Sergei Gerasimov is holding out in Kharkiv. In his war diary, the Ukrainian writer reports on the horrific and absurd everyday life in a city that is still being shelled.
In Yalta on the Black Sea in Russian-occupied Crimea.
September 9, 2022
In the seventh chapter of his opus “Das Kapital” (Volume 1) Karl Marx wrote: “What distinguishes the worst master builder from the best bee is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax.” One day, when I was studying at Kharkiv University, we young students asked the world-famous physicist Aleksandr Ahiezer what he thought about this quote. He smiled and answered enigmatically: “Bees are the small creatures of God.”
The difference between Russian and Ukrainian methods of warfare is that Russian troops often fight like God’s little creatures: they use spikes, mandibles and primitive swarm intelligence rather than sound planning and strategy.
Whether they like it or not, the Ukrainians must play the role of architect in this war. The counter-offensive launched a few days ago has been in preparation for months. It’s not just a massive attack, it’s a beautiful structure, like a Gothic cathedral, with foundations, walls, stained glass windows, buttresses and gargoyles on the roof.
In early June, President Zelensky ordered a major counter-offensive to liberate the occupied south. Back then, he managed to mislead even the best military experts. The experts shook their heads and said that informing the enemy about Ukraine’s plans might not be the best idea. At the time, no one could have guessed that the promised counter-offensive in the south was a special information operation that would last at least three months. Three months of struggle, heavy casualties and sometimes desperation. Three months of deceiving the enemy’s military intelligence.
The Russians probably thought we were idiots, but they started moving their troops south. They gathered 25,000 of their best soldiers on the right bank of the Dnipro, that mighty river that is very wide and difficult to cross. The counteroffensive had not yet begun. As it later turned out, it was supposed to start at an unexpected time, when everyone thought it wasn’t going to start at all.
The other part of the informational special operation was to make everyone believe that the coming counter-offensive would be hard, bloody, and tough. Our troops were slowly advancing to the south, which did not frighten the Russians. Then we started destroying all the bridges across the Dnipro, which they should have done carefully, because everyone could see that a trap was snapping here. But no, they kept fighting like a swarm of God’s little creatures, bees, wasps or hornets, flying close, stinging and dying – to their own surprise. Eventually the trap snapped shut in the south.
Then the counter-offensive promised for the south began in the north. It was prophesied to be slow, but it happened so fast that jokes were circulating on the internet: which is faster: a cheetah, a jet plane, the speed of light, or the Ukrainian counteroffensive?
In just three days, the architects managed to clear thousands of square kilometers of territory from bees, wasps and hornets, killing an average of six hundred Russians a day, which may sound like a lot. But if you calculate that that’s about half an orc per square kilometer, it’s definitely not much.
Unfortunately, Buryats, Tungus, Ingush, and other subspecies of the great Russian nation die much more frequently than “pure” Russians in this war. For example, for every Muscovite there are 275 Buryats and 350 Tungus, which means that Putin is committing genocide not only against Ukrainians, but also against small peoples of the Russian Federation.
The citizens of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions are also dying in droves. One of them left his wife a final letter. He was found during the battles for Balaklia.
“It’s not right to die in the summer,” the 26-year-old soldier wrote on two pages with the heading “Letter written before death”: “It wouldn’t be bad to be by the sea now.”
Perhaps he was one of those who made a Faustian pact and sold his soul cheaply to Putin, a modern-day fake Mephisto. But he was probably forcibly recruited by the Russian army and thrown into battle without mercy, where his tiny spark of lucid consciousness was lost forever in the war’s great conflagration.
To person
Sergei Gerasimov – What is the war?
Of the war diaries written after the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine, those of Sergei Vladimirovich Gerasimov are among the most disturbing and touching. They combine the power of observation and knowledge of human nature, empathy and imagination, a sense of the absurd and inquiring intelligence. Gerasimov was born in Kharkiv in 1964. He studied psychology and later wrote a psychology textbook for schools and scientific articles on cognitive activity. His literary ambitions have so far been science fiction and poetry. Gerasimov and his wife live in the center of Kharkiv in an apartment on the third floor of a high-rise building. The NZZ published 71 “Notes from the War” in the spring and 69 in the summer. The first part is now available as a book on DTV under the title «Feuerpanorama». Of course, the author does not run out of material. – Here is the 10th contribution of the third part.
Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.