The body of self-printed and distributed literature – samizdat – produced by these men and those that followed is a crucial source for what was going on beneath the veneer of success that the Soviet Union presented to the world. It was here, for the lack of anything else, that I began to look for the reasons why Russians began to drink in such quantities.
My research got me nowhere, however. The dissidents’ concerns were lofty and admirable – freedom of speech, freedom to emigrate, the right to a fair trial – but did not seem the kind of thing to drive a mass epidemic of alcoholism. Then I found a book by Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a veteran of the human rights struggle who was forced into exile in 1978. Perhaps because she was living in the United States, she took a broad view of the country, and looked outside the capital.
She wrote how Russians everywhere had become depressed by the hypocrisy of corrupt officials who promised a bright future for others while enjoying the fruits of the present themselves. The Russian state was killing hope, and humans cannot survive without it. In the vacuum, people reached out for anything available, including God.
The hunger for religion . . . was not a result of the efforts of the church, but rather of the decay and corruption of official ideology. It spread over the entire country and affected all social groups. Enormous numbers of people tried to fill the resulting spiritual and intellectual vacuum with alcohol, others tried to fill it with the most diverse kind of activities, from gardening to philosophy.
The Russian Orthodox Church, like the official hierarchies of the Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist congregations in the Soviet Union, had been infiltrated by and subordinated to the state. Although communists had begun by assaulting religion and imprisoning priests, Stalin realized during World War Two that the patriotic appeal of defending the faith was a useful mobilizer of men.
The Orthodox Church was not a monolith, however. Among its priests were some who did not support the government slavishly in all things, as their bishops did. And among those priests was a man called Dmitry Dudko – Father Dmitry, to his friends. Alexeyeva described him in her book, so I read his work. He, I realized quickly, was an exceptional man.
While the state was engaged in producing reports on how well it was doing, and the dissidents were engaged in proving it wrong, Father Dmitry was quietly comforting the miserable and the downtrodden. And he was not just a compulsive comforter; he was a compulsive writer. He left notebooks and articles and sermons: hundreds of thousands of words. These ranged from accounts of parishioners’ confessions to autobiographical sketches, to poems, to sermons. They are a priceless source for anyone seeking to understand how communism, a movement intended to perfect humanity, turned into a system of oppression and misery.
The communism he describes is not one that aims for a radiant future, despite its claims. The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
And Father Dmitry, I realized, as I read his books and delved into his world, was more than a witness and an agitator. His life story – from his birth in a Russian village after the revolution, to his death in Moscow in 2004 – is also the history of his nation. He lived through collectivization, the crushing of the 80 per cent of Russians that were peasants. He served as a soldier in World War Two, when millions of peasants died defending the government that had crushed them. He spent eight years in the gulag, the network of labour camps created to break the spirit of anyone who still resisted. He rose again to speak out for his parishioners in the 1960s and 1970s, striving to help young Russians create a freer and fairer society.
Those decades are little written about today, but they are central to Russia’s population crisis, so those are the decades this book focuses on. It is not a biography of Father Dmitry, nor is it a history of the Russians’ twentieth century. Instead, it is something in between. Father Dmitry’s life, for me, is the life of his nation in microcosm. In tracing the life and death of Father Dmitry, I am tracing the life and death of his nation.
How did Russia become a country where my friend Misha considers it acceptable to drink a litre of brandy before embarking on a day’s work? And how did it become a country where no one finds that strange – a country where brandy is on sale beside fried eggs, sausage and bread at breakfast time? One man’s alcoholism is his own tragedy. A whole nation’s alcoholism is a tragedy too, but also a symptom of something far larger, of a collective breakdown.
Public life in Russia is stubbornly dishonest. Transparency International’s yearly survey ranks countries on a 10-point scale, where 10 is very clean and 0 is highly corrupt (New Zealand came top in 2011 with 9.5, Somalia and North Korea came last with 1). Russia has, since the survey began in the 1990s, consistently scored between 2.1 and 2.8, putting it in the company of Nigeria and Belarus, and below the likes of Syria, Pakistan and Eritrea. Russians consider themselves civilized Europeans, but have to endure the humiliation of daily encounters with officials that belong in a squalid dictatorship.
I once asked Kolya, a friend of mine, what he would do first if he became president. Kolya is jovial and loud, so I expected he would announce something funny. Perhaps he would legalize polygamy for people whose names begin with a K. He sat and thought for more than a minute. He stared at his glass of beer and toyed with a cigarette.
‘I would kill myself,’ he said at last, without a trace of a smile.
It is hardly surprising that Russians have long been unenthusiastic about politics. In one yearly survey from the Levada Centre, a polling organization, the options to choose from are ‘life isn’t so bad, you can survive’, ‘life is bad, but you can endure’ and ‘enduring our calamitous situation is impossible’. There has been a slow move from the third category to the second since the late 1990s, but the fact that those are the only categories does not suggest that this is a country happy about the future.
