The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Visitors to Russia remarked on the drinking, but foreigners’ travels were restricted, and few people guessed how deep rooted the problem had become. The cost to the state from drinking was estimated, by 1985, at 160 billion roubles, which was four times the revenue from alcohol, and only then did the government wake up to the problem. In Brezhnev’s time, the official response was embarrassment. State statisticians stopped listing vodka as a separate item on the yearly sales digest when its sales climbed too high. They instead lumped vodka into ‘other’ with ice cream, coffee, cocoa and spices, which instantly made ‘other’ the largest item on the list. Their inaction allowed alcoholism to become epidemic, and sufferers turned elsewhere for help, including to Father Dmitry, as evidenced by the questions he read out in his sermons.

  ‘I know that abortion is a sin . . . but I’m afraid with my drunk of a husband – what kind of child will I have? Do we allow abortions in such cases?’

  The train was filling up, and vendors pushed past trying to interest us in their wares: an eggwhisk-shaped back massager, magazines, ice cream. A man sat down opposite me, then his wife. He was large and our knees touched. He had a two-litre bottle of homemade wine, opened it and downed a couple of inches. He offered it to me, but I gestured to the beer bottle tucked between me and the side of the carriage. He nodded, and left me alone.

  Three more people joined us on our benches. There was no room for my bottle, and I put it on the floor. A sharp-angled metal ashtray jutted out in front of me and I could either wedge my knee against it or lay my thigh alongside it. Either way, it cut into my leg. I was uncomfortable before we had even set off, and my buttocks were numb by the time we reached the city limits.

  The train rattled through parched fields. My plan to avoid the sun had failed. The train had swung round and I was in the full glare. The beer was beginning to make me nod, and the sun was battering the right-hand side of my scalp. Despite the discomfort and the crush, I fell asleep.

  Every weekend Father Dmitry’s disciples took this two-hour train journey. It was a long way to come to hear a sermon, but his was the only one on offer. I awoke before Kabanovo, and alighted with a dozen or so others on to a long platform lined with a picket fence.

  I walked through the village, along the dusty shoulder of a busy road. On either side were the kinds of solid brick buildings owned as weekend houses by wealthy Muscovites. Bare-chested men were watering their gardens, visible through chinks in high metal fences. A teenager at a bus stop pointed me to the right towards the church. The dust had coated my shoes light brown by the time I got there.

  I had no one to meet, and no particular plan worked out for what I would do here, so I sat down on a rock in the shade and pulled out Father Dmitry’s sermons once more. This one was in the question-and-answer form that he preferred, and repeated his core message.

  ‘How do you relate to Jews?’ someone asked.

  ‘As sacred friends,’ he replied.

  ‘And how do you relate to Russians?’

  ‘As sacred friends,’ he continued.

  ‘And how to other ethnicities?’

  ‘Also as sacred friends,’ he concluded. But that did not satisfy his interrogator.

  ‘You have all sorts of friends. But let’s be specific. Russians say that Jews destroyed Russia, planted atheism here. Do you agree?’

  ‘We all destroyed Russia and implanted atheism: one person did in theory, and another in practice. We are all people before God, and you should not divide us up or blame someone for it.’

  Father Dmitry would not be drawn into prejudice, into the language of blame used by the state. He preached tolerance and trust. It was his weapon against the misery and distress he saw around him. The Soviet government’s strategy for controlling its population – and one it inherited from its imperial predecessor and all other empires since the beginning of time – was divide and rule. The fact that he was asked such questions shows how divided Soviet citizens had become. Russians distrusted Jews, and vice versa. Armenians distrusted Azeris, and vice versa. Uzbeks distrusted Tajiks, and so on. Father Dmitry’s response was the opposite: unite and resist.

  When I looked up from the sermon, two puppies were observing me. They barked and scurried behind a bush. When I read on, they emerged. When I stopped again, they vanished. We played the game for a while, until I became distracted by a particularly itchy mosquito bite on my index finger which had swelled my whole left hand like a rubber glove filled with water.

