The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  But no one was listening.

  ‘Those who were around me, they are all gone,’ he wrote in the first edition of his newspaper. ‘Now, when I am summoned, only my wife goes with me. And one other, who they say doesn’t understand anything anyway.’

  The language of crucifixion that he used before to describe the fate of his country, that was now used for himself. He was on the cross, as Jesus was. This was his personal Golgotha, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion.

  Is it not Golgotha in your opinion, when people throw words at me like stones, and say ‘tell him that I now have a different spiritual father’? At least they could come and say it themselves, they could at least say goodbye.

  Is it not Golgotha when I hear on the telephone ‘I don’t want to talk to you, forget my number’?

  I huddled tighter into my coat. As we drove south-west out of the city, the sun rose off to our left, casting orange tendrils over the snowfields. A woman stopped the bus to get off, letting a gust of cold into our warmer cabin, and the four other passengers pulled their scarves tighter around their faces. My clumsy fingers, made thicker by cold and gloves, struggled to turn the pages. As we drove towards Arsenevo, Father Dmitry’s torment deepened.

  ‘Spiritual children, my friends, where are you? Answer me. Let us unite to do God’s work around Christ. If you think I fell then, when we unite, you can raise me. Surely you will not trample on me with your feet when I lie at the foot of Golgotha?’

  It is clear from his words in the next week’s edition that no one replied. He keeps admitting his guilt, saying that everyone is guilty, admitting his own guilt again. ‘I begin to understand how people, unable to withstand disgrace, end their own lives. This was how Judas, presumably, could not withstand his disgrace. And people feel sorry for Judas. How unhappy he was, who could be unhappier than him?’

  We pulled into a little village and stopped to fill up with diesel. As the fumes crept into the cabin, I began to feel sick. I do not normally get travel sick, but this seemed to be an exception, so, as we drove out, I looked at the road. We crept up a hill, and rounded a roundabout adorned with a large globe. The sun was a glowing orange hub in the sky, but so low I could still look at it without my eyes hurting.

  The sickness faded, but returned as soon as I plunged back into Father Dmitry’s world. I realized then that this was not travel sickness at all, but intense shame. His guilt was so huge that it seeped off the page. It was the feeling you had as a child when you had done something wrong and felt dreadful. You want your mother to hug you and make everything better, but you know that is impossible because it is you that is to blame. It was the torment described by Father Dmitry, and his knowledge that he had betrayed everyone and everything he loved, that was making me feel sick in sympathy.

  ‘I have stopped getting letters. It’s true, at the beginning I received a few letters, but they have stopped. Have I been forgotten or are my letters being intercepted?’

  The fingers of my right hand, the hand with only the thin inner glove on it, were stiff with cold and would barely unbend. I tried to massage them and dropped my pen, which evaded my clumsy attempt to catch it. It fell on to the floor of the cabin and into the slight gap left by the sliding door. I felt still sicker as I tried and failed to coax it out. Without a pen to take notes, I sat and watched the road. The sunlight was less orange now, more buttery, as we drove on a bleak empty road through a forest, the colours stripped out of the landscape.

  We crept to the top of a hill and met a huge view: white and khaki, forest and fields stretching far away.

  Father Dmitry was desperate to confess, and to rid himself of his feeling of guilt, but there was no one to confess to. He tried issuing a few statements, reaffirming his pre-arrest convictions, but that just tied him in knots with the K G B, who then threatened him with rearrest. Each twist in his position rendered him less believable anyway.

  Without friends to talk to, or the debates he loved so much, he was thrown back on to his newspaper, into which he poured his anguish. His family – his son Mikhail, his daughter Natalya, his wife Nina – was still around him, but they did not provide the debate he wanted. That had come from his spiritual children.

  ‘Has no one called?’ I ask Natalya, my angel of a daughter, who had circled around Lefortovo prison when I was inside, protecting me from troubles and misfortunes.

  ‘No, papa, no one has called.’

