Galya’s face was set. She declined without giving me a chance to come up with a plausible excuse. We had people to meet, she said, and took me by the hand once more.
‘Galya, why aren’t you wearing a fucking cross? Aren’t you Russian? Where are you going? Have a fucking beer.’
She towed me out of the cabin and back on to the path. Her good mood, already soured by the sight of her home village, was gone.
‘See that,’ she said. ‘Some example to his son. That was his son there, the one who said nothing. He’s got a pregnant daughter at home with no husband, and he’s sitting here drinking beer. No education. It was people like him who burned down my house, and look at him there with his cross. Oh, Russia, Russia.’
We turned left, her leading, on to a path across the fields, or what had once been fields. They butted on to the village houses but grew only rank grass.
‘Everything used to grow here,’ she said. Her voice was tight and her steps fast. ‘See there: potatoes. Over there: tomatoes. Here was beetroot. And now, nothing. It’s just ruined, like this whole country, and that man is there with his money and his beer.’
The sandy soil was exposed along the path, but otherwise this farmland had turned into wilderness. There was no human mark left.
‘No one will even harvest this hay. Why bother? There’s nothing to eat it.’
The path dipped down into some trees, where a small chapel sat in the shade. It was built of softwood planks and roofed with clear plastic. Inside was a well, made of circular concrete segments and choked with foul green slime. It was an evil-looking place to hold baptisms.
‘He built it,’ said Galya, with a jerk of her head back towards the pond. ‘He’s in the cement business.’ She paused to make sure I had understood. ‘Business,’ she repeated with invisible inverted commas around it.
A man was clearing weeds from a path that approached the far side of the well. Galya greeted him as Vasilyevich – son of Vasily – and explained my goal. He shrugged at the name Dudko. No Dudkos here, he said, but he had some papers on local history at his house if I was interested.
It was the first lead all day, and I accepted with enthusiasm. So, we walked back past the pond, the fat man, his car and his gang, whose hails Galya ignored. News of Galya’s visit spread quickly, and as we waited for Vasilyevich to bring out the papers, four or five women gathered: all of them were old friends of hers. There was no one else in the village. None of them had heard of the Dudkos. I was feeling a bit light-headed in the burning heat and began wondering whether Father Dmitry had existed at all.
The papers on the church were interesting, but Vasilyevich had no copies, so I looked through them, gave them back and turned to go. Galya and I would need to walk back to Berezino from wherever we were, so that I could find a bus back to Bryansk. There would be no further buses from here that day.
The earth track passed between further fallow fields. There was no cultivation here at all – just grass – and almost no livestock: only the occasional cow. The whole population seemed to have given up farming. We heard a car approaching from behind us. At the wheel was the man with the papers.
‘A friend of my wife came after you left,’ he said, addressing Galya instead of me. ‘She used to work for the post office. Apparently, this used to happen to letters sometimes. There are two Berezinos in the Bryansk region. The other one is over by Unecha, near the border with Belarus, spelled Berezina, with an “a”.’
It made sense. Berezino comes from the word for birch tree, and Russia has a lot of birch trees. It is a village name that could easily be repeated many times. Galya looked at me. The giggle was back.
‘Two Berezinos? And you’ve come to the wrong one,’ she said. She looked profoundly amused. The lines at the corners of her eyes were even deeper than before. She hooted with laughter and put her arm around me.
‘How far have you come to go to the wrong village? From London?’
I stood stupidly in the sun. I could not help but smile. Galya’s laughter was irresistible. I was probably already a local legend: the daft foreigner with a notebook who couldn’t read a map.
‘Get in,’ the man said. ‘I’ll take you to the bus stop. You’ve got a long trip if you’re going all the way to Unecha.’
Galya, who was still giggling, left me at the bus stop. She wanted to have a proper conversation with her mother and thought the old women might have calmed down by now. I could hear her still chuckling as she walked away. At last the bus came, and I was heading in the right direction.
When I finally found the narrow road to Father Dmitry’s real home village, far to the west and a day’s journey away, it was possible to imagine that nothing had changed here not only since he was born in 1922, but for centuries before that too. Conifers formed a spiky horizon all round. Potatoes sprouted from sandy fields. Sparse crops of barley ran right up against the walls of log-built houses.
But the impression was illusory. The peasants here in western Russia were some of the doughtiest enemies the Bolsheviks ever faced. They had to be prised away from their ancient customs like a child from its mother. The assault on them was merciless, their defeat was total, and their lives changed for ever. In the face of the onslaught, peasants clung to all that they could salvage: to their faith, Orthodox Christianity.
Orthodoxy is made up of ancient rituals and chants and processions that believers lose themselves in. Icons are objects of adoration, and churches have tiered screens to separate the priest conducting the mysteries from the waiting faithful. Orthodoxy claims descent from the faith of the earliest times, which is why it is so resistant to change – a characteristic reinforced in Russian villages where reform remains distrusted.
Father Dmitry never wrote much about his childhood, but from what he did record it is clear that his home was deeply religious. His father, an ordinary farmer with a stubborn face in photographs, kept a Bible in the house. His small son would secretly read it to himself. He played at being a priest, taking an ember and a candle, and filling the hut with smoke. He gave communion from a glass of water to all his friends, who treated the event, he said much later, with great solemnity.
