The authorities in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy Street. I’d been reading some of Khvylovy’s stories on the long train journey from Poland. His bitter, hallucinogenic I (Romance), told from the point of view of a Soviet Ukrainian secret policeman in post-revolutionary Kharkiv who executes his own mother, has atmospheric echoes of the wartime Kharkiv of a century later – a city under siege, unreliable electricity, the sound of shelling in the distance – and differences from it. Kharkiv is under no immediate threat of falling to the Russians, and despite the bombardment and boarded-up windows, the city is mainly bright and well-kept. Where Khvylovy’s story resonates with Kharkiv today is in his motive for writing it, his horror that his enemies – Russian imperialism, global capitalism, localist small-mindedness – were as strong as ever, but the causes he believed in (international socialism, Ukraine, art and human kindness) were being undermined by the institutions created to fight for them.
Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.
My visit to Kharkiv coincided with an intensified trawling of the streets for army recruits. The Ukrainian army is chronically short of soldiers to hold back the steady, creeping Russian advance across eastern Ukraine. Checkpoints and patrols, supposedly intended to ensure that people’s military details are up to date in the national conscription database, are widely believed, against the letter of the law, to be taking men straight to medicals, and from there to military training and dispatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it. Ctd....The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
initially it's quite a good read but then you meet passages like this:
"The biggest campaign, at least by poster count, is for the 3rd Assault Brigade. The ad shows a man with his back to us, in a plaid shirt, camouflage trousers and a back-to-front baseball cap, riding a motorbike towards floodwater and war smoke. Wrapped around him with her face over his shoulder towards us, clenching him in fishnet-clad legs and bare arms, a pistol in one hand, is a tousle-haired young woman. ‘I Love the Third Storm,’ the slogan reads."
- So...no mention that this "sexy" 3rd Assault is the main Azov Nazi brigade?...well, it didn't seem relevant at the time right?
When he moves on to Putin and the Russians though, it's less omission and more of the standard pro-Ukie fantasy fare: just updated a tad:
"...more than anything else, the recent Russian success has come down to Putin’s willingness to expend lives in thousands of small-scale infantry attacks that eventually, after enormous casualties, overwhelm the defenders. As Russia advances, and its dead and maimed pile up, the bonuses it is having to pay to find volunteers – it wants to avoid the socially perilous path of mass mobilisation in the big cities – mount in tandem. It is recruiting mercenaries from Africa, as well as inviting North Korean troops to join the fight. For now, with Russia’s deeper resources of money and men, as far as the grim goals of attritional conquest are concerned, the strategy is working. Judged by his actions, Putin deems it worth having several Russians die for every Ukrainian wiped from the battlefield and for every few hundred square metres of territory. "
Whatever happened to all those "meat assaults" with the enormous casualties ? Well, they have been mutated into the small potato of "small-scale infantry attacks" with umm...with just the same "enormous casualties": tisk! those Russians just can win without those "enormous casualties" no matter how they operate it seems...
But hang on... the Russians haven't mobilised to replace those "enormous casualties" and are still turning out as volunteers... How so? Well, that's fully explained by the pernicious influence of being, um, "paid" you see, bonuses and all...and of course those phantom Koreans too help fill the desperate hiatus with their ghostly asian magic presence and explain why though "Putin deems it worth having several Russians die for every Ukrainian wiped from the battlefield" the shortages of manpower are quite the reverse and that while Russia is still signing willing recruits up the Ukrainians are providing a pre-match press-ganging service for entire amateur football teams with no Bovril unfortunately till you reach the front next week...and umm, Ukraine is still losing.
-I gave up at that point as the writer was clearly either dishonest or deeply delusional and the article unfortunately not up to what I would expect from the LRB.
on November 14, 2024, 5:43 pm