The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  CHAPTER 2: A DOUBLE-DYED ANTI-SOVIET

  For details on Stalin’s deal with the Orthodox Church, see Service’s biography of the dictator, as well as the books by Jane Ellis. The quote asking where all the priests have gone is from Trofimchuk, Akademia u Troitsy, the Sergiev Posad seminary’s official history.

  The details of production of food on private plots come from Ioffe and Nefedova’s Continuity and Change in Rural Russia. The quote expressing amazement about Hagia Sophia is from Heard’s The Russian Church and Russian Dissent. The details about Pavlik Morozov are from Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers. The narrative of the gulag is largely taken from Applebaum’s Gulag.

  The Lenin comment is from Volume 35 of his collected works, as quoted in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, which is also the source for the details on K G B penetration of the Church.

  CHAPTER 3: FATHER DMITRY WAS K-956

  Details on the gulag are from Applebaum’s Gulag and from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

  CHAPTER 4: THE GENERATION OF CHANGE

  For information on the protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, see Gorbanevskaya’s Red Square at Noon. The Khrushchev secret speech can be found in Rigby’s The Stalin Dictatorship. The Leonid Plyushch quotes come from Fireside’s Soviet Psychoprisons. Information on writers’ roles under Stalin can be found in Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul.

  The Father Dmitry quotes here are taken from Our Hope, a collection of his sermons published in the West in English (and in Russian as O Nashem Upovanii). A description of the debris of Father Dmitry’s first church, following its demolition, is in the introduction to Bourdeaux’s Risen Indeed.

  The 1972 sermon is from Religion in Communist Lands, Volume 1, nos. 4–5. The other descriptions are from ‘An Eyewitness Account’ in Religion in Communist Lands, Volume 4, no. 2; and from an article by Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov found in the Memorial archives and originally published in Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya in 1974.

  The lonely struggle of Soviet Jews for emigration is described in Beckerman’s When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone. The letter by the ‘Jewish woman’ is by L. A. Gold and is dated 5 May 1974. It comes from the Memorial archives.

  CHAPTER 5: REDS ADMIT BAN OF REBEL PRIEST

  The details of shops selling meat, fruit and vegetables versus shops selling alcohol come from White’s Russia Goes Dry, as do most references to alcohol statistics in this chapter. The quotes from Moskva–Petushki are taken from the English-language version published in 1998 by Faber & Faber under the title Moscow Stations.

  The quotes from the sermon preached in Kabanovo are from the Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya, no. 118 from 1976. The quotes from Father Dmitry’s confessions, here and elsewhere, are from his notebooks published as ‘Na Skreshchenii Dorog’ in the Collected Works.

  Details on the number of abortions and government policy towards them come from Lutz, Scherbov and Volkov (eds.), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991, from Eberstadt’s Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis, from Feshbach and Friendly’s Ecocide in the U S S R, and from Feshbach’s Ecological Disaster.

  The Sakharov quote is from his essay ‘Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’, which I found in Salisbury (ed.), Sakharov Speaks. The protests by Shafarevich and by Yakunin and Regelson were published in Religion in Communist Lands in 1976 and are available online at www.biblicalstudies.org.uk.

  CHAPTER 6: THEY BEHAVED LIKE FREE MEN

  The Father Dmitry quotes here are from his self-published newspaper V Svete Preobrazheniya. A little more on his car crash in 1975 can be found in Religion in Communist Lands, but it remains a mysterious incident.

  Details on the Helsinki Accords and the formation of the Helsinki Groups are from Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, Beckerman’s When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone (which is also my source for the quotes from Shcharansky), Tompson’s The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Horvath’s The Legacy of Soviet Dissent and Lourie’s biography of Sakharov.

  The Amalrik quote is from Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia.

  The text of the interview with the New York Times was published in Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, no. 2, 1978. The press-conference transcript is in Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the U S S R by Yakunin and Regelson.

  Details on the abuse of psychiatry come from Fireside’s Soviet Psychoprisons, from Rothberg’s The Heirs of Stalin, from the Medvedevs’ A Question of Madness, from Alexeyeva’s Soviet Dissent, from Shimanov’s Notes from the Red House, from Nekipelov’s Institute of Fools and from Gorbanevskaya’s Selected Poems.

  The story of the Soviet Union’s support of Lysenko’s quack biology can be read in Joravsky’s The Lysenko Affair and Medvedev’s The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko.

