The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Father Dmitry now had none of the young intellectuals around him with whom he had so loved to debate. They had abandoned him, or been imprisoned, or emigrated to Israel. He still wrote, but there was no one to read what he produced or to argue with his conclusions, so he held debates with himself. He wrote the questions and then provided the answers: ‘There is only God. My hope in my friends has fallen to a minimum.’

  ‘The K G B agents did their business. I was left alone, solitary. I still continue my discussions, I look for new techniques, but people don’t come and the level of the discussions has fallen,’ he wrote.

  His writing became ever more bitter, as he lamented his abandonment. He wrote long statements to his old friends. His justification for his actions changed as the years passed. At first, he admitted his guilt and begged forgiveness. He said he was scared of imprisonment, and that he had been weak. Later, he tried to explain it away. He stopped admitting his faults. He had had no choice. He was a priest. To break with the Church would have meant damnation.

  Breaking with them would mean to end up outside the hierarchy, without service, without the sacraments, like a member of a sect. They said they would expel me, that was their defence. I would have been forced to live and die without the sacraments. That scared me. That was the choice I stood before. I did not want to suffer, and so I rejected everything I had said, saying directly and strangely that it had been anti-Soviet and libellous and now I suffer all the more. My suffering could only be understood by a mother who by fate was forced to reject her own children. My children – my books – were despotically taken from me. And, like an unfortunate mother, I am scared to call those children mine.

  Reading those words I felt sorry for him, but I no longer liked him. It was hard to like him. Yakunin was in prison. Ogorodnikov was in prison. Sakharov was in internal exile. Solzhenitsyn was in exile abroad. But it was Father Dmitry demanding sympathy because he had teamed up with the K G B to stay out of prison, done their work for them and undermined his friends. It did not look good, and his spiritual children did not come back because of it. And that made him angry.

  ‘Despite everything,’ he wrote, as if he had been wronged somehow, ‘I love all people, I worry about them, especially about my own Russian people, about my own Russia.’

  He invented a counterpart, Father Peter he called him, with whom he could hold long imaginary debates that confirmed his own viewpoint. But the debates were not like the old ones. Father Peter did not challenge his views. Before, Father Dmitry had insisted on tolerance and trust, but now he ventured further up the path of prejudice and racism the K G B had opened for him. This fictional counterpart asked him what he thought about the world, and about the faith, and about everything. Father Dmitry conflated himself and his country – ‘What happened to me taught me a lot, just as what has happened to our country should teach us a lot’ – and he was looking for someone to blame for the fate of both.

  Before the K G B warped him, he had looked for solutions. He was not interested in finding those to blame for the demographic catastrophe, the alcoholism, the abortion. He just wanted to unite everyone, to end hatred and to build a community. Now, with his community scattered in all directions, and himself left alone, he concentrated on finding culprits.

  And he had been well taught by the K G B. He blamed the Jews.

  ‘Do you really not see that they are to blame for everything? It is not an accident that Marx was a Jew, and the creator of communism and atheism. If you try just to say that, everyone considers you an anti-Semite,’ Father Dmitry said. It is hard to believe that this bigot is the same man who had so fought against prejudice and racism just a year or two before.

  11

  I look at the future with pessimism

  The K G B gave Father Dmitry a church in Vinogradovo, a village outside Moscow that has now been absorbed into the capital’s northern suburbs. I arranged to go there with Zoya junior, the daughter of Father Alexander. She was the young woman who had been dragged from her bed by her mother, Zoya senior, and forced to cook us lunch. She is also, as it happens, Father Dmitry’s goddaughter and has a letter from him in her flat.

  ‘I congratulate you, Zoya, on the birth of your namesake Zoya. Let it be so, her name is Zoya. You will always remember yourself in her. God preserve you. I wish you strong and flourishing health. Your spiritual father Dmitry Dudko,’ the letter says in his chaotic handwriting, above the date 27 February 1982. It sits on a fashionable Japanese-style sideboard.