In this book, I ask how this came about. It is not only a journey into the past, however, because the Russian population crisis could have enormous consequences for the future. In the Chinese province of Heilongjiang there are more than 38 million people. In Russia’s Maritime, Amur and Birobidzhan regions, which border it to the north and are collectively not too much larger, there are around 3 million people. If that number keeps falling, then it is easy to wonder if the Chinese might think the Russians do not want that land and decide to take it from them. The modern world has never had to confront a situation where a country does not have enough people to support itself any more.
In Father Dmitry’s life story, therefore, I have sought other answers too: is there hope for the future? Is the damage inflicted on the Russians reversible? Can a new generation, raised without the dead dogma of communism, kindle a new kind of state, where people are free to be themselves?
It is possible to imagine the kind of state where Russians might be happy to live, work and have children: the only kind of state that could have a future. It is what Father Dmitry was trying to build when he preached in the churches of Moscow, and when he prayed in the K G B’s camps. That is why I set off to follow the tracks of Father Dmitry and his friends, north to the gulag, east to the Urals, but first of all west to the village of his birth: Berezino, in the forests of Russia’s ancient heart.
SUMMER
1
They took our grandfather’s land
So one morning in summer 2010 I woke up in an old Soviet hotel in the city of Bryansk, far to Moscow’s west.
It was hot. The buildings were wavering in the heat before I even left the bus station, where tanned, shirtless bus drivers shouted their final destinations as if they could persuade arriving passengers to cancel their travel plans and go with them instead. The rout
e to Berezino was complex. First I sat on a packed minibus, which took me to a large shop. Then an elderly bus rattled to a town covered in grey cement dust. This was Fokino. Then another bus took me to Berezino itself. We stopped on the edge of a dusty yard, flayed by the sun and dominated by a five-storey apartment block. Two large-bosomed women stood beneath its balconies and argued.
My goal was to find Father Dmitry’s surviving relatives, but I had not up to now given much thought to how I would do that once I got here. My normal approach is to turn up, look inquisitive and hope someone takes pity on me. I walked towards the two women, and idled past them. They ignored me. One or two people were still by the bus stop, so I walked back towards them, passing the two women once more. Again, no one looked at me.
‘What are you doing?’
I turned to see a handsome woman of about forty, eyes crinkled with amusement, all dressed in black despite the weather. She was sitting on a bench in the shade of the bus station.
‘I saw you come in on the bus, and then walk over there, and walk back here, and now you’re standing around. What are you doing?’
She looked friendly, so I explained the nature of my quest: I was looking for relatives of Father Dmitry, and wanted to understand how his upbringing had made him the way he was. She shook her head. There were no Dudkos round here. But she had nothing much to do for the next few hours so she took my hand and marched me across the baked plain of the yard to meet her mother.
‘I’m called Galya,’ she said.
It was only after we had rung her mother’s doorbell for some time that she remembered that it was a Saturday. Her mother, it transpired, was a Seventh Day Adventist and would be praying with her sister, Galya’s aunt. We marched back down the staircase and across to a second apartment block – the ground in between was full of vegetables ripening early in this intense heat – where we found the old women. They wore headscarves and cardigans, and were sitting on an old sofa with the Book of Revelation open in front of them.
They had never heard of any Dudkos, and had lived here all their lives. This was not good. Nonetheless, I decided to come away with something and got my notebook out anyway. Anna Vasilyevna, Galya’s aunt, was born in 1922 – the same year as Father Dmitry. Nina Vasilyevna, who had twelve other children besides Galya, was three years younger. This, I thought, could at least be a chance to find out about life under occupation. This whole area was taken by the Germans at the very start of Hitler’s war. Father Dmitry had spent two years under German occupation, and all old people would have shared his experiences of foreign rule.
Except they did not want to talk about that. They wanted to talk about their faith, and about grandchildren – in that order.
‘I started to believe in God in the wartime. The bullets were flying. Our uncle Matvei brought the faith back from the army. He did not drink or smoke. He gave up vodka, and he stopped stealing or lying,’ said the aunt.
I looked round at Galya, who was giggling silently. I began to suspect this was a practical joke she had set up to pass the time.
‘They will burn everything. Now there is freedom of religion, if we live long enough the pope of Rome will come and kill us.’
She looked pleased, as if this would be a very satisfactory way to end her life. Then Galya’s mother started reciting names.
‘Vita, he’s first. Write it down. Then Olya and Natasha.’ I looked at Galya, confused. She mouthed the word ‘grandchildren’. I blinked and wrote the three names down. ‘Tanya, Sveta, Ira, Nina, Zhenya, Vasya, Yulia, Maxim, Igor, Denis.’ The list went on and on until it finally finished: ‘Nadya, Veronika, Misha. How many’s that?’
I counted them. There were twenty-eight.
‘Exactly. Twenty-eight. And eighteen great-grandchildren.’
An argument ensued about whether there were eighteen or nineteen. We went over the list thrice more. The aunt’s husband had been killed in the war, so she had no grandchildren and she eventually tired of such a sterile debate. She turned back to the faith, and my mind drifted a little. I looked at the generations: thirteen children, twenty-eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren. That is the kind of contraction happening everywhere in Russia. If every couple has just one child, then the generation size halves, which is more or less what had happened here.
