The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘No one should try to dictate to other people . . . the manner in which they ought to manage their internal affairs,’ he said after signing the treaty. He seemed to think it would have no significance beyond the paper it was written on.

  Some senior K G B officials, including K G B head Yuri Andropov, thought differently. They warned Brezhnev about the risks of signing up. They said these obligations might give the dissidents and critics in the West new tools to use against Moscow, but Brezhnev’s government – intoxicated by its success in winning recognition of the borders the Soviet Union had imposed on Eastern Europe after World War Two – ignored them.

  The dissidents, ever imaginative, soon proved Andropov right. In October 1975, Sakharov won a Nobel Peace Prize, giving the dissidents a morale boost. Over the next two years, they formed Helsinki Groups to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with its obligations under the Helsinki Accords – the first in Moscow under Yuri Orlov, the others in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic States. They knew these groups were illegal, but they presented them as civil initiatives to assist the government, and they could claim to be doing so under a treaty Brezhnev had himself signed up to.

  Every report they wrote was written dispassionately, singling out the particular clauses of the agreement that had been violated. It was a severe embarrassment for the K G B, and Father Dmitry was in no mood to make the agents’ job any easier.

  If officials had hoped that, by giving him a place in this elegant church, built in the late eighteenth century, they could persuade him to shut up, they were disappointed. This was closer to Moscow than Kabanovo, just 30 kilometres away from the city, and even larger crowds of worshippers came to hear him speak, and to enjoy the freedom of true discussion.

  ‘We discussed everything freely, not needing to look around us, expressing ourselves in our own language. It was like we lived outside the state. It was as if our country wasn’t militantly atheist. This freedom amazed one schoolboy from Leningrad. He at first announced that he was an atheist, that he could not believe, but after spending three days with us, he asked to be christened, and became a militant believer,’ Father Dmitry wrote later.

  The state’s pressure did not of course let up, no matter what Father Dmitry thought about it. The dissidents’ underground newspaper – the Chronicle of Current Events – repeatedly detailed the police raids on his home and those of his friends, just like it recounted the arrests of Jewish activists and Ukrainian nationalists and the exiling of scientists and writers. Police officers marched through the church during services, taking photos and making recordings. Police volunteers in red armbands jostled the worshippers as they filed into the church.

  But Father Dmitry and his friends were together, and they were not afraid. In the words of Andrei Amalrik, one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a prolific writer, ‘The dissidents accomplished something that was simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country they behaved like free men, thereby changing the moral atmosphere and the nation’s governing traditions.’

  The police might be outside, but inside the dissidents had each other, and they had their radios. They could hear about themselves on the B B C, and sometimes they could even read about themselves in the Soviet press.

  In April 1977, the Literary Gazette, one of the Soviet Union’s top publications and – K G B defectors later revealed – one that could always be relied upon to print whatever the security services wanted, launched a fresh assault on Father Dmitry, Ogorodnikov and other friends of theirs. Considering that he was supposedly just a village priest, and the others were ordinary citizens, it was a vastly disproportionate response. But the government had to do something. The repeated reports on foreign radio were in danger of turning Father Dmitry into the country’s most authoritative religious figure.

  The Literary Gazette’s story used the standard Soviet technique of heavy irony to undermine its targets, and combined it with excessive use of quotation marks to cast entirely unfair doubt on them. Father Dmitry was always called ‘Father Dmitry’, for example, and his friends were not described as very respectable, they were ‘very respectable’.

  The effect is certainly comic, and as I sat in the library reading the old yellowed pages I laughed at the memory of a story my wife once told me. She is a doctor and had a colleague who would, when bored, use the same technique employed by the Soviet propagandists and highlight random words in a patient’s medical notes to amuse later medical teams (patient came in with a ‘friend’, complaining about a sore ‘knee’ and other ‘symptoms’). It is not a sophisticated form of humour, more suited to an exhausted doctor on a night shift than supposedly the best propagandists in the world.

  The paper quoted some of Father Dmitry’s poetry, and then levelled the allegation that he had, while living under German occupation, collaborated with the Nazis by having his verses printed in an occupation newspaper. This, the article implied, was the reason he had been arrested and sentenced to the gulag.

  ‘“Father Dmitry” does not so much preach the Ten Commandments as transgress them, and at the same time the laws of his country,’ the paper said. That was a major accusation. In what was clearly a warning sanctioned from on high, Father Dmitry was being told he was breaking the law.

  The article ended, however, with an admission of how the Soviet government was losing the propaganda war. It said the article was written so as to warn innocent people away from talking to these dangerous criminals – or, as it quoted an unnamed citizen as saying, to ‘protect those close to us from the pernicious influence of these swindlers . . . let everyone know what is hidden behind their masks’ – but admitted that the potential victims would not hear the warning since it would not be rebroadcast on foreign radio, which was the only source of news they followed.

  Father Dmitry understood his growing celebrity and his own news value for foreign correspondents. He called a press conference in response, so as to deny the charges. He had not, he said, had poems printed in fascist newspapers, nor was he a traitor. He was just worried about the fate of the nation.

