The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Germangenovich cut a piece off the loaf of bread on the sideboard – 9 centimetres square, a bit bigger than a packet of cigarettes, though not as deep. That was the ration that he did not get. The bread was on a tray in school, and only the poor peasant children got any.

  ‘My brother asked for some and they refused him. So he just grabbed two bits of bread off the tray and ran. While they chased him, he ate one bit and the second he hid under his shirt and gave to me. That was a true brother.’

  The government moved many of the villagers a few hundred kilometres into Ukraine, where there would apparently be work and food. They walked into the houses assigned to them, he said, to find the tables laid and the beds made. The Ukrainians had all died of hunger, and their fields were unworked.

  In the winter of 1932–3, the death rate in some parts of Ukraine was thirteen times higher than normal. Russia was better off, but only just. In its worst-affected parts the death rate was nine times higher than normal.

  In 1932–3, somewhere between 5 and 6 million people died, making it the worst single famine of the century until China surpassed it in 1958. Grain production that year was around 60 million tonnes, but the five-year plan demanded 106 million tonnes and the plan could not be changed, so grain seizures by officials continued despite the evidence of starvation. Desperate peasants fled the villages for the towns, where rations were better. The government, which had abolished internal passports with the revolution, sent the peasants back to their homes and reintroduced travel permits. Now only town-dwellers would have the right to live in towns, and peasants would be tied to the land by their lack of documentation. For Germangenovich, it was serfdom come again.

  Stalin’s lack of sympathy for the starving peasants, whom he referred to as ‘peasants’ in inverted commas as if to accuse them of being impostors, was shown when, in a private telegram, he said they were Polish agents seeking to blacken the Soviet Union’s name. Ukrainian officials followed his lead and said the peasants were starving because they were lazy. Some 21,000 top officials, meanwhile, had access to special shops in the cities where delicacies were still available. Closed Shop No. 1 served the Moscow elite.

  While officials ate caviar, the boy Germangenovich was killing vermin to try to stop them eating the grain that was left.

  ‘We were ordered to kill mice, and we got given a book if we brought in a hundred mouse tails. It was a plague of mice,’ he said. ‘That is how we lived. Up to the war.’

  On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, finding the Russian troops totally unprepared. The invaders’ advance was quick and devastating. By 17 August, they had seized Berezina. The same disregard for logic that had led the Bolsheviks to starve millions of peasants had also persuaded them to purge the highest ranks of the army, leaving the officers untrained and scared to take the initiative.

  The Germans took whole armies of Soviet troops prisoner, of whom 2.8 million would be dead by early 1942. It was one of the most spectacular military disasters in history, and it exposed Father Dmitry and Germangenovich to the German army and an entirely different culture.

  ‘When the Germans came here in 1941, they looked at us and said ai-ai-ai. All these Russian children are naked. They were a badly fed army, and they asked my mother for eggs. And she said there were no eggs, because there was no grain for the chickens. They were soldiers just like ours,’ said Germangenovich.

  He could speak a little German that he had learned at school, so he often spoke to the soldiers, he said. They had nothing good to say for Hitler, or for Stalin. Neither side wanted to fight. They said they wanted to grab Hitler and break him over their knees.

  The Germans, he said, took their pig. Before the Germans came the whole village had been called out to dig anti-tank defences around Unecha. ‘We were digging anti-tank pits when suddenly there’s a motorcycle, and then the planes, and then tanks with the black crosses on them. It was hot, like today. A German tank driver comes out, with a red scarf. He saluted and said “Guten tag.”

  ‘Then the general came and told us not to be scared, that he had come to free us from the Bolsheviks. Our people were very glad really, despite what you read in the history books now. There would not be a collective farm again. They gave us our land, and reopened our churches. And this general said they would not shoot Unecha if no one shot at them.