  Left alone, his guilt chewed away at him.

  ‘The telephone is quiet. No calls and no one comes. They just judge me. They judge. They judge.’

  In his newspaper, he tried to explain the choice he had made, how he had tried to reconcile the biblical instruction to ‘render unto Caesar’ while also remaining true to God. This is a difficult issue to square for any theologian, but particularly so in the Orthodox tradition, which developed in the Byzantine Empire where the emperor was the protector of the Church. There was no theological defence against an atheist government, since the government was assumed to be the shield of the Church. Priests had no tradition of rebellion, of asserting the Church’s authority against the government, as the Catholic and Protestant clerics in the West did.

  He was faced with two different instructions – obey the government, and obey God’s law – but could not obey both of them. He was, as a law-abiding man and an Orthodox Christian, torn between them. In the 1970s, he had raised God’s laws above human laws. Now, however, the K G B had reminded him forcefully of the power of human laws, and he was pulled in two directions.

  ‘You are violating the rules of the fight. Instead of ideological methods, you are using administrative, legal, punitive measures,’ he wrote in an imaginary dialogue with the K G B that he composed around this time.

  Before his arrest, his newspaper had described the collapse of a community in real time. Now, it was describing the collapse of an individual. I could not – despite the lack of pen to take notes, despite feeling sick – stop reading. The sun flickered in my eyes through the trees and the cabin window, and the words were brutal, like a long, sliding car crash lasting hours.

  We stopped in a small village, where a red-brick church with a cross was the centrepiece of a row of houses. I took the opportunity to retrieve my pen, and read on.

  ‘We all need confession. But who will confess first? Everyone is called to confession, but let someone else confess. And no one even wants to understand my confession. Everyone is leaving, I am left almost alone, just with my family, and even Mikhail wants to go to Moscow.’

  Mikhail, his son, was angry and told him what everyone was saying.

  ‘What they are saying is that your books should be burned, that no one should come to you, that you cannot be a spiritual father,’ Mikhail said. Father Dmitry replied that he did not believe it, but his son insisted: ‘They are sparing you, a lot tougher things were said as well.’

  And Father Dmitry began to get angry. His friends would not forgive him. No one was coming to see him, and he could not believe this was out of choice. Someone must be stopping his old friends from coming.

  ‘I don’t understand, what is this? Revenge? And for what? Are they fulfilling someone’s orders, or just inspired by the spirit of evil? Are they stripping their father bare to laugh at their father?’

  It was a beautiful day now. The roads were almost empty, and nothing moved in the wide flat landscape ahead of us, just the puff of exhaust from a car a couple of hundred metres in front. It was hard to reconcile the beauty around me with the pain on the page.

  ‘Christians are leaving another Christian in sorrow. I understand that my sorrow is a bit different, that it’s not the kind to inspire sympathy. And anyway I’m not talking about sympathy, but do you really not understand that they are dividing us, to drive in a wedge, to play on our mistakes?’ he wrote. But he himself was as much to blame as any of them, accusing his old friends of abandoning him, of obeying orders, of anything he could think of.

  His community was truly shattered
. The lesson was clear: totalitarianism does not allow independence. It cannot. Even the smallest attempt to assert autonomy is a threat to the whole. Father Dmitry had understood this in the 1970s, which is why he encouraged hope and trust. Those are the only weapons that can be used against a state determined to destroy society.

  Father Dmitry had thought he had been serving his nation by spreading trust, and fighting abortion and despair, but, in doing so, he was defying the state. And that was not allowed. That was why he had to be crushed. His fate parallels the fate of his whole nation. Through the twentieth century, the government in Moscow taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical and treacherous. That is the root of the social breakdown that has caused the epidemic of alcoholism, the collapsing birth rate, the crime and the misery.

