Psychology Of War

The Psychology of War is a devastating novel about trauma, propaganda, guilt, and survival. Mik Sidorov did not go to war in search of glory. He did not dream of medals, patriotic speeches, or a heroic death for the motherland. He wanted only an apartment. A balcony. A table. Two plates. Perhaps a family. But the Russia that promised him a future delivered mud, hunger, rust, absurd orders, and a sky dominated by drones. Sent to the front in the Donbass, Mik discovers that real war does not resemble the colored maps on television. It is made of disposable young men, corrupt officers, false reports, starving soldiers, rotten trenches, and bodies thrown into the meat grinder by men who never dirty their own boots. He survives. But surviving is not the same as coming back. Months later, already outside Russia, Mik agrees to tell his story to Jan Kowalski, a Polish war correspondent he once hated. Through the interviews, he revisits the friend who died in the field, the rough sergeant who saved him from the enemy and from his own Russians, the Ukrainian who dismantled his propaganda without needing to torture him, and the mother who received at home a son transformed into a ghost. There is no easy heroism in this book. There is fear. There is hunger. There is guilt. There is silence. There is the brutal mathematics of staying alive when another man was left behind. Part psychological novel, part war drama, part political indictment, The Psychology of War shows that war does not end when the soldier comes home. It only changes address: it enters the mind, the family, the body, sleep, language, and memory. An intense, human, and uncompromising book about the price of believing lies — and about the difficult task of continuing to exist after war has destroyed almost everything.