacked on four fronts, tanks advanced on Kyiv. Once Zelensky and his government were eradicated, the rest of Ukraine would quickly fall back in line with Russia – or so the Kremlin thought.
But Putin’s Blitzkrieg proved to be a misstep. After a month of fighting, many Russian soldiers had perished and Moscow had failed to take a major Ukrainian city. In the areas that Russia had managed to occupy, including traditionally Russian-speaking Kherson and Melitopol, Ukrainians took to the streets with blue-and-yellow flags. Kharkiv, the city on the Russian border where pro-Russian separatists had demonstrated in 2014, fought tooth and nail to defend itself against the aggressor.
On day two of the Ukrainian war, Vladimir Putin addressed the Ukrainian armed forces directly in a television broadcast. The Russian President looked pale and his tone was bleak. ‘Do not allow neo-Nazis to use your children, women and elderly as human shields,’ he said. ‘Take matters into your own hands. I believe that we can come to an agreement with you more easily than with that mob of junkies and neo-Nazis that has taken control in Kyiv, and who are holding the entire Ukrainian people hostage.’
Exactly why Putin thought that anyone in the Ukrainian military would listen to what he had to say is a question for future historians of the greatest war in Europe since 1945.
What is certain is the fact that Putin underestimated both Zelensky and the entire Ukrainian people. On the night when Putin addressed the Ukrainian army, Zelensky recorded a brief video message in the heart of Kyiv. The Ukrainian President was dressed in military green, surrounded by members of his Cabinet. ‘Good evening everybody,’ said Zelensky. ‘The President is here. Our armed forces are here, along with our whole society. We will defend our independence, our nation. Long live Ukraine!’
1. Al Pacino
Mariana and Yana, aged 17 and 18, have already managed to catch a glimpse of their heroes at a bar in the heart of Kharkiv. After loitering for some time outside the changing rooms to no avail, they finally decide just to sit down in the auditorium. Front-row centre, the best seats in the house.
The date is 10th September 2002, and Ukraine – like so many other countries – is in the midst of the internet explosion. By the end of the year, around 2.5 million of the country’s 48 million inhabitants will be online. Mariana Belei is an early adopter, and writes gushing reviews of performances by her favourite team of comedians, who are led by a young Jewish man from the provincial town of Kryvyi Rih. Mariana is not alone in her pursuit: teenage girls all throughout Ukraine and Russia are writing page after page, blog after blog, on Volodymyr Zelensky.
Mariana and her friend wait in anticipation for a full 40 minutes. Finally the music starts, followed by eager applause. Afterwards she writes: ‘Everybody’s favourite, “Vova” Zelensky appeared on stage, and the show could begin.’
By that time, Mariana already knows the show inside out. Kvartal 95 has performed it in her home town three times. They deploy well-known sketches, such as the ‘Spanish dance,’ ‘the manipulative therapist’ and ‘the actor.’ The skits are highly physical, slapstick routines, and the actors tumble across the stage in black t-shirts and black leather pants.
The radiant linchpin and leader of the group is a lean young man with pitch-black hair, chiselled face, and a husky bass voice that is incongruous with his slight build. At first glance, Volodymyr Zelensky bears a likeness to the young Al Pacino, and his facial expressions occasionally resemble those of Rowan Atkinson, the comedian behind Mr Bean.
Kvartal 95’s humour is well-tailored to public sensibilities. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the values of the utopian socialist state had crumbled, but the new liberal society was still in its infancy. While the whole country was happily firing heated criticism at its administration, sex was still taboo as a topic. Any such allusions made by Zelensky always brought the room to its knees.
‘We laughed, laughed, and laughed again,’ wrote Mariana in her online review. ‘But then the final song came… the room erupted into thunderous applause.’
The 24-year-old young man on stage, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky, comes from a line of assimilated Jews. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his grandfather Semyon Zelensky left for the front with his three brothers. Of the four, only Captain Semyon returned – wounded – to Kryvyi Rih. Semyon’s parents had died when the Nazis burned their village to the ground.
