The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  The book does list Father Dmitry as graduating from the seminary, the first part of the institution. But he is not listed as having finished the second part of the college – the academy – until 1960. There is no explanation why it took him a decade longer than anyone else to complete his education, but those were the years he spent in the camps. I stepped out of the seminary, musing over the strange amnesia that had settled over the place. I walked out of the green gates and pushed through the crowds to the Assumption Cathedral, where the students worshipped and sang the liturgy on Father Dmitry’s first visit here.

  The sweet smell of perfume and the cool gloom were a comfort after the heat, glare and dust of the yard. Candles flickered, lighting the pillars as they towered up to the dome. A huge heavy gold screen bore rank after rank of saints in their strange, stylized clothing.

  Jesus said, when asked whether it was correct to pay taxes, ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God, the things that are God’s.’ It is an injunction that theologians have struggled to interpret ever since, as it apparently demands complete obedience to the government while also demanding obedience to God.

  Western theologians come from a tradition where the pope ruled the Church and kings ruled countries. They are able to separate the two kinds of authority and create a doctrine of resistance to secular authority if conscience demands it. But Orthodox theologians have never had that luxury, making the bishops’ task of relating to a government that explicitly wanted to destroy the Church very hard.

  Orthodox Churches draw their lineage back to the traditions of the Byzantine Empire when the emperor was both the ruler of the state and the protector of the Church. There is no theological basis for rebelling against the government, since it is assumed to be from God, even when that government is sworn to the Church’s destruction.

  ‘Every religious idea, every idea of God, every flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness,’ said Lenin. ‘Millions of filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions are less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God decked out in the smartest “ideological” costumes.’

  Stalin’s restoration of the Orthodox Church was marked by the almost complete penetration of the hierarchy by the security organs. Patriarch Alexy I, who headed the Russian Orthodox Church after its restoration, was highly valued by the K G B as an agent of influence, according to documents smuggled out of Russia by former K G B archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.

  ‘The Russian Orthodox Church supports the totally peaceful foreign policy of our government, not because the Church allegedly lacks freedom, but because Soviet policy is just and corresponds to the Christian ideals which the Church preaches,’ said Patriarch Alexy in 1955.

  Bishops remained sycophantic to the end, praising Khrushchev and later communist leaders even while the K G B were arresting Christians. Where now the Catholic Church in Poland is able to praise believers who were oppressed by the communist government, and to expel collaborators, the Orthodox Church in Russia has a much harder time. This is partly because it does not have a core of leaders who resisted the government.

  Anatoly Oleynikov, the last deputy chairman of the K G B, said in 1991 that only 15–20 per cent of priests refused to work with the security organs. Priests who refused to help the K G B were not promoted, and thus were denied access to the highest positions. The last two Soviet-era patriarchs – Pimen and Alexy II – were full K G B agents.

  Even though the communist regime is gone, the Church is still unsure how to relate to those priests like Father Dmitry who were imprisoned for the faith. As the little history of the seminary shows, it often finds it easier to ignore the fact that they ever existed.

  This identification of the Church with the state was not new of course. The Church had been almost completely suborned to the tsarist state as well. But, before communism, it could pretend to be serving God by doing so, since the tsarist government supported the Christian faith. The Soviet state was committed to eradicating religion, and expended considerable effort in attempting to do so. According to Father Dmitry, his fellow priests being trained in Sergiev Posad only very rarely put up a fight against the state’s atheism.

  ‘They made informers out of the students at the spiritual academy, and out of priests. They called them in and started to play on their sense of truth, on their love of the homeland, promised them better positions. Sadly, positions in the Church, although the Church is separated from the state, are assigned by the secular authorities,’ Father Dmitry wrote later. ‘I was never called in anywhere, not when I studied in the academy, nor when I became a priest. One academy student who gave in to them, a weak-willed but kind man, told me in secret that I was considered a double-dyed anti-Soviet, a desperate person.’

  The name of the man who informed on Father Dmitry was Vasily Petrovykh. Petrovykh graduated in 1947 and served as a priest in a remote village in the Kostroma region to the east of Moscow, which was not much of a reward for co-operating with the security services. Still, he had a wife and two sons, so perhaps he was not given a choice. Besides, co-operation was so widespread that not everyone who helped the security services could be given a high-profile job.

  Back on the station platform, cheap posters announced special church services in aid of those in prison; for those suffering from depression, apathy, desolation and suicidal thoughts; and for the dead. The Church, despite its long repression and then its close association with a brutal regime, has returned to its role as the comforter of the lowest in society.

  After Father Dmitry’s arrest, and while in detention, he dreamed of Stalin with an axe, teaching his friends how to kill people. He dreamed of being brought before Stalin in his underwear. ‘My conscience would not allow me to admit my guilt,’ he wrote later of his dream encounter with the dictator. ‘To speak the truth would mean to undergo torture. I decided to speak the truth. How can I speak untruth when there is so much suffering, when I am standing before him with bound hands, and he continued to teach those around him how to punish? And I woke up with that feeling.’