Playing was not something they did much of, in those days, however. The Bolshevik state was only newly established, and its economy was wrecked by civil war and international blockade. Before the revolution, the government had barely troubled the peasants, beyond demanding taxes. Once the tax collectors were gone for the year, the only official they saw was the constable. The Soviets were different.
Communist officials confiscated the peasants’ crops to feed the cities. They had machine guns and the farmers were powerless to resist them. One winter, troops came and took the last wheat from Father Dmitry’s family: the grain they needed to live on and to plant for the next year. His father, the bearded tyrant who ruled his household and read the Bible, lay on the ground and wept. Dmitry, his brothers and his mother wept too.
His sister was married by then, but her husband left for Ukraine to try to find food for his wife and young child. He was not heard of again. Abandoned, she struggled into the nearby town of Unecha with her baby to beg for food from the townsfolk. The baby cried and cried. He needed to be fed, she said, as often as a kitten. Her milk dried up, and she tried to appease him with water but he cried still more.
Finally, the baby calmed and slept. Her begging had failed and she had fed him nothing, but at least he was not uttering the unignorable screams of a hungry infant. She struggled on in her fruitless quest for food. It was only when she got back home that she realized he was dead. Desperate with grief, she ran to her own mother. She walked around their hut in her grief, until she found an edible plant in the garden. She dropped to her knees to eat it, but Dmitry was too fast for her. He ran out into the garden and slammed her round the head with a pole.
‘What did you do that for?’ his mother demanded.
‘We all want to eat,’ he replied. He wrote later that he was pleased he had defended th
eir food store, even from his own sister.
The family had planted rye, which they guarded jealously until it grew large enough to be eaten. The children awoke one day to find their grandmother had broken into their garden and was eating the immature seeds. She could barely walk she was so hungry, but the brothers drove her out of their crop like a cow. When they had pushed her out, they began to throw lumps of earth at her. She sank to her knees and cursed them.
Dmitry’s grandfather was also a religious man, and he built his own church out in the fields where he recited what he could remember of the old services. He was hungry and begged food. Their neighbours beat him and he lost his mind. The children then teased him and laughed at him, throwing stones. Once he caught Dmitry and thrashed him.
When Dmitry was already in his teens, he and his father gathered to mark Easter, the holiest date in the Orthodox calendar. Dmitry held his homemade cross while his father read the holy service. Stalin’s government wanted to force the peasants to give up their own property and merge it into a single collective farm. The new farms would be efficient and mechanized, and would provide the food surpluses the Soviet state needed so that it could industrialize. In effect, the peasants’ labour, livestock and land would be taken from them and used by the government for someone else’s benefit.
It is not surprising that many of the peasants wanted nothing to do with the new farms, but the government was determined. It sent squads of city folk into the villages to force the peasants to take part.
Recalcitrant peasants were taxed at a rate 70 per cent higher than their collectivized neighbours and, even after selling all their valuables, could rarely afford to pay what the state demanded. That is what happened to Father Dmitry’s father, who refused to join the collective. He was charged with tax evasion. His insistence on maintaining the old religious rites was added to the charge sheet. He was, under the new legal code on the young judge’s desk, conducting religious propaganda. He and Dmitry had to walk 3 kilometres to the courthouse in another village.
‘Why have you not paid the state?’ asked the judge.
‘I have not paid, yes . . . there’s nothing to pay with . . . I live badly,’ his father replied.
‘And why don’t you join the collective farm? There you will live better.’
‘Well, I can go into the farm, if I have to.’
The judge gave him two years in jail. He was one of the approximately 25 million Soviet citizens repressed – shot, deported, imprisoned, exiled – in the years between Stalin seizing power in 1928 and dying in 1953. That is an eighth of the Soviet population, approximately two people for every three families. Tens of millions more suffered by association. As relatives of ‘enemies of the people’, the families of the convicted prisoners too were denied many of the rights of citizens. Dmitry, the son of a class enemy, knew that his troubles were in many ways only now beginning.
After his father’s conviction, they sat for a while but had nothing to say. When Dmitry returned home alone, his mother was inconsolable. The sentence was extended, and those two years became four. The boys begged and stole food to keep themselves alive.
The collective farms were key to Stalin’s plans to turn the Soviet Union into a modern state capable of standing up for itself. They would break the old traditions, forcing the peasants to do the state’s will and to become pliant proletarians. They would also create a surplus of food to be exported so the Soviet Union could import the tools and equipment needed to modernize the economy. In this they succeeded. By stealing the peasants’ food, the government won its crash industrialization. As Stalin’s supporters say: when he arrived, Russia had wooden ploughs; when he died, it had the hydrogen bomb. The collective farms were not a long-term success, however. By the end of communism, Moscow was paying as much for imported grain as it was earning from exporting oil. Grain yields per hectare were a third of those in Germany, although the Soviet Union had some of the richest land in the world.
