The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  12

  They don’t care any more

  So, did Father Dmitry have a choice? Could he have refused to surrender to the K G B? The question is an important one because, as I have thought almost ever since I first heard of him, his personal experience closely mirrors that of his whole nation. When he betrayed his own conscience, he did irreparable damage to his soul. Before, he was a happy and confident man. Afterwards he was a miserable racist. The transformation was total and was a result of that moment when he decided to stop struggling, to seek compromise with people who wanted nothing but his destruction.

  Everything that followed – the sadness and the hatred – was a result of that moment. It is important to understand that his misery was a result of his own choice, because it takes us back to the misery of his whole nation. If he could have acted differently, if he had a choice, it means every Russian had a choice. That means that the depression of individuals is not inevitable. If every Russian had a choice, there is hope that some people took another path, and will continue to do so.

  The simple answer to the question of whether he had a choice is: yes, he did. And the proof for that is his old friend Gleb Yakunin, who was arrested a few months before Father Dmitry on similar charges, but who did not recant in 1980 and who won himself a five-year prison term and five years in exile as a result. The life stories of the two men could almost be a science-fiction story, in which someone faces an important binary choice and we get to see all the consequences that follow from both available decisions. Father Dmitry went one way; Father Gleb went the other.

  Father Gleb and I arranged to meet in the office of For Human Rights, a pressure group, in central Moscow. I was early and sat in the lobby, surveying the chaos of a place where new-generation Russians scurried around while grizzled veterans of the Soviet-era struggle tapped away one-fingered at their keyboards.

  Brown boxes were piled along the corridor, those on the bottom sagging under the weight of those above and slowly oozing their papers on to the floor. Wires ran along the walls and floor, linking extension cord to extension cord. Heaps of newspapers were covered in drifts of dust. One headline – ‘How much of an armed force does Russia need?’ – was all but illegible through the dirt. An alcove was full of a precarious heap of ring binders. If you had wanted to access the one labelled ‘Outgoing 2008’, you would have had to remove about a dozen others first or else risk them all collapsing on the floor. Some tinsel decorated a doorway. New Year’s Eve had been just a few weeks previously, but the tinsel looked like it had been there far longer than that.

  Yakunin arrived fifteen minutes late, bustling in off the street and greeting everyone boisterously. He led me downstairs, where the basement office was if anything more chaotic than the one above. We found space on a Formica-topped desk piled with broken electronic equipment, and he unloaded bread, pork, garlic, tea bags, sugar and more from a paper bag.

  ‘There,’ he said, when the kettle had boiled and my notebook was on my knee, ‘let’s talk.’

  When he said ‘let’s talk’, he meant that he would talk. He had a story to tell and did not intend to be interrupted. He and Father Dmitry met in the 1960s when, in the temporary liberal interlude that followed Stalin’s death, they opposed changes to the governance of the Orthodox Church that made priests into employees of their parishioners – that is, of the local government – and thus increased state control over them.

  In the end, only Yakunin and one other agreed to put their names to the letter of protest, and Yakunin lost his parish as a result.

  Despite Father Dmitry’s last-minute decision to keep his signature off the letter, the two men remained close. They were priests, they were neighbours, their wives got on; they had a lot in common. When Yakunin founded the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in 1976, Father Dmitry republished its statements in his self-typed newspaper.

  ‘He was a pure Church person and said what he wanted. I was banned and only Dudko could speak so openly. Naturally, that meant Western journalists went to him, and when the K G B decided to crush the human rights movement, they added him too,’ Yakunin said.

  The K G B linked them together, and the K G B’s favourite newspaper, the Literary Gazette, lambasted them both, along with Ogorodnikov, in 1977. Yakunin’s arrest in November 1979 preceded Dudko’s by a couple of months, and they were held in the same detention centre. It was there that Yakunin got the first hint that Father Dmitry might not endure. While his own interrogator attempted to break him down, Yakunin could hear voices coming through the wall.

  Yakunin’s interrogator noticed and said: ‘So? Do you hear how your friend Dudko is talking to his investigator?’

