Volodymyr Zelensky was already a celebrity when his first child was born in 2004. Back then, he and his wife Olena Zelenska often lived apart. He spent his days touring and promoting his comedy troupe in Kyiv, while she often stayed with her parents in their hometown of Kryvyi Rih, the city that Zelensky would later credit with forging his character. “My big soul, my big heart,” he once called it. “Everything I have I got from there.”
The name of the town translates as “Crooked Horn,” and in conversation Zelensky and his wife tend to refer to it in Russian as Krivoy—“the crooked place,” where both of them were born in the winter of 1978, about two weeks apart.
Few if any places in Ukraine had a worse reputation in those years for violence and urban decay. The main employer in the city was the metallurgical plant, whose gargantuan blast furnaces churned out more hot steel than any other facility in the Soviet Union. During World War II, the plant was leveled by the Luftwaffe as the Nazis began their occupation of Ukraine. It was rebuilt in the 1950s and ’60s, and many thousands of veterans went to work there. So did convicts released from Soviet labor camps.
Most of them settled into blocks of industrial housing, hives of reinforced concrete that offered almost nothing in the way of leisure, culture, or self-development. There were not nearly enough theaters, gyms, or sports facilities to occupy the local kids. By the late 1980s, when the population peaked at over 750,000, the city devolved into what Zelensky would later describe as a “banditsky gorod”—a city of bandits.
Olena remembers it more fondly than that. “It wasn’t full of bandits in my eyes,” she told me. “Maybe boys and girls run in different circles when they’re growing up. But yes, it’s true. There was a period in the ’90s when there was a lot of crime, especially among young people. There were gangs.”
The boys who joined these gangs, mostly teenagers, were known as beguny—literally, “runners”—because groups of them would run through the streets, beating and stabbing their rivals, flipping over cars, and smashing windows. Some of the gangs were known for using homemade explosives and improvised firearms, which they learned to fashion out of metal pipes stuffed with gunpowder and fishhooks. “Some of them got killed,” Olena said. According to local news reports, the death toll reached into the dozens by the mid-1990s.
Many more runners were maimed, beaten with clubs, or blinded with shrapnel from their homemade bombs. “Every neighborhood was in on it,” the First Lady said. “When kids of a certain age wandered into the wrong neighborhood, they could run up against a question: What part of town you from? And then the problems could start.” It was nearly impossible, she said, for teenage boys to avoid joining one of