  A light beige Lada car pulled up outside the church. It was old but well cared for. The driver gathered his belongings. He was aged around sixty, wore thick spectacles with cheap frames and a pocketed waistcoat full of screwdrivers and tools. He was carrying a bag with a pair of aluminium valves that appeared to be part of a heating unit. I asked if he was local, and he nodded.

  We chatted about the village, and life there, about jobs (none), the collective farm (closed), children (few) and old people who might remember Father Dmitry.

  He shook his head: ‘The people who knew him are all dead now. I was a student then so I did not know him but people still remember him, and talk about how he was investigated.’

  He was going into the priest’s quarters to drop off the valves, he said, and offered to show me around. Father Dmitry’s room had been subdivided into two smaller rooms since he lived here, with the partition between them decorated with teddy-bear wallpaper. I tried to imagine Ogorodnikov and his friends eating their communal meals here and discussing their faith.

  Father Dmitry might still have been under suspicion in Moscow, but he received a warm welcome from the locals. ‘When the upper hierarchy threw me and my children to the mercy of fate and attempted to make me admit my supposed slanders, when all these rumours spread around, the people helped me. They fed me and did not let me despair, and did not condemn me. When people close to the hierarchy tried to accuse me, saying I had not obeyed them, that I had broken some law, the people sympathized. Sympathy and love, that is what you need.’

  I followed the handyman out of the room, and he unlocked the door into the church itself – a simple structure of brick and tin that had been rebuilt since Father Dmitry’s day – then we crossed the road to the church’s schoolroom, with its garden full of potatoes.

  ‘You should not leave land empty,’ the handyman said, squinting at me for approval through his lenses.

  ‘They appear to be doing well,’ I ventured, although in truth the plants looked spindly.

  ‘Ah, how are they doing well? Our soil is just sand.’

  He offered me a lift to the station and I accepted with pleasure. It was not as hot as Moscow out here, but it would still be uncomfortable to walk far. He had, he said, previously lived in one of the more remote villages, but the bus service was cancelled and he had been forced to move into Kabanovo. He could not afford to run his car all the time, but liked to drive on occasion.

  Back on the platform we stood for a while in silence, watching a crow, its hands behind its back, balancing along one of the rails, then jumping nimbly round and stepping back.

  ‘Do you think’, he asked me at last, ‘someone like me, with the experience I have, could find a job in Britain?’

  I said I did not know, but before he left I asked him his name. He told me: Father Nikolai. I looked after him. He was the village priest, and I had had no idea.

  Father Dmitry did not last long at Kabanovo. The local authorities had no appetite for groups of bearded Muscovites turning up and perverting the locals’ minds with dangerous talk of trust and community and the deficiencies of the state. All the same, he continued his single-minded campaign against alcohol, abortion, despair and degradation, noting down the talks as he had before.

  A woman came to Father Dmitry to confess.

  ‘Do you have any particular sins?’

  ‘Yes, abortions.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Many.’

  ‘Well, how many?’

  ‘Thirty,�
� she said, and cried.

  By 1991, the average Russian woman had had 3.4 abortions over the course of her life. Stalin banned abortions but, after they were legalized in 1955, they became the dominant form of birth control. There were 8.3 million in the Soviet Union in 1965. In 1992, Russian women terminated 3.3 million pregnancies. The number has fallen since then, perhaps because the contraceptive pill is now widely available, but there are still more abortions than live births in many Russian regions, including Komi (where Father Dmitry was imprisoned) and Bryansk (where he was born), and the overall rate is four times the European average.

  Other dissidents did not have Father Dmitry’s insight into the health concerns of ordinary Russians, since they did not really encounter them. Sakharov, although a brave and humane man, was still calling for Russians to have fewer children in the late 1960s to combat global over-population.

