The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  But, in many ways the authorities’ approach proved counterproductive. The young people coming to Father Dmitry’s church knew the risk they were running. But, for many of them, that was the point.

  Father Vladimir was at that time a gangly young man, barely out of his teens, and felt stultified by the official culture dished up to Soviet citizens like prison slop on a tray. He had looked at yoga, at progressive rock, at Buddhism and at all the other bits and pieces of other people’s cultures that drifted through Moscow in those days. They did not appeal. He wanted something he could feel part of, something Russian.

  He was intrigued therefore by the thought of a Russian priest who refused to walk the official path, so he took the train to Grebnevo, Father Dmitry’s new parish. As he told me about it, he turned to his computer and called up a satellite image from the internet. He zoomed us in, click after click. First we saw the whole of Russia, then Moscow appeared, before it vanished to the left of the screen as he magnified a spot to its east. The word ‘Grebnevo’ appeared and the village itself filled more of the screen until we could see the church too, in a wood on the shores of a reservoir.

  ‘He asked everyone who went to the church whether they were christened, and there were a lot of people who weren’t christened. But I told him I was christened, even though I wasn’t, and he blessed me. My friends knew I was lying, and told me they knew, but I insisted that I had been christened secretly,’ Father Vladimir said, smiling at the knots his younger self had tied himself into.

  ‘I felt ashamed of having lied to them, and to him, so when I got back to university, I went to the church near Moscow State University and I got christened. I did not know the creed or anything, so the priest was cross with me, but I insisted and my happiness was so great afterwards that I ran back to the university like I was running on air.’

  At that time, getting christened was a risky step. Many priests took lists of these new-believers and shared them with the authorities. That meant being christened could hurt your employment prospects, or lead to attention from the security services. Father Dmitry, to avoid this, often christened people in his own home and deliberately did not write down their names. He later said he christened thousands of adults, sometimes a dozen a day. His rebel attitude captivated Father Vladimir.

  ‘It is hard to fight a totalitarian system. People who were scared, who needed support, they went to him. There were poets, artists. They had heard of this priest that you could talk freely to. A lot of people sensed what I sensed, that Father Dmitry was the most life-loving and optimistic man we ever met, and he was a man who had lived the hardest life.’

  His friends were surprised by Father Vladimir’s passion. After all, they had been the believers, not him. His sudden conversion took them by surprise. He caught the train to Grebnevo the next time Father Dmitry was speaking, then the next time also. He devoured every word the priest spoke, as well as those of the older believers – Ogorodnikov was there, of course, so were his friends Yakunin and Regelson – and decided to follow the priest as a disciple: a spiritual child in the language of Russian Orthodoxy.

  ‘I was a student, and I had a room in the halls, but after that I mainly stayed in Grebnevo. I wanted to stop university, but Father Dmitry thought people had to try not just to swim with the current, but to make something of themselves. He thought believers should not be marginalized, but should be part of society, so I stayed at university.’

  Father Dmitry already had a son and daughter, but he took his spiritual children into his home as if they were new additions to the family.

  ‘I helped him in his services. Before me there was another young man, but he had married so there was a free place. Father Dmitry was so open that I lived with him there and in his flat in Moscow. He slept on the bed, and I slept on a quilt on the floor,’ Father Vladimir remembered.

  He glanced back at the satellite image on the screen, fiddling around with the mouse to zoom in a little bit more on the church itself. At maximum magnification, the quality of the picture was not very good. You could see a dome, with a long shadow stretching north, and woods around the church, but very few details.

  ‘I can remember it so clearly. It’s a shame you can’t see much in that picture.’

  I asked when he last went back.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t been since those days,’ he said.

  Well then, I asked, would he be prepared to show me the church? We could go together. He paused, looking at the screen again, thought for a while, then nodded. On Thursday, he said. He would drive me out there to save us the train journey in the heat. We would visit the scene of his conversion. It was also the scene of Father Dmitry’s final confrontation with the security services, and Father Vladimir would talk me through how it had happened.

  That Thursday, therefore, I was sat in the front seat of Father Vladimir’s little white Toyota. It had right-hand drive, like a British car, because it had been imported from Japan. Such second-hand cars have taken over most of the far east of Russia and are increasingly available in Moscow too. Since they are cheaper and more reliable than many of the other cars in Russia, it is not surprising that drivers like them. For passengers, however, they are disconcerting. I was sitting in what should have been the driver’s seat. Oncoming traffic whizzed by inches from my left knee, and I felt vulnerable without a wheel to hold on to.

  The Moscow ring road was, as usual, heavily congested. We crawled forward, and Father Vladimir and I discussed the Olympics, and whether the Summer Games – next hosted by Britain – or the Winter Games – next to be hosted by Russia – was more prestigious. Retail mansions and supermarkets passed by on both sides. When we finally turned off to the right, they gave way to botched-together markets for building products. When we turned off to the left, even those vanished, giving way to the glories of the Russian countryside. With the air-conditioning on, I could appreciate its beauty without having to gasp in the heat.

