‘Let the words of the apostle “in Christ there is no Greek nor Jew” be not just words, but a rule for life,’ he wrote, in a quotation (actually, a misquotation) of St Paul’s letter to the Galatians that he was particularly fond of. ‘Free yourselves from prejudice and received opinions.’
He sensed that a decisive battle was close, that this was the calm before a downpour. Ogorodnikov and Yakunin were in prison, so he was the last major Orthodox rebel still at liberty, and the authorities were saving him for last.
Outside his little world, the whole dissident movement was under assault. The security services had been obsessed with squashing the tiresome self-publicists for a decade now. Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled in 1974, brilliantly summed up the state’s increasing paranoia, with its insistence that everyone pull together because ‘the enemies are listening’.
‘Those eternal enemies are the basis of your existence. What would you do without your enemies? You would not be able to live without your enemies. Hate, hate no less an evil than racism, has become your sterile atmosphere,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote in an open letter to the Writers’ Union.
Dissident opposition to the authorities’ sterile atmosphere grew despite the harassment, however, and the arrests severely damaged the Soviet Union’s international image. The dissidents’ allies in the West were lobbying hard to damage it further, and proved very effective.
The policy of détente pursued by Washington in the first half of the 1970s changed under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976. Activists in the United States, particularly from Jewish groups, had learned well how to lobby U S officials and to demand that they put pressure on the Soviet Union to protect basic human rights. Carter even wrote a personal letter to Sakharov saying he would ‘use our good offices to seek the release of prisoners of conscience . . . I am always glad to hear from you, and I wish you well.’
For Jewish groups, the main priority was the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. American Jewish groups bombarded their representatives with demands that they take action, and sent cards and letters to their kin the other side of the Iron Curtain.
The Soviet Union did allow a certain amount of emigration but resented allowing young Jews that it had educated and trained to go and work in a capitalist country. It often demanded they refund the cost of their education before they leave, which was all but impossible. The Jewish activists maintained close contacts with Western groups and in 1977 Natan Shcharansky, the most famous of them, was charged with treason. His conviction was a foregone conclusion, and he used the trial to shame the Soviet government, saying how investigators had threatened him with execution if he did not cooperate.
‘Five years ago, I submitted my application for exit to Israel. Now I’m further than ever from my dream. It would seem to be cause for regret. But it is absolutely otherwise. I am happy. I am happy that I lived honestly, in peace with my conscience. I never compromised my soul, even under the threat of death,’ he said. He thanked his supporters, among them the veteran dissident Alexander Ginzburg and the Moscow Helsinki Group founder Yuri Orlov, both of whom were also on trial.
‘I am proud that I knew and worked with such honest, brave and courageous people as Sakharov, Orlov, Ginzburg, who are carrying on the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia . . . Now I turn to you, the court, who were required to confirm a predetermined sentence: to you I have nothing to say.’
After his conviction in 1978, his face made the cover of Time magazine with the crumbling word ‘détente’ above him as a headline. He was in prison and his fate had become synonymous for many Westerners with the fate of the whole Soviet people. The government in Washington was finding it harder and harder to prevent public anger over the Soviet Union’s treatment of the dissidents from destroying bilateral ties.
Other minorities had champions too. Evangelical groups campaigned on behalf of their co-religionists in the Eastern Bloc, while broader human rights groups kept the fate of the political prisoners in the headlines.
Despite opposition from the White House, Congress had passed the Jackson–Vanik Amendment in 1974, which made normal trade with Moscow contingent on it allowing Jewish and evangelical emigration. That had hurt, and Moscow was in no mood to be preached to. Under Jimmy Carter, the preaching continued.
By 1979, even before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and the United States began to pour money into the saddlebags of the mujahedin, there were no relations left to salvage. The superpowers’ détente had failed.
