Summary of The Showman by Simon Shuster: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

 

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Showman by Simon Shuster: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

The Showman is a detailed account of Volodymyr Zelensky's life and leadership during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, revealing his transformation from a slapstick actor to a symbol of resilience, his failures in preparation, and his strategy to counter Russia and maintain Western support.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jan 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224269969

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In spring 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and candidate for Ukraine's presidency, appeared more scared than usual during his comedy show. The event was set to begin in less than an hour, with Zelensky playing the lead role as the ringmaster in his vaudeville show. The audience was a mix of Kyiv's high society, retirees, hipsters, office workers, young couples, and the middle class that had formed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Zelensky had a lot on his mind, much more than the night's performance. A bomb threat had been called in, and Zelensky told his troupe not to panic. Although the law required theater precautions, police officers had come with a canine unit to sniff around the coat check and concession stands. However, they found nothing suspicious, and the theater decided to carry on without informing the concertgoers of the danger.

The performers were not all aware of the danger, and some had been performing with Zelensky for decades. They wondered whether he would take them along to the office of the president. Zelensky admitted that the jokes had not been easy to write and that there were limits to what he could say on television as the frontrunner in the race. He told the audience that it was just a concert, fair and square, and that the world has never seen such a thing.

The crowd seemed to love him in either role, and Zelensky spent nearly an hour with his fans, taking photos and accepting their bouquets. His friends later told him about his addiction to the applause and adulation, which he had always chasing since he started doing comedy as a teenager.

In 2019, Vladimir Zelensky entered politics, a job that would transform him from a movie star to a politician. The media would question him, and he would face gaffes, scandals, budgets, and a war to fight. Zelensky had no convincing answers to these questions, but he believed that leadership would not require him to change. His life as a showman had taught him what he needed to play the role of president, and he was intent on remaining the person his experience had forged.

Zelensky's motives in running for office were to save Ukraine from its current leaders, who he described as a threat to everything he had spent his life creating. He believed that if he didn't run for office, all of this might be gone soon. This meeting at the Palace of Ukraine opened the door for the author to write a book about Zelensky. The author followed Zelensky's administration for Time, covering his struggles to govern, manage relations with Donald Trump's White House, and negotiate a lasting peace with Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Throughout the years, Zelensky's character evolved over time, and his answers to questions about him evolved. On the campaign trail, he appeared as a naive charmer preparing to enter a world of cynics, oligarchs, and thugs. By the time they met again in the presidential compound in the fall of 2019, Zelensky had absorbed some of the poison from that world and burned off a lot of his innocence.

In the first few months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky transformed into a wartime president unique to our age of instant information. He became a symbol of the kind of fortitude all leaders hope they can muster when called. His showmanship as an actor on stage and a producer in the movie business made him effective in fighting the war, which required Ukraine to hold the world's attention and win the sympathy of people and their governments across the globe.

Zelensky's success as a leader relied on the fact that courage is contagious. He spread his success through Ukraine's political ranks, and many Ukrainians ran to defend their towns and cities against an invading force armed with tanks and fighter jets. Zelensky's ambivalence about writing a book about the war shaped his response to the book. He felt he had not lived or achieved enough to be the focus of a biography, and as long as the war continued, he found it hard to see how a book about the war might end.

In the end, it took well over a year to finish the book, and the war raged on, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, uprooting millions in Ukraine, and shattering the world's illusions about the permanence of peace in Europe three decades after the end of the Cold War.

The author recounts their experience reporting on the war in Kyiv, Ukraine, during the first year of the invasion. They spent time with Zelensky's offices and interviewed them about their administration, hopes, plans, fears, and memories. The author's family, half Ukrainian and half Russian, grew up in central Ukraine, and the author's father grew up in Moscow before fleeing to the United States in 1989.

The author's main goal was to record the history of the war, understand the events leading up to the Russian invasion, and chronicle the way Zelensky and his team experienced it. However, they did not keep diaries or careful records of these events, and their text messages and photos captured little of their emotions, exhaustion, and fear. The author also interviewed Zelensky's friends, enemies, advisers, ministers, staff, and First Lady Olena Zelenska, who helped clarify the record and correct her husband's recollection of events.

The author tries to verify the accounts of the people involved, but some of the deceptions may have been mine. The author acknowledges that the mind devotes its power to surviving, not recording, and that sometimes the memories of participants may be inaccurate.

The author also notes that the accounts reveal that Zelensky's bravery put him in greater danger than necessary for his cause. The author wishes he felt more fear while following him around, as fear can protect or make us run away.

PART I

DAYBREAK

Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and politician, felt no deep attachment to his home in Koncha-Zaspa, Ukraine, after the invasion began. The house, with its neoclassical facade, seemed too grand and presidential for Zelensky, who had spent his entire life as an actor. When he took office in 2019, Zelensky promised not to live in the properties reserved for government officials in Ukraine, especially the one in Koncha-Zaspa. The villa, which featured a billiard room, home theater, and a separate wing with an indoor pool beneath an elegant glass dome, was among the most palatial of the bunch. Zelensky mocked the previous heads of state for using the villa and filled it with gaudy furniture. However, he lived in the house, greeting his kids and climbing the marble staircase to his bedroom.

Zelensky chafed at the big and kingly role of president, which grated against his persona he had spent decades cultivating on the screen and stage. The press never forgave him for it, and reporters would remind him of his famous lines from his sitcom, which propelled him into office and haunted him afterward.

Zelensky's frustration with the political elites and their lavish homes contributed to his unpopularity during the third winter of his presidency, when Russian troops surrounded Ukraine. He was an upstart who believed he could govern a nation of forty-four million people the way he had run his movie studio. However, on that awful night, when the sound of Russian bombs woke the residents of Koncha-Zaspa, Zelensky was in his mansion, bathed in soft light from the chandelier.

On February 24, 2022, the bombing of Kyiv began, causing confusion and fear among Ukrainians. The news in Ukraine had been warning for months of an impending war, with talk shows debating which officials and lawmakers were most likely to flee. The U.S. intelligence services had concluded that Russia planned to invade from three directions and overrun the capital in a matter of days. The Russian aim was to seize most of the country and remove Zelensky's government from power.

To many Ukrainians, these predictions had sounded absurd, as the attack was not expected to go beyond the border regions in the east. For about eight years, Ukraine and Russia had been fighting a protracted war over two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. Few in Kyiv believed the latest escalation would spill too far beyond those regions and even fewer believed it would ever reach their homes.

The president did not warn his wife to prepare, only on the eve of the invasion, and they went to bed without making any wartime plans. The sound of the explosions outside jolted them into a new reality, and they both needed more than a brief moment at the top of the stairs to adjust to it.

Outside, the president hopped the few steps to the driveway and got into his waiting motorcade. The traffic thickened in the other direction, and by noon, gridlock on every road out of town would be evident. As the bombing continued, Kyiv would return to its peaceful state, returning to the state of siege that had formed so much of its history.

In the early morning hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky received numerous calls and messages from his friend Denys Monastyrsky, who had been waiting for signs of the attack. Zelensky asked him where and what direction the Kremlin had chosen to attack the country. Monastyrsky informed the president that it had started, and he asked him where exactly and what direction the Kremlin had chosen. Zelensky knew Ukraine lacked the means to beat the Russians back, but he