The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Yuri Andropov was head of the K G B from 1967 to 1982, and thus ran almost the entire campaign against the dissident movement. Next to the phone was a switchboard, two metres wide and covered in different coloured buttons that could connect him to any of his subordinates anywhere in the country. From this desk he co-ordinated the exile of Sakharov to Gorky; the arrest of Jewish nationalists who wished to go to Israel; the harassment of Father Dmitry and his friends in their church community in Grebnevo.

  Even before he headed the K G B, he had been ambassador to Hungary, and thus responsible for crushing the Hungarians’ attempt to loosen the Soviet embrace in 1956. He helped send the tanks and soldiers into Budapest and cowed the nation for a generation. As chairman of the K G B, he did the same to Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Prague Spring attempted to create a more flexible kind of socialism. These two experiences of uppity satellites showing worrying degrees of independence convinced him that the Soviet Union was engaged in a death struggle with imperialism, in which the fight against dissidents was a key front.

  Not everyone in the Politburo – the leading organ in the state – shared the full extent of Andropov’s paranoia. Many thought the government’s critics could be won over by generous treatment and benefits. Andropov disagreed, and his K G B were merciless. They kept up surveillance and harassment of anyone they suspected of ‘thinking otherwise’, as the dissidents themselves termed their activities.

  His aim was to extract confessions from the K G B’s opponents, to make them admit that they were not honest strivers after truth and justice, but foreign spies bent on undermining their homeland. His agents were highly skilled. They were allowed to detain suspects without charge for months, and could use those long spells of inactivity to undermine the dissidents’ resolve. The dissidents in response drew up precise guidelines of their own for how to engage with interrogators, approaching the conversations in full knowledge of how dangerous they were. Natan Shcharansky, the Jewish activist, was a highly skilled chess player and plotted his approach in the same way he would plot a match.

  Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, outlasted his interrogators, and was honourably defiant to the last. ‘I rely on my own inner conviction, on my experience and on my thoughts,’ he said. It did not save him from a seven-year sentence, but it meant he kept true to himself and inspired fellow dissidents to do the same.

  Not all dissidents were as stern and unyielding as him. In 1973, K G B agents managed to extract confessions from Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, who had been compiling the underground human rights journal the Chronicle of Current Events. Although Krasin had written the handbook for arrested dissidents, telling them to admit nothing, he was finally broken over months of detention. They grilled him repeatedly, extracting tiny concessions from him, holding out the chance of meetings with his wife and family. They were ably assisted by an informer sent in as a cellmate. Eventually, tiny step by tiny step, they overcame both Krasin’s and Yakir’s resistance and sent them back to their old friends as changed men.

  ‘We forgot the basic truth that we are citizens of the U S S R and are bound to respect and keep the laws of the state,’ said an appeal that Krasin wrote from inside prison.

  According to K G B records, fifty-seven dissidents were summoned for interrogation as a result of evidence given by the two men. Confronted by Krasin and Yakir, forty-two of them also capitulated.

  The amount of resources put into the case – thousands of hours of agents’ work, hundreds of books, rolls and rolls of tape for recordings – was enormous, but it was fully justified from Andropov’s point of view. When senior dissidents such as these recanted their views, the demoralization among their friends was deep. And Krasin’s recantation was so total that some of his former comrades wondered if he had been a K G B plant all along.

  This did not always work. Solzhenitsyn never broke, despite near-constant surveillance – the results of which Andropov reported to the Politburo regularly. Neither did Sakharov, and nor did the religious dissidents like Ogorodnikov.

  For Andropov, any act of freethinking was dangerous, as he himself laid out in a speech in 1979, less than a year before Father Dmitry’s arrest. He said that Westerners often asked why, if the Soviet Union had built socialism, and was strong and prosperous, it felt so threatened by people who did nothing more than hold prayer meetings, write letters or draw pictures. Did this not suggest the government was actually rather weak? Not at all, Andropov replied. The secret of the Soviet Union’s survival was constant vigilance.

  ‘We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system – to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions of the overthrow of socialism.’

  That meant that, although Father Dmitry saw himself as a simple priest, the K G B saw him as an existential threat. Today’s religious believer was tomorrow’s terrorist. Was he aware of how seriously the K G B took him when he passed through the doors of the Lubyanka that day in January 1980?

  This was not the first time he had been picked up by the K G B and brought here. Back in 1948, when he was a student and had written an unwise poem about Stalin, this was the scene of the interrogation that sent him to the gulag.

  Sitting on a low wall and looking at the Lubyanka building, I contemplated Father Dmitry’s state of mind in those first hours. He had been picked up at his church. He had thought he was being taken to his flat. He was instead taken to the Lubyanka, and on to Lefortovo. Everything was being done to keep him off balance.

  Did his own personal experience of the horrors he would face if he were sentenced to prison help his resolve or undermine it? I thought back to Abez, to the dying village in the Arctic where the mosquitoes whined around my head and bit through my socks.