  ‘Mankind can develop smoothly only if it looks upon itself in a demographic sense as a unit, a single family without divisions into nations other than in matters of history and traditions. Therefore, government policy, legislation on the family and marriage, and propaganda should not encourage an increase in the birth rates of advanced countries while demanding that it be curtailed in underdeveloped countries,’ the great dissident wrote, in his typically lofty style. His calls for intellectual freedom and peaceful coexistence were very powerful, but they were also very irrelevant to the kind of people Father Dmitry was dealing with.

  In 1970, Russia’s homicide rate was eight times the European average, but such numbers – with their implicit rebuke to the government – were increasingly hard to find. In 1972, Brezhnev’s government stopped publishing life-expectancy statistics. That same decade, infant mortality figures dropped out of the data too, having risen sharply from 22.9 per thousand in 1970 to 31.4 in 1976. The government instead boasted of having one of the highest proportions of doctors in the world, but hid how little effect they were having.

  Healthcare spending dropped from 6 per cent of national wealth when Brezhnev took power to half of that by the mid-1980s. Over the same period, the number of cigarettes imported doubled to more than 73 billion a year: that means the Soviet Union imported a packet of cigarettes a month for every man, woman and child in the country. It made its own cigarettes too.

  In December 1975, Father Dmitry was sacked once more. A letter from his bishop accused him of the ‘systematic inclusion in his discussions and sermons of political material of an anti-social character, including tendentious criticism of the life of our state’. The bishop went on to criticize him for having used the church buildings for preaching to groups of people who had gathered to hear him preach, although it might be supposed that such was a priest’s job, before attacking the Western media that had spoken out in his defence.

  ‘I consider it unacceptable that on some internal question in Church life, including in relation to Church discipline, which is regulated by the canons, laws and traditions of our Church, anyone at all from abroad should put pressure on us, in this case in defence of Father Dmitry, in the aim of furthering their own interests,’ he concluded.

  That was a nod to the kind of conspiracy theorizing that was already consuming the K G B, who established a special Fifth Directorate in 1968 to crack down on intellectuals, students, nationalists, religious believers, Jews and anyone else suspected of serving foreign powers. Even before Father Dmitry came to Kabanovo, the K G B were trying to break dissidents through long interrogation and the planting of sympathetic agents in their cells as fake detainees. If they succeeded, the dissidents were paraded before Western journalists. Foreign reporters were showing increasing interest in the dissident story, and were beginning to write about Father Dmitry. His sacking from Kabanovo in December 1975 made the news in papers across the world.

  ‘Reds admit ban of rebel priest,’ said the headline in the Baltimore Sun. ‘Soviet priest draws anger of government’, read the headline on an Associated Press report picked up by other U S newspapers. And he was not the only famous religious dissident. His friends Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson gained a splash of their own with a report to the World Christian Council on the persecution of believers.

  In response, the Soviet authorities unleashed the heavy weapons of their propaganda arsenal. Izvestia, one of their two largest newspapers, went on the attack. In January 1976, Vladimir Kuroyedov, the government’s most senior religious official, took over almost a whole page to detail how in fact Soviet religious laws were the most ‘humane and democratic in the world’, and that anyone saying otherwise was lying to harm the country’s international prestige.

  There were, he continued with sadness, a few malcontents, but religious believers themselves could be trusted to drive them out. Although, in fact, a hundred of Father Dmitry’s parishioners – at considerable risk to themselves – had signed a petition protesting against his sacking, Kuroyedov insisted they had expelled him because of his ‘sermons of an anti-social content’.

  ‘For this same reason his parishioners have thrown him out of two other churches,’ Kuroyedov added. That was a lie. Father Dmitry lost his first position because the church was dynamited and his second because he was sacked by the bishop – neither of them things Kuroyedov could admit without fatally undermining his own argument that believers were free and unhindered. Instead he linked Father Dmitry to the state’s enemies.

  ‘This “shepherd”, previously convicted of a crime, has been declared by reactionary propaganda in the West to be a “genuine fighter for the faith, suffering for Christ”,’ Kuroyedov’s article concluded with heavy Russian irony, naturally without mentioning the nature of Father Dmitry’s criminal offence – writing a poem – or his subsequent rehabilitation.

