The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  We walked along the uneven ground, and through a gap in the crumbling perimeter wall. Here apparently was a palace complex, which had been done up since Father Vladimir was last here. It had been ruinous in his day, and he was keen to see it in its proper glory.

  The first herald of the complex was not promising. Someone had defecated in the middle of the path, and it lay stinking and covered in flies, next to a smeared wedge of toilet paper. We stepped over that towards a tent erected by a film crew in the courtyard. They would not be filming an aristocrats’ drama, however, because the palace complex that Father Vladimir was so keen to see was in ruins, the bricks exposed and the plaster peeling off in chunks.

  Father Vladimir was shocked. It turned out that the complex had indeed been renovated, but had then burned down just before the opening ceremony. He looked around at the mess, the piles of filth and the collapsing glory of the complex.

  ‘You know, say what you like about the people who were in power then, at least they were not these criminals like we have now. Yes, they arrested me, but they did not beat me, whereas now so many people have been killed just for money.’

  I said, surprised, that he sounded nostalgic. He seemed to long for the days when the police took him so seriously they would smash down a door and drag him away.

  ‘I am nostalgic. If you think of all the horrors people live through, from these criminals. All authority is from God, and in the 1990s there was no authority. Yes, they were against us in those days, in the 1970s, but at least there was authority of some kind. At least then the oppression was for ideological reasons, now it’s just for the money,’ he said, looking up at the buildings, and nodding at the gaping windows. ‘Lacking a master destroys more than any enemy,’ he said.

  Trees were growing from the tops of the walls of the old palace now, and the rot looked irreversible. I was not sure whether to take it, like he did, as a metaphor for the whole country or not. I could see his point that the Soviet Union at least looked after its citizens, but I could not agree that that was justification for forcibly injecting them with anti-psychotic drugs if they held a different opinion.

  The lake was ahead of us, and provided a more cheerful topic of conversation. Dozens of local kids swam and splashed in the shallows. Others were rowing out in an inflatable dinghy, their friends trying to drag them out. When they failed, they ducked under the water and heaved the whole boat over, shrieking. According to local legend, the lake was created in honour of Catherine the Great in the shape of the Russian letter ‘ye’, which is the first letter in Yekaterina, her first name, although it did not look much like one when I called up the satellite picture that evening.

  That evening, I read some more of Father Dmitry’s writings from this period. He self-published a little newspaper, which he called In the Light of the Transfiguration. He stuck it up on the wall in Grebnevo so all his visitors could be instantly informed of the troubles and triumphs of his flock, and of their friends throughout the Soviet Union. A few issues of the paper were reprinted in a three-volume edition of his works published in 2004, and in them he detailed the attacks on him and his spiritual children, and taunted the authorities with his defiance.

  ‘O Godless ones! You have everything in your hands, I have nothing but faith in God,’ he wrote. ‘To send out an army with weapons against a weaponless priest is shameful and embarrassing.’

  He then listed his demands: a printing press of his own; the right to speak out wherever he wanted; and the right to hold services in one of the churches in the Moscow Kremlin. That, he said, would even up the forces. He was beginning to talk as if he was at war with the government.

  A couple of days later, I decided to investigate the Literary Gazette’s allegations against Father Dmitry. Perhaps he really had published poems in a Nazi-sponsored newspaper. It was not the most terrible of crimes if he had, but the article was very specific in its information. Admittedly it had said Father Dmitry was aged twelve when his work was printed, which would have meant the Nazi occupation started a decade earlier than it actually did, but it was curiously exact in naming the newspaper as the New Way and saying it had been published in Klintsy. It even gave a name for Father Dmitry’s poem: ‘Song from a Cellar’.

  ‘The Hitlerites didn’t give a damn about the literary form, but the content was to their liking, and was entirely consistent with Goebbels’s propaganda,’ it said.