  CHAPTER 7: IDEOLOGICAL SABOTAGE

  Andropov’s war against the dissidents is dealt with well in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive.

  CHAPTER 8: IT’S LIKE A PLAGUE

  Keith Richards’s autobiography Life is well read on the audiobook, mainly by Johnny Depp. Of many audiobooks I have listened to on long train journeys, it may be my favourite.

  For Poland’s experience during and after the Soviet invasion, I relied on Kochanski’s The Eagle Unbowed and on Applebaum’s Iron Curtain. Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss is not entirely reliable, since it was written much later as a justification of his own role in the camps, but is the best we have.

  CHAPTER 9: THE UNWORTHY PRIEST

  Details on the Podrabineks’ trials can be found in the Chronicle of Current Events, and other reactions to Father Dmitry’s recantation of his views can be seen in Google’s news archive. I have not been able to find a video recording of Father Dmitry’s television appearance, so I have relied on contemporary observers’ descriptions of his appearance.

  CHAPTER 10: THE K G B DID THEIR BUSINESS

  The quotes from Father Dmitry are from his Podarok ot Boga, ‘Vernost v Malom’ and V Svete Preobrazheniya.

  The quote accusing the K G B of killing the ‘spiritual father’ is from the Chronicle of Current Events. Father Dmitry wrote about Divnich in Nash Sovremennik.

  CHAPTER 11: I LOOK AT THE FUTURE WITH PESSIMISM

  The Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign is described in White’s Russia Goes Dry, and its spectacular demographic effects are dealt with at length by Eberstadt in Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis. The corrupt privatization deals and crooked 1996 presidential elections are well described in Freeland’s Sale of the Century and Hoffman’s The Oligarchs.

  The three Russian sociologists are Ioffe, Nefedova and Zaslavsky, and their book describing degradation in the countryside is The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia.

  CHAPTER 12: THEY DON’T CARE ANY MORE

  Details of Ogorodnikov’s torments in the 1980s can be found in his A Desperate Cry. That covers more ground than my account of his life, which more or less ends in the mid-1970s. The life story of Alexander Men is described in Roberts and Shukman (eds.), Christianity for the Twentieth Century. He was a fascinating and humane man, who deserves to be better known. The details of K G B infiltration of the Orthodox Church are from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s The Mitrokhin Archive, and from Ellis’s The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness.

  CHAPTER 13: MAKING A NEW GENERATION

  Some of the finest writing on the winter protests in Moscow was by Julia Ioffe in the New Yorker. The British journalist mentioned in the account of the Pussy Riot trial is Tom Parfitt, whose coverage of the winter of protests for the Daily Telegraph was also superb. Other journalists whose work I appreciated include Miriam Elder of the Guardian and Shaun Walker of the Independent.

  ‘Krasivo Sleva’ is found on the Markscheider Kunst album of the same name. I would recommend St Petersburg ska as something purely joyful to anyone who needs cheering up.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Helen Conf
ord at Penguin for editing sensitively but forcefully. Thanks also to Lara Heimert, my editor at Basic, for her faith in me, and to my agent Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown.

  This book has involved a lot of time sitting in libraries and travelling in Russia, and I am very grateful to the Society of Authors’ Authors Foundation for giving me the John Heygate award, which helped pay for me to do both.

  I have shamelessly trespassed on people everywhere I have gone. I have been bought drinks, given food, told stories and driven to places I could not otherwise have reached. Through this, I have come to a far greater understanding of Russian culture than I previously possessed, and for that understanding and that hospitality I am profoundly grateful.

  In Moscow, thanks to Amie Ferris-Rotman, Antoine Lambroschini, Tom Parfitt and Simon Ostrovsky for having me to stay. Thanks also to Tanya and Kirill Podrabinek for their generosity. In Perm, thanks to Alexander Ogaryshev, and to Masha, Kolya and Slava. In Abez, thanks to Alexander and Natasha Merzlikin and their family. In Inta, thanks to Yevgeniya Kulygina and to Nikolai Andreyevich. In Unecha, thanks to Tamara Fyodorovna and her family. In Bryansk, thanks to Yuri Solovyov for his insights.

  In Cambridge, thanks to the extraordinary Marina Voikhanskaya. An evening with her inspired two very different books.