This was bad news for Father Dmitry and the remaining dissidents. While there had existed some chance that the Soviet Union could win trade concessions, the Kremlin abided by some of its international obligations to protect human rights. Now that that chance was gone, the K G B had nothing to lose from rounding up the last of the troublemakers who polluted their socialist utopia. The Moscow Helsinki Group of young dissidents that attempted to hold the Soviet Union to its international human rights obligations was crushed. Yuri Orlov, the group’s founder, like Shcharansky refused to co-operate with his investigators. He got seven years in prison, plus five years in exile. The Ukrainian, Georgian and other nationalist groups were closed down. Jewish organizations were destroyed. The dissident Christians were arrested.
By late autumn 1979, who was left? The greatest of all the dissidents, the Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, was still at liberty, fighting his tireless and lonely battle, but he was all but alone now. His allies had been picked off one at a time. And Father Dmitry was almost alone too.
This, for him, was Russia’s crucifixion. After the crucifixion would come the resurrection, which he yearned for, so it was time for the final fight. He appealed to all believers in the country. They must pray for the persecuted, for those who, like their friends Yakunin and Ogorodnikov, were not with them in the last redoubt.
He had an ultimatum for those who would imprison them, and a demand of his followers: ‘All actions, that one way or another help the persecutors, must be stopped immediately.’ He was calling on his supporters to boycott the state.
This was more than a taunt. It was revolution. It was practically suicide.
‘Happily,’ he wrote of his congregation, ‘only a few people are scared. More new individuals are coming, praise God. A religious spring is beginning in Russia!’
Inside might be a religious spring, but outside Father Dmitry’s windows it was winter, by now 25 November. Snow had been on the ground for a week or two, and the temperature was below zero. He was not deterred. As long as they remained united, they had nothing to fear.
But they did not remain united. Just the next week, some of his spiritual children – his footsoldiers, the crucial support he needed in his fight for the soul of the Russian nation – had left him. They had not, he wrote, even said goodbye. And their departure was accompanied by arguments, and arguments meant even he began to question their good faith. He had tried to banish distrust beyond the church walls, but it was back, creeping under the door like a cold draught from the winter outside.
‘I start to wonder, is it not someone’s provocation: to break the unity of my spiritual children? First there were arguments, ethnic differences, and now they depart. This must be to someone’s benefit.’
He was getting suspicious and distrustful. He was beginning to think like the people he was fighting, and as soon as he did that he had lost. His whole battle was based on using his own methods, not theirs. The K G B were chipping away before their final assault.
He tried to shore up his position but a week later it was worse. Threats were exchanged between members of the congregation. The Sunday discussion had been full of alarm, and his distrust grew. ‘Who knows, maybe someone planned this so as to disunite us,’ he wrote. And the ‘ethnic question’ – the Jewish question, anti-Semitism, racism, everything Father Dmitry had tried to banish – reared up. The discussion ended with slammed doors, with shouting, despite his appeal that they needed to lov
e each other, to keep everyone in their hearts.
He wrote later how it appeared.
Russians said: ‘You only have Jews with you.’
And Jews asked: ‘How can you keep all these anti-Semites?’
This internal division, he wrote, was not accidental. Someone had been sent to dig into the fault-line in his congregation, to use the old tactics of divide and rule. Distrust was all around him now. It was almost the end of the year, and on 16 December he prayed that 1980 and the new decade would bring his spiritual children back to him, and to each other. By now, fewer people were coming to his discussions, and he had plenty of time to think.
Eventually I began to read the last stapled-together document in the envelope. He could not sleep, he wrote, and he heard the bells strike the quarter-hours. The police were following ever more closely those who came to his church, and he recounted a conversation between an arrested man’s wife and a state investigator. When she told him she wanted a big family, he scorned her.
‘Only scoundrels have big families,’ the investigator said, allowing Father Dmitry to end his newspaper and the year on his favourite theme: the threat to the future of the Russian people.
‘That is why our families are shrinking. We will go far with these morals, until the last person eats the last person.’
That was the end. There were no more copies in the envelope. I would need to find an eyewitness to describe what happened next. For that, I would need Father Alexander.