  ‘There were fewer cars back then. We used the suburban trains, or the bus,’ said Father Vladimir after a while of silence. He had clearly been reminiscing to himself about his first journeys to see Father Dmitry in Grebnevo. ‘There were fewer stray dogs too,’ he added, as we drove past two puppies and their mother, her teats swinging in time with her legs as they walked along the verge. ‘I haven’t come back here, because he was not here. Without him, there was no reason. I followed him here.’

  The broad horizons of Russia opened around us: birch trees, scrubby fields, little houses with lace carvings around their windows, all painted in fine blues or greens. I left him to talk as I looked at the view.

  ‘The Soviet government was like a great wall, you know. It did not let good or bad develop. But since those days the weeds have grown fast, the wild capitalism has spread.’

  We entered the town of Shchelkovo – five-storey apartment blocks, trade centres, generic restaurants, scattered trash – and Father Vladimir decided we should stop and see the church. Most Russian churches have onion-shaped domes made of silver metal or wooden shingles. In the grandest churches, the domes are golden or painted in bright colours, and cluster in clumps like tulips.

  This church was, however, built of red brick and spired like a Protestant chapel. Father Vladimir told me that he had once known the priest here. There was some connection to Father Dmitry too that I did not catch as we passed inside. More than a hundred women were following the service, which was an impressive turnout for a Thursday, and the sweet harmonies of the choir were unusually well sung.

  A young priest held out a gold cross for the worshippers to kiss. A grand screen was half obscured by scaffolding, but its ranks of gold icons – all the bearded faces looking to the middle, where two icons of Jesus and Mary gazed out at us – were arresting nonetheless. Several of the women noticed Father Vladimir and pushed over to him for a blessing, cupping their hands at waist height, casting their eyes down.

  While they gathered, I watched the heat haze from the candles dance before the ico
ns. It was mesmerizing to see the ancient faces of the saints come alive in the shimmering air. An elderly woman standing next to me asked me who I was. Raisa Ivanovna, she was called, and it turned out she had worshipped at Father Dmitry’s church in the 1970s.

  ‘It was amazing how young people came to his church. Normally it was just us old women. I was already old then, like I am now.’ She laughed. ‘I had always believed, but I believed more after I heard him, if you know what I mean. He was so kind. The security services questioned me. They asked me who, what, when, where, but I just told them I went to him as a kind shepherd, and that he was like a father to me. He was a man under surveillance, you know, and we were amazed by how many people came to him anyway. They did not care. What did they have to be scared of, what did we have to be scared of? We were not spies. We knew we were not spies.’

  Father Vladimir had returned, and was preceded by a middle-aged woman: plump and handsome, with laughter around her eyes. She shook my hand. She was Zoya Semyonova, she told me, and had been another of Father Dmitry’s spiritual children. We would, she said, go for lunch.

  We turned our backs on the service. Another few women begged a blessing from Father Vladimir on our way out of the door. We walked over the road, around the back of a nine-storey block and into the lift. She rang the bell next to a door – steel with padding over it – and we waited. She rang the bell again, until we finally heard movement. It swung open, to reveal another Zoya – Zoya’s daughter – who had clearly been asleep.

  ‘We have come for lunch,’ Zoya senior announced, with the authority of a mother, so Zoya junior stood aside and we all trooped into the kitchen. Zoya senior then summoned her husband, who was also a priest who had known Father Dmitry, and we sat down to drink tea.

  Zoya’s husband, Father Alexander, arrived before Zoya junior had finished her preparations. He was dressed in black shirt and trousers, but not in a robe like Father Vladimir. He had the priest’s full beard, however, and a wide-nostrilled nose that made him look almost ridiculously Russian.

  While Zoya junior attempted to improvise a meal for this unexpected kitchenful of guests, he launched into the story of Father Dmitry.

  Father Alexander, it transpired, had been the young man who preceded Father Vladimir as the altar boy. In fact, it was his marriage to Zoya senior that opened up the spot that Father Vladimir then filled. He had, like Ogorodnikov, experienced those first sermons in the cemetery church in Moscow, when it seemed the whole city was packed into the courtyard to be intoxicated by free speech. He was just twenty-three then and worked as a conductor on the railways, a job that gave him a lot of spare time to dedicate to the faith.

  ‘He christened people at home in those days because the K G B were following him. He had a domestic chapel where he held little services. My brother had been christened as a child, but I had not. My parents were scared of the K G B; my mother had been in a German concentration camp and was scared of everything. We were believers, though of course we did not shout about it. We lit candles, painted eggs, all of that,’ he said. His eyes were dark and direct, and did not flinch while he told his story. I would look up from my notebook and he would be sitting in exactly the same way as he had been two minutes earlier, his eyes focused on me whether I was looking at him or not.

  When Father Dmitry was sacked, his congregation gathered in his flat. ‘It was like the earliest Christian times. People sat anywhere they could: on windowsills, on the floor. They drank tea. It was unique. They asked questions. It was a festival of faith. For a year the K G B were thinking, wondering, how they could stop this. They gave him a church to keep him under control; that was at Kabanovo. But of course they didn’t control him. Oh, it was so beautiful there.’