After winning the presidential election, Zelensky was frequently asked about his Jewish heritage. He politely brushed the questions aside. ‘We were a completely ordinary Soviet-Jewish family,’ he said in an interview with the Times of Israel in 2020. ‘Most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious.’
Zelensky’s parents were typical representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia. Zelensky’s father, Oleksander, was a mathematician, and his mother Rymma worked as an engineer until she retired due to health reasons.
The family had one son: Volodymyr. In the early 1980s, the Zelenskys moved to Mongolia, where Oleksander took charge of a mining company. Rymma could not adapt to the harsh climate, with its scorching summers and ice-cold winters, and after four years returned to Kryvyi Rih with Volodymyr, leaving her husband behind. ‘My father worked in Mongolia for nearly 20 years,’ Zelensky later said. ‘He gave Mongolia everything: his health, intellect, and the most important thing: time. Time he could have spent with me.’
Rymma and Volodymyr moved into a modest Soviet flat in the centre of Kryvyi Rih. Black-and-white photos from that period reveal an adorable little boy, with dark eyes and long black eyelashes. In one such photo, Rymma holds him up proudly on one arm. It is clear that the apple did not fall far from the tree.
Volodymyr was raised by his mother and grandmother. ‘My mother still calls me every day,’ Zelensky once said. And Vova always picks up. If he doesn’t, Rymma will simply give him another call – or 10.
Zelensky’s industrial home town does not have a rich cultural history. Kryvyi Rih literally means ‘crooked horn’ and refers to the sharp turn made by the Inhulets river as it meanders through the steppe before feeding into the mighty Dnipro. The first known written reference to Kryvyi Rih is in a document from 1739, which described it as a cluster of villages and winter camps belonging to the Cossacks, who then ruled the steppes. In the late-18th Century, the Russian Empire colonised southern Ukraine and the Black Sea region. After the sixth Russo-Turkish war (1768-1774), the Russian authorities funded an outpost in Kryvyi Rih. By the mid-19th Century it had grown into a military settlement, but was still far from a flourishing city.
The discovery of large iron-ore deposits changed all that, and transformed the Crooked Horn into the Kryvbas – one of the Soviet Union’s largest industrial regions along with the Donbas in eastern Ukraine and the Kuzbas in Siberia. Mines and smelting furnaces were built along the vast underground iron veins, and were soon accompanied by workers’ homes. Modern-day Kryvyi Rih stretches out for nearly 50km, with endless ribbon development filling the gaps between the smokestacks and mineshafts.
Volodymyr Zelensky remembers the Kryvyi Rih of his youth as a sombre place. The large-scale extraction of iron ore from open mines filled the air with a red dust that clung to the lips and clogged the throat. Whenever it rained, the puddles on the asphalt turned blood-red. The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the planned economy ushered in the demise of heavy industry, giving free reign to the black market, and rampant violence.
Iron ore was not the only thing that left red stains on the asphalt. From the late 80s, Kryvyi Rih was ravaged by youth gangs, known locally as ‘runners.’ The runners were regionally organised around streets and districts (kvartaly) and bore odd names such as ‘the Bulls,’ ‘the Horses,’ ‘the Ninth,’ ‘For Nothing,’ and even ‘the Cabbage Rolls’ – a favourite dish of Ukraine and Russia. The gangs ‘raided’ the territories of rival gangs, got into brawls, shot at one another using home-made guns, and extorted money from their peers in exchange for ‘protection.’ This was not organised crime as such. The fights were really a form of exaggerated hooliganism, and introduced some action into the youths’ otherwise poor and mind-numbing existence. But they could be fatal. In an investigative piece on the runners in 2020, journalist Samuil Proskuryakov drew a comparison with the senseless violence in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. In the roughly 10-year period that the runners ruled Kryvyi Rih, 28 teenagers and one police officer lost their lives. The youngest victim was 13 years old.
