‘What a mob of them there was, in and out of uniform, and all gathered just to prevent people from entering the church,’ he said in his third question-and-answer session. This was heady stuff. No one else acknowledged publicly the way police officers abused their powers to harass ordinary Russians. ‘As a priest, I must defend the faithful when they undergo persecutions of any sort. I, the shepherd, must defend my sheep from the wolves. As long as the atheists act like wolves, I’ll come out against them.’
He stressed hope, and the impossibility of living without it. Why stay sober if tomorrow will be no better than today? Why have children if the future they live in will be as miserable as the present we have now? The important thing was to believe that tomorrow could be better. As he answered one alcoholic who wrote him a question: ‘I ask all of you in church right now to pray for such unfortunate people. Surround them with your attention and warmth. Remember that saving such a person is the greatest of deeds.’
He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing, to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings. This was unspoken of course. No official came out and said the communist state survived only because of suspicion, distrust and slander, but it was true. The greatest enemy of the state was its own people. If they began to trust each other, it could not command their fear and obedience.
The misery that Father Dmitry heard in confession was the symptom of the state’s policy. No one trusted anyone, and that is a parlous way to live. People were living in solitary confinement in the middle of crowds, and it was killing them. Father Dmitry set out to break down the walls and tear the bars from the windows.
He launched his mass discussions in December 1973, and by the beginning of January all of Moscow seemed to know about them. Thanks to their fame, we have several different accounts. One dissident wrote, ‘People spoke about them who were very far from the Church: professors and writers, believers in the transmigration of souls, and the same number of people who believed in nothing; followers of yogic philosophy and the same number of people who followed nothing. And most importantly, young people: kind Russian boys, wonderful Russian girls, fervent Jewish youths with fire in their eyes, excellent, determined and tough Jewish girls, Baptists and Zen Buddhists, Anthroposophists and Marxists.’
Ogorodnikov had told me how old women had feared him when he first entered their church, and that generation clash was the first topic tabled for discussion in that first discussion. Perhaps it was Ogorodnikov himself who asked about it. Perhaps it was an experience shared by many of the swallows of this new religious spring. The discussions were written down, typed up and passed around from hand to hand. They were hugely popular, and they confirmed Father Dmitry as the star of the religious dissidents. In one account, he is hailed as ‘the bravest and one of the best men I have ever seen’. The worshippers marvelled that he should have the courage to speak up fortnight after fortnight, apparently with no fear of the consequences that surely awaited him.
‘Why does he do it? I can’t understand how he continues,’ a friend of one chronicler remarked. ‘He is quite difference from Solzhenitsyn. I have spoken to them both, Solzhenitsyn simply was afraid of nothing and nobody, but this man is afraid, all the time. Yet he carries on.’
Soon enough the records of Father Dmitry’s sermons slipped under the Iron Curtain and into the West. Emigré publishers printed them, bound them and sent them back by their secret couriers. That helped cement Father Dmitry’s position, especially when his name began to feature on the B B C and the Voice of America, the radio stations that dissidents listened to in private and called simply ‘the Voices’.
The format Father Dmitry created was simple and brave. Again and again, he was asked to help a parishioner trapped in a pit of despair: ‘I get drunk till I pass out – so I can forget. But once I sober up, the depression will be back, only stronger.’ These people had been suffering alone, unable to understand why they were so miserable, unable to talk about it, and suddenly they learned that everyone else felt the same way. ‘I was a wasted individual. Alcohol had destroyed me. There was no light, no joy, no rest. My soul was destroyed.’
In his answers Father Dmitry repeatedly appealed for his hearers to trust each other. The authorities, he said, were splitting the molecules and compounds of society, trying to create moral, domestic and social atoms. Many of his listeners were clearly alarmed by what sounded like a political campaign.
‘What are you doing? These interviews are propaganda and agitation, and they’re forbidden. They can get you for that,’ said one question he read out. It gave him the opportunity to express his belief that their faith in God and each other could defeat alcoholism and despair, and to voice his defiance of anyone who tried to stop him.
