“Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles,” Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “la dorure en reste aux mains.” We must not touch our idols, lest the gilt comes off on our hands. Flaubert’s warning has been echoing in my mind as I have repeatedly scrolled past Annie Liebovitz’s portrait of Olena Zelenska and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in my social media feed this week.
They are an attractive couple, to be sure, and the story of Zelenska’s strength and resilience in the face of a brutal war, reported inVogue and illustrated with Liebovitz’s photographs, is deeply compelling. There she is, sitting pensively on steps inside the presidential residence in Kyiv, meditating on the horrors of war with her silk ecru blouse setting off the armed guard and sandbag-reinforced wall in the background. There she is again, clutching the lapel of her ultramarine woolen coat to her neck while three stoic woman soldiers in battledress guard a wrecked helicopter.
This is Vogue, of course, where image is everything, and the photos were captured and edited by image-maker extraordinaire Liebovitz – one expects nothing less. The article, “Portrait of Bravery: Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska,” is ostensibly a profile in feminine courage, and Liebovitz frames the images not so much as the contrast, but the reconciliation of conventionally soft feminine and hard masculine virtues. The pictures tell a rich story with deep meaning.
I cannot gainsay Zelenska’s steel, resolve, or intelligence. I cannot know her mind, but choosing to remain in a city under siege, when the barbaric invader has made no secret that it aims to murder her and her family, takes a quantum of courage that I know I do not possess.
Yet, despite its title, the article in Vogue is not really about Zelenska at all; it is about her spouse, the president of Ukraine. Author Rachel Donadio accomplishes a peculiar bait-and-switch that is telegraphed by Liebovitz’s photographs. Fully half of these present Zelenska with Zelensky. In one, they are holding hands at a living room table, gazing into Liebovitz’s lens. In another photo – in fact, the one making the rounds of social media – Ukraine’s president manfully embraces his spouse, sheltering her in his muscular arms, contrasting her stylish millennial new-femininity, with his millennial new-masculinity. The message here is clear: Zelensky is the hero we need at this moment, and it is validated by Zelenska’s profile in courage.
This is just the latest variation on the hero-myth of the Ukrainian president and his people that has grown to near-cultic proportions in the five months since the Russian invasion began. Throughout the spring and early-summer, leaders of what was once called “the Free World” flocked to Kyiv, eager to be photographed with Zelensky.
The embattled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson strode in a bespoke suit with the Ukrainian President, clad in military khaki and camouflage Saucony sneakers through the streets of war-torn capital, hoping some of Zelensky’s macho magic would rub off. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, in blue suede shoes and a matching pantsuit, followed. In between, came the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia, and even a parade of western media celebrities.
In fairness, Zelensky extended the invitation to the representatives of friendly powers in March. “It can be dangerous here,” he said, “because our sky is not yet closed to Russian missiles and planes.” Yet, he added: “You know for sure that the eyes of all the people of the world are now focused on our capital, on Ukrainians.” For political leaders like Johnson, who was then embroiled in a series of domestic crises that ultimately cost him his premiership, and Pelosi, whose Democratic Party faces a brutal reckoning in the midterm elections less than four months from now, it was an offer that they could hardly refuse.
In his fatigues and perpetually stubbled face, Zelensky is the paragon of a heroic war leader who has answered the call of destiny to take his place on the stage of history. And the Ukrainian resistance against the awesome, if somewhat inept, might of Vladimir Putin’s war machine has been both unexpected and impressive. The American Jewish Committee’s David Harris and the Canadian celebrity journalist Andrew Coyne, among many others, updated Winston Churchill’s famous quote about the Greek resistance in World War II to speak to our contemporary moment: “Hence, we will not say that Ukrainians fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Ukrainians.”