  ‘The Germans gave us land, divided up the horses. We started to grow wheat. In 1942 and 1943 we had a great harvest, we kept it for ourselves, and the Germans took meat, chickens and pigs. They opened the churches, and people went to churches to pray. We chose our own mayors, police. The mayor was our neighbour. The Germans made us work sometimes, carrying wood or resurfacing the road, but it was not so bad.’

  The Germans brought order, according to Germangenovich’s account, which more or less tallies with most academic studies I have read. He described how the Germans shot one of his neighbours for stealing a pig. And, he said, they killed the Jews – a fact he related deadpan, as if it did not bother him. That was in November 1941 and March 1942 when Sonderkommandos 7b and 7a rounded up the Jews in Klintsy, Oryol and Bryansk.

  ‘They killed the few Jews that we had here, and the gypsies. There was one young Jewish lad, but he left, so it was just the old ones left behind. All the Jews worked in the town, they traded, they didn’t work with their hands. There were maybe a hundred in the city – they were killed.’

  In a sudden rush of memory, he flicked back to the start of the war: ‘The Germans had dropped all these leaflets on us. They published newspapers as well. They had agitators who worked hard. “Destroy the Yid politicians,” the leaflets said. They threw leaflets from planes, I remember.’

  Later I decided to look up those leaflets in the Lenin Library in Moscow. I found a section – formerly classified – of ‘special materials’, newspapers published by the Germans under occupation, which people like Germangenovich would have read. Sure enough there was a photograph of children and adults running after airdropped leaflets tumbling through the air. Perhaps he was among them.

  The newspapers were a glimpse into a vanished life of a non-Stalinist Russia in the 1940s. There were jokes (‘What is the punishment for bigamy? Two mothers-in-law’), lists of church services, and accounts of how the peasants were using their private land. Every issue had lists of people missing – wives, children, mothers – and the names of those looking for them.

  ‘Konstantin Mitenkov from the village of Kamenki . . . informs his wife that he is alive and healthy,’ said one notice.

  Most of the pages, of course, were filled with orders and propaganda. All typewriters were confiscated and town-dwellers were banned from venturing into the countryside. Jews were blamed for everything, over and over, particularly for the repression dealt out by Stalin’s N K V D security service. A picture of an Orthodox priest featured the caption: ‘When the healthy body of the accused person survived the six weeks of torment, he had to appear before the tribunal of the N K V D, which included in its make-up only Jews.’

  Anti-Jewish campaigns in Slovakia, France, Norway and elsewhere were described in horrible detail, as was a build-up of anti-Semitism in the United States. Russians were exhorted to unite with the Germans against this supposed mutual enemy. It was clear that not everyone swallowed the message. A decree promised death to anyone who sheltered Soviet partisans, and deprivation of rations to anyone who did not register themselves with the authorities.

  But some Russians did go along with the Nazis. There were photographs of Russians in German uniform. ‘They know who is really to blame for the war,’ one paper said; ‘fighting alongside the German soldiers and their allies, they are aiming for one goal: to destroy Jewish Bolshevism and give peace to the Russian land.’

  The Soviet troops returned to Unecha on 23 September 1943.

  ‘I went to church. I was in the choir during the occupation,’ said Germangenovich. ‘Then the reds came back and closed the church and took the priest away and killed
him. The priest was old, old, but he was taken away immediately when the reds came back. They took away our police too, and our mayor. Some got shot, some got sent to the north to die of hunger. All of us young people got conscripted into the army.’

  It must have been a strange liberation for men like Father Dmitry and Germangenovich. Occupation had been – although fraught and dangerous – a time of unprecedented freedom and prosperity. Hitler’s government hated the Russians, but the German army was keen to protect its rear and secure food supplies, so it treated civilians better than Hitler ordered it to do. It provided building material for churches, and doubled the size of the peasants’ personal plots of land where they grew their food.

  I wondered, after hearing Germangenovich, how much the German propaganda, with its relentless slurs against the Jews and the communists, had affected him.

  ‘After the war if people had asked how the Germans were I would have said they were good. But no one ever asked me.’