‘Atheism has corrupted people. Drunkenness, debauchery and the breakdown of the family have all appeared. There are many traitors betraying each other and our country. Atheism can’t hold this back. Faith is what’s needed . . . If this is so, then I must preach. If they forbid me to preach from the pulpit, I’ll speak from outside the pulpit. If they throw me in jail, I’ll preach even there. Preaching’s my main job.’
Although he thought the Christian God was the answer to the crisis they were living through, he also argued that his lessons applied equally to non-Orthodox believers and he appealed to them too.
‘A kind of unwritten brotherhood is forming. Believers and non-believers are coming, Orthodox and non-Orthodox – Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians,’ he said. And he reached out across that great divide within Russian society that had provoked so much violence for so long. He talked to the Jews. It was an ambitious attempt to heal all of society, regardless of who was in it.
By the 1970s, Jewish activists were campaigning for emigration to Israel. The Soviet government, however, did not wish for many of Russia’s best-trained specialists to work in a capitalist country and denied them permission, instead sacking them from their jobs and turning them into pariahs. Many of these passionate young people found a home in Father Dmitry’s parish, feeling no contradiction between their own religion and his inclusive doctrine.
‘I have many times heard what Russians say about Jews, that they have a conspiracy, that they are perfidious and only do evil, that these are not people, but demons,’ Father Dmitry wrote. ‘And I have many times heard what Jews say about Russians, that they are brutal Black Hundred nationalists, that they are ready to kill all Jews, and are scared of them, and assign some kind of power to them . . . Where is this misunderstanding from? Relations between Russians and Jews have become particularly strained. O Lord, open their minds and hearts, show them that they are brothers and must love each other.’
It was intoxicating. By his fifth or sixth session, the church was packed to capacity and his followers rigged up loudspeakers in the yard outside. Hundreds of people came hours early to be sure of a place.
‘There is a choir, which sings a little flat and, at the back of the church, an open coffin containing the body of an old woman, from which comes a strong smell of spices. It is very hot, and the hat of the woman standing in front of me is made of some angora-like substance, which is constantly going up my nose. Somewhere in the church a mad woman is barking like a dog and pawing the ground. I wonder if I will be able to last out the service without fainting,’ wrote a visitor.
It sounds like a medieval church, like a sermon in England during the Civil War. The ferment and the excitement gripped the hearers as they heard spiritual ideas discussed openly for the first time in their lives. Father Dmitry criticized the police, begged people not to drink, feud or lie, and all the time called on his parishioners to unite among themselves and trust each other.
‘As the communists use the slogan “Workers of the world, unite”, we must say “Believers of the world, unite”. We must create the Kingdom of God here on earth,’ he said. ‘If y
ou do not defend others, then you are not defending yourself, and you are leaving the field open for attack.’
It could not last. There was no way the authorities would allow this defiance to continue in their capital city. Dissidents could just about meet in flats around Moscow to whisper their heresy, but this was too much. To gather every fortnight and hear instructions to reject communist authority was close to sedition.
The authorities were in a tricky position, however. They feared criticism from the West, and could not arrest a priest for preaching the gospel, because that was his job and he was doing it in a church. Father Dmitry’s appeals were rousing: ‘I’m looking at all of you here. If we were all armed to do God’s work, nothing would be impossible for us. So let’s all help each other. Communicate Christian knowledge to each other, support each other in misfortune and temptations, and in general manifest an active love for each other.’ But they were not treasonous.
In late April, he gave the authorities the opening they needed by reading out a question that accused the patriarch of ‘grovelling before the authorities’. Even though Father Dmitry’s answer defended the patriarch as a man surrounded by enemies, this was too much.
A fortnight later, on 4 May 1974, when the faithful crammed into the church to hear his tenth fortnightly discussion, they were disappointed. The patriarch had banned him from talking to them until he had explained himself. Two weeks later he stood before them again, with his beard and his blue eyes, but without his priest’s robes, which the churchwarden refused to hand over.