  It was a warning to his parishioners and friends to shun him, to leave him alone, but they did not heed it. Father Dmitry had taught them to trust each other, and that meant defending each other too.

  ‘To tear a priest away from his flock is like a doctor leaving his patients, or a teacher his pupils. But these comparisons are weak. It would be nearer the truth to say it is like tearing a mother away from her children,’ said Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and prominent dissident, in a statement on Father Dmitry’s dismissal.

  ‘Father Dmitry’s living, free, Christian word went into the hearts of listeners and fanned their faith; it also gripped those who were seeking, those who doubted, unbelievers. Father Dmitry attracted young people – this was his main crime,’ said an appeal by Father Dmitry’s friends Yakunin and Regelson to the B B C.

  Not everyone agreed with them, of course. Father Dmitry’s notebooks include a conversation with a fellow priest who told him he liked the sermon, but would have taken out ‘the sharpness’.

  ‘And if a sword isn’t sharp, if a sabre isn’t sharp, how do you fight? With a blunt blade? The sharpness is the point,’ replied Father Dmitry.

  The priest was not so sure: ‘If we are tough, they will shut the churches. As it is we are preserving something.’

  But Father Dmitry was an old campaigner, and refused to change. He said the fight to save his nation was urgent, and could not be put off for tactical reasons.

  ‘In the camps we used to say “You should eat today what you could eat tomorrow.” And I am doing today what I could do tomorrow, since otherwise tomorrow might not come,’ he said. ‘How many people were shot, how many were killed in the camps, how many died at the front with a meaningless scream? They died, and for what? So their children could suffer?’

  6

  They behaved like free men

  I met Father Vladimir Sedov between the platforms of a metro station in western Moscow. Cheerful and lean in his black robes, he looked like a wolf with a sense of humour. His flat was chaotic, full of books and icons and bunk beds and living things. His cats regularly interrupted our conversation. One was bald and as friendly as a dog, one more cautious, despite its spangly collar. There was also a parrot, and several sons.

  Father Vlad
imir is straight-backed and dignified with the bearing of a man in early middle age, but he shared his memories of Father Dmitry with the eagerness of a schoolboy rushing for lunch. He was born in Baku, but grew up in the Moscow region where his father was an engineer. He studied in the mathematics department of his university, and a distinguished career beckoned when this happened: ‘There were these rumours about an unusual priest who held question-and-answer sessions. My friends had been, and I heard about him, and I wanted to go too.’

  This was in 1976, just a few months after Izvestia’s assault on Father Dmitry and his dismissal from the church in Kabanovo. It is clear from Father Dmitry’s sacking, and from the criticism of him in the national press, that the authorities considered him a significant threat by this stage. Nonetheless, in April 1976, he got a new parish. Perhaps the Church authorities calculated that he would, after having been sacked twice, not behave so unorthodoxly another time. Perhaps some individuals in the Church hierarchy secretly admired his stance. They were all believers after all, and a few bishops may deep down have been proud that one of their fellows was doing his job as they were all supposed to. Perhaps top officials were sensitive to foreign opinion, and did not want to give Westerners an opening to criticize the Soviet Union by depriving Father Dmitry of a post, no matter how irritating he was for the old men in the Kremlin.

  Besides, the security organs were no doubt hoping that, after the very public warning of the Izvestia article, ordinary churchgoers would shun Father Dmitry’s services. It was well known that association with dissidents could lead to a summons, to questioning, to unemployment and, potentially, to prison. And prison was a place to be dreaded. Dissidents like Anatoly Marchenko had written prison diaries and circulated them in typewritten and carbon-copied manuscripts, so everyone knew that the Soviet jails were brutal, diseased and cruel. At one point, Marchenko, who was jailed for illegally attempting to leave the country, described seeing a fellow inmate chop off his penis and throw it out the window at a female guard. The other prisoners barely flinched, so accustomed were they to human degradation.