  Germangenovich and Father Dmitry were all immediately conscripted into the Soviet army, with its relentless demand for new soldiers. Father Dmitry arrived at the front as the rawest of recruits directly after the Soviet army had liberated Berezina. This was after Stalingrad, when the Soviets had broken the Nazis’ back. But there was a lot of fighting still to come and the soldiers would need to march all the way to Berlin. That march was chaotic and brutal, as the Soviet troops delighted in avenging themselves on the Germans who had killed their comrades and destroyed their homes.

  Again this is a time that Father Dmitry did not linger over in his memoirs, but he did write that he was revolted by the mass rape of women in newly taken towns, and by the obscene language used by his fellows. He wrote not of battle but of saving an icon from being destroyed, and about how soldiers at night cough like sheep. He refused to join the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, because he was a believer. He claimed never to have fired a shot in anger. Then he was injured. A shell fragment entered his leg and, while in hospital, he contracted typhus fever. His military career was over.

  He returned to Berezina, but life had changed. Stalin was aware of the role the Orthodox Church had played in winning support for the war effort. He allowed the German-opened churches to remain open, so there was somewhere for Father Dmitry to worship.

  He was a war veteran with a pension, but there was no work for him. Months went by. He reported to the military commission, but they had no orders for him. That was when he saw the advertisement that changed his life: an Orthodox seminary was taking applications for trainee priests in Moscow, the first such intake for decades. This was part of Stalin’s bargain with the Orthodox Church. Father Dmitry applied, was accepted and left for Moscow. He was gone by the time his brother Vladimir returned from the front.

  ‘He had gone to Moscow and gone to study in the seminary. This was in 1944, when the war was going on still,’ Vladimir told me when I was in Berezina. ‘It was very hard to study there, to get in there.’

  I met Vladimir after church in Berezina one Sunday. I was late for the service so I sat outside, waiting for it to end. While I was sitting in the morning sunshine reading through Father Dmitry’s memoirs, the priest unexpectedly stepped out into the sunshine. He was still holding the incense and a candle, but was talking into his mobile phone.

  ‘We’re still holding the requiem,’ he told his caller, promising to call back later. He gave me a quizzical look and turned back inside. A chicken strutted round from the back of the church, pecking at the dust on the path.

  At last, the service was over and the priest came out to ask who I was. I explained my interest in Father Dmitry, and he pointed out Vladimir. Vladimir in turn called over his daughter Maria. Maria hailed Lidiya, daughter of one of Dmitry’s sisters, perhaps of the woman he had smashed round the head and driven out of their garden. We sat in the church building, which was deliciously cool now the day was heating up, and I asked them what had made Father Dmitry the man he was. Vladimir’s hearing was bad, and his accent was thick. Lidiya had to repeat my question to him, her accent spongy with the soft ‘g’ of peasant Russia.

  ‘Our parents were believers, and they implanted the faith in us children. I remember my father was reading the Psalms, I was small, but I learned Psalm number 50 by heart because I heard how he read it,’ Vladimir said. He had very clear blue eyes, like a child’s.

  Lidiya filled in for him. She was born in 1938, so presumably she was repeating his memories anyway: ‘They took our grandfather’s land, his horse. They took everything. Life was bad then, though it’s not much better now.’

  Maria, a tall woman in a russet headscarf and violently patterned blue and green dress, had been quiet. She sat holding her father’s hand, curls of hair emerging over her forehead. She had clearly felt she had nothing to say on the subject of the 1930s, but life today was a different matter.

  ‘Life is poor, we don’t live, we survive. We count pennies. One daughter studies in college, the other has finished eleven classes and needs to study in college too. And pay? Well, give health to my grandfather. You have to pay to study. The grandfather pays. I don’t work. My husband earns 10,000 roubles a month. Can you really live on 10,000?’

  A monthly salary of 10,000 roubles is about £200.

