We looked at each other in the gloom, unsure of what to say next. He turned back and pulled his mattress off his bed, cursing. I was definitely not to blame, but I could see the dark patches of damp on his sheets. Then a savage flare of lightning lit the compartment and, almost instantly, thunder cracked directly overhead. The flash showed torrential rain pouring down the window of the compartment and, now I listened, I could hear the drumming of the drops on the roof, louder even than the rattle of the wheels.
Rainwater was pouring through the ventilation hatches on top of the carriage, through the ceiling, down the partition, through the gap between my bunk and the wall and on to his bed. I held out my finger to feel the water. It was already a substantial waterfall and the volume was increasing. I tucked my sheets away from the torrent, turned on to my right side and looked out at the storm. Every few seconds, a lightning flash would fix the conifers of the forest into a cutout, like the backdrop to a fairy-tale. The temperature had dropped with the storm’s arrival, and I felt rather snug on my dry top bunk. I curled up in my blanket and dozed off, listening to the curses of my neighbour as more and more water drenched his sheets.
2
A double-dyed anti-Soviet
To Father Dmitry, fresh from his village, the capital of the Soviet Union was something wonderful. Moscow might have been semi-destroyed by World War Two, its people living in rags and surviving on porridge. But it was still the biggest and richest city he had ever seen.
‘Moscow seemed to me to be a fairy-tale town,’ he wrote later.
And the fact he could become a priest must have seemed a fairy-tale also. He had grown up at a time when religion was a secret activity, conducted in fields or at night. Churches still loomed over many towns and villages, but more often than not they were used as storerooms or factories or hospitals.
The seminary owed its rebirth to the deal struck between the Orthodox Church and Stalin at the height of World War Two. Although Stalin was by this stage marshal of the Soviet Union, responsible for the defence of the world’s largest country in the worst war it ever fought, he summoned three of the surviving four bishops to a late-night meeting in September 1943, and insisted that they train new priests.
Stalin himself had studied at a seminary long before the revolution. He had got top grades and was even a highly praised choirboy for a while, which may have explained his enthusiasm.
‘Why don’t you have cadres? Where have they disappeared to?’ he mused, according to a later history of the Orthodox Church. Presumably he was being sarcastic, since his own security service had arrested, imprisoned and shot them all. His sarcasm could have given the new patriarch Sergei a golden opportunity to protest that thousands of his fellow believers were in the gulag. The patriarch was too cautious, however, knowing that if he protested he might join them.
‘One of the reasons is that we train a person for the priesthood and he becomes a marshal of the Soviet Union,’ he said. He was referring to Stalin.
It was grotesque flattery, but appears to have worked in setting a jocular tone. The meeting lasted until three in the morning, with the dictator reminiscing about his schooldays in pre-revolutionary Georgia. That year, 1943, his government restored the Church as an official body. Some monasteries reopened when the war finished. And the seminary was opened too. At first it was based in Moscow, and then it was moved to a monastery in Zagorsk – a town 70 kilometres to the north-east of Moscow now known by its pre-revolutionary name of Sergiev Posad.
The train I caught to Sergiev Posad had none of the snug comfort of the sleeper from Unecha. It was one of the many electric suburban shuttles that take Russians from Moscow to their country houses in the forests and villages outside the great city. These dachas are a cult in Russia, and some Russians spend months growing vegetables or raising poultry like their peasant ancestors. Those farmers’ descendants still love the taste of homegrown food.
It has long been lucky for the country that they do. In 1940, the private patches that peasants were allowed to keep produced almost all of the eggs and milk they consumed, as well as half of the potatoes and milk for everyone else, thus compensating for the inefficiency of the collective farms. By 1990, privately produced food made up more than a quarter of all the food produced in Russia, despite being grown on less than 2 per cent of the land area. In times of economic collapse, Russians have had the backstop of their own gardens to keep them alive.