  Massive thanks to Xenia Dennen, Michael Bourdeaux and Larisa Seago, all formerly or currently working at the Keston Institute. Their patience and help allowed me to obtain documents I could never otherwise have found.

  Staff members at the State Public Historical Library of Russia and the Russian State Library (the Lenin Library) in Moscow were helpful far beyond the call of duty and cheerfully subverted their own photocopying rules when faced with a bit of pleading. The people at Memorial in Moscow were magnificent and shared their huge archive with me. I also appreciated the services of the British Library and the London Library.

  Every person mentioned in the text is identified by his or her own name, apart from my friend Misha in the Introduction, whose name I have changed.

  To create a clear narrative, I have taken some liberties with the order in which conversations happened. Days, weeks or months after an interview, other conversations often provoked new questions. That means that many of the interviews presented as single events are actually composites of several different encounters.

  Naturally, journeys of discovery do not proceed in a simple linear fashion (or they don’t for me anyway), so some conversations have been moved backwards or forwards to suit the narrative. The content of all conversations is of course presented faithfully. These are the interviewees whose insights were most important to me. I am grateful to all of them.

  Max Adler, Solikamsk; Vasily Afonchenko, Bryansk; Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Moscow; Nikolai Andreyevich, Inta; David Badaryan, Inta; Yulia Boretskaya, Inta; Semyon Boretsky, Inta; Alexander Daniel, Moscow; Mikhail Dudko, London and Moscow; Vladimir Dudko, Berezina; Irina Flige, London; Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Moscow; Maria Gureva, Bryansk; Alexander Kalikh, Perm; Lidiya Khodunova, Berezina; Alexei Kolegov, Syktyvkar; Alexei Kovalyov, Unecha; Sergei Kovalyov, Perm; Yevgeniya Kulygina, Inta; Zhores Medvedev, London; Alexander Merzlikin, Abez; Natasha Merzlikina, Abez; Michael Meylec, Perm; Father Mikhail, Inta; Alexander Ogaryshev, Perm; Alexander Ogorodnikov, Moscow; Dmitry Oreshkin, Perm; Vladimir Petrovsky, Moscow; Alexander Podrabinek, Moscow; Kirill Podrabinek, Moscow; Tanya Podrabinek, Abez and Moscow; Elmira Polubesova, Perm; Lev Regelson, Moscow; Vladimir Sedov, Moscow; Alexander Semyonov, Moscow; Zoya Semyonova Sr, Moscow; Zoya Semyonova Jr, Moscow; Viktor Shmurov, Perm; Vasily Shpinkov, Kazashchina; Alexander Skaliukh, Perm; Yuri Solovyov, Bryansk; Sergei Spodin, Perm; Oleg Sukhanov, Sergiev Posad; Alexander Tefft, London; Father Vadim, Staraya Guta; Anna Vasilyevna, Berezino; Nina Vasilyevna, Berezino; Marina Voikhanskaya, Cambridge; Maria Volkova, Berezina; Gleb Yakunin, Moscow; Olga Zagorskaya, Inta.

  Index

  Abez gulag camp/town 58–61, 66, 67, 68–71, 155, 156, 157, 159–66, 168

  abortion 85, 95, 99

  Achkasova, Olga 66

  Afghanistan, Soviet invasion (1980) 131, 135, 177

  agriculture 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 29, 34, 48, 191

  collectivization 11, 18, 23, 24, 25–6, 29, 34–5, 37, 69, 145

  home grown food 31, 37

  see also famine

  Akhmatova, Anna 60, 70

  alcoholism see drinking

  Alexeyeva, Ludmilla 8, 9

  Alexy I, Patriarch 44–5

  Alexy II, Patriarch (K G B codename D R O Z D O V) 45, 222–3

  Amalrik, Andrei 113

  Andreyevich, Nikolai 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67–8, 70, 71, 147, 148, 151, 154