One can hardly fault Zelensky for doing everything that he can to promote the hero myth. If Ukraine is going to win this war – even if it is only going to fight Russian imperialism to a stalemate – then it needs foreign help and image building is a critical part of that effort. Ukraine’s sponsors are all, to one extent or another, liberal democracies whose governments are sensitive to public opinion, and Ukraine knows that a positive opinion is essential to ensure that the support from the American, British, French, Canadian, and other governments remains reliable.
Yet our media attentions are fickle, and the public can become bored or distracted by other outrages. It is not enough to create a heroic narrative once, it must be cultivated and fed continuously. The worse thing that can happen to Ukraine right now is that Americans will forget that Ukrainians are fighting a savage invader, just as we have forgotten about the migrant children in border detention camps, or the cancer of American gun culture only two months after the Uvalde shooting.
Until the war ends, maintaining the image of heroic Ukraine and its leader abroad is a matter of strategic importance. No wonder, with all else that he has to do leading his country’s defense, Zelensky has had time for Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie, and to pose with his photogenic spouse for the world’s top celebrity photographer. In this, as in all other wars, image matters – it might well be the most potent weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal. Zelensky, it has turned out, is a capable and shrewd war leader; he understands the power of myth.
Yet, there is always an accounting when myth collides with reality. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, promoted by US propaganda throughout the Second World War as a heroic ally, and revered as the benevolent agent of social justice by two generations of Communist true believers was revealed in 1956 to have been just another genocidal dictator; his embalmed body was quietly removed from its place of honor in Lenin’s tomb.
On closer inspection, we discovered that Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” was a pretty run-of-the-mill racist whose reality does not quite live up to Raymond Massey’s portrayal in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. We always knew that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder but, for two centuries Americans have chosen to overlook that fact and celebrate the myth of America’s great philosopher of liberty, who gave voice to self-evident truths that “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The revelation that Jefferson was also an unrepentant serial rapist changed all that. In the collision between heroic myth and sordid reality, his statues – and even Honest Abe’s – have begun to fall. The heroic myth demands inhuman perfection, but writing of Mohandas Gandhi, a hero of a different type, though a mythic hero nonetheless, George Orwell opined that the “essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty.”
Even the saintly Gandhi, we have learned, had human flaws; he expressed virulently racist views when he was a lawyer in South Africa, disowned his own son, and allowed his spouse to die of an easily-cured illness on principal. “If God wills it,” he said, “he will pull her through.”
Perhaps, as Orwell wrote, saints and mythic heroes “should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” For when the war in Ukraine is over, and Putin has marched his legions back to Mother Russia, there will be revelations. I can’t help but think of Emma Bovary, stood-up by her lover for a hotel assignation. Emma truly adores Léon Dupuis, the sensitive clerk who has introduced her to a world of poetry, but in that moment of disillusion she passes judgment: “il était incapable d’héroïsme, faible, banal…” incapable of heroism, weak, banal.
She doesn’t really mean it, of course, it is an expression of her disillusionment that her lover has not lived up to her unreasonable expectations. He is not the perfect hero; he is merely a human being. Like Léon, neither Zelensky nor the Ukrainian people can live up to the idealized standards that we have set for them.
The Ukrainian leader is not the craven, venal, mercenary that Putin supporters and apologists on left and right make him out to be, either. And their own celebration of the Russian dictator as an anti-imperialistic hero is the absurdist flipside of the Zelensky myth. The narrative that Zelensky is merely an agent of global capital was sophomorically deployed in a photoshopped meme of one Liebovitz’s portraits of Ukraine’s first couple behind a table full of American dollars that made the social media rounds this week.
The uncomfortable truth is that all national leaders, even the Socialists, are agents of capital and capitalism. This is the nature of global capitalism, and it is unreasonable to expect Zelensky to be any different. What makes the narrative so potent is that it taps into persistent antisemitic libels right out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Putin, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping – Hell, even Nicolas Maduro – are all, to some extent, agents of global capital… But only Zelensky is Jewish, so that seems to make him suspect.