  He was not able to express such nobility at his real trial, though he won the small triumph of stopping his tormentors from swearing in his presence. He tried to justify his poem’s criticism of Stalin by saying that atheists killed the spirit of people, but it was not an argument that won him much ground.

  Eventually the prosecutor told him to write down his confession, to write the words ‘I consider myself to be guilty. I slandered Soviet reality.’

  But Father Dmitry refused. He said that he did not consider himself guilty: ‘I spoke the truth. Come with me, and I will show you what is being done. I will show you my suffering father, I will show you the exhausted people.’

  It did not sway his accusers. He got ten years in the gulag for distributing anti-Soviet poems. There was no appeal. The village lad had been through starvation, brutality, the imprisonment of his father, destitution, war, occupation, conscription, injury, arrest and now imprisonment. He was only twenty-six years old, and his life was still ahead of him.

  As my train waited at one of the little stations on the way back to Moscow, an express thundered past in the opposite direction. Despite the noise they make, Russian trains are rarely very quick, and I had plenty of time to read the destination boards bolted to the side of each carriage: Vorkuta.

  Vorkuta is in the far north and, if I wanted to retrace Father Dmitry’s route into the camps of the gulag, I would need to take that train too. After his sentencing, he was sent up the rails to Inta in the Komi Republic, at the northern end of the Ural Mountains. By the late 1940s Komi was one vast prison, where the tundra took the place of a fence: frozen solid in winter, impassable swamp in summer.

  Back in Moscow, the returning Muscovites from my train streamed on to the platform of the Kursk station. Progress was slow, held up by a crowd that had gathered to watch an old drunk arguing with three fashionable teenagers. He was furious at some slight, and two policemen had
to hold him back as he tried to swing punches. The teenagers’ smug smiles and the officers’ chuckles simply enraged him all the more.

  Eventually, the policemen tired of the game and released his arms, at which point he collapsed on to the grimy, soggy tarmac and wriggled like a turtle on a jar, shouting abuse as the three teenagers walked away. I went inside to buy my ticket north.

  3

  Father Dmitry was K-956

  From my upper bunk, the forest shuffled past very slowly. Every kilometre a sign – a square of metal or a neat little lozenge of concrete – told me how far we were from Moscow, with smaller signs counting off the tenths of a kilometre in between. I mused about how much paint it must take to keep them bright and shining, and what on earth they were for. The only reasonable explanation was to provide something of interest for passengers on the train to look at, but it seemed an incredible amount of effort for such a minimal reward. After a kilometre or two, they lost their appeal almost entirely.

  The town of Inta, where Father Dmitry served his sentence for writing poems, is 2,000 kilometres from Moscow. Getting there would take thirty-six sweltering hours. I scribbled a calculation, that is 55 kilometres an hour; another calculation: 34 miles an hour. If that was our average between Moscow and Inta, it was no wonder it felt like we were going slowly. You can drive more quickly in many built-up areas, and this was very far from being a built-up area. There were no houses of any kind. The trees were dense and monotonous: solid, prickly and dark.

  Sometimes we would rattle through villages, clutches of log-built houses huddled close to the tracks. But fewer than half the houses had anything planted outside. Most were still secure against the weather, their roofs were whole, but no one lived there. If someone did, they would have filled every available hectare with potatoes against the winter. Outside the villages the fields were choked with weeds: no livestock, no crops. The only farm animals I saw all day were a dozen geese in a garden.

  One of the most striking statistics about modern Russia is that, of the 153,000 villages in the country in 1989, some 20,000 have been abandoned. Another 35,000 have fewer than ten people. The population has fallen faster in cities, however, meaning that the proportion of Russians living in villages has actually gone up over that period. This is a practically unique example of a modern, developed country deurbanizing.

  The economy of the far north has all but vanished. It was based on subsidized coal mines and, now the subsidies are gone, as are most of the factories that burned coal, so the mines have not been able to stay open. In Soviet times, workers received special high wages for working in the north, but those rates are gone too. The knock-on effect of the mine closures has touched everything the Soviets created in the Arctic. Shops cannot stay open without people to buy their goods. Factories cannot stay open so far from their markets. The railway line I was travelling on was built to tie the Arctic into the Russian economy but, that whole day, the only two other trains I saw were passenger trains. There were no goods being shipped either north or south.

  Somewhere to the north-west of me, in 1923, the O G P U security service, which would later be renamed the N K V D, then the K G B, then the FSB, opened its first labour prison. That first link in what became the chain of gulag camps was on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. It opened when Father Dmitry was just a year old. The island camp held several thousand men by 1925.

  But feeding and guarding prisoners in such a remote location was expensive. The government in Moscow needed every rouble to build its new economy. The camps would have to pay their way. That meant that, over time, they were forced to evolve into profitable enterprises. They did this by a key innovation: feeding prisoners a quantity of food proportionate to the amount of work they did. This killed off weaklings early, meaning that non-productive inmates did not have to be carried by those strong enough to fell timber, make bricks, dig coal or do any of the other tasks left to prisoners in the fastnesses of the Soviet state.