In the early 90s, Kryvyi Rih was not only a leader in youth crime: local mafia bosses had built up such a strong position that the city became known as the ‘Ukrainian Palermo.’ The Communist state-run businesses were managed either by shrewd young men who had gambled by taking out big loans, or by bandits who had eliminated the competition through intimidation and violence. Sometimes the line between entrepreneurs and mafia bosses in Kryvyi Rih was blurred: even ‘honest’ businesspeople surrounded themselves with thugs carrying AK-47s.
Luckily for an only child without a father, Volodymyr Zelensky lived in one of the greener central neighbourhoods, Kvartal 95, which was home to the intelligentsia and where the air was cleaner than in the outer suburbs.
The young Volodymyr was a bright pupil. But his first appearance in the school choir was no great success, as his music teacher Tetyana Solovyeva recalled years later: ‘Even as a young child, he already had a deep bass. I swear to you, he spoke in a bass voice. I said fine, come and rehearse with us. I already knew what would happen. The children started singing, and he just grumbled a low “Ooooh, ooh ooh,” everybody burst out laughing. And he even had the nerve to ask: “What are you all laughing at?”’
The mercurial Vova was at his best when he could move his body, such as during the wrestling lessons that his mother made him take as a form of self-defence, or the ballet lessons that he enthusiastically took. As a teenager, Vova Zelensky wore a ring in his ear, which in a town like Kryvyi Rih quickly raised suspicions of homosexuality, and was an open invitation to the city’s thugs. To avoid violence, it was best to have a girl on one’s arm.
Volodymyr attended Grammar School No. 95, one of the city’s best schools. He listened to Beatles albums that the Soviet record company Melodia was permitted to release from the late 80s onwards, the perestroika era. The creative teenager wrote poetry and songs and played the guitar.
He was an enormous fan of soviet bard Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980). Volodymyr (the Ukrainian variant of ‘Vladimir’) not only shared the singer’s namesake, but also his birthday, 25th January.
Zelensky’s favourite Vysotsky song was one of the most famous, the theme song from the well-known 1967 film Vertikal. Song About a Friend tells of the camaraderie between mountain climbers: on the steep slopes of the Caucasus, where alpinists are dependent on each other for survival, the wheat is separated from the chaff, and you find out who your true friends are.
The young Zelensky was already interested in politics, and at the age of 16 dreamed of becoming a diplomat. If he had had the chance, he would have chosen to study at the famous Moscow MGIMO academy for diplomats, the alma mater of the current Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and the spokesperson for his department, Maria Zakharova. Admission to the MGIMO was contingent on bribes, however, and the amounts were beyond anything that the young Zelensky could afford.
Young men in their late teens who do not go to university had to enter military service. But Zelensky did not see himself as a soldier, so he enrolled in a law degree in Kryvyi Rih. His father, Oleksander, thought that Volodymyr could have become a famous lawyer. Zelensky himself was less enthusiastic. ‘I really wanted to go and study in Moscow,’ he said later in an interview. ‘When I had just started university [in Kryvyi Rih] I wanted to change degrees. But during my first year I ended up with KVN, and after that I didn’t want to go anywhere else.’
The 1990s were the heyday of the international comedy talent shows that kept audiences throughout the Soviet Union glued to their televisions. While the history of KVN – the ‘Club for the Joyful and Inventive’ (Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh in Russian) – goes back to the early 60s, the phenomenon did not gain real traction until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the show was run by a Russian host, Alexander Maslyakov.
Although the successor to the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States proved dead in the water, the former members of the Soviet Republic still retained a strong communal culture, strengthened by their common use of the Russian language. KVN teams mushroomed in Kazakhstan, Georgia, and especially Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia. Amid the chaos and economic misery of the 1990s, the exuberant comedy contests were a weekly highlight – if you managed to catch them, that is.
In Armenia in the early 90s, for instance, power was scarce and TV broadcast for fewer than three hours a day. ‘But every self-respecting Armenian had (and still has) their collection of VHS tapes with the recorded episodes of KVN shows,’ wrote Anna Grigorian in the online edition of Planet of the Diaspora. At Armenian schools and universities, new KVN teams were constantly forming among groups of ambitious teenagers who dreamt of making it as comedy performers. Because of the sheer volume of willing participants, the KVN competitions were organised like football divisions. The premier league was, of course, held in Moscow.
