The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Right by the path was the grave of Veniamin Arteyev, born May 1980, died October 2007. His little sister Zoya was next to him. She had been born three years after him, but died six months earlier, on 20 April 2007. And between them was their mother. Her birth date was obscured by snow, but she died on 7 September 2003. I looked at Alexander for an explanation of this family tragedy.

  ‘Their father sold moonshine. He wanted to be rich, and look what happened. The two kids died in the same year,’ he said with a grimace.

  And a little further along was Andrei Kulikov, born March 1983; died, two months after his twentieth birthday, in May 2003.

  ‘He was my pupil, he died of this too,’ said Alexander, flicking his jaw-line in the Russian sign for getting drunk. ‘He shot himself in the end. They are all kids of twenty, twenty-four, twenty-five, they all died of this,’ he said, with another flick.

  ‘It’s like a plague,’ I said, at last.

  ‘Ah no, it’s worse,’ he replied.

  A grey stone grave for a young man, 29 August 1981 to 28 October 2006, dredged up another memory for Alexander: ‘That one died on his snowmobile falling through the ice. They didn’t find his body for a year.’

  There is apparently a disco sometimes in Old Abez, the little village the other side of the river where Natasha’s mother used to teach. Drunk and exuberant, the lads race each other back over the frozen Usa, heedless of the streams of ice-cold water that run on top of the ice, concealed by a thin crust of snow. One time there were six snowmobiles stuck in mid-river where they had crashed into water flowing under the snow and been abandoned.

  Even the two dogs seemed subdued by the graves, and they sat in the snow by the snowmobile, waiting for us to move away.

  The mood hung with us back to the house, and the conversation continued with Natasha in the kitchen.

  ‘If someone comes back from working on the railway, he’s cold, he’ll sit and watch television and drink vodka,’ she said. ‘People are lazier than they used to be. Or else now they are wiser, because they do not do what we used to do.’

  She reminisced about the colder winters of her youth, and the heroic amounts of work people did to stay alive.

  ‘When I was small this was big, the biggest village of the north, 2,000 people at least in the village itself, and more in the hamlets around. Now there’s no one there,’ she said, leaving their fate hanging in the air, to be filled in by Alexander.

  ‘Last year eleven people drowned, falling out of their boats,’ he said.

  Natasha took over again: ‘They weren’t all found. There was a lot of water this year and strong winds, and then there is this as well.’ She tapped her jaw-line.

  Do the women – I tapped my jaw-line – as well, I asked?

  ‘They also. Everyone in Russia drinks now.’

  The mood was bleak, as the conversation rolled on towards the fate of the country.

  ‘I was like you once,’ said Alexander. ‘I believed in improvement and the future. I condemned this and that and everything, but I started to change. Look at your son. He is small now like a toy but he will become big and you will care more about how he will do at school, what he thinks and so on, and this will become your main concern. Your own successes will be less important.’

  Young people, he said, had no concern for the victims of the gulag, and no interest in the work he does to try to keep the graveyard respectable.

  ‘The younger generation collects berries on the graves, they light fires. Yes it happened, they say, these people died, but it has nothing to do with us. In March there will be a new mayor in Inta and he will come to the memorial cemetery. They always do. But he will only come once and never again. That’s what they do,’ he said.

  Did that mean that officials, the state, had no interest in the graves?

  ‘The state has no relation to any of this. They cannot afford to provide us with gas, but they can build themselves offices. Everything is done through the arse, to screw things up,’ he said, with an unexpected profanity, the only one I heard him use. ‘The state makes you pay. If you don’t have to pay for the railway, they will make you pay for the mosquitoes that bite you. They find a way to make you pay.’ And that was why the collective farm had closed, and with it had gone all work but on the railway. ‘There was no point in keeping the animals, you have to make money. You have to be able to pay for processing and transport.’

  There had been a geological survey base in Soviet times but it was found to be unprofitable, so it was closed and all the equipment sold off. Now it has been reopened.

  ‘We realized that in Russia all we can do is drink vodka and sell oil, so we need to find more oil. If we run out we won’t even be able to buy vodka, so these geologists are back,’ he said.

  I asked him whether he was depressed about being a Russian.

  ‘I haven’t called myself that for thirty years. I don’t think about that. As soon as you think about being a Russian, you think about not being a Jew,’ he said. ‘I remember Zinoviev, the leader of the revolution, had a Jewish name because people began to talk about it after 1991, and to wash all this dirty washing and to talk about how the Jews were to blame for everything, how all the Jews were bad and all the Russians were good and so on.’

  He shrugged. He had escaped to the pure clean north. He wanted nothing to do with all that dirtiness.

  At four the next morning, I was a dumpy figure in the cold waiting for the train south, towards the sun. The thick clothes and darkness made all of us on the platform look the same, men or women, misshapen like clay dolls.

  Alexander told me as we waited on the platform that ‘before’ 300 children had studied at the village school. Now there were just ninety. I thought about that word ‘before’. Before, there was order. Before, there were children. Before, there was work. Before, people drank less. Before, people lived beyond their twenties.

  In Two Years in Abez, Nikolai Punin looked out at the grim view of Abez. ‘If you asked me what hell looked like, I would describe it just like that: the total rule of the straight line and the right angle. No free spirit was left alive by their obsession with tidiness, fences and orderly footpaths, all neatly maintained and swept constantly. Who said that hell is packed with good intentions? Quite the opposite, there were no good intentions, only meaningless ones and that made inmates lose all hope.’

  A crowd of railway workers boarded the train and, although I had a ticket, it seemed I had to sit in the cheapest compartment until I got to Inta, where I could be assigned bed linen. Hunched in my coat, hat and scarf almost touching across my face, I dozed.