  It was economically successful, since it meant camps could be pushed into areas barely habitable and exploit their resources for the first time. Decades later, this expansion was chronicled by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army officer jailed for making jokes about Stalin, who became the historian of the camp system. After his release in the 1950s, he collected accounts from other former inmates, and welded them together into a great sprawling epic of oral history that he called The Gulag Archipelago.

  Solzhenitsyn compared the camp system itself to a cancer, spreading from its original point of mutation on the Solovetsky Islands – colloquially known as Solovki. Camp officials were aggressive cancer cells, the camps they set up were the secondary growths. Instead of voyaging up blood vessels and lymph canals as cancers do in the body, the metastasizing prison system spread up railways and rivers.

  ‘In the summer of 1929 an expedition of unconvoyed prisoners was sent to the Chibyu River from Solovki,’ he wrote. ‘The expedition was successful – and camp was set up on the Ukhta, Ukhtlag. But it, too, did not stand still on its own spot, but quickly metasta-sized to the north-east, annexed the Pechora, and was transformed into UkhtPechlag. Soon afterwards it had Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, and Vorkuta sections – all of them the bases of great independent future camps.’

  The conditions, he wrote, were ‘twelve months of winter, the rest summer’. The camps expanded rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s, when the likes of Father Dmitry’s father were imprisoned. But they became still worse in the 1940s when the war stretched the country’s resources and left even free citizens hungry, let alone prisoners. Work norms increased, while food rations were cut. According to statistics published later, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, which was one in four of the prison population. In 1943, the death rate improved slightly, and only one in five prisoners died: 267,826 people.

  Solzhenitsyn wrote how nothing was wasted on human comforts, not even to honour the dead. ‘At one time in Old Russia it was thought that a corpse could not get along without a coffin. Even the lowliest serfs, beggars, and tramps were buried in coffins,’ he wrote. ‘When at Inta after the war one honoured foreman of the woodworking plant was actually buried in a coffin, the Cultural and Educational Section was instructed to make propaganda: work well and you, too, will be buried in a wooden coffin.’

  More than two million people died in the camps of the gulag during the war years, many of them building this railway line I was travelling on. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its troops rapidly overran the rich coal fields around Donetsk in Ukraine. Stalin’s government, in desperate need of fuel, charged the prisoners with laying rails across the tundra to Inta – founded in 1942 – and to Vorkuta. The rails laid, the prisoners that survived worked in the mines to produce the coal to keep the factories churning out bombs and guns.

  The soldiers and the factory workers are honoured now. Surviving veterans are greeted by the president every Victory Day, afforded special privileges, given medals. Its triumph in World War Two has, if anything, become ever more sacred to the country as the years have passed. The role of the prisoners in forging that victory has been all but forgotten, however, even though many of them had committed no crime at all and worked harder than anyone. They were guilty only of being slightly richer than their neighbours, or of failing to join a collective farm, or of telling a joke. Their torment is largely unacknowledged in Russia today.

  Although Vladimir Putin in 2010, during his spell as prime minister between his two stints as president, made The Gulag Archipelago compulsory reading for schoolchildren in their eleventh year, he does not encourage modern historians to delve into the past. The K G B’s files are closed to all but a chosen few, and there has been little acknowledgement of the oppressors’ guilt from Russia’s new supposedly democratic government.

  As the train rattled along, I had a strange feeling that the suffering of every one of those forgotten victims had, because it was unacknowledged, hung around in the air like the spirits of unburied children. The haze would b
e purple, I thought, and so dense that no breeze could disperse it. As fresh prisoners came to replace those who died at work, the suffering built up into a great pulsing tube. The tube followed the railway line, until it became an artery linking the cancerous organs of the camp system. To the north it flowed round the bump of Inta, before ending in the coal fields of Vorkuta. To the south, it converged with dozens of other tubes at the great beating heart of the K G B headquarters on Lubyanka Square. From there, arteries spread in all directions. Some stretched east and north through Siberia to the camps of Norilsk; others went beyond that to the far east and over the sea – where the purple congealed on the waves in a loathsome slick – to the nightmares that were Magadan and Kolyma.

  As I lay sweating on my damp bunk, the hallucination became real for a second, and I could see the purple outside the windows, filtering the sunlight pouring into our carriage. My neighbours did not notice it. Perhaps they were used to it. Almost everyone in the north is a prisoner, or the child of a prisoner, or the wife of a prisoner, or the friend of a prisoner, or the jailer of a prisoner. The purple miasma clings to them all, and affects how they speak and behave. It makes them cautious and unfriendly and distrustful. It was only me, the visitor, who could see it.

  Most of my neighbours on the train were returning from holiday, still wearing T-shirts bearing the names of Russia’s seaside resorts in the Caucasus: Sochi, Anapa, Tuapse. In the two bunks beneath me was a middle-aged couple – he had a moustache, she had tight shorts. They kept themselves to themselves, and rebuffed my occasional attempts to chat. In fairness, my overtures were self-serving. If I had made friends with them, I could have occasionally sat on their bunks. As it was, I not only had no one to talk with to pass the time, but had to pass the time lying on my bunk looking at the trees and checking my speed calculation.