He would not be silenced, however. ‘The condemned man’, he said, ‘is allowed a last word.’ He told his parishioners that the Church authorities had sent him away to a new parish in a distant village. He could keep preaching as much as he liked, but all of Moscow would not be his parish any more.
‘The atheists are using the bishops’ power to smother the Church, to dispose of those who don’t please them,’ he said, in his last words to the church of St Nicholas as its priest.
His congregation complained bitterly, sending letters to the patriarch and the bishops. They said they had found spiritual freedom in his church, that he had comforted them in a comfortless place, but to no avail.
‘I am a Jewish woman,’ wrote one worshipper. ‘Previously I thought that Orthodoxy was Jewish pogroms and chauvinism. Having heard Father Dmitry’s sermons, I understood that true Christianity and Orthodoxy preach fraternal love to all people. I understood that God is love. Father Dmitry’s words opened this path to me.’
It is clear that Father Dmitry’s message had got through to his parishioners if not to his superiors. The patriarch and the security services felt threatened by him, and had taken prompt action to ensure that his influence was contained. Ogorodnikov and his fellow worshippers would need to go to considerable inconvenience if they were to keep hearing his sermons out in the villages.
‘A whole lifetime has gone by. It was 1973, so almost forty years have passed, but it was an important, strong thing. People gathered whom you never saw in church. Not just intellectuals, but others,’ Ogorodnikov said at the end of our conversation. ‘There were discussions, and conversations, and meals. There we created an independent Christian society. It is not just that we had lunch or something, we lived the life, you understand.’
5
Reds admit ban of rebel priest
I missed my train to Kabanovo, the village where Father Dmitry was exiled when he lost his church in central Moscow. The next train would not leave for another hour, but it was already waiting at the platform so I sat in my seat and felt the carriage heat up as the sun grilled the roof. I was careful to select a place on the shady side.
Other passengers were filing in. Most of the men – like me – had bought bottles of beer, to keep them going on their journeys out to their dachas. It was too early in the day for vodka, which was a relief. Vodka needs company, but beer can be drunk alone. Beer-drinking neighbours would allow me to read Father Dmitry’s sermons in peace.
Russia has, of course, always been famous for drinking. One of the first mentions of the nation in all history – in the tenth century – features King Vladimir in Kiev rejecting Islam because ‘drinking is the joy of the Russians. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’ Books about pre-revolutionary villages describe how drinking was the major form of entertainment. If peasants had savings, they spent them on vodka. Their drinking was largely restricted by their spending power, however, so alcohol consumption became self-limiting. If peasants got rich, they got drunk, which meant they got poor, which meant they got sober.
Before 1917, duties on alcohol provided up to 40 per cent of government revenue and Lenin pledged to ban the trade, since it was blocking the nation’s path to communism. That proved hard to do, however. Like the tsarist autocracy before it, the Soviet Union struggled to provide consumer goods and found alcohol a useful way to make money from its population. By 1925, alcohol was a state monopoly, and by 1940 there were more shops selling alcohol than fruit, meat and vegetables put together.
It did not stop there. Production of spirits trebled between 1940 and 1980, and the consumption of all alcoholic drinks – including wine and beer as well as vodka and brandy – increased eightfold. Most of this growth was in the Russian heartland, rather than on the traditionally Muslim fringes of the empire where drinking was less popular. Wages were rising and living standards too, as the damage caused by the war was repaired and stability allowed economic advances. Thanks to the more humane style adopted by the government after Stalin’s death, it became almost impossible to get sacked, and Russians got paid whether they turned up to work drunk or sober. There was no longer a limit on how much people could drink, and alcoholism became epidemic.