  ‘My heart was wounded by the suffering of the people, and so I forgot my own well-being and the well-being of my family and made a decision: no matter what may happen, I will bring my mite, however small, to the treasure-house of human salvation, and with this mite I will appear before God saying, look, Lord, that is all that I could do,’ he told the assembled journalists. ‘They can imprison me again, they can contrive catastrophes, they can execute me, I shall know what I am suffering for.’

  It was almost like he was taunting the authorities, laughing at their inability to halt his growing fame and influence. In August 1977, he gave an interview to a journalist from the New York Times. He denied that he was involved in politics, but still delved into the politics of his country, and into its unfolding demographic catastrophe.

  ‘Our nation has become corrupted, the family has fallen apart, the nation has got drunk, traitors have betrayed each other, or, as we call them now, stool-pigeons – in huge numbers. We say: a third person could be a traitor, so we try to speak one on one. People say the walls are listening, and we are starting to lie to each other, we do not trust each other,’ he said. ‘The poor Russian people. What a diabolic storm has broken upon it.’

  In Grebnevo, we walked through the gate into the churchyard, a shady wooded area, where the church’s cross rose up to catch the afternoon sun. Zoya senior and Father Vladimir were looking around in delight, while Zoya junior and I were smiling at every comment they made and every memory that burst out of them. To the left of the gate had been Father Dmitry’s living quarters, and the hall where the believers had gathered for their Sunday discussions.

  Zoya senior walked around the side of the building and was trying to get her bearings. ‘This was where the room was, it’s gone now,’ she said, standing on a patch of lawn. ‘This is where the ambassadors came. All the great people sat here, French people, English people, Americans, they all
sat here.’

  Father Vladimir was closely examining the door. ‘This was where they arrested me,’ he said at last, with a broad smile. ‘They broke the second door.’ Father Vladimir was arrested in Grebnevo in November 1978. ‘It is so strange to be here,’ he said. ‘It is like it is all living in front of my eyes. I brought some people here after work on Friday, then on Saturday some police cars came from over there. This was in November. Father Dmitry came and told us to stay in bed, that he had a plan to confuse the police, but I was worried they would kill him. So I barricaded the door. All of us were holding the door shut and the police started to smash it down with a log.’

  Zoya senior had joined us now: ‘I had come up by then, so I was outside with the police, and someone said there were terrorists or bandits inside the building.’

  Father Vladimir: ‘They finally came in and I tried to hang on to the table, but they took me away.’

  Zoya senior, laughing: ‘They were saying he’s a terrorist, he’s a bandit, and I was saying it’s just Vladimir, he’s a student.’

  Father Vladimir was dragged away barefoot, in his underwear, and held for ten days of detention. His arrest was the culmination of three months of police harassment. Uniformed officers regularly pushed into the rooms where Father Dmitry lived and insisted on checking the number of beds, the number of chairs, the number of people. In December, Father Vladimir was detained again and his friend Georgy Fedotov was taken off for psychiatric assessment, in what could have been the prelude to the forced treatment that so many dissidents had to undergo.

  Soviet officials began having dissidents diagnosed as insane back in the 1960s, and came to appreciate the value of psychiatric drugs in social control. These chemicals could sedate or torture anyone who refused to obey orders, or who acted differently.

  Pyotr Grigorenko, a general who disagreed with the policies followed by Nikita Khrushchev’s government, was among the first to be treated this way. The Serbsky Institute in Moscow, supposedly the country’s leading centre of psychiatric medicine, proved more than willing to co-operate with the K G B in restraining people such as him. In April 1964, it diagnosed him as suffering from ‘paranoid development of the personality, with reformist ideas arising in the personality, with psychopathic features of the character and the presence of symptoms of arteriosclerosis of the brain’.

  The report went on:

  Reformist ideas have taken on an obstinate character and determined the conduct of the patient; in addition, the intensity of these ideas is increasing in connection with various external circumstances which have no direct relation to him, and is accompanied by an uncritical attitude to his own utterances and acts . . . Because of his mental condition Grigorenko requires compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital, as the paranoid reformist ideas described above are of obstinate character and determine the conduct of the patient.

  When his wife Zinaida, genuinely concerned, asked when he had gone mad, a K G B official responded: ‘The illness is a subtle one, not everyone would notice it . . . but his ideas are socially dangerous.’

  Soviet psychiatrists came up with new diagnoses, such as ‘creeping schizophrenia’, that only they were able to diagnose. Criminal investigators were allowed to request a psychological evaluation, in which doctors could almost always be guaranteed to give the diagnosis the K G B required.

  Gennady Shimanov, a Christian, wrote of his own experiences attempting to persuade a doctor that he was just like everyone else.

  ‘No, Gennady Mikhailovich,’ the doctor had replied. ‘If you were like everyone else, we wouldn’t keep you here. How many days have you been here now? Have you seen a single normal person here? There you are. Well, all right. Now tell me please about your “conversion to God” as you call it.’

  When Shimanov tried to find out what his symptoms were, the doctor was clear.