Russians with jobs, who cannot flee the city all summer, head out at weekends. This Saturday morning, my carriage was packed with them and sweltering. Temperatures reached 39 degrees in late July 2010. In a few weeks’ time, fires in the forests and in dried peat bogs around Moscow would choke the city.
As the train set off with a rattle, I sweated against the plastic seat back and resented the couple opposite me whose legs were trespassing into my space.
I had been at a dreadful party hosted by a British diplomat the night before and had, in a fit of revenge against everyone in the world, got drunk and boorish. This morning I was still irritable. My eyes itched and my brain ached. As we rumbled out of the Kursk station, a procession of hawkers entered our carriage and loudly failed to interest us in the items they had for sale: nylon socks, potato peelers, radios. A gypsy boy came and played the accordion so badly I was tempted to pay him to go away.
The sun shone on the forest as we left the city behind.
The seminary at Zagorsk did not open immediately after the restoration of the Orthodox Church. At first instruction was given in Moscow. The first time that Father Dmitry and his classmates got to see the ancient seminary buildings was in May 1947, when they took this same railway line to celebrate mass in the glorious Assumption Cathedral, built under Ivan the Terrible and the centrepiece of Russia’s holiest monastery.
That was where I was going on that baking-hot train. The trees flicked past the window. The grass beneath them was dry and sparse. There was a lot of summer still to come, and it was already the hottest since records began. In a couple of weeks, Russia would ban wheat exports in anticipation of a disastrous harvest and the world’s food prices would soar in response.
The couple opposite me whose legs I had resented were now asleep. They were middle aged and heavy set. He wore a light-blue shirt and flat cap, while she wore a flowery dress and looked hot and flustered even with her eyes closed.
I too tried to doze, but I kept being knocked by other passengers. They were fare-dodgers, pushing up the train in the hope we would stop soon and they could run down the platform around behind the ticket inspectors to the already checked rear of the train. Their chances were slim. The inspectors worked in a team of four: two women and two burly men to keep order.
The woman opposite had tucked her arm through her husband’s. She did not remove it even when asked to show her ticket, as if she were worried he might be stolen. Their tickets checked, she closed her eyes and laid her head back on his shoulder. He did not wake up, and slept with a slight smile. Their fondness for each other improved my mood considerably.
After an hour and a half of slow rattling we pulled into Sergiev Posad, a little town with factory chimneys and apartment blocks. I could not face walking far in the heat, so I asked a taxi to drive me to the great walled fortress of the monastery complex, then felt stupid for paying 150 roubles when the journey took less than a minute.
The monastery was founded here more than six centuries ago, when a young man built a wooden chapel. He was St Sergei, after whom the town was named. His asceticism did not stop him networking with princes, however. They asked him to bless their armies, and he secured a reputation as a national religious leader.
The complex has come a long way since Sergei’s day, having been ruled by a succession of equally canny hierarchs and thus endowed with land and wealth by generations of tsars and aristocrats.
Today, it is a perfect fairy-tale mix of heavy white walls – to guard the monks against the threats of the world, such as a Tatar attack in 1408 an
d a Polish siege 200 years later – then, soaring above them, the elegant gold bulb of the Assumption Cathedral, topped by a cross so heavy it needs guy wires. Either side of the entrance gate, which is as weighty as any castle’s, the icons are sheathed in clear plastic marked by hundreds of lipstick smears where women on pilgrimage stop to kiss them. As I walked in, thousands of pigeons strutted among the feet of the faithful, occasionally flying up to their roosts in the arrow slits of the high walls.
I had asked Oleg Sukhanov, press officer at the seminary, to show me around and was already late. He was large and moustached and wore black. He did not seem to mind my lateness, however, and bustled me through the crowd flowing into this perfect little city of Orthodox architecture.
The seminary was off to our right, through a garden. Inside, stairs stretched up to the first floor. The stairwell was screened by heavy mesh, like in a prison, as if to prevent suicides. It struck a jarring note, but I had no time to ask about it, since at the first landing Sukhanov strode left down a dark corridor lined with photographs of the seminary’s alumni.