The KVN sketches bear little resemblance to traditional Anglo-Saxon stand-up comedy. The scenes are presented by groups of actors organised into teams, with song and dance included as key elements. It is not uncommon for the punchline to be absent, with the joke residing in a gesture or a facial expression.
In the routine titled Born to Dance, for example, Zelensky played a man with a nervous tic. He cannot stop dancing, not even while being ‘interviewed’ about his condition on stage by a fellow team member, Denys Lushchyshyn. Zelensky’s moves are so infectious that the interviewer involuntarily joins in, moving along with him. The two men dance across the stage cheek-to-cheek, with the audience in stitches.
‘What nationality are you, by the way?’ Lushchyshyn asks.
‘I’m Russian,’ Zelensky replies, ‘and yourself?’
Taken aback, Lushchyshyn answers: ‘Let’s say I’m from Ukraine.’
Zelensky points his behind to Lushchyshyn, and the two men dance pressed up closely against one another, quasi doggy-style.
‘Honestly though, Ukraine has always shafted Russia,’ Zelensky calls out.
‘Ugh, tell me about it,’ says Lushchyshyn, ‘You’ve got no clue what they’re up to. First Ukraine sticks it to Russia…’
The two men swap places.
‘… and then Russia screws Ukraine!’
The roots of Zelensky’s KVN-team, Kvartal 95, lay in his immediate circle of friends, the young students that he sometimes hung around with at the fountain in Bohdan Khmelnytsky park. Many dreamed of appearing in the KVN shows on TV, but it was Zelensky who got scouted by one of the premier league teams of the day: Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit. The team members were all in their thirties, and in search of new blood. Zelensky had his television debut at age 18.
Two older members of Transit, Borys and Serhiy Shefir, would become Zelensky’s friends for life. For a long time the trio not only shared an office together, but they were also neighbours, living just outside Kyiv.
Olena Kiyashko, an attractive, short-haired blonde, had known Zelensky from high school. One day they meet on the street. Olena was carrying a VHS tape of the film Basic Instinct in her hands. ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to see that!’ Zelensky cried. ‘Could I borrow it from you?’ It was a barefaced lie – Zelensky, a confirmed film buff, had already seen Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller at least 15 times. But the ploy gave him a reason to ask for Olena’s telephone number – how else was he supposed to return the tape to her?
Olena knew who Zelensky was. Vova and his friends were local personalities, who livened up school events and other festivities with their performances. ‘I didn’t think we would start dating,’ Olena later recalled. ‘Those boys were always surrounded by the prettiest girls.’ Up until the moment when Zelensky declared his love for Olena, she never thought anything of it. Once they were an item, Olena broke it off. ‘I had romantic feelings for somebody else.’ That was when Zelensky called her up for ‘a very serious talk.’
‘I told him that I had other plans for my life, and that we had to go our separate ways. But then he said a few things that got me thinking, about what I would be missing out on.’
Olena chose Vova. ‘Once he’s set his mind on something, he never lets go,’ she said 16 years later, after 10 years of marriage.
When Transit began to dissolve in 1997, Zelensky got a new crew together. Other KVN teams always carefully constructed their teams from cookie-cutter personalities: a lead singer, a dancer, a comic talent, and sketch writers. To Zelensky, however, the most important factor was loyalty. Although Kvartal 95 would start out as a group of friends, it would grow into the most famous Ukrainian comedy team in history.
Life partners:Volodymyr Zelensky and Olena Zelenska.Ukraine Government
None of the members of Kvartal 95 had any training in the entertainment industry. Olena Kravets (b. 1977), the only woman in the troupe, studied financial economics. Oleksander Pikalov (b. 1976) earned his living as a street cleaner before beginning an engineering degree. Yuriy Krapov (b. 1973) worked as an electrical engineer in the mining industry. At the behest of his father, who wanted him to become a surgeon, Yuriy Koryavchenkov (b. 1974) worked for two years as a nurse in a local hospital.