  ‘Just for accommodation we pay 5,000. A kilogram of meat costs 260 roubles. How can anyone live on 5,000? Milk is 20 roubles a litre. And we need clothing. And everything. We don’t live. We survive. The girls are beautiful, they want to look good. And milk is more expensive in winter.’

  I pulled a new notebook out of my bag, and they began to talk among themselves. Even in the bad times, they said, children were born, but now the village was dying. Vladimir, who had a habit of laughing at things that did not seem funny, chuckled: ‘The death rate is conquering the birth rate.’

  Maria talked over him: ‘There’s no work. Most people work in Moscow on the building sites. That’s men. Women work in shops. It’s very hard to find work. My daughters finish school, and college, so as to get a job in a shop. God willing. One is working in marketing, the other in the commercial section. And without higher education you can’t even work in a shop.’

  Vladimir laughed again. ‘The bad life left with the Soviet Union, but the good life did not come, it did not come.’

  I took some photos of the family before leaving. Vladimir stood with his vulnerable, baby-blue eyes, flanked by the two cousins. I then walked out of the church and back down Berezina’s street. Most of the houses were single-storey squares set in their own gardens. A five-storey block, of the standard Soviet design found everywhere from Armenia to the Arctic, towered over them, but most of its balconies lacked washing lines. They were empty.

  The fields either side of the lane were mainly given over to potatoes, but one field of barley stood by the main road. I barely recognized it at first, being accustomed to barley how my grandfather grew it, in tightly regimented blocks surrounded by raw earth. Here the sandy soil was choked with grasses and wild oats that shaded into the barley with no clear division between crop and weed.

  It was only when I stopped and looked up and down the road that I realized I had no clear plan how to get back to Unecha. I had got a lift here with a fellow guest at the hotel who was driving to Moscow, but now I would need public transport. There was a bus stop on the other side of the road: an open-fronted, heavy-roofed shed, which had lost its benches. A plank was balanced in a corner to be sat on. I sat on it for a while, and waited for a bus to come. It was uncomfortable.

  Cars passed about every three minutes. A bus passed after twenty minutes, and another half an hour later. They ignored my waves. I read more of Father Dmitry’s memoirs as I waited. He had little more than his brother to say about the German occupation.

  The Germans dissolved the collective farms, he wrote, and the farmers worked for themselves again. The chairman and secretary of the collective farm, who had testified against his father’s religious activities, even started to visit
the newly reopened church. Life improved.

  I put the papers away, and walked to the edge of the forest. There was a building there I wanted to look at. The fields were fallow, and the enormous barn was rusty and decaying. This had once been a major grain silo, with five hoppers controlled by switches, to load grain on to trucks. The electric circuits had been plundered long ago and the fuse boxes were clogged with old birds’ nests, the copper wire stolen. Dozens of wagtails had set up home. They did not mind me, but another bird that I did not recognize complained as I poked about: ‘Tut tut cheep tut tut cheep.’

  Four rooks mobbed a buzzard on the margin on the trees, the dense saw-toothed wall of conifers. Swifts screamed overhead and mice scuttled in the long grass. The old collective farm was heaven for wildlife, but hostile for humans. No trucks had been driven here for years and years. I looked over to the bus stop and saw that a woman was now waiting, which made me suspect a bus was due.

  In Unecha, I sought a ticket on the night train to Moscow. From the capital, I would find my way to the Orthodox Church’s seminary near by. I was late at the ticket office, however, and only top bunks were available. Top bunks are torment when the weather is hot, since the heat in the carriage is trapped under the roof, but I took one anyway. I boarded the train at midnight and hoisted myself on to my shelf. I was quickly soaked in sweat, but I dozed. Perhaps hours later, I was dragged from sleep by the man from the lower bunk tugging at my arm and shouting.

  ‘You’re pissing on me, you’re pissing on me,’ he yelled.

  Stung by guilt, I reached under the bedclothes. They were dry, and I denied it as forcefully as I could.