  Father Dmitry understood quickly, on emerging from detention, what had happened to him. He understood that he had been a danger to the state, and why the state had to isolate him or destroy him. The concepts of trust, hope and faith were too dangerous to be allowed to flourish. Most Russians caught in the national decline did not have his awareness. They drank or fought without knowing why life was so miserable. Father Dmitry tried to rebuild the old community, to get working again. He appealed in what was left of his newspaper for unity, for his spiritual children to come back, and for them to try again. But who would come back to him now? It was too late.

  On 22 February 1981, he typed his last issue. He said he had to stop publication so as to keep his secrets to himself from now on, but I think he was just depressed that no one read his paper. He had certainly shown no desire to hide secrets in the past. I finished the page. It was incredibly cold.

  In Arsenevo, it turned out that buses to Baydino did exist, but that they would not do me much good. There was one in the morning, which I had missed by more than an hour, and one back in the evening, for which I would have to wait six hours. If I were to wait for the evening one, I would still have no way of getting back again unless I was prepared to spend the night there. The temperature was if anything even lower out here in the countryside, and my breath was a thick cloud in the waiting room, so sitting around was not an attractive option. I walked out into the cold and looked for a taxi. There was no shortage. Half a dozen men were waiting in their cars for non-existent customers, and I hired the first: a stocky driver with a moustache in a white Zhiguli.

  It was eerie outside the little town. The cold was so intense that the upper branches of the birch trees were covered in hoar frost, as delicate as the first leaves of spring but white and sparkling. Sometimes the low sun caught a tree just so, and then every crystal would light up and the whole glowing tree was transformed into something more magical than any neon display. Sometimes the birches were a dark screen along the road, and then I could see between them to the vast featureless fields, their snowy crust unscarred. At other times the road ran through a dense wood, threatening in black and white.

  There were no other cars on the road, which stretched ahead of us in a straight, desolate line. A black figure appeared on the horizon after a while and trudged onwards without stopping as we drove past. He was the only sign of life we saw for the whole half-hour it took to reach the village.

  We turned right, following the sign for Baydino, then crossed a small iced-over river and stopped on the far side. The driver gestured to a line of houses that paralleled the road. That was it, Father Dmitry’s refuge when the storm broke over him.

  ‘Quiet, monotony, fresh air, the absence of a mass of people, two or three women walk by, a boy runs past, sometimes a drunkard passes, totally inoffensive, just swaying slightly: after the city’s din and fuss, it was unusual,’ he wrote later, before going on to describe their first evening. ‘Some young voices unexpectedly began to sing, and they played on the balalaika. They sang for a long time, and then were quiet. Calm, quiet, and nothing else. For my children it was boring, my wife was also dissatisfied, but I felt like I was in heaven.’

  I had specific instructions to help me find the house he had lived in. I knew which way its door pointed, how many fir trees were in its garden and what colour it was painted.

  I did not anticipate the search would take me long, so I asked the driver to wait and stepped into the cold. The field was knee deep in snow, but villagers had beaten a path across the field towards the nearest house. I could tell from the footprints that the path was regularly used by a woman (or by a man with small feet), but I could not see her anywhere in the yard of the house, where the only sign of life was a dog who barked frantically from a locked shed. The yard also contained a huge log pile, next to a shed that had until recently contained rabbits. Their hutch was empty. Perhaps the woman had taken them to market on the morning bus.

  My instructions said Father Dmitry’s house was the one with conifers in the garden, but there appeared to be pines all along the track that formed the backbone of the village. Finding his place was going to be slightly harder than I had anticipated. The shovelled path ended after the rabbit woman’s yard, and I followed the tracks of an animal, which turned out to be a cat, since four of the creatures were looking at me from the locked yard of a house. A car in the yard was piled with so much snow you could hardly tell it was a car. Apart from the cats, there were no other signs of life. By the time I reached the top of the village, mine were the only human footprints.

  The village contained about thirty houses, of which three were habitable. The rabbit house was the only one permanently lived in though, and the other two were clearly only used at the weekend, probably as country retreats for Muscovites. Of the rest, some were rotting, their walls buckling and window frames stolen for fuel. Others were still weather-proof, but forlorn, with trackless snow piled to the window sills. There would be no balalaika music here now, not even any drunkards such as the one Father Dmitry had described. Baydino was another one of the villages in the statistics, and was all but dead.