  And I thought about Alexander Merzlikin, our bearded guide to the graveyard where Karsavin and the others were buried, and a conversation we had had as we waited on the platform for the train back south. A dozen or so local people stood patiently, making no movement, while Tanya and I waved madly around our heads, trying to keep the mosquitoes off.

  ‘I don’t know how they can stand the mosquitoes,’ I had said to Merzlikin, gesturing at the others. ‘I don’t know how you can stand them.’

  He smiled and shrugged. He was not a man of many words.

  ‘And I can’t imagine what it’s like in winter,’ I added, slightly lamely.

  He nodded: ‘Unless you’ve been here, you can’t.’

  That was the problem, I realized. Father Dmitry knew what he was up against. He knew what a Russian prison was like in winter. But I did not. I could not appreciate the horrors he had lived through, nor the events that had shaped his mind. I needed to go back to the north, to see what it had been like for him in the cold and dark.

  WINTER

  8

  It’s like a plague

  A Russian train in winter is a far better place than the same train in summer. With snow and the long dark night outside, inside was snug and warm. In summer, a top bunk is torment, but now I was happy to wrap myself in my blanket and, if I felt a little too hot, to hold my fingers against the ice on the windowpane. I could melt through it and leave little clear circles, then watch the crystals crawl over them once more.

  The platform of the Yaroslavl station in Moscow had been hard-pressed snow and dirt. A man stood selling power tools. He had a heap of drills around his feet, and a cattle prod in his hand that he crackled at me as I walked past. On the opposite platform stood a train with destination boards proclaiming Ulan Bator and Beijing in three languages. It pulled out five minutes before us. In a few days’ time, we would be thousands of miles apart.

  Just before our departure, a man came swinging down the train flogging knock-off phones. A woman, one of
my neighbours, asked what he had.

  ‘Are you going to buy,’ he asked aggressively. She hesitated. ‘Then what’s the sense in showing them to you?’

  The woman looked around at us in surprise at his sales technique, and we shrugged and grunted and introduced ourselves. On the top bunk opposite me was Andrei, a snub-nosed woodsman in a vest – ‘I am a driver, a sawyer and a boss. See, that’s four jobs’ – with strong opinions, particularly about people from Chechnya – ‘They should all be killed, they don’t work and see how much money we give them.’ Just a couple of weeks before, a suicide bomber had attacked one of Moscow’s main international airports, killing thirty-seven people. His sister had passed through the airport ten minutes previously, he said, so that may have been the source of his strong feelings, although the suicide bomber had not in fact been from Chechnya.

  Beneath Andrei was a sulky-looking girl who spoke on the phone for most of the first evening, and slept for most of the next day. Opposite her, and directly beneath me, was Yekaterina, a pretty girl from Vorkuta who listened to everyone’s conversations and smiled without saying much.

  Most of the conversation over the next day was driven by our neighbours on the other side of the aisle. They were a mother and daughter from Ukhta. The mother – her name was Angelina – had learned English a long time ago and was delighted to show off to the carriage by holding exclusive conversations with me about Prince Charles. I spoke to her in Welsh for a while when she asked me what this place Wales was that he was prince of. She then happily explained to our neighbours that she had not understood a word. They had not understood a word of the exchange that led up to it, so probably did not realize I had been speaking in a different language at all, but she did not let this undermine her triumph.

  Angelina’s grandfather was in the gulag in the early days. He was a Ukrainian convicted in the 1930s, during the wave of collectivization that submerged Father Dmitry’s family along with millions of others. He was released after the war but not given permission to return home. His daughter – Angelina’s mother – came to join him, aged just sixteen, in 1946 and ended up marrying a Latvian and staying in the north.

  ‘They always wanted to leave but stayed. It’s hard to leave when your house is here, your children. They say that it was fun at first because there were so many young people, so many intellectuals. It’s not like that now of course,’ she said.

  Angelina switched back to Russian to include her daughter, Olya, and the others and for a long time they all discussed life in the north. They were relatively well off, but Olya and her husband had stopped at just one child.

  ‘A two-room flat costs 2.5 million roubles,’ she said. I did a quick calculation in my head. That is around £50,000. ‘And a new-build is even more. How can you afford to have a second child? This is the problem. We would need more living space before thinking about another child.’

  Angelina moved on to an account of a holiday she had taken in Jerusalem, with side pilgrimages to the Holy Places in Bethlehem and Nazareth. Olya was not listening, however. She was still mulling over living standards for young families.

  ‘You are lucky to have been born in Britain,’ she whispered while her mother was talking, so only I could hear.

  Up in my bunk I lay on my side, with my hand under my head, and watched the forest rattle by. As the trees receded into the distance, the partition one and a half metres away, against which Andrei was sleeping, seemed to rush towards me at astonishing speed. It made me feel a bit sick so I rolled on to my front to look out directly into the trees. The snow closed off any view beyond the first or second trunk. Every branch was laden with snow. Every twig was laden with snow. Every crosspiece on every telegraph pole was laden with snow. The tops of the poles wore a little white wig. The houses in the abandoned villages were huddled under the weight on their roofs, their windows dark and their paths uncleared. Their fences were just a few inches of black spike sticking out of the drifts, and the mammals that had left loping tracks on the snow’s crust passed over them as if they were not there. The branches of birch trees sloped up, and the branches of fir trees sloped down.