  At the time, Yakunin thought Father Dmitry was holding out, since the voices were loud and angry, but he was wrong. He was deeply disappointed by Dudko’s recantation and television appearance, and by the subsequent changes to his character.

  ‘There were always people who gave up, because they were scared. But with Dmitry Dudko, it was like a rebirth. He could have asked for forgiveness for his cowardice, but he didn’t. Instead, he created a construction to explain it. It was like a psychological rebuilding of himself. He went on and on about how much he loved the K G B. It was almost as if he fell into a psychological hole.’

  Yakunin was tried and convicted. He was under no illusions about the official Church’s attitude to him. At his trial, two priests who represented the Orthodox Patriarchate abroad testified that his ‘antipatriotic activity’ had turned the Christians of the world against the Soviet Union. Another witness said Yakunin could drink two bottles of vodka (Yakunin asked in return: ‘Over what period?’), while another said Yakunin was an agent of imperialism, an opponent of peace, and deserved to be on trial. On hearing his sentence, Yakunin said: ‘I thank God for the destiny I have been given.’

  He was therefore in prison when Father Dmitry suffered the guilt and loneliness that allowed the K G B to remodel his character, and he was away in exile for the whole long process that changed his old friend from a believer in humanity to an anti-Semite. This is not to say that all was well in prison. Yakunin and others suffered torments. Ogorodnikov later wrote that he had attempted suicide three times, in full knowledge of the fact that it was a mortal sin.

  And their tormentors knew how to keep them twisting. In 1986, Ogorodnikov was tried again and forced to confront the world’s indifference. ‘An empty courtroom during my trial, where besides the K G B there were only the two of you,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘is symptomatic evidence of the loss of interest in my cause and the weakening of Christian activity.’

  It is a testament to the strength of both Yakunin’s and Ogorodnikov’s characters that they survived. At last they heard that things were changing. A colonel in the K G B flew all the way to Yakutia to see Yakunin in exile, and they got drunk together. Yakutia was about as remote as you could get in the Soviet Union, so Yakunin realized something was up.

  ‘He said they knew I was honest, and they did not need me to sign any papers. I could go back to Moscow and be a priest if only I stopped my political and human rights activities. I told them I had already been so long in prison I didn’t mind staying a little longer,’ he said, smiling. ‘Then a couple of months passed and all political prisoners were amnestied.’

  He was given a parish, but it was a different world that he had come back to. The dissidents had always hoped that, given the chance, everyone in Russia would be just like them: idealistic, democratic, honest. It did not turn out that way. The new freedoms did not spark a reckoning of the betrayals of the past as the dissidents had hoped, or an examination of the Russians’ own sins, but rather an orgy of blaming minorities and foreigners. The change wrought in Father Dmitry had been visited on millions of other Russians, who shared his distrust of outsiders and his self-loathing.

  Among the little group of believers who had discussed the reforms to the Church with Father Dmitry and Yakunin in the early 1960s was a pr
iest called Alexander Men. Unlike them, however, he had stayed out of trouble. He had not felt the need to advertise himself, so the Soviet government had not bothered him, instead leaving him to inspire those around him with his gentle faith and unflinching honesty.

  He was born a Jew, but had never felt any kind of discrimination from ethnic Russians in the 1970s, the time when Father Dmitry was preaching inclusiveness and urging everyone to stand together to oppose the collapse of Russian society. By September 1990, however, that had all gone.

  ‘In 1975, fifteen years ago, I gave an interview which was published in Paris. They asked me whether there was any anti-Semitism in the Church. I said that I hadn’t come across any, not on a mass scale. Fifteen years later and the picture has completely changed. I wouldn’t say the same thing now. Anti-Semitism has become, unfortunately, one of the distinguishing features of the Church,’ he told an interlocutor, who then asked if he himself had been a target.