  In fact, the Tula region is the core of the cancer that is eating away at the Russian population. It has just 2.2 people of working age for every one pensioner, which is the worst figure in all of Russia, but one that the country as a whole will exceed in just a few years. The number of pensioners compared to working adults is increasing all over the industrialized world, but nothing like to this extent. As a comparison, in 2010, Great Britain had 3.6 people of working age for each pensioner, while the United States had 4.5 – more than twice as many as the Tula region. Only the Pskov region has a population that is contracting faster than Tula’s. It has the highest ratio of deaths to births in the country, and the second lowest fertility level. It is, in a word, dying.

  Tracing my own footprints back through the village, I tried to decipher the directions I had been given. Father Dmitry’s house was clearly one of three adjacent buildings that formed a line on the side of the village nearest the road, so I waded into the snow in one of the gardens, to look more closely. By this stage, I had lost all feeling in my toes, and I had my padded hood cinched tight over my face to hold my scarf over my mouth. Just my eyes were exposed to the cold. I ploughed forward. The snow was waist deep here, and I realized the best way to make progress was almost to lie on it, walking on my knees rather than my feet and supporting my weight on my stomach. I did not even to try to lift my legs clear at every step. If I walked on my feet, sometimes the crust would support me, but I would invariably crash through halfway into the next step, which made extricating myself far more difficult than if I just ploughed forwards like a cow.

  The first house fitted all the requirements except that the porch pointed the wrong way. Just a few small panes of glass were missing from a decorative window, but that had been enough to let the weather in. The floorboards of the porch were rotten, and trash had blown through. This house was still together, but would not be for long.

  I pushed on to the next house. Really, I should have gone round back by the road, but it was taking a long time – five minutes to go 20 metres – to get anywhere, so
I just dived through the hedge that separated their gardens, and floundered round to its front door. It was hard work, and I began to sweat under my coat. I released the hood a little, and suffered as my feet warmed and the blood flowed back into my toes. Some snow had pushed down into my boots and was melting, which made me feel all the colder.

  This second house was definitely not the one, being the wrong shape, so I repeated my hedge dive to get to the third. They all three looked more or less the same: cream-painted walls, single storey, porch, two rooms. But this last house was the most damaged of the three. A whole window was missing, so I heaved myself over the sill and inside, where there was only a light dusting of snow. It was a relief to be able to walk without wading. In the bedroom, two old wire bedsteads lacked mattresses. A wardrobe still held some cheap summer dresses, and a row of their matching belts hung from a rail. A Formica-laminated cupboard stood up against a wall, its doors open. Here were toothpaste tubes, and bottles of iodine, and a glass full of toothbrushes. A magazine from 1981 – the same year as the last edition of Father Dmitry’s newspaper – was piled on top of some school-books. A girl called Galina had done her Russian homework here.

  On the wall behind the cupboard was a swallow’s nest.

  As I prepared to hoist myself back into the snow, I noticed, among the wreckage of dozens of dead butterflies on the windowsill, an empty bottle of vodka and a half-used bubble packet of hypodermic needles.

  I retraced my way back through my trench to the house of the cats, and started again. At the end furthest from the river the houses were even more damaged, without roofs, full inside and out with snow, and with no chance of any traces remaining of their previous owners. I gave up, walked back out to the road and down to the car. In a brief panic, I worried that the driver might have got bored and left me in the cold, but he was still sitting there patiently with a cigarette. Just as I was about to get in, I noticed that smoke was now blooming from the chimney of the first house I had passed: the one with the rabbits and the barking dog. There had been no smoke before, so this could only mean someone was home. The driver said no one had passed him, and I had seen no one, but smoke was smoke. Excited to find a human at last I strode back down the beaten path, and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I tried another door. There was still no answer.