He showed me the dormitory: vaulted roof, whitewashed walls, unvarnished parquet floor. Each bed had a chair at its foot. They were so close together only a narrow bedside cupboard could fit between them. A handful of students were relaxing, wearing high-collared jackets like military cadets. The room did not look like it had been redecorated since Father Dmitry’s day. The only new furniture was a row of cheap laminated wardrobes, the doors of which were already hanging askew.
My tour was at high speed, and next stop was the chapel. According to legend, when King Vladimir, who was to become the Russians’ first Christian ruler after his conversion in 988, wanted to choose a religion, he sent emissaries to investigate all the faiths of his neighbours: Latin and Greek Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The embassy that sailed to Constantinople was so dazzled by the gold and ritual and incense of Hagia Sophia that they rushed back to tell him all about it. Theirs was an experience that visitors to Orthodox cathedrals still revel in today.
‘When we stood in the temple,’ they are said to have told him on their return, ‘we hardly knew whether or not we were in heaven, for, in truth, upon earth it is impossible to behold such glory and magnificence; we could not tell all we have seen; there, verily, God has His dwelling among men, and the worship of other countries is as nothing. Never can we forget the grandeur which we saw. Whoever has enjoyed so sweet a sight can never elsewhere be satisfied, nor will we remain longer as we are.’
That was convincing enough for Vladimir. He converted to the Greek version of Christianity in a decision no doubt helped along by the Byzantine emperor offering one of his daughters as a bride. On entering that chapel in Sergiev Posad, I could see what those envoys had meant. Sometimes Orthodox churches are gaudy and vulgar, but this one was sublime. A sky-blue vaulted roof glowed gently in sunlight pouring through a glazed lantern. Frescoes of angels and saints sucked my eyes towards the ranks of gold-framed icons on the screen. An elegant chandelier dominated the middle of the space. Two women bowed in their whispered prayers. Another woman carefully straightened narrow yellow candles that were bending slightly in the warmth of the day.
Father Dmitry, raised in a village faith of whispered prayers in homemade churches, would have been entranced by the majesty of this chapel. I craned my neck back and traced the paintings and the structure. It was magnificent: awe-inspiring and calming all at once.
In a classroom down the corridor, trainee priests stared and giggled at laptops like students all over the world. A sombre oil painting of an intense religious discussion loomed on the wall behind them, with peasants clustered around a cross in a dark room. The students were young, handsome and in high spirits.
Sukhanov and I returned to the corridor with the photographs. Father Dmitry’s year was the first picture on the left, because they were the first students to enter the seminary after it reopened. All the other years had formal portraits of the students and teachers gathered together. This one had eighteen separate pictures, which had clearly been gathered after the students had already left. Some of them were identified by name but most were not, and I could not find Father Dmitry among them.
Later accounts relate how he always loved talking and debating, a trait he learned from the father and grandfather that had introduced him to Christianity. They had taught him that religion is a living thing, something to be discussed and celebrated. His father had taught him phrases from the Bible, and they had explored them, asking what they meant. He must have been a rambunctious presence in class, and that alone was enough to make him stand out. In 1940s Russia, people who wanted to survive did not talk openly to strangers. Even relatives needed to be treated with caution.
Soviet children were raised on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a young boy whose body was found on the edge of his village in the Urals in 1932. According to the story pieced together (some say, invented) by the police, Pavlik had informed the authorities that his father, a poor peasant, was forging documents allowing kulaks to pass themselves off as ordinary citizens. On the basis of the evidence, his father was exiled. Pavlik was then murdered. Four of his family members – his grandparents, a godfather and a cousin – were executed for the crime, which was said to have been a bloody act of revenge.