  ‘Of course, that goes without saying. I feel it. I have been a priest for a long time, thirty or so years, but this has only started to happen now. I feel it in the way people behave towards me, in the way they talk to me, in everything . . . There has to be a category of people who are held responsible for the sins of society. They are the personification of society’s own sins.’

  Men pointed out that, even if the anti-Semites were right and that it was Jews who had ordered that churches be dynamited and believers killed, nothing would have happened had Russians refused to obey. Obeying orders, he was saying, is not a defence.

  ‘That means people are to blame. But it’s a very difficult thing to admit and so you have to find someone else to blame. It’s easy to swear at the Jews. A coward will always pick on someone defenceless.’

  That was an austere message to give to the Russians, a nation that had been obeying unpalatable orders for seven decades.

  ‘Make a comparative analysis of denazification in Germany and destalinization here and you’ll understand.’

  That interview seems as relevant now as it did when he gave it, perhaps even more so considering the Kremlin’s current campaign against historians who publish works ‘to the detriment of Russia’s interests’. But he never got to see how prophetic he was. He was struck down from behind with an axe four days later while walking from his home to the train station. He was aged just fifty-five. His murder has never been solved, but it is easy to see a link between the racism he had suffered and his tragic end.

  Yakunin rambled a lot during our conversation. It was hard to keep him on the topic of the 1980s. He preferred to skip through current events – Egypt, a new law in Russia, the unexpected cold, an album of chants he wanted to record – but he would come back to the 1980s in the end.

  ‘In our camp there were fifty political prisoners and 250 guards. And we only had three real dissidents. Of the others, some had tried to cross the border, or to blow something up. They were not actual dissidents. Us dissidents were necessary to the K G B though, you see, and when they imprisoned us all they had no one left to fight.

  ‘The thing that interests me is why they were so scared of us. When our information got to the West, they were scared. But look now, look at the things people write, and they don’t care. They spit on it. That is the single big difference between now and then. They don’t care any more.’

  In 1990, after his release from the camps, Yakunin was elected to the Russian parliament. He was part of the liberal wing pushing for reforms and, when hardliners launched a coup to try to preserve the Soviet Union in 1991, it was natural that he should be part of the commission set up to investigate it. That gave him access to the K G B archives. It is hard to believe now, but in that brief window of reform, an uncompromising dissident priest was allowed free access to the deepest secrets of the state.

  ‘They asked me which bit I wanted to see. I said Fifth Directorate, fourth section, which was the section devoted to the Orthodox Church. I wrote out all the most important facts for three months. I should have kept my mouth shut and worked more, but I could not.’

  In January 1992, Yakunin publicly revealed the extent to which top Church figures had helped the K G B. He published their codenames, giving them a chance to own up to their identities: A B B A T (that was Metropolitan Pitirim); A N T O N O V (that was Metropolitan Filaret); and A D A M A N T (that was Metropolitan Yuvenali, Father Dmitry’s bishop and the one who had moved him from parish to parish at the K G B’s request). They refused to identify themselves, and their outraged boss, the patriarch, went to top officials demanding that Yakunin’s access be ended.

  Yakunin protested and wrote to the patriarch. ‘If the Church is not cleansed of the taint of the spy and informer, it cannot be reborn,’ he told him. He listed the codenames again, and singled out one unknown hierarch for particular attention.

  ‘The most prominent agents of the past include D R O Z D O V – the only one of the churchmen to be officially honoured with an award by the K G B,’ he wrote. The patriarch was right to panic about the damage Yakunin could do, since D R O Z D O V was in fact himself. The K G B’s penetration had gone to the very top, and it is hardly surprising that the Church did not want to rid itself of the spies. If it did, there would be hardly anyone left. It was not just the odd rogue priest who had informed on his flock, but almost everyone. The rogues were the ones who had refused to help the K G B.

  In this way, the Church was a true reflection of the whole of Russian society. The K G B and the Russian people had penetrated each other to such an extent that they could not be separated. The culture of betrayal and suspicion and distrust that the K G B relied on had become part of the national culture, poisoning politics in the 1990s and beyond: decades of corruption, murder and sordid sex scandals. If it cannot purge itself, however, the Russian nation will never rid itself of the illness that has driven people to alcohol. Russians need to trust each other again.

