Will Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky still be alive three months from now? That we do not know accounts for much of his authority and allure.
He remains resident in a city his enemy is almost certain to eventually capture. When it does, he is likely to be killed. He has refused the passage to exile he has been offered.
And so when we watch him we are looking at a person who has chosen to value a show of defiance over life. It is perhaps the most powerful position a human being can take.
Almost nobody sets out to be a martyr. It is a choice thrust upon one because circumstances take the strangest turn and a flight to safety turns out to be unacceptable. When he became Ukrainian president it is improbable that Zelensky signed up for this. He was a comedian, after all, swept into office on the promise that qualities like irony would bring freshness to a corrupted body politic.
I am reminded of Nelson Mandela. When he was 40 years old nobody would have clocked him for a martyr. His car was too fancy, his clothes too expensive, the women he slept with too young. He was a preening man, much too frivolous, many thought, to acquire the gravitas of leadership.
Yet by the time he was 45 he was in prison facing trial for a capital offence. It is unlikely that he had given much thought to death until then; this was the hand his flamboyant life had dealt him. But here he was. To try to save his own skin would have led to a life of ignominy. The path to honour and political potency was to dare his enemy to kill him.
The ways in which he prepared himself are moving. Among the books he read during the Rivonia trial were CJ Langenhoven’s Skaduwees van Nasaret (Shadows of Nazareth). He was hedging his bets. If he survived, the Afrikaans he learnt would hold him in good stead. If he was to hang, the book was a training manual for how best to stage the meaning of his execution, for the novel’s narrator was none other than Pontius Pilate, and what he expressed, above all, was the horror of having put Jesus Christ to death.
Mandela lived, as we know, but that he flirted so boldly with death elevated him to godliness. He earned a licence to perform a role in politics a mere mortal could not. A quarter of a century after he dodged death he convinced SA’s insurgent youth to embrace a doubtful peace. Counterfactuals are impossible, of course, but it is unlikely that anyone less than a martyr could have convinced a country in the throes of a revolution to stop fighting. His strange ambience created a kind of magic, melting the poles of a zero-sum conflict, for a while at least.
We cannot know Zelensky’s future. If he dies, his memory will no doubt inspire a cosmopolitan politics for some time to come. If he lives, the vast credibility he has earned in this moment may, as with Mandela, create the conditions for a feasible peace. For the scariest dimension of this conflict is its intractability; it seems close to impossible for both sides to climb down with the fundaments of their identities intact. It is one of those moments that requires a licence for unusual creativity, the sort permitted to one who has walked steadfastly towards death.
In the early 1960s the apartheid government wanted to kill Mandela. Twenty years later it came to understand that more than anything else it needed him to live, for he had become the imaginable way out of a quagmire.
One wonders whether in his savvier, more pragmatic moments, the same thought has crossed Vladimir Putin’s mind. If he takes Kyiv and kills his enemy he may have closed off his path out.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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