  By 1982, Father Dmitry was installed in the new church, with Alexander and Zoya senior as two of his few remaining spiritual children. When I asked Alexander why they had remained with Father Dmitry, he seemed confused by the question. Father Dmitry’s televised confession, he said, had merely been proof of his spiritual worth. Father Dmitry made no mention of Alexander in his writings from the early 1980s, although he did describe that single disciple who had stayed with him because ‘he doesn’t understand anything anyway’, and I have wondered if this was a reference to Zoya’s father.

  Be that as it may, it seemed appropriate to be visiting Vinogradovo with her. She looks like her father, in so far as a beautiful woman in her twenties can look like a middle-aged bushy-bearded Orthodox priest. She wears a gold cross around her neck and is an educated and sharp representative of Russia’s new middle class. She works as an interior designer, drives a smart German car, and picked me up outside a metro station at the end of the line.

  She had never visited Vinogradovo before, or if she had she had no memory of it. She programmed it into her satellite navigator, which squawked directions at us as we drove out of Moscow towards the great ring road that sweeps traffic around the capital. Out here on the city perimeter are vast new developments of tower blocks and shopping complexes. The architecture, despite occasional whimsies of towers and turrets, is joyless. You know that, while the walls may look clean and unspotted now, in a couple of years they will be as flaky and damp-stained as their Soviet-made predecessors.

  When approaching the city, these towers meld into a solid wall, rearing out of the virgin forest. While Russia is shrinking and its villages are dying, Moscow is booming. Here is, according to some estimates, 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth. The oil and gas money is a fountain showering Italian clothes, French wine and German cars on the elite, and offering work to everyone else as long as they are prepared to get their hands dirty.

  The total number of people living in Russia’s cities shrank by 3.7 million in the decade after 2000. That is a decline of more than 3 per cent, and in some places the collapse has been far worse. In Komi and the Bryansk region, the urban population fell by almost a tenth, while in the Tula region it slumped further still – by more than 13 per cent. Moscow had none of that trouble. In the same period its population rose from 9.9 to 10.6 million, making it by far the biggest city in Eastern Europe. And that is just the official figure. Millions of illegal immigrants from the former Soviet republics work here on building sites and in the markets. They are unregistered and uncounted, but they keep the capital moving and earn crucial roubles to send back to their families in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan or Armenia.

  It was some time before Zoya junior and I realized that her satnav was malfunctioning. At every junction on the ring road, it directed us to turn off, then threaded us randomly through the nearby streets before depositing us back on the ring road again. It did this three times before we switched it off and relied on the map.

  The map was almost equally unhelpful. We drove past our destination three times without seeing it, and went down what appeared to be every backstreet there was before finding the one we wanted. When we reached the church, I wondered what I had come for. It was just a church: yellow ochre and white, surrounded by gardens and trees that probably looked nice when not covered by a foot of snow. Inside, the church was fussy, adorned with modern icons that have for me no spiritual power, and guarded by an old woman who knew nothing of Father Dmitry and wante
d nothing to do with me.

  Nonetheless, looked at from outside, it was a smart and grand building. More importantly, it was near Moscow, pretty much as near as it was possible for Father Dmitry to get while remaining in the diocese that surrounds but does not include the city. It would have been a far more convenient location for his discussion group and community than Grebnevo. But the discussion group was no more by the time he was here, the community was scattered. There was nothing to see in this church, and we turned around and drove back towards the city.

  Zoya junior was meeting some friends in the Sretenka monastery, a lovely building just a few hundred metres away from the Lubyanka. It was a Saturday evening and the regular prayers to welcome in the Lord’s Day would be read with incense and chanting, so I happily accepted her suggestion that I should come too.

  In the 1980s, just a few people would have attended services at churches anywhere, and probably fewer still so close to the K G B’s headquarters. Now, however, the church was packed. President Vladimir Putin, his ministers and the country’s top businessmen are all regular churchgoers, as are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians.

