Zelensky’s heroic wartime leadership has deep historical rootsIn ‘The Zelensky Effect,’ Olga Onuch and Henry Hale investigate the historical and cultural origins of Ukraine’s solidarity in the face of Russian invasionReview by Serhii Plokhy
March 9, 2023
In a recent interview with Volodymyr Zelensky on “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” David Letterman asked the Ukrainian president about the source of his country’s fighting spirit. Letterman also suggested that he already knew the answer: that it came from Zelensky himself. The president demurred, instead praising the courage of Ukrainians in military uniform defending their country.
The basis of Zelensky’s personal courage and the solidarity of Ukrainians resisting unprovoked Russian aggression are among the key themes of Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale’s deeply researched and well-argued book, “The Zelensky Effect.” They locate the roots of Zelensky’s ability to captivate and mobilize the imagination of his fellow citizens in the rise of Ukrainian civic identity. “This is not simply Zelensky’s doing,” the authors write, adding that the Ukrainian president is “a product of a Ukrainian culture steeped in the same sense of civic national belonging and duty that he advocates, advances and now symbolizes.”
The Zelensky effect, as the authors define it, is the manifestation of Ukrainian civic identity since the start of the all-out war, though its origins are far older. Looking for the sources of Ukraine’s inclusive national identity, which crosses linguistic, ethnic and religious lines, Onuch and Hale follow the life story of Zelensky and his generation from the final decades of the U.S.S.R. to the current war. The results of that history were succinctly expressed in the words “I’m Ukrainian” printed on the hoodie that Zelensky wore on “My Next Guest.” But it’s even clearer in the language he used in that interview, responding to questions in Ukrainian but slipping in a few Russian words when telling a Jewish joke from Odessa. As Onuch and Hale explain, the rise of independent Ukraine in the early 1990s helped to overcome the obstacles that had long divided Ukrainians and Russians from each other and from their Jewish and Crimean Tatar fellow citizens.
Zelensky, who today represents the entire Ukrainian nation, was long regarded by supporters and opponents alike as a representative of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east, a region whose inhabitants had stood apart from the struggle for democracy and sovereignty embodied by the revolutions of 2004 and 2014. But Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its attack on Donbas in 2014 changed Zelensky and Ukraine itself. A comedian who made a name for himself in Russia before becoming known in Ukraine, Zelensky left political news to others. But in 2014 he turned political, reacting to the annexation of Crimea with pointed barbs and sarcasm. Zelensky and his cohort, politically inactive up to that point, adopted the big-tent Ukrainian civic identity that Onuch and Hale regard as a result of decades of civic activism.
The vision of a multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation was initially formulated in the middle of World War I by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who was the first scholar to make a persuasive historical case that Russia and Ukraine were separate entities. Hrushevsky envisioned the rise of a free Ukraine as the result of common efforts of Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and Poles. Jews, as fellow victims of Russian imperial rule, were at the top of Hrushevsky’s hierarchy of friends of Ukrainian freedom. He also welcomed Russians and Poles who wanted to support the cause, promising Ukrainian support and cultural autonomy in return.
In 1917, Hrushevsky’s vision of a multiethnic and multicultural Ukraine served as the political foundation of the first modern Ukrainian state, known as the Ukrainian People’s Republic. It did not survive the Bolshevik invasions of 1918 and 1919, which brought civil strife and violence, often directed against minorities. To pacify Ukraine, however, Vladimir Lenin eventually made concessions to the Ukrainian cause that Vladimir Putin now finds unforgivable. The Ukrainians were recognized as a distinct people, and their language and culture received state support in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the founding polities of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin reneged on many of those concessions, pushing a Russification agenda that produced a new category of citizens, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, consisting largely of Ukrainian peasants who moved to the cities, where they lost their language but not their identity.
In December 1991, when Ukrainians went to the polls to vote on the future of their republic, the results were astounding: More than 92 percent chose independence, with huge majorities registered not only in all regions of Ukraine but also among all ethnic groups. Jews demonstrated slightly greater support for independence than did ethnic Russians.A week after the Ukrainian referendum, the Soviet Union was dissolved by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Independence created a new country that faced the difficult task of reconciling its borders with the politically, culturally and linguistically diverse population that it inherited from the U.S.S.R. At the time, some observers wrote of two Ukraines: the largely Ukrainian-speaking and Europe-oriented west and the Russian-speaking and Russia-oriented east. Those were the divisions that Russia tried to exploit in 2014, annexing Crimea and starting a hybrid war in Donbas that succeeded in some Russian-speaking areas but failed in others.
That was the juncture at which Zelensky and his generation of Russian-speaking citizens from Ukraine’s east and south joined the battle to preserve the Ukrainian nation and state. When Putin ordered his armies into Ukraine in February 2022, the new Ukraine embodied by Zelensky fought back. Zelensky was both product and architect of Ukraine’s new sense of identity. That identity has grown stronger over the course of the war, helping to ensure Ukraine’s survival as an independent nation-state after Putin’s Russia confronted it with an existential challenge. In their conclusion, Onuch and Hale write that “Ukrainian civic identity was what had produced not only Zelensky, but 44 million Zelenskys.”
Serhii Plokhy is the author of “The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History,” to be published in May.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/03/09/zelensky-effect-review-onuch-hale/