In 1998, Kvartal 95 entered a competition in Sochi, the Russian spa town on the Black Sea. Reports say that KVN founder Maslyakov was especially impressed by the young law Life partners: Volodymyr Zelensky and Olena Zelenska. Ukraine Government student Zelensky, and Kvartal 95 was invited to the grand final in Moscow. At that time, Kvartal 95 began touring through Ukraine and Russia. Its schedule was unrelenting, travelling over the pockmarked Ukrainian roads during the day (often by bus), and performing at night. Precious free time was taken up with writing new material and rehearsing new routines.
In 2001, Zelensky gave an interview to the local Siberian edition of Moskovskiy Komsomolets, the popular Moscow-based daily tabloid, after completing a tour of Siberia with Kvartal 95. He said that he enjoyed the icy winter weather: ‘Back home the winters are grey, without snow.’ The young comedian, the interviewer noted, spoke Russian with a ‘cute accent.’
The 600,000 inhabitants of Kryvyi Rih are overwhelmingly Ukrainian, with ethnic Russians a minority (even the 15,000-strong Jewish community is larger). And yet for many, Russian is their native language. ‘We grew up in families where nationalism was not very important,’ said Zelensky in his interview with Moskovskiy Komsomolets. ‘We speak Russian. The fact that others speak Ukrainian is no issue.’ Even in the icy chill of the Kuzbas, thousands of kilometres from Kryvyi Rih, the young Zelensky felt as though he was living in ‘one country.’
By then, Zelensky and his co-performers were already spending most of their time in Moscow, still the economic centre and cultural centre of the former Soviet Union. The young comedian’s favourite places in Moscow were the famous theatre academies. ‘My favourite actors walked these halls,’ he said in an interview in 2008. ‘I wanted to sit in the same lecture theatres, study the same roles as they did.’ But again, money was a problem, so Zelensky opted for on-the-job training. ‘I decided that if I couldn’t take the traditional route through a theatre academy, I would complete the School of KVN. The road might be a longer one, but would be no less effective.’
Zelensky would not retain any fond memories of Moscow. ‘Knock on someone’s door in Moscow, and they don’t open it. Not even your own neighbours.’ The sophisticated Moscovites looked down on provincial types, who swarmed to the capital during the 90s.
Though the members of Kvartal 95 lived in Moscow, they had no fixed address. Registering with the local municipal council was impossible, so Zelensky and his comrades were always moving between hotels and apartments. Money was an ever-present problem. ‘We were probably the poorest team in the history of KVN,’ Zelensky recalled in 2008.
When on tour, the group always took their own food with them: bacon and potatoes. The actors shopped at the VDNKh All-Russia Exhibition Centre, the only place in Moscow that sold instant noodles. Zelensky said of their cooking: ‘We prepared meals on an electric hotplate in our hotel room. The fire alarm often went off when we were trying to bake potatoes.’
Not that nobody earned anything from the immensely popular KVN. The host and manager, Alexander Maslyakov, was the copyright owner and the sole shareholder of the production company that made the shows. TV stations from across the Soviet Union paid top dollar for the broadcasting rights, and because of the enormous viewership, sponsors were eager to advertise. Maslyakov was only too happy to oblige, and would gladly drop the name of a particular brand several times over the course of a show. All the revenue went to Maslyakov and the competitors received nothing – not even reimbursement of their travel or accommodation expenses. The Russian media would speak of the ‘Maslyakov pyramid scheme,’ while the participants referred to the producer as ‘His Majesty.’ Those who did not fall in line were excluded from the competition.
Whenever Kvartal 95 organised performances under the banner of KVN, they were forced to surrender a portion of the takings to Maslyakov – some Russian media sources placed the amount at up to 40 per cent. A gig in the provinces paid no more than US$600, which had to be shared among the whole team.
‘We hardly have enough to live on,’ Zelensky recounted in 2001. ‘I have no car, no house, I live on what I get from our shows. It’s hardly enough to keep the wolves at bay.’