It could not have been more different when these two old women were born. Industry and railways had brought unprecedented mobility to Russia in the years before the revolution, but the villages where they started their lives had still changed little since the Middle Ages. The fertility level was high – comparable to that of Somalia today, where each woman has more than six children – and 80 per cent of Russia’s population were peasants.
Although serfdom – the slavery that tied peasants to the villages and gave landlords almost limitless powers to punish them – was scrapped in 1861, the peasants were still not free to move. They had to pay off the debt incurred by buying their freedom, and were collectively liable as villages for the sum. Few wanted to leave anyway. The communal pull was so strong that successive well-wishers from both ends of the political spectrum retreated before their stubborn attachment to their old ways of life, the yearly division of land, the Church, folk medicine.
Death rates remained high. Mothers smothered unwanted babies in bed. Babies were left in the care of their siblings, who often rocked their cradles so hard they fell out and died. Diarrhoea was treated by hanging children up by their legs and shaking them violently. ‘Outie’ belly buttons were spread with dough so mice could nibble them off. In most homes, more than half the children died. The poorer families, according to one eyewitness account of life in a Russian village in the late nineteenth century, often welcomed the deaths of infants with the words: ‘Thank goodness, the Lord thought better of it.’
It was a life of superstition. Any outsiders were distrusted and opposed. Local officials could flog adults on their bare bottoms for the most minor of offences. The eyewitness, an aristocrat called Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, described how in one village near her home pigs dug up the body of a baby that had been murdered.
‘No action was taken in the matter. Peasants do not like criminal investigations and keep quiet even when they know something.’
Officials could demand taxes before the harvest if they wanted, and would then confiscate property when the peasant in question could not pay. When the revolution came, the peasants rose up and seized the lords’ lands, as well as that of any profitable neighbours who had made money from the few agricultural reforms imposed before World War One. The Bolsheviks, who understood nothing of the countryside, declared war on them, seizing their grain and causing famine. Somewhere between 10 and 14 million people died of hunger in the four years after 1917.
These old women were living witnesses to the history of their nation, its triumphs and its tragedies, but sadly they did not much want to talk about it.
‘Now there is freedom of religion, but there is little time. When they smashed up the church, they imprisoned the priests,’ said Galya’s aunt, slapping my foot and chuckling.
Her sister chipped in: ‘The pope of Rome will soon announce a census of religions.’
The aunt was not to be outdone. She summoned all the breath in her lungs and intoned: ‘They will come and kill us.’
Both old women burst out laughing. Galya leaned over to kiss them on their pale cheeks. They adjusted their headscarves, and we left, leaving them sitting on the sofa companionably discussing their imminent demise. The photograph I took could just as easily be from a hundred years ago. Galya looked at me, shrugged and giggled.
I tried to give up the quest at this point and go back to Bryansk to regroup, but Galya was having none of it. Although born here, she visited rarely and wanted to show the peculiar Westerner off to all her old friends. So it was that we boarded another bus, which took us beyond the end of the metalled road, to Pupkovo.
There had been no rain for weeks, and the road was pale dust w
ith a strip of yellowing grass up the middle. I could not imagine how anyone reached Pupkovo in the thaw, when a winter’s worth of snow melted all at once, but then the thaw itself was hard to imagine in this brutal heat. Chunks of the fields on either side of the bus broke off into the air, floating on a wavering mirage.
When the bus stopped at the entrance to the village, there was desolation. A standing cross marked where the communists had knocked the church down. The church had stood until 1937, the cross said, so I wondered briefly if this was where Father Dmitry had worshipped as a boy. We strode down a slight slope into the village, where houses ringed an artificial pond. Most of the houses lacked glass in their windows; some of them lacked roofs. The place was all but abandoned and it was clear Galya was not the only person to have left Pupkovo.
‘There used to be a club there,’ said Galya, pointing at one building, which had been part of the collective farm. Now she was not smiling. ‘But there’s no one left to dance any more.’
We could hear laughter, however, and skirted the pond to a little cabin that had been built out over its surface. A shiny German car stood outside. A glistening fat man in tight shorts and nothing else waved us in, welcomed Galya by name and passed his bottle of beer into his left hand so that I could approach him and shake his right. He did not stand up or otherwise move. His was the expensive car parked on the lane. That and the large gold cross on a gold chain around his neck showed him to be a man of means. Galya explained my mission. The man turned to his two companions and to a child who was turning kebabs on the barbecue.
‘Dudko? Who the fuck was Dudko? Wasn’t he from the Kaluga region?’
The men simpered. The child stared.
‘He was from the Kaluga region. Come on, we’ll hire a forester’s truck. Get some fucking beer, and some meat and have a barbecue. It’s not fucking far through the forest,’ he said with a grin, and a lunge towards Galya.
The Last Man in Russia Page 2
