Vlad Beliavsky hoped to bring some peace to the world with his first book, The Pyramid Mind. If we all trained our minds properly, he thought, we could live together in harmony. At best, he imagined his book might even stop wars.
Today, he is in Kyiv, wearing military uniform and silhouetted against a neutral background. It is safer not to give details of where; he simply says he is in a military building. As his book is published, 13 years after it was conceived, Lieutenant Beliavsky is marking a year spent fighting for the future of Ukraine.
He is a handsome, youthful 33-year-old. In other circumstances you could imagine him in a boyband or becoming the Brian Cox of psychology. But look closely, and there are heavy bags beneath his eyes. His skin is pallid. He talks slowly, measuring his words with scrupulous care. At times, he seems on the verge of tears.
You look exhausted, I say. He smiles. “I’ve been in the army for a year, and we don’t have breaks or weekends. We just serve.” But he’s one of the lucky ones, he says. “I’m not on the frontline at the moment. I’m not deprived of sleep as I was in March and April last year.” Back then, he was defending a besieged Kyiv. “It was madness. We slept for only three hours a night.”
He is now working in the cybersecurity team. What is life like? “Tough. But we are coping. It’s really hard here. I never thought a war of such intensity would take place again in Europe. It’s not a pleasant experience.” Beliavsky, I realise, is a master of understatement.
Until he joined the army, he had always considered himself a pacifist. “I was more horrified at the thought of taking lives than being killed. Life is a gift, and we need to protect it. I always felt my mission was to help people develop this life, to grow, so we could be healthier, more productive, happier.”
Not surprisingly, the start of the war caused an existential crisis. He wavered a few weeks before signing up. To go to war was a betrayal of his values. But not to go to war would have been a still bigger betrayal. “There was no other option. The smartest people in the world tried to negotiate with Russia and failed. I came to believe that in some cases you just need to stand up and fight back. Otherwise they would come and destroy everything. And I couldn’t let that happen. I thought if I stood aside, I’d never feel OK with myself in the future.”
There is a quiet intensity to everything Beliavsky says. For all his conviction, he seems to be a man still coming to terms with a shattered belief system.
Beliavsky grew up in Ukraine with a father who worked in commerce and a mother who worked in marketing. Fascinated by history, as a teenager he would sit with his father discussing the rise and fall of civilisations. Mad and bad dictators were a recurrent theme.
At university in Kyiv, he studied international relations, and that’s where he came across Seneca’s writing on stoicism. “This book was written 2,000 years ago and it was speaking to me. That was the first time I understood the power of literature. There could be another guy in 100 years who reads your book and if it has value it could influence him. That’s great!”
After an internship at the Ukrainian embassy in Kazakhstan, he worked for a year in international relations at the State Savings Bank of Ukraine. He hoped to become a diplomat. “I thought it was a means to reconcile people; to establish peace. Then I understood that peace comes from within.” He started to believe that conflict had to be treated at its source: by the time the stage of diplomacy is reached, it is often too late. He became more interested in psychology as a route to peace. “I thought, if we know how to reach internal harmony, we’ll know how to create harmony around ourselves. Because if I feel good about myself there is little chance I would start a war or suppress anybody.”
In 2014, he began researching psychology and philosophy at Warwick University in the UK, studying for a PhD while continuing to work on his book. The more he studied, the more he realised he had work to do on himself. “I understood that I was messed up as well. I needed tools to fix myself.” In what way? “I didn’t know how to cope with negative emotions.”
The Pyramid Mind is Beliavsky’s attempt to fix himself and the rest of us. He describes the book as a “mind management model” that explains how the mind is organised, how it works, and how best to nurture it. Part textbook, part self-help manual, it includes lots of practical advice. Rather than dedicating himself to one school of thought, Beliavsky is an integrative psychologist, uniting traditional medicine, psychology, alternative and complementary approaches.
He is also a mixed martial arts expert. At the age of 19, he started learning aikido. “I asked our sensei why we were learning great techniques but ignoring others. Let’s diversify our skillset, I said, but those schools are very rigid.” So he started practising other martial arts away from the aikido class. “I felt as if I was cheating on my tutors and coaches! I ended up doing MMA because I favour this curiosity. You become a well-rounded fighter and it’s harder to defeat you.”
Hold on, I say, I thought you were a pacifist? That’s the point, he says – MMA helped him move beyond negative thoughts and made him less likely to have real fights. “Even though I practised martial arts, I never tried to prove dominance over people. If somebody tries to hurt me, I do anything to avoid verbal or physical conflict.” It is a philosophy he took to the frontline.
Beliavsky returned to Kyiv from the UK during the pandemic. As an IT expert, he developed apps to improve mental health, while working on his book. When the writing was finished, he planned to go on a long surfing trip in Asia, but by then Russia had invaded Ukraine. Last March he joined the army as a lieutenant. How would he describe a typical day on the frontline? “You sleep little. Too little. Then you go to your checkpoint with your military unit and patrol your district. You communicate with other units and try to capture saboteurs and maintain order in the streets. If there is a suspicious group of people, you need to be ready to use rifles and start fighting. It was like an apocalypse movie because the streets were deserted.”
What was it like for a pacifist to use a rifle? There is a long pause. “Well, luckily I didn’t have to use it very often, but still … I was asked this question almost a year ago by a friend who is an American sniper. I said I hoped I would wound a person but not kill them, so that we could interrogate them. So you’re determined to do your job, but to say you’re absolutely determined to take someone’s life … no.” He trails off. What did his sniper friend say? “He said he remembered almost everyone he killed. When I asked how he coped, he said he didn’t perceive those people as human beings and it helped him. It was a hard thing for me to accept.” Could he ever adopt that mentality? “No,” he says quietly.
