He might be from a small and remote town, but this was enough to qualify him as a high-flyer. In the late 1960s, he was already living the communist dream, creating his own legend. He was defending the revolution. Once he beat up a friend who had had sex with a female classmate in the Pioneers’ room. They were welcome to have sex of course, that was their business, but they should never have used the Pioneers’ banner as a sheet. They had fucked on the flag, and needed to be taught a lesson.
Another time, some locals were out in the middle of town in winter. It was cold and they were warming their feet on the eternal flame, which burned to commemorate those who had died defending the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikov was not having that. ‘So I go up to this group of people, and they think I’m joking, and they laugh. And I then, I knock one of them so badly that I put him on his knees and make him promise that he will never come to this eternal flame again, or use bad language or anything.’
Ogorodnikov was enjoying his tale, and the effect it was having on me. I had come to meet a religious dissident and was listening to a fervent communist. His flow was broken, however, when Andrei, still not wearing any trousers, trotted into the kitchen, presented me with a toy pirate, hesitated and trotted out again. Ogorodnikov laughed, and promised to hurry his tale along.
He had been unusually committed, he said, but he insisted that he had not been totally abnormal. Cynicism had not yet set in by the late 1960s, and everyone he knew believed in communism. In that, they were not alone. Even the dissidents were communists. They might have disagreed with their government’s tactics, but that did not mean they objected to its goal of establishing a society where everyone lived equally.
‘I regard communism as the only goal that can be put forward by the modern mind; the West has been unable to put forward anything like it,’ said dissident Andrei Sinyavsky at his trial in 1966. The government was about to jail him simply because he had written something it did not like, but he still supported its ideology.
There is purity and naivety in this kind of dissidence. Soviet officials saw CIA plots and foreign intervention in the dissident movement, but most of these young people were simply idealists who wanted everything to be better for everyone, not only for themselves. If people like Sinyavsky criticized the authorities, or people like Ogorodnikov beat up cold people for warming their feet, they did so honestly, because they wanted to improve the system, not for money or advancement. It is a crucial distinction. They saw problems and they tried to correct them, and they met their friends and debated how best to do so. It did not occur to them that the state did not want their help, and they had to be forcibly shown the error in their doctrine.
By the time Ogorodnikov went to university, a lot of officials were no doubt thinking it was time he learned to shut up. For the Soviet hierarchs, the revolution had been won. That meant Ogorodnikov was a revolutionary without a revolution, and that is a dangerous breed. The government had no need for such as him. It needed passive, non-complaining workers to run the machine that supported the top officials.
‘Life was cynical. The leaders understood it was all a lie; it was money and a career. Public service was for their good, not for the good of society. The holiday homes of the Young Communist League had already become brothels, you understand,’ said Ogorodnikov.
He lasted two months studying philosophy at the university in Sverdlovsk before being expelled. It was a disillusioning experience. He had got to university to find that the Young Communist League was dominated not by tireless strivers such as himself, but by mini-politicians, people using the system to climb the ladder of party and state, people who wanted wealth and power.
Bureaucrats, secure in control of their empires, began to divide up the system, to morph into mafia groups. Organized crime spread, and disillusionment with it. Ogorodnikov was out of step with the times. He was not the man to work patiently at politics behind closed doors, to swap favours and to pay bribes. He needed crowds and applause and action. He had created a discussion club at university, where they read poems by authors who were already dissidents, or who had never been rehabilitated. That was unacceptable, even for a rising star such as himself, and he was thrown out of the Young Communists as well as out of university. He was back in Chistopol, with the K G B watching him. They found unofficial literature during a search of his house, and opened a criminal case. It was looking grim.
He still wanted to go to university, however. Theoretically this should have been impossible, but there were chinks in the Soviet system’s armour if you knew where to stab. It was slow and lumbering, whereas he was quick and decisive. He worked out a plan to outwit the authorities. He wanted to get into university in Siberia, which was probably far enough away for the security services to lose track of him. In order to be sure, however, he decided to distract their attention. He went to Moscow first, where he made as much noise as he could.
Playing for the highest stakes, he applied to V G I K, the Soviet Union’s film school and one of its most prestigious centres of higher education. He knew he would be refused entry. He just wanted to distract the K G B from his real plan. Bizarrely, and in testament both to his charm and to the K G B’s incompetence, he got in.
‘It was a miracle,’ he said simply, describing how he was one of the lucky people picked out of the hundreds of applicants. And his life became something wonderful. Expulsion from Sverdlovsk had been a blessing. He was a handsome student at one of the country’s top universities. He had a generous stipend. Women wanted him, and their mothers encouraged them. He had so much money that he could fly off to a Black Sea resort for a break, fly home for an exam, then fly off on holiday again.
‘I had a mass of girlfriends. V G I K was like a key to every door. In the Soviet Union, cinema was everything, and when you said you were at V G I K, and had good clothes, and so on, well, mothers really wanted you to marry their daughters. In hotels where there were no rooms, they would find a room for you, and so on. When there were no plane tickets, they found them for me.’