  I felt I had a sense of Father Dmitry’s character by now. His strength lay in his refusal to compromise. He held firm to his own beliefs in all circumstances, no matter what was demanded of him. If he had published a poem in a Nazi newspaper, it would reveal a flaw in his character, particularly if the poem did indeed chime with Goebbels’s propaganda, since it would mean he had collaborated with the occupiers.

  I had already visited the Lenin Library’s store of papers printed under occupation when I looked for information on Father Dmitry’s childhood, so I returned to that high-ceilinged parquet-floored room up under the library’s flat roof, with its spider plants and striplights, and found the New Way, published in Klintsy, in the card index.

  A few minutes later, the helpful librarian brought it over to me, safely enclosed in a stiff card folder. It was stamped ‘restricted’ – in Soviet times, only researchers approved by the K G B would have had access to this. Now, anyone could read it. After all, no one really cares any more.

  The paper was bad quality, yellowed and full of holes. Its masthead said, above the words ‘under the Swastika flag to freedom’, that the New Way was published on Thursdays and Mondays. I sat and began to read. It was pretty crude.

  ‘The German army is bringing freedom to the whole Russian people, together we will defeat communism and secure the dawn of personal well-being,’ said one issue in huge letters. And there were collaborators among the Russians who helped set the tone.

  ‘Yid-Bolshevism has not killed the spirit of the Russian people,’ said an article by a Russian Orthodox priest published on 11 April 1943, which listed fifty-five churches restored and twenty-nine priests appointed. In June, an article announced a training course for wouldbe priests.

  By 19 August, in the last copy in the archive, fifty-eight churches were open and thirty-five priests operating. However, if Father Dmitry was tempted to celebrate that fact with a poem, he did not do it here. There was no poem or article under his name that I could find, nor a poem called ‘Song from a Cellar’ published anonymously or otherwise.

  The Nazis also issued another newspaper with the title the New Way. It was published in Riga, Latvia, but I thought I might as well scan through it anyway. Its first edition had a map of Europe, featuring an enormous Germany stretching from Romania to the North Sea. Photos showed happy Russians surrendering, and Russian youths cleaning German boots with smiles on their faces. There were no poems by Father Dmitry here either, nor in another paper called the New Times published in Vyazma, nor in New Life, or any of the other forgotten publications issued under the Nazis on the thin and fragile wartime paper.

  ‘It was probably just a libellous article,’ the helpful librarian told me. She had become quite involved in my search, and shuttled back and forth with piles of these strange old newspapers.

  I returned to my Formica desk and sat with the long drawer from the card index in front of me. I was tempted to agree with her that the Literary Gazette’s accusation was a crude lie. It was a strange lie, since if you are going to libel someone and try to blacken their name, it would seem more sensible to make up a really dreadful crime for them to have committed.

  According to people quoted in one of Father Dmitry’s books, for example, at one point in the 1970s the police alleged during private conversations that he had murdered children on the Nazis’ orders. That was proper defamation, which could really damage someone. I mused on why they had not made that allegation public. My imagination started to get tied in knots.

  Maybe it was the irrelevance of the poetry offence that meant I should doubt its v
eracity. Perhaps the K G B were acting in the knowledge that since people know big lies are supposedly more believable than small lies, then small lies are actually more effective as libel. Could it be an advanced double bluff? Or a triple bluff? They had after all had decades of experience in deception. This, I imagined, is the kind of paranoia that must have swirled in everyone’s mind in the 1970s. In trying to keep one logical step ahead of the opposition, you began to see shapes in a fog of suspicion that gets thicker the further you go.

  I willed myself to snap out of it, and wrote down a conclusion. From the evidence available, I wrote, the allegation that he wrote poems for the Nazis looks like a lie. There, I could leave and get on with other things. I breathed out, and gathered up my notebooks. But then I doubted myself again, pulled out the long drawer full of the dog-eared index cards and scanned through them one last time, checking off all the names of the Nazi papers to make sure I had missed nothing.