  ‘Your symptoms are a one-sided fascination with religion. You have cut yourself off from life. After all, how do healthy believers behave? An old dear drops into church, crosses herself, goes out and carries on with her affairs, having forgotten God already. We still have such people, but in time there will be fewer and fewer. But it is quite different with you. That is what worries us.’

  And it was not just the religious who were targeted. Zhores Medvedev, a respected scientist, had become obsessed with disproving the theories of Trofim Lysenko – a charlatan biologist whose ideas had convinced Stalin and thus replaced orthodox genetics as official scientific doctrine. This was not just a subject of academic interest. Scientists who backed the Mendelian and Darwinian views of genetics and natural selection had been sacked and jailed. After Stalin’s death, the ideas of Lysenko had been gradually allowed to fall into disrepute, but Medvedev wanted acknowledgement that they were wrong. He wrote up a history of the affair and published it abroad.

  ‘I read it recently – it’s a polemical work,’ said the doctor who arrived to examine him. ‘By now people have forgotten about Lysenko – the struggle in genetics is over. And instead of forgetting about it like everybody else and getting on with your work, you recently published this book abroad. Why?’

  The book is a passionate attack on Lysenko, well sourced and intelligently argued. For the doctors, however, the fact that Medvedev was combining scientific work with historical research was a sign of mental illness.

  ‘As a matter of fact I have observed that your brother suffers from a split personality,’ a doctor told Medvedev’s twin, Roy, a historian. ‘He is a biologist, but is also involved with many things that bear little relation to his immediate responsibilities. Besides, he is always dissatisfied about something, always fighting against something.’

  The Soviet state in some ways existed like a country in the Middle Ages, when people were punished for any deviation from the pure religious line. Officials saw Marxism as the revealed truth, while the Soviet Union was the perfect society, and only insanity or dishonesty could explain any deviation from that way of thinking.

  Leonid Plyushch, a Ukrainian dissident and one of the most famous victims of psychiatric abuse, said the doctors would explain to him that, since he had risked his own freedom and his family’s happiness by his actions, he must be mad. He would respond by saying that the early communists had done exactly the same thing. They had risked imprisonment for something they believed in. The doctors would then respond by saying he was having delusions of grandeur, since he had compared himself to Lenin. They always had an answer.

  ‘Since all dictatorships proclaim heaven on earth, all who refuse to live in that paradise must be crazy – or have been bought by agents of foreign intelligence,’ Plyushch wrote.

  During that time, he was treated with haloperidol, a powerful anti-psychotic drug that also has strong sedative properties. It was one of the few such drugs produced in the Soviet Union, explaining its popularity with Soviet doctors. He was also given insulin shots, specifically to suck up the sugar in his blood and plunge him into artificial comas.

  Medvedev was fortunate in having a twin who believed in his sanity. Roy mobilized support, including from Sakharov, and won release for his brother. Not all dissidents were so lucky in their friends and relations, however, and some spent months inside, enduring regular injections of sulphazin. That was a suspension of sulphur in peach oil, which had no medical use beyond causing pain and inducing fever. Plyushch saw a fellow inmate nearly killed by an injection of sulphazin.

  For now, Father Dmitry’s friend Fedotov avoided all that. He was released after a few days, as was Father Vladimir, but it was the kind of harassment intended to make them rethink their behaviour.

  It did not work, of course.

  Father Vladimir: ‘When the police volunteers came in their red armbands and were supposed to keep order, we wore white armbands and said we would keep our own order.’

  Zoya senior: ‘They asked us if we were expecting a high-up boss or someone, and Father Dmitry said we were expecting the highest boss of all. It was Eas
ter, you see.’

  Father Vladimir mused on Father Dmitry.

  ‘He was not scared to sacrifice himself, you know. In a totalitarian state, if someone gets in trouble, then they are avoided. This is how the state creates order. It was not just those who were under investigation who were avoided, but people who knew them as well. There was no severe repression, like there had been in the 1940s, but it was not necessary because the fear survived. That was how the state controlled the people, by making them fear each other. Father Dmitry did not have this fear.

  ‘When I ended up in Father Dmitry’s big family, I felt I was with people I could trust. He did not aim to create this separate society, it just happened. He created a free society. He was not God, but he was holy. What I experienced then, it was so bright and sharp for me. What I had with him I remember like it was yesterday, I remember that brightness more than’, he waved his hand around to indicate the modern world, ‘more than this even.’

  As we walked out of the church and back into the trees, he described how they had lived in Grebnevo. They ate in shifts, since there were always at least sixty people there, and only seventeen could fit at the table.

  ‘While we ate, someone read out a religious book while Father Dmitry rested. Then he would come out and the discussions started. I used to collect the questions. That was one of my jobs. Some people were happy to ask the questions themselves, but others preferred to write them down, they were still scared of what might happen. This lasted all day, several hours anyway. If the service ended at twelve or one, then we would not leave until six or seven in the evening. If we came on Saturday, we would remove the table and take these screens down off the windows, put mattresses on them and sleep. One morning Father Dmitry came out and laughed, there were so many of us. You could not even turn over in bed.’