He no longer believed in the communist ideals of his teenage years. Who would after seeing the corruption, inefficiency and cynicism he had encountered? But who cared? He was young, rich and clever, living it up in the capital of a superpower.
These trainee Soviet aristocrats needed to learn how to produce high-quality films that would satisfy the ideological requirements of the old men at the top of the party. They also needed to know what the Soviet Union was up against, propaganda-wise. That meant they had special viewing rooms for Western films that the general public never saw.
One day in spring 1973, they sat down to a treat: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, a version of the Bible story by a gay communist Italian, and a modern classic. It is a stunning production, full of genuine landscape, and broken faces. Pasolini’s Christ, played by a Spanish student, is a pretty boy, a gentle revolutionary, railing against hypocrisy, begging for a return to spiritual values and honesty.
The music alone must have been a revelation. Ogorodnikov would have already known the Prokofiev, Mozart and Bach. But Odetta’s ‘Motherless Child’ cuts the soul like a saw, while Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar mends the wounds. ‘Gloria’ by a Congolese choir adds drama to the scenes of rapture. The screening was supposed to warn Ogorodnikov, to demonstrate the West’s propaganda techniques and show him how to counter them. Instead, it converted him.
Christ, as presented by Pasolini, is a young dissident, with pure revolutionary yearnings, no matter how hard the cynics around him tried to burn them out. It is hardly surprising it inspired the young man who watched it. It was a blueprint for action, and the parallels between the Holy Land and the Soviet Union were there for all to see. The Pharisees were the communists, claiming to be motivated by higher values but really stuffing their pockets. They even had the ridiculous hats.
Watching the film, Ogorodnikov decided that he too could be a man who overturned the tables of the moneylenders, who held up t
o them a mirror showing what a true believer looked like. He came out of the cinema a committed Christian, and his life began.
‘But I was in a vacuum. I was outside the Church, I did not know what the Church was, I had no knowledge. What does it mean to be a Christian? How do I live in this totalitarian society, which is pressing on our freedoms, on our spirits?’
He smiled at the memory.
‘We were the first swallows of a new spring. Before us the Church was all old people, old people, and we were the first swallows. One time, I went into a church in one of the provinces, and the old women tried to force me out of the church. “We won’t let you close the church, we won’t allow you, we won’t let you,” they said. In the understanding of these old women, a young man could go into a church with only one aim, to smash things up, to close the church. It was only when I went up at the end of the liturgy to receive communion that the old women understood. All the church was crying, they were crying. I was a new generation, you understand?’
The trouble was that he did not know how. Books on Christianity were hard to find. Khrushchev, in one of his spasmodic attempts to keep communism alive and fresh after he had denounced Stalin, closed more than half the churches in the country. Those that operated were largely a formality, where old women attended sterile services rushed through by ignorant priests.
The Orthodox hierarchy was completely subordinate to the state. Priests were answerable to local committees controlled by atheists. Bishops made no efforts to rein in the government’s anti-religious campaign. In fact, they defended it if ever challenged by foreigners.
One such bishop, Metropolitan Yuvenali, during a visit to Britain in 1975, used an interview with the B B C to attack ‘some circles in England’ who present ‘a biased and one-sided picture of Russian Orthodox Church life’. There was a ‘spiritual revival’, he insisted.
If there was such a revival, it was no thanks to Yuvenali and his fellows. The Church printed almost no official literature on the faith. Believers received no support from the Church hierarchy, were forced to discuss religion in their own homes, and were on their own when it came to finding texts and puzzling out their meanings.
This is alien to Orthodox tradition, which stresses hierarchy and the importance of priests in administering the sacraments. If these new young believers were to be truly Orthodox, they needed churches to attend, but where could they find one that sated their energy, their intelligence and their questing spiritual hunger?
That was when Ogorodnikov heard about a church on the edge of Moscow, in an old cemetery, where an unusual priest was actually preaching to parishioners. Russia’s Orthodox Church never had much of a tradition of preaching, even in pre-revolutionary times, but there were always itinerant preachers, holy fools who rejected the world and travelled from town to town, enlightening crowds at markets and crossroads. The priest was cast from that same rebellious, truth-telling mould.
He was Father Dmitry.
‘In his services, in these talks, it was like being alive,’ Ogorodnikov said, the wonder still audible in his voice. ‘The Church had lost so much, there were so many martyrs, but it was quiet about it. Sermons were censored and had to be as abstract as possible. Priests had to talk in an incomprehensible language in the sermons. It was like they were not addressing the people, but something they could not see. If the words entered into your soul, so you heard the meaning, so you felt Christ in your heart, then the priest would be banned, he would be sacked, and you know he would not be able to find work, feed his wife. It was a dangerous situation.’
Although Father Dmitry had been in the camps, he was rehabilitated in 1956 and his criminal record erased. That meant he was free to finish his religious training and get a job as a priest. His original church at Transfiguration Square was blown up, but he got a job in another one less than a kilometre away and there he administered to his parishioners as best he could. People of all ages, he said later, kept coming to him with questions about depression, about alcoholism, about abortion and violence.