The story, which is likely to have been fabricated but which was passed off as true, was turned into an opera, songs, plays and biographies. School groups visited Morozov’s grave, and children were encouraged to believe that snitching on your own father was valuable if your father was working against the state. Martyrdom in the service of communism was the highest ideal. Stories such as this one established a generation gap between new, young Soviet people and the old patriarchal villages of their parents.
As the historian Orlando Figes put it: ‘for anyone below the age of thirty, who had only ever known the Soviet world, or had inherited no other values from his family, it was almost impossible to step outside the propaganda system and question its political principles’.
Father Dmitry, however, had inherited other values from his family, and that made him no Pavlik Morozov. He did not inform on his own father, although his father attended secret religious ceremonies, nor on his grandfather.
By the end of the 1940s, the gulag camps all across the Soviet Union contained more than 2.5 million people – a million more than in 1945 – and a similar number of people were in internal exile. From the second half of 1948 onwards, the police began rearresting former political prisoners by the alphabet.
‘I have long noticed your anti-Soviet spirit. You have read one or two sermons, and you’re already conceited. You want to reshape everything,’ said the professor who taught the students how to preach. Dmitry, when asked his opinion of the Bolshevik killing of the tsar and his family, replied that it was brutal, and that he pitied the children. That was an unwise thing to say, and by now the authorities had their eye on him. He had always loved writing. Inspired by the Psalms, he used poems as a way of exploring the same issues he liked to debate: his country, history, God.
One older fellow student asked to read his poems. Dmitry, a village boy and untrained in the ways of the security services, assented. The student handed the poems to the K G B.
Prosecutors seized on a poem of his that described Stalin as an ‘executioner’ and the ‘first destroyer’. Father Dmitry’s brother Vladimir gave me a package of poems in Berezina, but I could not find this one among them. Perhaps he destroyed any other unwisely political ones long ago. The poems I was given had gently nationalist themes, but nothing so outspoken.
‘Russia, I think of you always / and I am greatly concerned for your destiny,’ says one. Another tells how he loves Russia for ‘her tears, which she shares with him’. I wondered how many of these poems had been read by his fellow students.
In the corridor of photos, I took out a torch so we could better see the faces in the pictures. One of these men informed on him to the police. Who knows what reason
s led him to denounce his fellow student? Often informers were people who were themselves at risk of arrest – children of kulaks, or members of supposedly suspicious minorities such as Jews or Poles – who were forced to denounce or be denounced.
Then again, a seminary with its concentration of believers was likely to have been a particular focus of suspicion, and agents would have kept a close watch on what was happening there. In the 1940s, there is said to have been at least one informer for every six or seven families in Moscow as a whole, and the Church would have been under still closer scrutiny. Perhaps then the man who sent Father Dmitry to jail was just doing it for money or a better flat.
The night before his arrest, Father Dmitry wrote later, he dreamed that a cross came towards him, that he carried it on his right shoulder and that it became heavier and heavier, until he woke up. He was arrested in central Moscow while calling on a sick friend.
He had to wait until Stalin’s death before studying at the reopened seminary in Sergiev Posad. He was arrested before Easter 1948, and the seminary did not move out of central Moscow until the autumn.
His troubles are not mentioned in the official history of the college. Stalinism is too embarrassing an episode to be remembered at all in fact, and the book describes the 1940s simply as a busy time when the trainee priests had to share their premises with several educational establishments already based in Sergiev Posad. The chapel was home to a social club, the historian wrote, and students played ball on the open ground between the seminary and the cathedral.
‘The schoolchildren with their cries and running about, the grownups hurrying about their affairs, the students playing their games – all of this created an atmosphere of vanity, of hubbub, having nothing in common with a monastery. On top of this was a club built next to our bedrooms and classrooms,’ he wrote. A reader knowing nothing of the context would assume these were the only difficulties the priests faced, and the book does not record Father Dmitry’s arrest or the undoubted lesson it must have taught the others of the dangers of speaking out.
The Last Man in Russia Page 5