This narrative is a kind of leftist hipster-bigot détournement of the dominant media image that Zelensky has cultivated for strategic ends, and which western political leaders, celebrities and media have enthusiastically promoted like infatuated Emma Bovaries. We have seen “heroes fighting like Ukrainians,” and the resolute war leader speaking from flat panel video screens, addressing world leaders at the UN General Assembly, at the European Parliament, and at the US Congress as an equal. And not merely as an equal but as the conscience of the (newly-reconstituted) “Free World;” an indomitable figure endowed with the moral superiority of his heroism.
Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are going to have their Madame Bovary moment, and I cast no doubt on their courage to note that. The expectations are so high that they cannot possibly be real. Liebovitz has given us the image of a perfect couple: she is proud, strong, defiant in the face of peril, and fashionable to a fault; he is strong, supportive and, his dark soulful eyes seem to say, capable of great emotional depth. These images belie the frustration and anger that every couple experiences, let alone those under a hail of Russian missiles.
We may celebrate Ukrainian soldiers as heroes, but can we forget that the goal of their heroism is to maim and kill young Russians and fellow Ukrainians who have sided with the Donbas separatists? General George Patton once noted that the “object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” Even when perhaps necessary, or in the service of a laudable goal, war is grim and bloody; it mangles bodies and destroys lives and, in the process dehumanizes even the “good guys.”
One need not minimize the appalling atrocities committed by the Russian invader to acknowledge that Ukrainian soldiers are almost certainly committing atrocities of their own, even if they come nowhere near the bestiality of the massacre of civilians by Putin’s troops in Bucha and elsewhere. War is a vile, brutal business, and in its course prisoners are tortured and killed, suspected traitors are summarily executed, the hated enemy is not permitted to surrender alive. American soldiers have committed such acts; so have men in British, French, and Canadian uniforms.
The Guardian and the Washington Post celebrated the grit of the ill-fated defenders of the Azov Steelworks in Mariupol this spring without once noting that they were members of the Azov Regiment, a unit that originated as a white nationalist neo-Nazi paramilitary organization, which was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion. As absurd as Putin’s accusation that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis might be, there is a tiny modicum of truth – and this is it.
Governments at war make difficult choices, and sometimes they are very bad, like dropping a nuclear weapon on a prostrate enemy, imprisoning peace activists, or detaining “hostile foreign nationals.” It is inevitable that Zelensky and his government have made, and continue to make such choices – like tolerating a fascist regiment in the army – in the interests of necessity. There is nothing idealistic in pursuing policies of realpolitik, in fact it is the opposite of idealism, and how well the heroic image of Ukraine and its leaders will fare when it collides with this reality remains a question. My guess is “not too well.”
Mythmaking is a weapon of war and all sides have deployed it in every war, from the image of the heroic crusader that persists even to this day, to Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, and the smiling Uncle Joe who persuaded Americans to put aside their distrust of Bolshevism and believe that the Ruskies were people just like us in The North Star. Henry Luce built his publishing empire selling the heroism of the British resistance to Nazi aggression in the pages of Life and Time, and no less than Edward R. Murrow plead their case as he reported from London under the the Blitz.
All of the most durable myths have some connection with reality. The people of London did persist bravely throughout the Blitz, even though they wept when their courage weakened and might have cursed Churchill’s claim that “we will never surrender” as they dug the bodies of children from the rubble. And the Ruskies were – and are – people just like us, even if Joe Stalin was not quite the benevolent uncle he was made out to be. It does not follow, however, that the myth is reality.
This does not mean that Zelensky is the arch-villain that the Putin apologists make him out to be. But we should be always conscious that our heroes are myths, and that war is, at the end of the day, about the grimmest realities. The fault is not really theirs; they are after all humans like ourselves and cursed with all the imperfections and limitations of our species. But when we touch them, and encounter their realities, we must prepare ourselves for the gilt that comes off in our hands.