  Andropov, Yuri, as head of K G B 7, 112, 138–9, 140, 177

  Arguments and Facts 247–8

  Armenia 62, 63

  Arsenevo (village) 182, 187, 191

  Arteyev family (of Abez) 165–6

  atheism 88, 90, 96–7

  Marxism as 82, 85, 86

  see also religion

  Austria 7

  Badaryan, David 62–4

  bankers/businessmen 210

  St Basil 234

  Baydino (village) 182, 187, 188–91

  Father Dmitry in 182, 188, 189–90, 192–6

  B B C 82, 88, 102, 110, 114

  Berezina (village) 20, 21, 24, 28–9, 31, 32, 33, 110, 211, 213–16

  Berezino (village) 14–18, 20

  Berezovsky, Boris 210

  birth control 99

  abortion 85, 95, 99

  birth rates see population crisis

  Boretsky, Semyon 151–3, 159

  Boretsky, Yulia (wife of Semyon Boretsky) 151, 153

  Brezhnev, Leonid 7, 75, 86, 95, 99, 100, 112, 177, 206

  his ‘developed socialism’ concept 75

  Helsinki Agreement (1975) and 112–13

  brick making 152, 153

  Britain 82

  see also B B C

  bureaucracy 79–80, 149–51, 160

  see also state control

  Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange 169

  cars 106–7, 153, 187, 203

  see also transport

  Carter, Jimmy 129, 130

  Catholicism 210

  see also religion

  Chechnya/Chechens 1, 3, 144–5, 231

  Cherkizovo (village) church, Father Dmitry at (post-recantation) 206

  children 26, 28–9, 85, 168, 191–2

  christening 104–5, 126

  death of 16–17, 95, 99–100; from starvation 22

  state removal from parents 245

  see also education; population crisis; young people

  China 11, 28, 237

  Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights 125–6, 218

  see also Yakunin, Gleb

  Chronicle of Current Events (dissident newspaper) 113, 139, 242

  the church see Russian Orthodox Church

  C I A 79

  cigarettes see smoking

  cinema/film 80–81

  class struggle 26, 27

  see also peasant class

  coal mining 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 63–4, 154, 191

  collectivization 11, 18, 23, 24, 25–6, 29, 34–5, 37, 69, 145

  see also agriculture

  communism 9, 24, 41–2, 75

  post-communist Russia 10, 11

  under Khrushchev 74–5

  Young Communist League 32, 67, 74–5, 77–8, 79, 80

  consumerism 76, 106–7, 207

  corruption see state corruption

  Cossacks 25

  crime, organized 79–80

  criminals, in gulag camps 54, 65

  Czechoslovakia, Soviet invasion (1968) 73, 138–9, 171, 172, 177

  dachas (country houses) 37

  Daniel, Yuli 8, 170, 233–4

  Darwin, Charles 60, 118

  Day (newspaper) (continued as Tomorrow) 208, 209

  death rates see population crisis

  depopulation 5, 18, 24, 48–9, 58, 64, 156, 189, 203,
216, 241

  dissidents/dissent 7–8, 51, 72–3, 77–8, 90, 99, 113–14, 134, 170–72, 238, 246–9

  aims/objectives 78–9

  Chronicle of Current Events (newspaper) 13, 139, 242

  election protests (2011–12) 229–31

  Helsinki Groups 112–13, 125–6, 130, 131, 135, 139

  Jewish 89, 129, 130, 139

  K G B action against 100, 104, 113, 116, 126, 127–8, 129, 130–33, 139–40, 172, 207, 217–25; interrogation 139; psychiatric assessment/treatment of 116–19, 127

  Moscow, Bolotnaya Square protests (2011) 230, 238

  official criticism of 114, 129, 232

  papers/writings by 7–8, 33, 79, 80, 197; see also samizdat

  Pussy Riot 232–3, 234

  samizdat (underground publications) see samizdat

  Western media reports on 129, 130, 171, 172; on prisoners 242, 243

  see also human rights; individual names

  Divnich, Yevgeny 181

  Dmitry, Father (Dmitry Dudko) 9–10, 141, 252–3

  birth/childhood 9, 14–15, 21–4, 33

  arrest (I)/imprisonment in Inta 43, 44, 45–7, 48, 53–8, 62, 64–6, 141; release 72, 83

  arrest (II) by K G B/interrogation at Lubyanka 133–4, 136, 140–41, 219; imprisonment in Lefortovo 134, 136, 141, 172, 181; appeals for his release 134–5, 180; his recantation 173–8, 179–80, 202, 219; his Izvestia article on 174–6; letter of apology to Patriarch Pimen 177; as propaganda 176, 177; release 177, 182; move to Baydino see in Baydino below; see also K G B and below

  in Baydino 182, 188, 189–90, 192–6