The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘He swore at everyone, using all these swear words. Do you know these words in Russian? Yes? Well, he was using them all. The believers understood it was not him speaking, that evil was speaking. He swore, he was swearing, and he said he could not stand it. He said that he had had it up to here. And I’m being quiet, and not saying anything – let him swear.’

  Father Dmitry came up to her husband and looked at him: ‘I will give you five years. Five years. Five years not to drink.’

  Her husband said: ‘I can’t survive.’

  ‘You will survive.’

  ‘I won’t survive.’

  ‘You will survive.’

  ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I will drink.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘I have drunk for twenty years. What have I not drunk? Anything that burns I’ve drunk. I will drink.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  She laughed a beautiful musical laugh, and her face had dropped a decade or more. She looked young: ‘The priest was like this, and my husband was like that.’

  Two times Father Dmitry said with such certainty: ‘No, you won’t.’

  They went home, and her husband calmed down and no more was said about it.

  ‘Then the next day my husband left to go to work, and to think that my husband after twenty years could come home from work sober. What a thought. The time comes. It’s four, five, and I’m waiting, and everything’s shaking inside, could it be possible? I wasn’t worried that he would drink, of course he would drink, he always drank, but that he would go against God. This was very important to me, it was like a sin. I was thinking about how I had forced him to commit a sin. Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock. And he appears,’ she paused for dramatic effect, loving her story.

  ‘And I look at him. And he’s sober. Sober!’

  Her husband had told her an incredible story: ‘The bus broke down, we stopped on a bridge, the lads ran off and bought some wine, and said, “Seryoga, pour it out,” and I said, “I do not drink.” And they said, “What?” And I said, “I do not drink. I went to a priest, and the priest gave me five years of no drinking.” They gave me a glass, but I said no.’

  The woman laughed with joy.

  ‘He said no. No! And he’s been like this ever since. Ever since. It was a miracle. It is a miracle. A miracle. Father Dmitry saved him. He wanted to save the whole Russian people like that, one at a time. That was what I wanted to say. God bless you.’

  Sources and Bibliography

  For my demographic data I have relied on the website of Russia’s Federal Service of State Statistics (www.gks.ru), which publishes figures at fascinating levels of detail. I have used the monthly figures (which tend to show a lower total), rather than the census data, mainly because they allowed me to follow changes over small periods of time in very specific places, which is crucial to how I came up with my ideas. I have used www.mortality.org, for reliable life-expectancy and other statistics.

  I have used and appreciated Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis by Nicholas Eberstadt (Washington, DC, 2010). He seems to make a good case, but I have also followed the online discussion about whether he has gone too far in his gloomy prognostications.

  I have used newspaper archives in London and Moscow, as well as periodicals from elsewhere, for contemporary views on Dmitry Dudko. Among the most useful have been Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought, 8 March 1979; 12 April 1979; 29 February 1980), the Keston News Service (26 June 1980), Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (the Chronicle of Current Events, multiple issues, available on www.memo.ru), The Times (of London, multiple issues), the New York Times (multiple issues) and those papers included in Google’s mercifully digitized news archive.

  I have scoured the libraries of Moscow and London, and corresponded with libraries further afield, in an attempt to find everything ever written by Dmitry Dudko. He was a prolific writer, so this has not been easy. I never found a copy of Vrag Vnutri (Frankfurt, 1979) but, otherwise, I am confident I have read the vast majority of his work. Here is a list of the books and articles that most informed this book.

  Our Hope (New York, 1977) is the English translation of O Nashem Upovanii (Paris, 1975).

  Podarok ot Boga (A Present from God, Moscow, 1997) is the closest thing he wrote to an autobiography.

  The Collected Works published by the Moscow Patriarchate (Moscow, 2004) include in Volume 1: ‘Vernost v Malom’ (‘Faithful over a Few Things’); ‘Poteryannaya Drakhma’ (‘The Lost Coin’); ‘Vyyavlenie Iskusnykh’ (‘Exposure of the Skilled’). Volume 2 contains: ‘Na Skreshchenii Dorog’ (‘At the Meeting of the Roads’); ‘Kak Istolkovat Pritchi’ (‘How to Interpret Parables’); ‘Propoved Cherez Pozor’ (‘Preaching through Shame’). Volume 3 contains: ‘Khristos v nashei Zhizni’ (‘Christ in our Life’); ‘Liturgiya na Russkoi Zemle’ (‘Liturgy on Russian Land’); ‘V Ternie i pri Doroge’ (‘Among the Thorns and along the Wayside’).

