BIOGRAPHY
The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
Simon Shuster
William Collins, $42.99
The face of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is staring at me, this time from the cover of a book. The image is arresting. Minimalist. Humourless. Zelensky looks straight into the eyes of the reader, with an expression that is solemn but resolute.
It is a mesmerising image that beckons us to open the book by Simon Shuster, long-time correspondent covering Ukraine and Russia for Time magazine. The narrative describes the year 2022 and includes major moments of the first 10 months of full-scale war – invasion day on February 24, the Battle of Kyiv, and the September counteroffensive and subsequent liberation of Russian-occupied areas in and around Kherson and Kharkiv.
Simon Shuster’s biography of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows his human aide as well as focusing on his role as a wartime leader.Credit: AP
Shuster’s work is informed by time spent with the Ukrainian president, starting from the campaign trail in 2019, continuing through the first two years of Zelensky’s presidency and then the first year of all-out war. Given unprecedented access to the president and his team, the author affirms that they let him gather information “with no preconditions”.
The book is based on hundreds of interviews, some of which are recent, others reaching back over 10 years. Those Shuster questioned range from Zelensky himself to First Lady Olena, Valerii Zaluzhnyi (then commander-in-chief of the armed forces), Oleksiy Reznikov (minister of defence at the time) and Mykhailo Podolyak, one of the president’s closest aides. Add the likes of past presidents Viktor Yanukovych and Petro Poroshenko and rival opponents such as the infamous Viktor Medvedchuk and you have an impressive list of interviewees.
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There are also those who are not famous but are vitally important for their eyewitness accounts, such as Father Andriy Halavin, a local priest in Bucha, who shared with Shuster his lived experience of Russian occupation, describing how the Russians “began to brutalise the town, torturing civilians and killing them at random”.
While the book opens with the first day of full-scale invasion, the narrative goes back in time to position Russia’s attack in relation to salient aspects of Ukraine’s history. The text is not overloaded with facts, but there are just enough to allow the reader to understand the roots of the current Russian aggression. In this, Shuster has got the balance right. There is enough historical detail to keep one engaged, but it is not so dense as to make the reader feel they are grappling with an encyclopaedia.
This is no mean feat – Russia’s war against Ukraine has a 10-year timeline, a couple of decades of prelude and a few hundred years of backdrop. Shuster expertly includes what the reader needs to know to understand what is happening today and why.