From a cultural and social perspective, things were even worse. Or so I heard from Vasily Germangenovich Shpinkov, universally known as Germangenovich, from the village of Kazashchina. Kazashchina is a couple of kilometres to the west of Berezina. On my way to see him, I walked past a stork’s nest, a dense umbrella of sticks. Storks are supposed to bring good luck, but this one did not seem to have helped the village. Almost every house was boarded up or rotting.
Germangenovich was born in 1926, making him four years Father Dmitry’s junior. If he was busy when I arrived, he showed no sign of it, since he sat me down, squeezed on to the seat next to me and began to talk as if he had been waiting for me his whole life.
He had a strange twisted nose, scarred in the way I imagine a serious explosion would scar it. His grey hair was thick but chaotic. His eyes were bright. I had plenty of time to examine him since he believed in the bigger picture. His life story started with Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava. That was in 1709.
He was a Cossack and proud of it, and he pointed out to me his reproduction above the door of a painting in which Cossacks are shown writing a rude letter to the Turkish sultan. He wanted me to know that the tsars had been good people, and told me so at length. I had to write it all down, since he waited for me to do so after every sentence.
As a result, my notebook is full of pages of information on tsaristera serfs, when peasants were tied to their village and forced to give their labour to their lord for three days a week.
‘In 1931, Stalin brought in a second serfdom. He took the land, he took the livestock and he left the people with just a quarter of a hectare. And people did not have to work only three days a week for their masters like under the old system, but all the time, plus the churches and priests were destroyed.’
He was talking directly into my face, so I had a close view of his nose. His eyes were alive either side of it.
‘I remember how they forced people into the collective farm. The chairman of the village council sat at a table with a pistol which he said was for the enemies of the people, who were those who did not want to join the collective farm. I was six years old and was up on the stove.’
He gestured to the huge flat-topped stove that dominated the room. Traditional peasant houses such as this one are built around the stove. It projects into every room and keeps them warm in the wintertime. In very cold weather, the family sleeps on top.
When the chairman had finished his speech and everyone shouted ‘Praise Stalin, praise the revolution!’, Germangenovich’s grandmother told them they were all fools, that nothing good would come of it; that it was not for life, it was for death. Her curses made no difference. The government took over all the barns, and all the livestock. It even took people’s wedding rings, the state’s desire for currency was so strong.
‘We had to give our cow to the state, and my mother got two and a half metres of cloth, which she used to make shirts for my father. That was the payment for our cow: a couple of shirts. When my father took the horse to the collective farm, we cried, we children. He knew that the horse would die, because it would have no master, no one would look after it. Our horse went to the common barn, and they took our land, and this is where the starvation came from.’
There were seven people in his family: his parents, him, his three siblings and his grandmother. They ate herbs and weeds to stave off hunger. His father did not have the money to buy an exercise book, so they went semi-naked and barefoot to their lessons without anything to write in.
‘The children were weak, many could not go to school. They were naked and hungry, and refused to leave the house. How can you walk when your legs won’t move? At school, they gave out bread. They had a list, and they divided children up. The poorest got bread, but me and my brother were so-called middle peasants so we got nothing.’
Middle peasants were the group of people between kulaks – the supposedly rich oppressors, who were often ordinary farmers whose hard work had allowed them to own slightly more than their neighb
ours, and who were sent off to die in Siberia and the north – and the Bolsheviks’ favoured poor peasants.
The classifications were based on a report that Lenin wrote in the late nineteenth century. He was a committed Marxist, and saw the laws of class struggle all around him. That led him to the erroneous conclusion that peasants were dividing into classes – kulak, middle and poor – thanks to the government’s abolition of serfdom and various other limited agricultural reforms.
In fact, peasants distributed their land afresh every year, with families receiving a share proportional to the number of people in their household. That imposed equality and the differences Lenin observed were transient developments brought about by temporary increases in some families’ sizes that would be erased when young men left home or old men died.
The peasants he labelled as rich were rarely rich enough to employ labour, and in any case distrusted the habits required to get ahead in business. Besides, as Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia noted, any surplus wealth tended to go on vodka, which had the habit of returning the relatively rich to the ranks of the poor once more.
Even if stratification into classes did occur, it was wiped out by the revolution and subsequent disturbances. Peasants stole their rich landlords’ belongings, then the Bolsheviks stole what was left. There were no kulaks, no middle peasants and no poor peasants. There were just peasants, and all of them were in dire condition.
For the Bolsheviks, however, what Lenin wrote was true, and the communist government set targets for how many kulaks needed to be ‘dekulakized’ so as to establish fairness in the countryside. In June 1931 alone, 101,184 families were resettled from their homes to remote areas. The population of the Narym territory in Siberia increased from 120,000 to 300,000 in less than three months as the kulaks poured in, with no allowances made to feed the new arrivals in the long Siberian winter.
The kulaks were often the peasants with the best handicraft skills. With their departure, the villages lost their most skilled and accomplished residents, as well as much of their livestock, since many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals rather than hand them over to the state. Lacking animals to work the land or supply manure for fertilizer, the peasants’ grain crops collapsed, while grain seizures continued. That caused a new famine.
The Last Man in Russia Page 3