  It was dark and cold that night, but the church was warm and fuggy. It was packed with worshippers, mostly women, who crossed themselves and bowed as the progress of the service demanded. Priests in hats appropriate to their clerical rank – black, with and without veils, and purple for the most senior – performed the mysteries. Back and forth the men went in the complex ballet of their faith. Two young men had the task of tending to the hundreds of candles, which were thin. They calmly and patiently straightened any candle that looked like falling over, while the heat from the flames shimmered, and the gold on the vast wall of icons flickered the light back into the room.

  The gorgeous bass swell of the choir, which included several of Zoya junior’s friends, tugged at my spirit and I stood and lost myself in the sound for more than an hour. Russian churchgoers do not sit down unless they absolutely have to, and that is only if they are very elderly or very sick. Services, therefore, become an exercise in endurance and eventually, despite the thrill of the ancient music, my legs were no longer prepared to tolerate it. I said goodbye to Zoya junior, and walked back into the cold.

  During the 1980s, Father Dmitry worked patiently to reassemble a group of spiritual children. He never regained his position as a rebel and a media star, but he retained his passion for preaching, and a small group of young men and women eventually assembled around him once more.

  Among them was Vladimir Petrovsky. He had none of the baggage of the heroic days before the televised confession, and knew a different spiritual father: quieter, more private, subdued, depressed, angry.

  We met at the Botanical Garden metro station, which I know well, since it was the setting-off point for one of my favourite weekend walks when I lived in Moscow. In summer, the nearby park is a riot of wild growth, with hidden formal gardens in a vast expanse of woodland that reveals new secrets on every visit. In winter, however, it is like everywhere else: a spread of beaten dirty snow dotted with trash. The temperature was a little warmer that day, but it still bit when I stepped out of the glass and concrete metro station.

  Petrovsky was slight. His grey hair was scraped over his scalp, and his eyes peered at me from behind thick spectacles. Perhaps it was just me that day, but he did not seem as open as the people I had interviewed about the 1970s, and appeared to be very suspicious of my intentions. His questions as to why I was writing about Father Dmitry at all were searching. As we walked through the edges of the park to his flat, which was up a dark flight of stairs in a concrete apartment block identical to thousands of others in Moscow, I felt myself under examination. It was not a pleasant experience, so, by the time we were in his little kitchen, where he made tea, and I sat at his oilcloth table, I was on edge.

  He looked at me and waited for my questions. Perhaps the reason he looked so unenthusiastic was because he knew what kind of questions were coming. When I asked Father Dmitry’s disciples about the 1970s, they could focus on arrests, and harassment, and comradeship and solidarity. The years after his humiliation had little of that, and Petrovsky probably knew I would ask about the extreme nationalism and prejudice that the K G B had kindled in Father Dmitry.

  ‘I found out about him through my godfather,’ said Petrovsky. ‘I came to him in 1987. The first time I went into his flat was in July, on 1 July, after his wife was buried.’

  The loss of his wife Nina after a long illness devastated Father Dmitry. She had patiently supported him through his years of triumph, then through his humiliation, and had been one of the few people who never judged him. He needed new spiritual children desperately, and Petrovsky’s arrival was well timed. At first, their discussions were about literature, and Petrovsky began to go to his house regularly, or to his new church at Cherkizovo – a distant village he was assigned to after Vinogradovo.

  ‘As a priest, he led a person’s soul. He said that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy revealed the soul more than anyone else. In this time many young people came to the faith. It is hard at first to speak of the soul so he tried to speak to them in their own language through literature,’ Petrovsky told me, staring at me directly through his thick glasses. ‘I became his assistant from 1987 and stayed with him to the end. I worked nowhere at first, I just helped him. I was on my own. I was given a bit of food but the first years were hard. That was before I became a priest.’

