9 August 2024
Teresa Cherfas reviews The Language of War by Oleksandr Mykhed, translated by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv and Abby Dewar [paperback, £18,99, pp304, ISBN-9780241690840, Allen Lane, London, 2024]
In 2000, whilst making a film about the Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky and the second Chechen War (Babitsky’s War), we filmed an interview with his editor back in Moscow. Slavik Shuster reflected:
‘War is very biblical. Andrei, for instance, started reading the Bible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think that all the scenes of the Bible – in a war, you see them. You really see them. You can imagine them better. They’re in colour.’
I found myself remembering those words as I read Oleksandr Mykhed’s new book, The Language of War. But it wasn’t until I reached the Epilogue that I discovered that he too found the Bible a guiding principle for his writing about Russia’s war against his homeland, Ukraine:
‘The stories I need now are simple. They should have rage, love for the homeland, revenge, and life according to the laws of the Old Testament.’
Mykhed’s book is a deafening scream of rage and revenge, a chronicle of the first 13 months’ of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It is a mixture of diary entries and reportage, interviews and personal insights and observations. Four chapters, interspersed among others, are titled: ‘War Crimes. Fragments of Chronicles.’ It is evident that in writing this book, the author had the clear intention of contributing to the growing body of documented evidence for any future Hague criminal tribunal, to ensure accountability for Russia’s war of aggression. The Oscar-winning film, ’20 Days in Mariupol’ is another, and The Reckoning Project (see my podcast Then and Now with Nataliya Gumenyuk) yet another.
Oleksandr Mykhed’s book begins on the very day of the invasion and recounts those first hours and days with vivid diary recall. One gets a picture of his comfortable, middle-class life as an aspiring young author, living with his wife in a new townhouse in Hostomel, not far from Kyiv. They are both from the creative intelligentsia and every one of their friends seems to be equally talented and creative – artists, stage designers, poets, academics, tech entrepreneurs. His mother is a professor, an academic, a linguist, who moved with his father to the small town of Bucha, to be nearer to their only son. On 24th February 2022, their lives were forever changed. To quote Mykhed, this war ‘is the most significant thing to ever happen to us.’
For anyone who follows reports and long-form journalism, reads books about Russia’s war on Ukraine, the stories are, mutatis mutandis, uncomfortably familiar: horrific rapes by Russian soldiers of women and girls, sometimes in front of their husbands and children, looting and desecration of people’s personal items and properties, execution-style killings of unarmed civilians, acts of unspeakable humiliation of their civilian victims, targeted shelling of clearly marked emergency vehicles or public transport – the shelling of Kramatorsk train station, the shooting up of cars marked ‘CHILDREN’, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children and their evacuation to Russia with no further parental contact, their coerced adoption into the Russian world.
These are interspersed with personal testimony from Mykhed’s friends, from his mother the professor, from his time serving in the Ukrainian army, as well as deep dives into parallel experiences drawn from different theatres of war – for example, his growing interest in the effect of war on children and how this might impact them as adults.
The Language of War is not an easy read. It is of the moment, and doesn’t have the distance of time that some of the greatest war literature has, but that is not the point. It is a snap-shot of how war feels in the raw, what it does to the psyche, how it changes you and your former perceptions of life and of fellow humans. In it, Mykhed swipes at journalists who ask, ‘how are you?’ or ‘how does it feel?’ He swipes at the author of a letter in response to a piece he published in a German newspaper: the letter writer, a Mr. Stephen from London, born in the Cold War generation of 1964, warns him of excessive patriotism that ‘outside of football stadiums in the World Cup leads to escalation and war.’ He swipes at an expert on the wars of Yugoslavia, who dares to point out that the Siege of Sarajevo lasted longer.
But his biggest swipes are reserved for all that is Russian. The visceral hatred expressed in The Language of War, not just for Putin and his generals, but for every last Russian, living or dead, in favour or against their country’s invasion of Ukraine, for Russian culture, dead or alive, for the Russian language, for the Russian World, for anything that has the slightest whiff of Russianness, is shockingly revealing. Would Penguin’s imprint Allen Lane have published a book about another war that was so uncompromising in its hatred of all members of the enemy nation, its culture past and present? I wonder. You only have to imagine substituting Russia and Russian for Israel and Israelis, for a contemporary comparison.
In one episode from the book, Mykhed recounts how a Russian businessman from Perm, someone from ‘another long-forgotten life’ reaches out to his wife, Olena. Writing in Russian, he asks how he can help. He explains that he now lives in Kazakhstan and will return to Russia only ‘after the bastard dies.’ He writes: ‘Come to Astana. I will rescue you here.’ Olena texts him back in English: ‘It’s not only Putin’s war. You’re all responsible. Remember that.’ He replies in Russian: ‘Now we have no homeland. At least I don’t. I have never supported anything of it. Even if rusia (I can’t but keep the original spelling: he wrote his country’s name in lower case and with only one ‘s’ [Mykhed observes]) shrinks down to just one region, but no one will die – I will vote for that.’
Mykhed follows this reported exchange with his own wry commentary:
It feels so weird to hear the voice of the ‘little man’ from the Russian classics – ‘the little Russian’ who will never be able to admit his fault. Until the bitter end, he will be searching for his ‘homeland’ all over the world. He’ll be hoping for the death of a person he allegedly has never voted for – watching the absolute evil rise all the while. Until the last Ukrainian town is destroyed, the little man will firmly believe: I, yes, I – a grown up man in my late forties – am innocent and cannot decide anything in my life. I don’t have much of a destiny either – things just happen to me.
In the week of the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War, it is uplifting and humbling to see the Russian political prisoners, who paid such a heavy price for their opposition to the illegal war and to the regime that authorized it, free. They are already under fire for misjudging comments directed at Western sanctions on Russia. I can’t help wondering whether Mykhed would have equal contempt for them.
In the no doubt necessary process of Ukrainianisation, escalated in time of war, the Ukrainians might have lost some focus on their direction of travel towards Europeanism. The Russian political scientist, Vladimir Pastukhov, writes about this with understanding about the whys, tempered with warnings about the consequences:
I think that somewhere around the autumn of 2022, Ukrainian society faced a serious choice between two strategies for forming a national identity in the context of war, ensuring full cultural emancipation from Russia: ‘all who are not Ukrainians are against us’ or ‘all who are for us are Ukrainians.’ This was a serious fork in the road, at which a powerful division of two peoples took place against the backdrop of one’s aggression against the other. The division was inevitable and justified, but (…) left two groups of people outside the ‘Ukrainian national project’: Russian-speaking Ukrainians within Ukraine and Russians proper who sympathized with Ukraine in its fight against the aggressor outside Ukraine. (…) for the former, the ‘entrance’ to the project remained open on the condition of accelerated Ukrainization, primarily linguistic, and the rejection of any ties or contacts with ‘Russianness.’ For the latter, entrance to the Ukrainian world was completely and forever closed off, since they were under the curse of Cain, tainted by ‘imperial’ culture. (…)
A vicious circle is emerging: what was supposed to contribute to a speedy victory is today turning into an obstacle to achieving it. Perhaps this is one of the most serious miscalculations of Zelensky’s team. A return to the idea of Europeanism as a basic national idea is becoming an increasingly urgent political task. But it is poorly compatible with the idea of hatred for everything Russian. You can’t be in both camps.
All wars end in negotiation, so the military historians will tell you. The longer this war continues, the more difficult it is to imagine what the human landscape of that negotiated peace will look like. It is a tragedy of biblical proportions, and yes, Old Testament rage and revenge will take generations to quell, let alone heal. Pity Ukraine.