Did he manage to shoot people without killing them? “I hope I didn’t kill anybody.” He says he can’t be sure. “Things happened so fast that you just don’t see everything.”
Has his psychology proved useful in a war setting? “Yes, it’s absolutely practical,” he says. Beliavsky spends his spare time supporting his comrades. “I tell people that I know psychotherapy and psychology, I’m here if you want to talk and I have a programme for you. I have little success with the older generation, but young soldiers come for advice.”
Beliavsky says his sniper friend knew more about psychology than most. “He suffered from PTSD from the war in Afghanistan and he uses mindfulness techniques to stop flashbacks. He understood the nightmare of having trauma because of war and asked me what he could do to feel better.”
Are many people in Ukraine traumatised? “Yep. Many.” Beliavsky stresses he’s not just talking about the military. Is he traumatised? “I hope not,” he eventually answers. “I sleep relatively well. I had a couple of nightmares during the first month. When a shopping mall in Kyiv was destroyed by a ballistic missile, we were nearby. It was a very frightening experience.” Has he lost friends? “Yes. I lost friends on the battlefield. Not many, but some of them I knew well. I lost three friends who I knew before the war. We talked together, went to pubs, and worked together for the same IT company. We enlisted at the same time. Luckily, I haven’t lost relatives.”
Beliavsky says his psychology has helped him and others cope with fear. “Soldiers have a stereotype that if I feel fear, I’m weak. And I say, well, that’s bullshit. We all have emotions, including negative emotions, for a reason. We react fast when we face a life-threatening situation. We run faster, we become stronger, we feel fear but that’s OK. It helps us to fight the situation or to flee. Fear only becomes a problem when it paralyses you.”
When was he most frightened? “On 4 March, the day I joined the army. I woke up at 4am and heard that there were battles at the nuclear power station in the south of Ukraine. Fire broke out and Russians were shelling the nuclear power plant. It was the most horrifying thing I’ve felt in my life, because if there was an explosion, it wasn’t just about Ukraine – the whole continent would be impacted. It’s the largest nuclear facility in Europe. If there was an explosion, there would be no life. There would be no place for peace, for raising children, for becoming better versions of ourselves.” He seems to be reliving the horror in front of me, and is momentarily overcome by hopelessness. “At times, I just don’t see a solution.” Then he snaps out of it. “I feel lucky I can help people with the skills I have, that I can teach them psychology and instil belief.”
Beliavsky knows he can’t afford to despair. He spends a lot of time teaching fellow soldiers how to rewrite the stories they tell themselves. Understandably, many can only see negative endings. “One of our most negative stories is that we’re trapped, we’re losing our lives, so it’s a nasty time to live. I’m helping them to make tweaks to these stories so they can reshape the plot.”
In The Pyramid Mind, Beliavsky says that the most contented people are realists rather than optimists or pessimists. So how does he tweak narratives to make them positive but realistic? “A friend of mine said he was afraid there would be no future in our country, even after the war ended. I said: ‘What is one good or constructive thing that has come out of the war?’ And he thought, and said: ‘Well, we have become stronger as a nation, we have a powerful army, and we have people we are proud of.’ I asked him: ‘Do you think if we manage to get through this nightmare period, this hell, these people would help you and our country to rebuild faster and would there be a brighter future for everybody?’ And he said: ‘Yes.’ So he created a new narrative.”
As for Beliavsky’s future, he’s telling himself as many positive stories as possible. He hopes to find a partner, have children, work on a second book, create apps to help people with their mental health. Even now, he is working on apps to support people through the war.
What has the war taught him about the mentality of Ukrainians? “I knew we were resilient, but I didn’t know how wonderful and strong our people are. You’ve got 40 million united Ukrainians, so what will Putin do? Will he massacre 40 million people? That’s the only way he can win this war. The only way.”
One of his biggest concerns is that war robs his people of their humanity. “I see people changing because of the war. I see them becoming tougher, and I feel heartbroken because Ukrainians are extremely outgoing, friendly people. We need to protect our souls and minds.” Are Ukrainians becoming less kind? “It’s not that you become less kind, you just smile less often, joke less often. You see death every day and, as Nietzsche said, if you look at the darkness too long, the darkness also starts looking at you.”
Does he think about the possibility of being killed? He nods. “I don’t find it very scary, to tell the truth. I mentioned stoicism, and one of the values I remind myself of almost every day is memento mori – we all die. The most important thing for me is the quality, not the length of life.” He talks to friends about the worst thing that can happen, and death is not top of the list. “You don’t want to be killed, but there are more terrifying things, like losing family and becoming disabled because of the attack. Many of my friends tell me that they hope it will be fast if it has to happen.”
Actually, he says, if he were to die in the war, he would now feel he has made his mark on the world. “I wanted to create a book and it was the work of my life, and I was extremely happy that I finished it. When I joined the military, I thought: if I get killed, there is at least something that will keep living.”
Has the war made him a better psychologist? Another pause. “I don’t know. Right now I am helping many more people than before the war. So I have much more practical experience.” Would he prefer to be a less good psychologist in a time of peace? “Yes,” he says, with a heartbreaking smile.
• The Pyramid Mind by Vlad Beliavsky is published by Simon & Schuster (£9.99). To support the Guardian, buy your copy at bookshop.theguardian.com. Delivery charges may apply.