  Zoya junior had by now, from somewhere, produced soup, fish, salad and bread. She too was listening to her father as he evoked the different world they had lived in just forty years before.

  ‘People came from Moscow to him, you could not stop this. The villagers, these collective farmers, saw how these beautiful ladies from Moscow came. It was like a place of pilgrimage. People would pray, eat, sleep, then stop for the night. And in the morning, they would clean, talk, have these discussions. Then they would put up the antenna and listen to the B B C and the radio would broadcast these same words he had just spoken in Kabanovo.’

  It was like a different country, the way he described it, as if they were living outside the Soviet Union.

  ‘The local people were kind. They brought mushrooms, eggs, even chickens that would run around everywhere.’ He laughed. Everyone else chuckled too. ‘And there was a china factory, I remember, so we only ever drank tea from new cups. We had a big kettle, and I was the main operator of the kettle.’

  The K G B were circling outside the windows, the nation was sinking into a depression, but in their little room in Kabanovo – the one I had seen that is now subdivided by teddy-bear wallpaper – they had been free. One evening the stove was burning, and it was howling winter outside.

  ‘It is so good,’ said Father Dmitry. ‘And it is so scary. It cannot last long being so good in such circumstances.’

  ‘We knew the K GB were all around,’ said Father Alexander, after a mouthful of soup, ‘and of course it was scary, but we were together.’

  Father Dmitry wrote later of the kind of tactics the K G B used against him. Marina, one of the congregation, was repeatedly summoned and questioned about him; then her mother was summoned; then her younger brother; then the family’s friends and neighbours. It was designed to drive people away from Father Dmitry, who wrote to his spiritual children to reassure them, and to raise their spirits.

  ‘The godless have used everything: libel, forgery, traitors among the priesthood, but everything has been without result, and now they have moved to their favourite method: violence, physical force. But as was said long ago: physical force is powerlessness. In their powerless fury, they don’t know what to do.’

  Father Dmitry had learned about violence himself in 1975 on a trip he made with Alexander and a couple of others. They all wanted to drive to Bryansk, to Berezina, to Father Dmitry’s home village, to see his brother and his relatives. The four of them squeezed into a Zapo-rozhets, a small, rickety, noisy Soviet car. Alexander and a doctor friend were in the back. Father Dmitry and the driver were up in front.

  When they set off down the main road to Bryansk, a barrier was across the road. It looked new, as if it had just been installed, and they had to make a 400-kilometre diversion. It was a daunting prospect, but they were determined. Perhaps the driver got tired on this extended journey, or perhaps it was too dark. He did not see that a truck had been parked across the road until it was too late.

  ‘We crashed into the back tyre. They were right in front of us. They wanted to kill us. Both of Father Dmitry’s legs were broken below the knee,’ said Alexander. It is impossible to know now if the crash was really an assassination attempt or just a strange accident, but they could be forgiven for thinking the worst. A black car had been following them, and a bus arrived soon after the accident, full of people who laughed at them, at how the God-botherers had got in an accident.

  They were taken to a hospital intended only for workers at a nearby nuclear power station, and left untreated all night.

  After lunch and back in Father Vladimir’s white Toyota, we drove through Shchelkovo, the drab apartment blocks sliding past. It merged almost without a break into Fryazino, with more apartment blocks, then into Grebnevo, where at least the houses were smaller.

  I could see Father Vladimir’s eyes flitting around, as he looked for things he recognized. At last we mounted a small rise, and he sighed. We stopped on the edge of a beaten stretch of earth that faded into a garden. Ahead of us was a gate, and beyond was the dome of the church. He sat for a while without getting out of the car, smiling.

  Zoya senior was there before us, looking up at the church. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. And it was. The green dome on its white and ochre c
olumns was proud against the blue sky. Bright summer vegetation filled in the scene. ‘When Father Dmitry first came here, he was with his wife Nina and she gaped at this. She thought they had been mistaken – she told Father Dmitry to check they had come to the right place.’

  Father Dmitry took up his new post here in April 1976, a time when the Cold War was getting distinctly colder. The early 1970s had been marked by détente, when the two sides wished to trade with each other and resolve their differences. Washington was losing the Vietnam War and facing massive anti-war protests at home. It did not want diplo matic trouble abroad as well. Henry Kissinger, national security advisor and later secretary of state, was not interested in ideology or in lecturing the Soviets on how to behave. He wanted good relations, and both sides wanted to spend less money on weapons.

  The culmination of détente was a summit in Helsinki in August 1975, where almost all European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, signed a series of accords recognizing each other’s borders, and establishing a multilateral framework for negotiations (it later became the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

  This was a triumph for Moscow, which had long wanted the West to recognize the existence of a separate East Germany and its own dominance of the eastern half of the continent. Almost as an afterthought, the signatory countries tacked on an agreement to respect basic human rights. These obligations were nothing new for the Soviet Union. Its own constitution contained most of the freedoms guaranteed in a democracy, and it had signed up to the founding documents of the United Nations, with their guarantees for all human rights. Officials had never kept these old promises, however, and Brezhnev himself told journalists he had no intention of enforcing the new ones.