We met, along with the two Zoyas, senior and junior, and Father Vladimir at a sushi restaurant just outside Moscow. The contrast was strange. Father Alexander’s bearded face and black robe were like something from the Middle Ages. The flashy decor and plates of highly priced fish were pure twenty-first-century Russia.
He sat next to me, and told his story with enormous enthusiasm. He kept making barely comprehensible jokes, patting me on the back to make sure I understood them. He edged ever closer to me as he did so, squashing me against the wall and grabbing my left arm. Zoya junior took advantage by occasionally swooping on his sushi, so every time he turned back to his plate he looked slightly puzzled by there being fewer than there should have been.
He talked intermittently about their life in Grebnevo. About how they ate together, chatted, drank tea and read God’s law. About how half of them were Jews, and half Russians, about their arguments, and about how Father Dmitry stood above them all, and took no sides.
Then on 14 January 1980, in the evening, Father Alexander was arrested. Zoya senior fled to Father Dmitry with their children. Father Dmitry went to find out what was going on. A policeman met him at the station: ‘We knew you would come,’ the policeman said. The police had no intention of releasing Alexander, but they knew that Father Dmitry looked out for his flock, and respected him for it.
Father Dmitry went home, and in the morning the police came for him too. They detained him directly after he had finished conducting the service, bundled him into their car and took him away. He was told he was just being taken to the city for his flat to be searched, and his wife Nina went with him. They did not take him to his flat, however, but to the Lubyanka – the K G B’s granite-edged headquarters that looms over Moscow from its hilltop.
A search team was, in their absence, ripping up his flat, as well as the houses of Father Alexander and Father Alexander’s mother, and the flats of their friends Ovchinnikova, Kuzmina, Glemyanov, Chapkovsky, Kapitanchuk and Nikolaev. Dozens of agents took part.
Father Dmitry’s wife Nina sat all day in the lobby of the Lubyanka, waiting for her husband’s release. It was only in the evening that she was told he had been arrested and taken to Lefortovo, the K G B’s prison. He had vanished from sight, and would have to fight on his own now.
‘They held me for fifteen days,’ said Father Alexander. ‘The K G B told me later they had no problem with me.’ The jokes and backpatting were over while he remembered it, and how Father Dmitry vanished from their lives.
With the arrest, and the searches and the harassment, the dissidents’ publicity machine barely survived. It was down to Father Vladimir and his friend Georgy Fedotov to tell the world what had happened. Fedotov told the foreign correspondents, and was then himself arrested and held in a mental hospital.
Father Dmitry’s other friends at liberty were tireless in their campaign for him, nonetheless. Already on the day of his arrest, they organized dozens of signatures under an appeal to Christians of the Whole World. ‘The appearance of Father Dmitry in our country and in our times cannot be understood but as a miracle to redeem Russia and the whole modern world. The mind cannot comprehend the colossal influence that Father Dmitry has had on the spiritual life of our nation,’ it said. The list of signatures showed his wide appeal. Most of the names were Russian of course, but there were Jewish names too, as well as Soviet Muslims and Ukrainians.
‘The worst plagues of our life: attacks on the Church, the collapse of the family, alcoholism, abortions, all of this appeared in Father Dmitry’s sermons as a reflection of the battle between good and evil.’
Their appeals reached the world. The London Times on 23 January quoted a letter written by Father Dmitry just before his arrest, which he had clearly been expecting.
‘Sound the alarm! Silence and compromise are not tactical steps, they are betrayal . . . If anything happens to me, let this letter be my message.’ The article went on to describe dozens of other dissidents from all over the Soviet Union who were swept up in this vast operation.
They included Tatyana Shchipkova, ‘a member of an unofficial seminar on religious philosophy, who was sentenced to three years’ hard labour’. There was Mikhail Solovov, ‘who took part in an attempt to put up independent candidates in the last Soviet elections’. There was Malva Landa of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Rolian Kadiyev, of the exiled Crimean Tatars, and other discontented people from Lithuania to Leningrad to the Arctic.