  In doing so, I accidentally flicked past the cream-coloured divider marking off the next section of the index. Before I had time to rectify my error, my eyes automatically read the index card my clumsiness had revealed. There, staring back at me, were the words In the Light of the Transfiguration. That was Father Dmitry’s self-published newspaper. I forgot all about the Nazi poem and whether it existed or not. Surely they didn’t have Father Dmitry’s words here? In the Lenin Library? I bounded back to the issue desk, filled in a request form and handed it over to my friendly ally.

  ‘Have you found it?’ she asked.

  ‘No, but I’ve found something better. It’s his own newspaper, I think.’

  She shook her head, chuckled at the strangeness of foreigners and walked back through the door to the restricted section. This could be truly extraordinary luck. The Lenin Library was the official reference library for academic researchers. It did not concern itself with the dissidents’ self-published documents. I had been informed that the Lenin Library possessed no such archive, and yet here one was. I mused over how it could have ended up here at all. Perhaps it had been deposited here after some long-ago K G B investigation ended. Maybe a secret Christian archivist in this bastion of scientific communism had stashed it among the more respectable papers.

  When she finally brought me the brown envelope stuffed with documents, I pulled them out with trepidation. I need not have worried, however; it was the real thing. I had seen some issues of the newspaper in Father Dmitry’s collected works, but they were incomplete and they lacked the immediacy of seeing a genuine hand-typed, carbon-copied version.

  This was an original. It was typed out – if not by Father Dmitry himself, then by someone who knew him well. It was clearly the work of an amateur. Misspellings were stamped over with rows of capital X X Xs, and each edition had a hand-drawn cross in the masthead. It was like taking a time machine back to the heady days of freedom at Grebnevo. After the fog of the Nazi and Soviet lies, it was a clear, crisp morning.

  The threat circling around him was clear on the very first sheet of the very first paper, dated Sunday, 3 June 1979. A priest called Vasily Fonchenkov, he wrote, had joined Yakunin’s Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights, whose statements Father Dmitry regularly republished. The Christian Committee had been founded in December 1976. It worked in partnership with the Helsinki Groups and tried to publicize the troubles that believers of all denominations faced in living their daily lives: arrests, sackings, harassment.

  The K G B were acutely sensitive to information leaking into the West that revealed any persecution of believers, much of which came from the Christian Committee. Yakunin had kept the group small, with just three or four members, to prevent penetration, but that tactic had failed. Defectors later revealed that Fonchenkov, though a priest, had been recruited nine years earlier by the K G B’s Fifth Directorate and given the codename F R I E N D. They did not know it at the time but, by admitting this false friend, Yakunin had given his enemies access to the very heart of their free community, and their every move would now be reported back to the K G B.

  Flicking through the pages of Father Dmitry’s newspaper – each issue was three sheets of paper, stapled together, typed on just one side – was like fast-forwarding through 1979. On 17 June, there is an account of Father Vladimir being arrested again, although of course at that time he was just a student called Vladimir Sedov, not yet a priest. The police did not know how to deal with him. Officers still believed the old stereotype that only ignorant old women went to church, and had failed to learn that educated young Russians flocked to see Father Dmitry in their dozens.

  ‘How can you be a believer if you have higher education?’ he was asked by the police.

  ‘Today it is people with higher education who believe, only dunces don’t believe,’ he replied with commendable cockiness, and was held for three days without charge.

  On 24 June, Father Dmitry conjured up an amusing contrast in generation gaps. In the 1920s, he described a grandmother being challenged by her grandson in the act of hiding an icon under her pillow. The grandson then ripped the cross from around her neck, leaving his grandmother in tears. In his imaginary scenario for the 1970s, the roles are reversed: a communist grandfather challenged his Christian granddaughter.

  ‘I have heard, I have been told, you have been christened,’ the grandfather says. ‘How could you? You don’t think about your grandfather at all, what will happen to me?’