  Amid the furore of the emerging truth of how far the K G B had penetrated the Church, Patriarch Alexy attempted to explain why he had decided to work for the security services. Like informers everywhere, he clearly knew deep down that he had acted wrongly, but he could not bring himself to do the honourable thing and resign. Instead, he told an audience in America that he had no choice but to cooperate, since otherwise the churchgoers would have had no priests, which would have been a disaster.

  ‘I still now think with terror of what might have happened to my flock if by my “decisive” actions I had left it without the Eucharist, without being able to attend church, if I had left their children without Baptism and the dying without their final parting words. I would have committed a great, indelible sin, and out of concern for my own moral reputation I would have left the running of the diocese and betrayed my flock,’ he said. In short, he had had to betray the Church in order to save it.

  Yakunin continued his campaign. Eventually, therefore, in October 1993, he was defrocked. Even the Soviet Union had not disqualified him as a priest. It had taken his parish, but not his title. It took the spite of an Orthodox hierarchy on the defensive to throw him out. He maintained his campaign for a full inquiry into the Church, however, and in February 1997 the Church took the last remaining step open to it. He was officially excommunicated, a step usually reserved for someone who has committed acts of serious and unrepentant heresy. ‘Let him be anathema before the whole people,’ the Church said in a statement issued after a full synod.

  It is a sign of how far the Church’s values and those of the liberals had diverged that, while Yakunin was being thrown out, a priest called Ioann could remain metropolitan of St Petersburg despite anti-Semitism so virulent that he considered The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be ‘already in action’. A racist was a bishop. A K G B agent was patriarch. In a way, it is hardly surprising that Yakunin should be thrown out for being an honest man.

  Western liberals who had praised Father Dmitry in the past were so disgusted by the change in him and the Church that they dropped any f
urther interest. In a study of the modern Russian Orthodox Church published in Britain in 1986, Dudko had the second highest number of entries in the index: more than Stalin, or Solzhenitsyn, more even than Ukraine. In another study by the same author published ten years later, he was not mentioned once.

  I asked Yakunin whether he regretted never having made up with Father Dmitry.

  ‘You know, my mother and father are buried at the Friday Cemetery,’ he began, and I worried he had headed off on another tangent. Then I remembered that Father Dmitry is buried in the Friday Cemetery, so I listened closely. ‘I regularly go there to pray. One time, when I had finished, I needed a pee, so I went over to the wall, and I was peeing, and I looked up, and there was Dmitry Dudko, and I was pissing on him.’

  He laughed.

  ‘No, I never saw him again. It would have been like talking to a deaf mute. There would have been no point.’

  As I walked away, I mused on what Yakunin had said, and I realized something I had not noticed before. I had spoken to almost all the people who had been closest to Father Dmitry, the core members of his old community, over the previous year or so. And almost none of them now had any contact with each other at all.

  Yakunin never saw Father Dmitry after their arrest. Ogorodnikov never saw Yakunin, and asked me for his phone number. It was me who broke the news to Ogorodnikov that his old friend Sergei Fedotov had died the year before.

  ‘What? Sergei? Tell me you’re mistaken, tell me you’re mistaken,’ he said again and again, breaking off our talk to come back to it.

  Father Vladimir never saw Father Alexander, and neither of them saw Yakunin. Father Dmitry’s son Mikhail, when he heard I had seen Yakunin, who is his godfather, said: ‘Well, I don’t expect you’ll hear much from him.’ And so it went on. The K G B’s destruction of the community had been so successful that now they just swapped gossip about how far the others had fallen.

  ‘You know, apparently, he’s involved in group sex,’ one former disciple said about another I had spoken to. And that pretty much summed it up. Gossip and distrust had replaced solidarity and friendship. And if the K G B could do that to these staunch fighters and firm friends, just imagine what they did to the whole country. And that is how the Russian nation was divided and ruled.