Volodymyr Zelensky was born in 1978 in Kryvyï Rih, a major steel and mining center in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east-central region. Raised as an atheist, as he should have been at the time, the Ukrainian president was first and foremost a Soviet boy. When he was 13, the USSR collapsed. His largely unpoliticized adolescence followed the hopes and chaos of an independent Ukrain...