  I pieced together his self-published newspaper V Svete Preobrazheniya (In the Light of the Transfiguration) from an unpublished collection in the Russian State Library; from the Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya (Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement, no. 127, 1978 and no. 129, 1979); from Volnoe Slovo (Free Word, no. 33); and from ‘Propoved Cherez Pozor’ in the Collected Works.

  Religion in Communist Lands (Volume 1, nos. 4–5; Volume 4, no. 2) contains accounts of his sermons.

  Other writings are in:

  Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya (no. 118, 1976; no. 120, 1977)

  Russkoe Vozrozhedenie (Russian Renaissance, no. 2, 1978; nos. 7–8, 1979)

  Izvestia (21 June 1980)

  Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (no. 7, 1980)

  Den (Day, including 21–7 June 1992; 15–21 November 1992; 1–9 January 1993; 7–13 February 1993; 23–29 May 1993; 1–7 October 1993)

  Zavtra (Tomorrow, March 1994; March 1995; September 1994; November 1995; April 1996)

  Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary, November 2002)

  The 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of the dissidents’ hand-printed samizdat (‘self-published’) literature. Some of these were smuggled into the West, printed in book form and then smuggled back (tamizdat: ‘published there’). Many were also translated and published in English. They include:

  Elena Bonner, Alone Together (London, 1986)

  Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle (London, 1978)

  Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Red Square at Noon (London, 1972)

  Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Selected Poems with a Transcript of her Trial and Papers Relating to her Detention in a Prison Psychiatric Hospital (Oxford, 1972)

  Karel van Het Reye (ed.), Letters and Telegrams to P. M. Litvinov (Dordrecht, 1969)

  Dina Kaminskaya, Final Judgement: My Life as a Soviet Defence Lawyer (London, 1983)

  Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward (eds.), On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (London, 1967)

  Pavel Litvinov, The Demonstration on Pushkin Square (London, 1969)

  Pavel Litvinov, The Trial of the Four (London, 1972)

  Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony (London, 1969)

  Anatoly Marchenko, From Tarusa to Siberia (Strathcona, 1980)

  Anatoly Marchenko, To Live Like Everyone (London, 1989)

  Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (London, 1969)

  Zhores and Roy Medvedev, A Question of Madness (New York, 1972)

  Viktor Nekipelov, Institute of Fools: Notes from the Serbsky (New York, 1980)

  Alexander Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry (Keston, 1986)

  Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond (New York, 1991)

  Harrison E. Salisbury (ed.), Sakharov Speaks (London, 1974)

  Igor Shafarevich, Russophobia (samizdat, from 1981)

  Gennady Shimanov, Notes from the Red House (Bromley, 1974)

  Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson, Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the U S S R (Keston, 1978)

  I have also relied on secondar
y literature for information on Russia, the Soviet Union, demographics, religion, totalitarianism and other themes covered in this book. These are the ones I have found most useful.

  Olga Afremova, Otets Dmitry Dudko (Father Dmitry Dudko, Moscow, 1992)

  Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent (Middletown, Conn., 1985)

  Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem, 1998)

  Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The K G B and the World (London, 2005)

  Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London, 2003)

  Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–56 (London, 2012)

  Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, Nebr., 2009)

  Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke, 2002)

  Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union, Novocherkassk 1962 (Stanford, 2001)

  Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston, 2010)

  Anatoly Belov and Andrei Shilkin, Diversiya bez dinamita (Sabotage without Dynamite, Moscow, 1973)

  Philip Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London, 2005)

  Michael Bourdeaux, Risen Indeed: Lessons in Faith from the U S S R (London, 1983)

  Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London, 2011)

  Alex Butterworth, The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London, 2011)

  William C. Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe (London, 1999)

  Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (London, 1986)

  Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–45: A Study in Occupation Politics (London, 1981)

  R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933 (New York, 2004)

  Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison, Wis., 2004)

  Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Survive (London, 2011)

  Sidney D. Drell and Sergei P. Kapitza, Sakharov Remembered: A Tribute by Friends and Colleagues (New York, 1991).

  Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London, 2000)

  Nicholas Eberstadt, Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis (Washington, DC, 2010)

  Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London, 1986)

  Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (Basingstoke, 1996)

  John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (London, 1995)

  Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York, 1995)

  Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr, Ecocide in the U S S R: Health and Nature under Siege (London, 1992)

  Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London, 1996)

  Orlando Figes, The Whisperers (London, 2007)

  Orlando Figes, Just Send Me Word (London, 2012)

  Harvey Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons (New York, 1979)

  Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994)

  Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century (London, 2005)

  Masha Gessen, The Man without a Face (London, 2012)

  Graeme Gill and Roger D. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2000)

  Yves Hamant, Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (Torrance, Calif., 1995)

  Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (New Haven, 1995)

  Albert Heard, The Russian Church and Russian Dissent (London, 1887)

  Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (London, 1986)

  David Hoffman, The Oligarchs (London, 2011)

  Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London, 2005)

  Grigory Ioffe and Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia: A Geographical Perspective (Boulder, Col., 1997)

  Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova and Ilya Zaslavsky, The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia (Pittsburgh, 2006)

  David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago, 1986)

  Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (London, 1994)

  Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (London, 2007)

  Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (London, 2012)

  Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown U S S R: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley, 1991)

  Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)

  Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2008)

  Richard Lourie, Sakharov: A Biography (London, 2002)

  Wolfgang Lutz, Sergei Scherbov and Andrei Volkov (eds.), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991 (London, 1994)

  A. Malenky, Magnitogorsk: The Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine of the Future (Moscow, 1932)

  Nick Manning and Nataliya Tikhonova (eds.), Health and Health Care in the New Russia (Aldershot, 2009)

  David Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–91 (Harlow, 2004)

  Mervyn Matthews, Patterns of Deprivation in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Stanford, 1989)

  Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000)

  Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss (Oxford, 2011)

  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1949)

  Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London, 2010)

  Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago (London, 1959)

  Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen (London, 2004)

  Keith Richards, Life (London, 2011)

  T. H. Rigby (ed.), The Stalin Dictatorship: Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and Other Documents (Sydney, 1968)

  Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman (eds.), Christianity for the Twentieth Century: The Life and Work of Alexander Men (London, 1996)

  Abraham Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime 1953–1970 (Ithaca, NY, 1972)

  Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman (London, 2012)

  Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov (eds.), The K G B File on Andrei Sakharov (London, 2005)

  Theo J. Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford, 1989)

  John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (Bloomington, Ind., 1973)

  Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London, 2007)

  Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004)

  L. Sitko, Intalia: Stikhi i vospominaniya byshikh zaklyuchennihk Minlaga (Intalia: Poems and Remembrances of Prisoners of the Mineral Camp, Inta, 1995)

  Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (London, 2011)

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (London, 1968)

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago, Moscow, 1990)

  Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (London, 2011)

  William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003)

  Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)

  William Tompson, The Soviet Union under Brezhnev (Harlow, 2003)

  Mark Trofimchuk, Akademia u Troitsy (Academy of the Trinity, Sergiev Posad, 2005)

  Judyth L. Twigg (ed.), HIV/AIDS in Russia and Eurasia (Basingstoke, 2006)

  Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008)

  Anatoly Vaneyev, Dva Goda v Abezi (Two Years in Abez, Moscow, 1992)

  Timothy Ware, The Orthodox
Church (London, 1993)

  Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul (London, 2010)

  Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge, 1996)

  Michael Wieck, A Childhood under Stalin and Hitler: Memoirs of a ‘Certified’ Jew (London, 2003)

  Venedikt Yerofeyev, Moskva–Petushki (Moscow, 1989)

  Venedikt Yerofeyev, Moscow Stations (London, 1998)

  These are specific references, listed by chapter, to works mentioned in the text.

  INTRODUCTION: WE WILL BURY YOU

  The reference to the king rejecting Islam comes from Heard’s Russian Church and Russian Dissent. The statistics on relative alcohol consumption come from Eberstadt, Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis. The figures for the increase in Russia’s consumption of alcoholic drinks from 1940 to 1984 come from White, Russia Goes Dry.

  The ‘we will bury you’ comment and the background to Khrushchev saying it are from Taubman’s biography of the Soviet leader.

  The information on Sinyavsky and Daniel comes from On Trial, edited by Labedz and Hayward. The Alexeyeva book quoted is her excellent Soviet Dissent.

  Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index is available on the organization’s website cpi.transparency.org, and the Levada Centre’s survey is on www.levada.ru along with a fascinating array of other investigations.

  CHAPTER 1: THEY TOOK OUR GRANDFATHER’S LAND

  The quotes from Father Dmitry are mainly taken from his Podarok ot Boga.

  The eyewitness account of pre-revolutionary village life comes from Tian-Shanskaia’s Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia. Other useful books on peasant life include the early parts of Figes’s A People’s Tragedy, plus the early chapters of the following books on the famine.

  These are Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, Davies and Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger and Stalin’s Peasants by Fitzpatrick. Snyder’s Bloodlands is magnificent for collectivization, famine and the violence of the war, while Ioffe and Nefedova’s Continuity and Change in Rural Russia was also a major source.

  The fate of the Jews is described in Altshuler’s Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust and Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The general origins and effects of anti-Semitism are touched on in Butterworth’s The World that Never Was. Accounts of the mass rape inflicted by Soviet soldiers when they captured towns in World War Two are legion. Among them are those in Applebaum’s Iron Curtain.