  Having provoked a few chuckles with that, Father Dmitry then warned his congregation to be careful of the unknown men who were attending his services, in case they were agents sent to undermine the congregation. Then he ended with the account of a religious man who was locked up in a mental hospital for five months, and given eight of the dreaded injections of sulphazin, the 4 per cent suspension of sulphur in peach oil, which was prescribed to induce a fever and torment the patient.

  He wrote about anything that concerned him: about religious festivals, about persecution and about the decline of his nation into alcoholism. A train crash was caused by the driver being drunk. ‘History has not known such a number of railway catastrophes as are happening at the moment.’

  And there were constant reminders of the danger that the wolves in uniform posed to his flock. In August, a spiritual daughter of his wrote about being summoned by the K G B and questioned for four hours about Father Dmitry and his sermons. The three agents told her not to tell anyone, but she wrote to her priest anyway.

  ‘It is interesting what their aim is in summoning her. We do everything openly, anyone can come and listen. It is clear they are searching for lying witnesses. Well, whatever, let them search,’ he wrote. He was confident in the loyalty of his friends.

  A week later the same woman recounted a second summons, and the K G B’s threat to try her under Article 70 – anti-Soviet activity – of the criminal code, if she did not testify that Father Dmitry himself was engaged in anti-Soviet acts. The threat was clear, but he ignored it. He had more important subjects, like a woman who prayed in the church every day.

  ‘Everyone around her drinks: husband, father, even her fourteen-year-old son. She does not know what to do. Only the church gives her the strength to bear this unbearable cross.’

  The impression grew upon me, as I turned the pages, of an embattled community strengthened by the pressure upon it, and of Father Dmitry as the cheerful, smiling centre, the rock on which they could all stand. He printed a letter from a prisoner being held in Vorkuta in the north, who wrote about his interrogations.

  ‘When they ask me who my spiritual father is, I reply with respect that it is the Holy Father Dmitry Dudko . . . In Dmitry Dudko I find the spiritual powers that help me serve Jesus Christ,’ the letter said.

  If he ever doubted himself, letters like that must have kept Father Dmitry going, for he was under no illusion that they could soon all be arrested. He regularly hid the surnames of people who wrote to him, and now used the language of war: ‘I don’t name surnames on the principle that
at the front it is dangerous to pronounce them, since the enemy may be listening.’ Together his friends and allies would be strong enough to resist anyone, however.

  It was September 1979. The hot Moscow summer was over, and the leaves were turning gold and russet. The first cold nights were biting, and the geese were flying overhead, honking, heading south, reminding the people stuck on solid earth that the cold times were coming. Father Dmitry’s neighbours were piling their hay into stacks in the barns and the fields, and preparing to bring the dairy herds indoors for the winter.

  Father Dmitry was still pounding away at his typewriter, however. ‘They ask us whether our militant mood is not recklessness. We answer that it is less reckless than compromises would be, since they would give up our positions without a fight.’

  And a couple of weeks later, on 23 September, when night and day are the same length and summer is undoubtedly over, he returned to the language of war. ‘In struggling against our external enemies, against their attacks and persecution, we sometimes forget about or pay too little attention to our internal enemies. If the attacks of external enemies serve to mobilize our forces, to strengthen and unify us, then internal enemies weaken our forces, disorder our ranks, disturb our unity.’

  He denied repeatedly that his language was political, or that he was opposed to the Soviet Union, but his words belied him. The film student-turned-believer Ogorodnikov was in prison by now, and Father Dmitry described his hunger strikes. He criticized the Church for being controlled by the Godless. He criticized the government for doing nothing to save the nation from its despair. He criticized the murder of the Russian tsar by the Bolsheviks, and prayed for the souls of the royal family.

  Then on 11 November, he wrote that his friend Yakunin, leader of the Christian Committee, had been arrested. The net around him was tightening. The stress was getting to his spiritual children too. Under the constant harassment, the believers were clearly beginning to argue among themselves. He begged them not to divide along ‘ethnic’ lines – Sovietese for division into Russians and Jews.