One night, he had the radical idea of treating the questions he kept being asked not individually but collectively. Many of them were on the same themes, after all. If he could gather the afflicted people together, not only would they hear his words of comfort, but also they would feel support from each other.
On 8 December 1973, he encouraged the attendees of his regular Saturday service to write down questions – ‘about what you’d most like us to talk about, about the questions you have, about your doubts, about the things that puzzle you’ – that they would like him to answer. The questions covered every topic he had hoped for: from the practical (‘Where can I find a Bible?’) to the theological (‘They’ve flown in spaceships but didn’t see God. Where is God?’), and, increasingly, to the personal too (‘Father, I’m a drunk. My family is gone, my life is shot, and yet I can’t stop drinking . . . What should I do?’).
Ogorodnikov was astonished.
‘This was completely unexpected, and when Father Dmitry answered our questions publicly, it was like a mouthful of water, it was so unusual, you had a sense that it was not true, it was hard to believe that in Moscow there was suddenly a place you could freely speak out. And the most important thing is that the public came to these talks, and these were people you never saw in church, serious intellectuals, and not just intellectuals. There were a lot of Western correspondents – you could tell them by their clothing. Everyone else wore black and grey, so you could tell them immediately.’
The day after our conversation I went out to see the church he had been talking about. From the sun-blasted tarmac of Transfiguration Square, site of Father Dmitry’s first church (the one that was blown up during Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign), I walked past the Mossovet cinema, along the tram tracks, and there it was, through a fine gateway. Before entering, I wandered into the attached cemetery, mainly to enjoy the shade under the trees. Although still early, the heat was building again.
From the graveyard, I walked to the church, a fine pink building, with a green roof. A plaque told visitors it had been built in 1790 and was protected by the state. Inside was cool relief from the dry furnace of the street. Old women wore headscarves tightly knotted under their jowls. Young women’s heads were covered more artfully, their scarves showing the contours of their hair.
The sanctuary, and the icon-covered screen that protected it, was off in the left-hand corner of a wide, shallow room. It was an awkward arrangement, reflecting the fact that the church had been cut in half to allow Old Believers – members of an ancient Orthodox sect – to share it with the official Orthodox. I had in fact initially entered the Old Believer side of the building, and been faced with a young man in peasant garb crossing himself and bowing to the altar repeatedly. I waited for him to stop so I could ask him if I was in the right place, but he kept going for two or three minutes, so I left and found someone else.
From Father Dmitry’s first days as a priest, he kept notebooks, little accounts of meetings. He mentioned no names, just described a woman, or an old woman, or a child, or a man, in encounters that provide unique flashes of insight into private life in the 1960s and 1970s.
Official literature was still full of Soviet advances in healthcare and the extensive provision of leisure facilities. Father Dmitry’s notebooks tell a different story: despair. Stalin’s re-engineering had failed to make the Russian soul happier. Instead it was sick. Father Dmitry’s notebooks record the squalid crimes they committed and the procession of horrors that filled horrible lives.
‘An old woman came to confession. She did not give her child the breast. He died. She had two abortions,’ said one entry.
In another he told a drunkard not to drink.
‘When you drink, you forget a little,’ the drunkard replied. ‘I don’t see the point of not drinking.’
Father Dmitry had been preaching for more than a decade when, in the early 1970s, his sermons began to gain more attention and the likes
of Ogorodnikov began to attend. He was part of a small group of believers – Gleb Yakunin, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov and Alexander Men were the others – who wanted to revitalize the faith, to make it relevant to modern people and to reach out to the casualties of the Soviet experiment. They had a lot of work to do.
Before the 1917 revolution, the Orthodox faith was so conservative and ignorant that it was largely confined to the illiterate. Most educated Russians had abandoned the Church for Marxism and materialism. Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, the trend was reversed. It was Marxism that was sterile and corrupt. One atheist wrote, after attending Father Dmitry’s church, ‘the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ’s teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast. It stresses the value of the individual, of humaneness, forgiveness, gentleness, love.’
Marxism was now the official ideology and it became the target of the same kind of revulsion that had once been aimed at the Church. Father Dmitry compared the death and horror he saw and heard about every day to a war, but a war with no clear enemy.
‘There are other difficulties, perhaps as great as times of war,’ he said in one sermon recorded in 1972, ‘pervasive sin, when vice, like rust or vermin, is corrupting our values and morally crippling the rising generation, when moral standards are disintegrating, when drunkenness, hooliganism and murder are increasing.’
Khrushchev had briefly spoken out about Stalin’s crimes. His was only a partial account – he did not mention his own role, for example – but even that vanished when he fell from power. Under Brezhnev, the victims of the K G B were expected to keep their mouths shut. For Father Dmitry, that meant their wounds would fester. He believed in openness, and in talking about what no one else mentioned: his own eight and a half years in the camps, the K G B agents standing among the parishioners while he addressed them, or the police trying to block access to his services.
The Last Man in Russia Page 10