  In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling apart, but did not realize it yet. After Leonid Brezhnev had died, and two more geriatric general secretaries followed him to their graves in quick succession, the country finally had a leader who was prepared to try to stop the epidemic of alcoholism. Russians now claim that Mikhail Gorbachev’s restrictions on alcohol, which involved grubbing up vineyards and restricting sales drastically – 90 per cent of alcohol shops in Moscow were closed, for example – were disastrous. The popular myth today is that people turned to shoe polish and anti-freeze in their desperation to get drunk, with catastrophic effects on the nation’s health. But that is not true. This was, in fact, Russia’s demographic zenith. In 1986–7, life expectancy bounced upwards to its highest ever level, while the birth rate zipped up too.

  Had the country stuck to Gorbachev’s alcohol policies, then perhaps the catastrophic post-Soviet demographic collapse might not have been so bad. If the government wanted the nation to have a future, it had to curtail alcohol consumption severely. It had no choice. Sadly, however, it could not afford to do so. Revenues collapsed without alcohol being sold in the state shops. Some money went to illegal distillers instead and thus stayed out of government coffers, some was just not spent at all and languished in savings accounts. Public support for the leadership slumped too, often because of complaints swapped in queues at the wine shops. Even supporters of the measures got bored of them. There were no consumer goods to buy with the money people saved, and what was the fun in that?

  ‘I always hated drunkenness,’ one woman from Minsk wrote to a newspaper. ‘But suddenly it seems that nobody celebrates holidays any more. We used to make ourselves new dresses for the festivities. This year I didn’t feel like making a single new dress. Why bother?’

  That complaint was itself a sign of how, under Gorbachev’s policy of openness, Russians began to be free to discuss subjects that had been taboo just a year or two before.

  The huge campaign against the dissidents that culminated with Sakharov’s exile and Father Dmitry’s recantation was unwound. In late 1986, Sakharov had a phone installed so Gorbachev could call him and invite him back to Moscow. Yakunin and Ogorodnikov were released in 1987. Gorbachev, burnishing his image as a modernizer, told the United Nations in 1988 that there were no political prisoners left in his country, and he was close to telling the truth, although full rehabilitation did not come until the 1990s. Controversial themes were up for discussion in ways they had not been since the revolution.

  Father Dmitry entered int
o that with enthusiasm. This was when he elaborated his theories about the Jews’ responsibility for all his nation’s ills.

  ‘It is not that he went into politics, but politics came to him,’ said Petrovsky. Among the people who attended his discussions at the end of the Soviet period was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a firebrand nationalist christened by Father Dmitry, and whose misnamed Liberal Democrat Party – it is neither liberal nor democratic, rather the opposite – became the first registered opposition party in the Soviet Union.

  Although this was before Zhirinovsky’s more controversial remarks, such as that Russia and Germany should once again carve up Poland between them, and before his friendship with a former member of Hitler’s SS, the politician was still a noxious combination of Soviet nostalgia and racism. Petrovsky attempted to explain away Father Dmitry’s friendship with him – ‘People asked whether he would go into a beauty contest, and he said that to save a soul he’d go anywhere’ – but in truth, by the end of the Soviet Union, Dudko’s views now had more in common with the extreme right than with anyone else.

  By April 1992, a few months after the Soviet empire’s collapse, he was appearing at demonstrations with chauvinist politicians, and was appointed spiritual adviser to a new newspaper called Day, which combined communism, Orthodoxy and anti-Semitism into a single package. In May 1992, Day reprinted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document detailing a plot (in fact invented by the tsar’s secret police) by Jews to take over the world, in what was surely the Protocols’ first publication in Russia since the Nazi-sponsored papers of wartime. A week or two later, it reprinted an interview with Hitler.

  ‘The newspaper Day is showing, like no other, what is being done to the country,’ Father Dmitry wrote in one of his columns. It seemed that, having lost his chance to rally people around a message of hope, he had launched a campaign of nihilism and hatred instead. Now he was even lamenting the collapse of the totalitarian state that he had once urged his followers to boycott.