A week later, in an article headlined ‘Father Dudko: The Flower of Russia’s “Religious Spring”’, The Times praised the steadfastness of his fight to save his people. ‘In almost every sermon Father Dudko refers to the key problems of Soviet society: the high divorce rates, widespread alcoholism, hooliganism and criminality among the young. His solution is a stable family life,’ the paper wrote.
His arrest made headlines in newspapers across North America, from the New York Times to the Ottawa Citizen, and his name was repeatedly paired with that of Sakharov, the most famous of all the dissidents, who was now exiled to Gorky. His exile and Father Dmitry’s arrest were the clearest possible signs of the regime’s confidence. The K G B could now get rid of anyone they wanted, the papers said, even those previously deemed ‘untouchable’.
The Olympics was scheduled for Moscow that summer and, in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan, many Western countries were under pressure to boycott the Games. Campaigners added the fates of Sakharov and Father Dmitry to the charge sheet against Moscow and indeed a U S-led boycott went ahead, ruining the Soviet Union’s party, in what was supposed to be its triumphant ascent to the pinnacle as host of the world’s biggest festival.
All of this, of course, was unknown to Father Dmitry. While his spiritual children fought and prayed for him, while K G B agents gathered evidence and while Western journalists kept his name in the headlines, he was in a cell in the K G B’s prison of Lefortovo waiting for interrogation.
7
Ideological sabotage
The Lubyanka building, to which Father Dmitry had been taken, then dominated and still dominates north-central Moscow. If the democratic Russian government that took power after 1991 had wanted to change the country and to commemorate the victims of the previous regime it might have opened this building to the public or turned it into a museum. I have often thought how wonderful it would be to see groups of children running in and out of the forbidding front gate, exorcizing the ghosts of the past with their laughter.
The post-1991 government did not turn
it into a museum, of course, or throw open its doors. Instead, it left it as it was. It is still the headquarters of Russia’s security agency and is still off limits to ordinary citizens.
When I lived in Moscow, I walked past it every day on my way to and from the office. If I was talking on the phone when I did so, I would lose the signal as I approached the towering façade. It would only return when I was a good 50 metres beyond. The F S B, as the K G B’s main successor agency is now known, takes no chances.
The Lubyanka’s first two storeys are granite, made of sharp-edged blocks. Above them are six rows of windows poking out of an ochre façade, with a broad cornice along the top. A grand entrance pierces the front, while smaller doors give access to the sides. At the back is a towering entrance for trucks, blocked by high barred gates and guarded at all times by policemen. Presumably, this entrance was busy during the K G B’s heyday.
The front windows face towards the Kremlin. They previously overlooked a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet security service, but he was toppled in 1991. Officials occasionally mutter about putting him back.
To the right of the Lubyanka’s front elevation as you look at it, there is a large rock on a low plinth. This was brought from Solovki, the first island in the gulag’s archipelago, and erected as a memorial to the K G B’s victims. You reach it through the underground walkways that honeycomb the space underneath Lubyanka Square. They are full of kiosks selling cheap lingerie, pirate D V Ds, baked goods and electrical components. The rock does not get as much passing trade as the kiosks. It is large and grey and smooth.
I have been inside the Lubyanka on two occasions, both times for off-the-record briefings with members of the F S B. The chats yielded nothing of interest from a news perspective, but were fascinating nonetheless. This had after all been the inner sanctum of the K G B, then, as the F S B is now, second only to the Kremlin as a source of power in Russia. On both occasions I entered through a small side entrance, was scrutinized by a security guard through thick glass and was left sitting on a chair for five or ten minutes until my escort arrived. Then my documents were checked and I was given leave to pass through a turnstile and climb a grand staircase to a first-floor corridor lined with doors. We turned towards the front of the building and entered a large office. It had a huge desk at the far end. That desk was, one guide told me, just how Andropov had left it. This was in fact Yuri Andropov’s office.
The Last Man in Russia Page 16