Olesya Gerasimenko, a journalist, has published her book “Don’t Close Your Eyes” with Freedom Letters, bringing together her wartime reporting and diary entries. In an interview with Novaya Gazeta Europe, she said she wanted to record the experience of the past three years for herself and for her daughter, with whom she is living through forced emigration.
Gerasimenko says the book grew out of an attempt to show not only the armies, but also the much wider circle of people pulled into the war. She names doctors, soldiers’ mothers, deserters, women earning money near the front, and people who once sewed medical masks but now make body armor. In her view, all of them, including the journalist herself, have been drawn into the same vortex.
She also describes people who return to draft offices and military units even after deception or pressure. Gerasimenko links this to a lack of reflection, the power of group loyalty, and a sense of brotherhood. Even those who tried to flee, she says, often come back because of shame before their comrades and the feeling that ordinary civilian life has already become alien to them.
“Certainty gives an illusion of safety. I am with my own people. I am on the side of truth. So everything will be fine with me. But war is nothing but uncertainty,” Gerasimenko says.
She also criticizes the tendency of both media and audiences to seek simple ideological formulas. In her opinion, speaking honestly about war requires a willingness to hear disturbing answers, and people in Russia begin to trust only when they sense not a desire to condemn them, but an attempt to understand them.
Gerasimenko stresses the role of the commander as well: it is the commander who sets the acceptable threshold of cruelty or mercy. At the same time, she considers this war unusual because it combines modern technology with practices she compares to the Middle Ages and to “meat assaults.”
Asked about patriarchy, the journalist says the state needs soldiers, and that is why the war has coincided with an intensified push for traditional gender roles. In that logic, men go to the front in order to meet expectations, while the war itself, in her assessment, relies on a system that first damages a person and then exploits that vulnerability.