The novelist Venedikt Yerofeyev, in his underground masterpiece of the late 1960s Moscow–Petushki, satirized the standard working week of his cable-laying gang as follows: ‘We would play brag one day, drink vermouth the next, play brag again the third day, and on the fourth back to vermouth again . . . Needless to say, we didn’t lay a finger on the cable drum – in fact if I’d so much as mentioned touching the drum, they’d have pissed themselves laughing.’
Conspiracy theorists speculate that the state liked a drunken population, since that made the Russians easier to control. That may be true, and it is certainly the case that the government was hooked on the revenue from drinking as much as the population was hooked on the oblivion it gave. Taxes earned from alcohol were greater than the defence budget by the early 1970s.
The trouble was, of course, that the same drinking that was financing the government was destroying the population. Alcohol was blamed for a third of car accidents, and four-fifths of deaths on the roads. Almost all sexually transmitted infections were linked to alcohol consumption.
If you look at the figures for how long Russians have been expected to live, the high point to date – just under seventy years – came in the early to mid-1960s. Life expectancy spiked upwards again in the 1980s, briefly surpassing its 1960s level, through only by a couple of months, when Mikhail Gorbachev severely restricted access to alcohol, but fell back once more when the campaign was unwound. By 1994, the average Russian was predicted to live for sixty-four years, and the average Russian man for less than fifty-eight.
In 1965, the first year for which the Russian government presents statistics, 119,170 Russians died from ‘external causes’ (car crashes, murder, suicide, poisoning, drowning), the majority of which are connected to alcohol. By 1995, that number had almost tripled. In 1965, a total of 419,752 Russians died from problems with their cardiovascular system, which are often caused by drinking and smoking. By 1995, that number had more than doubled.
National security was at risk too: ground crews apparently would siphon off the pure alcohol in fighter jets’ de-icing fluid and replace it with water, causing the planes to crash.
And look at the army, saviour of Russia on the many occasions when foreign invaders have coveted its we
alth. Russia’s most sacred holiday is Victory Day. Every year, soldiers goose-step over Red Square on 9 May to mark the 1945 triumph over Adolf Hitler. Wave after wave of Red Army troops threw themselves at the German positions defending Berlin that year, clambering over the bodies of their comrades. Finally, the Germans broke and fell, allowing the Russians to wave their red flag from the Reichstag and establish the Soviet Union as a superpower.
That could not happen now. In 1990, some 1.021 million potential Russian soldiers were born. In 1999, that number had dropped to 626,000 – a fall of almost two-fifths in less than a decade. For comparison, since we were on the subject of World War Two, almost 150,000 more babies were born in Germany in 1999 than in Russia, even though there are far fewer Germans than Russians and even though Germany is itself afflicted by a shrinking population.
It is as if Russia’s army had already suffered a series of major defeats before even picking up a gun. You cannot fight a war without soldiers and, to breed more troops, you need mothers to have babies. In mid-2009, Russia had 11.7 million women in their twenties. By 2015, that number will have fallen to 6.9 million – that’s another two-fifths decline.
In the last sixteen years of communism, 36 million Russians were born and 24.6 million died. In the first sixteen years of capitalism, those figures were more or less reversed: 22.3 million Russians were born and 34.7 million died. If you plot a graph, in which the number of people alive is laid out according to their date of birth, with the youngest at the bottom and the oldest at the top, Russia looks like one of those rocky stacks in the North Atlantic, undermined by the waves until its huge overhang threatens to collapse altogether. The base of Russia’s diagram – children – is washed away, and the consequences are almost impossible to predict.
And then there is alcohol’s effect on the economy. Some estimates from the late Soviet period had a third of the workforce absent at any one time thanks to over-drinking. ‘Drunks are to be found on the shop floor more and more frequently. At some enterprises, special brigades have been formed to “grab” those who have drunk too much and stop them getting to their machines, to prevent accidents. They drink during working hours, they drink after work,’ one Soviet economist said in 1981. ‘This is the ultimate lack of respect for work, the ultimate negative attitude to it.’
The Last Man in Russia Page 11