  I put in the earphones of my iPod and listened to the memoirs of Keith Richards, guitarist of the Rolling Stones, which I had brought for just such a long journey as this one. With my blanket tucked around my ears, and the snow glistening outside, I drifted off to sleep while he was driving through Morocco and getting stoned with Anita Pallenberg in the sunshine.

  The whole of the next day I was on the train. Without the little kilometre markers of concrete and metal to look at – they were covered in snow – the main objects of interest were the occasional station buildings which we hurtled past without stopping. The station managers – women in their late teens, mostly, swaddled in furs like fresh-faced beavers – stood outside the buildings holding up little white lollipops of plastic. Otherwise, there was forest. When night fell it looked like a negative photograph. The sky was black, and the trees were white.

  The next morning a sudden worry I had missed my stop jerked me awake. I had a crick in my right shoulder and winced as I craned around to look out the window. The sun was a pure yellow, like a lemon pip, rising above the bleakest landscape and sending delicate fingers towards us, reaching between the blue shadows and under the sky. Beyond the sun were the pale lumps of the Ural Mountains. Nearer, the snow was sculpted into smooth shapes by the wind. We passed through the village of Ugolny – Coal Town – without stopping. It was all ruins, with no people and no tracks except those of a mammal of some kind, perhaps a fox.

  Ahead of us, a haze in the clear sky traced back to a tall chimney spewing a dark stain of smoke for miles and miles. We pulled into Inta through blocks full of shattered buildings and empty windows. I pulled on my jumper and my down-filled jacket – of a brand recommended by a mountaineer friend because it kept him warm on top of the Andes – then my gloves, which were in two parts. The inner stayed behind if I wanted to take the outer layer off to use my camera. Last came my hat.

  I was ready for the cold, I thought, but I was wrong. Minus 34 degrees centigrade caught at my throat like sandpaper and at my thighs like a bucket of iced water. Nikolai Andreyevich had come to meet me. He was smiling under a peaked cap, but I was coughing in the cold and had to wait to return his greeting.

  He had a taxi waiting. The road was sheet ice where it was not beaten snow, and we roared towards town at 120 kilometres an hour. For some reason, Nikolai Andreyevich had decided we should deny I was British. Perhaps he liked the pretence, or perhaps he was concerned that my presence here would attract unwelcome questions. I was, he told the taxi driver with studied nonchalance, ‘from Moscow’. I was not to speak more than I had to in case my accent betrayed the lie, but in any case the headlong journey was so terrifying I did not much want to say anything.

  I had friends here now, so had no need to stay in the Northern Girl hotel and argue over how much they would overcharge me for a sagging single bed. Nikolai Andreyevich had persuaded a woman called Galya, whose hair was carefully dyed but resembled a squashed magpie, to rent me her flat. I was delighted to get into the warmth and to drink a cup of tea.

  Her flat was decorated with icons and with calendars celebrating the various branches of the Russian armed forces. In the living room was a flashing picture of Jesus that I unplugged as soon as I was alone. After a shower, I approached getting dressed strategically: two pairs of socks, underpants, long underpants, trousers, T-shirt, jumper. My coat, gloves, hat and scarf would come after another cup of Galya’s revolting purple tea.

  As we sat in the kitchen, Nikolai Andreyevich lectured Galya about Schopenhauer, then moved on to lecturing her about coal, engineers and other topics. She initially mistook the lectures for a conversation and tried to make comments, but soon learned not to. I ate biscuits, then left to find some lunch, while Nikolai Andreyevich went off on business.

  Lunch was not a success. My first attempt, in a café round the corner called Ugolyo
k, failed when a waitress told me it was full. I could see that only one of the dozen tables was occupied but she insisted, with the certainty of a true believer, against all available evidence, that there was not a single empty chair.

  My second attempt, at the Barakuda, Inta’s other café, started little better. The only dishes on offer were various wizened bits of meat. I asked the blank-eyed waitress if they could fry me some eggs. She said no. I asked about an omelette. No again. I asked about boiled eggs, suggesting I would be happy to pay 250 roubles – £5 – for two, which is a pretty reasonable price by anyone’s standards. No. How about scrambled eggs?

  The waitress, who had the wattled neck and initiative of a tortoise, but none of the charm, refused, pointing out that she had no way to enter 250 roubles into the cash register if it did not refer to a specific dish. None of the dishes featured eggs. In fact, she was not sure they even had any eggs. Or, she added, maliciously, any potatoes. The stand-off was beginning to look unresolvable when the cook emerged from the kitchen and told me I could have the eggs and some mushrooms too if I wanted them. Since I was the only customer, she cannot have been very busy. Perhaps she agreed simply to shut me up.