  The train’s approach to Inta was heralded by the phone of a teenage girl on the bench opposite me. There had been no reception for the two-hour journey through the forest, but we were now within range of a mobile tower in the town. Her ring tone was a repeated English-language chorus: ‘I am a sexy girl. I like you fuck me well. I am a sexy girl. I like you fuck me well. I am a sexy girl.’ She grappled under her coat to find it, pressed the green button and began a muttered conversation with her mother. I wondered if she knew what the words of her ringtone meant.

  The prevalence of such trashy English-language culture is, I supposed, another sign of the collapse of Russian confidence. The dregs of Anglo-America had been dumped on places like Inta, and been taken up for want of anything else vaguely vibrant. As I waited for us to pull into the platform, I remembered other examples I had seen up here. One taxi driver had affixed a semi-transparent sunshade across the top of his windscreen with the English words: ‘Guns don’t kill people, I kill people’ (I have corrected his spelling).

  Most startling of all, however, had been a T-shirt – it must have come from a Sekond Khend – I had seen worn by a middle-aged man. Below a picture of a grinning male face, it bore the boast that ‘Five billion potential grandchildren died on your daughter’s face last night.’ What path did that take to get to its final owner?

  When, after Inta, I finally got my bunk a
nd snuggled down in the warm, I mused over how it was that English-language trash culture had penetrated so far into Russia. After World War Two, Western writers feared that Russia’s totalitarian state would conquer them all, but in fact the reverse happened. Russia today is like the opposite of A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess. At that time the Soviet Union seemed so powerful that he imagined a future when Western teenagers spoke a slang peppered with Russian words: moloko for milk; droog for friend; horrorshow for good. But that is not how it turned out. It is not Western hooligans using pidgin Russian as slang, but out-of-control young Russians speaking pidgin English. You see it in the graffiti along the railway lines: White Pride, Skinheads, Hooligans.

  This penetration began in the 1960s, when the West pioneered mass fashion and the Beatles. Russians old enough to remember talk about listening to foreign pop music on home-made LPs fashioned from X-ray film, which was solid enough to keep the groove, although it did not hold it for long. But Western culture still had to sneak through the chinks in the Iron Curtain. That meant a random selection of Western bands and writers, protected by the communist state from more vigorous competitors, flourished in the Soviet Union when they withered and died at home. Like flightless birds on an inaccessible island, bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Judas Priest became hugely popular, expanding to fill evolutionary niches they had no access to in the West. Minor band members still play solo concerts in major Moscow venues when they might struggle to fill the back room of a pub in London.

  Meanwhile, bands like the Rolling Stones are all but unknown. Their records for some reason failed to penetrate the Soviet counterculture at the right time. As the train rattled along, I plugged in the spoken version of Stones guitarist Keith Richards’s autobiography, and his words helped the thought process along.

  ‘We were not destroying the virtue of the nation but they think we are so eventually we’re drawn into a war,’ said Keith at one point as he described his arrest and conviction on drugs charges.

  If Keith thought that his one night in Wormwood Scrubs was a declaration of war by the authorities, he should have looked at what was happening in the Soviet Union. His same post-war generation, his Soviet contemporaries, full of fiery optimism, attempted to do what he and his friends did and revitalize culture, inject it with a bit of dynamism. The first post-Stalin dissidents were young people who gathered at a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow to read their poems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were the equivalent of the bohemians meeting in coffee shops in Chelsea or in Greenwich Village.

  The Soviet state at first was not quite sure how to respond. Boris Pasternak was criticized for his Western-style novel Dr Zhivago, but he was not arrested, nor did he lose his country home in Peredelkino, a village where houses were reserved for artists and writers.

  Two of his disciples – Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel – however, were to be made examples of. And it was their arrest and prosecution for the publication of work abroad that diverted the Soviet youth movement on to a new track.

  ‘The lack of opportunity to struggle for the Cause discouraged the most ardent Communists among the young,’ wrote one friend of Sinyavsky’s. ‘Can a thirty-year-old writer be expected to wait like a good boy for the censor to show a little magnanimity in ten or twenty years’ time, if then? Sinyavsky had not that degree of patience.’

  It is noteworthy how many of the Soviet dissidents did not begin as rebels. Sakharov was a physicist. Zhores Medvedev was a biologist. Father Dmitry was a priest. In an ordinary society, they would have continued their activities unhindered. However, the state’s ideology kept intruding into their lives in ways they could not tolerate.

  Sinyavsky and Daniel’s trial was publicized by four of their friends, who were then themselves arrested and prosecuted. Alexander Ginzburg only wrote up a transcript of a legal hearing and passed it to journalists, but that was enough to earn him five years in a labour camp. When he came out, he was of course a committed opponent of the regime.

  Whereas young Germans and Frenchmen waved the red flag and demanded a general improvement of the world, starting now, young Russians fought for the most basic of human rights. The state’s oppression distorted the cultural movement. It started with poetry and writing, but it could not develop into the mass-market rebellion of the Western baby-boomers, because it never got out of the basements.

  It was as if the police in Britain and America had arrested Buddy Holly and Cliff Richard, given them six years of hard labour and then kept arresting any of their friends who spoke out in their defence. It is hard to imagine how Bob Dylan’s protest songs or the Rolling Stones’ poseur rebelliousness would have then made it to number one.

  In 1968, when Jean-Luc Godard filmed Keith and the rest of the Rolling Stones and intercut them with staged footage of actors pretending to be Black Panthers, eight real rebels showed astonishing bravery by gathering on Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Assaulted by the crowd, who shouted ‘scum’, ‘dirty Yids’ and – to Natalya Gorbanevskaya who had come with her baby – ‘The tart’s got herself a child, now she comes to Red Square’ – they were arrested.

  Gorbanevskaya, because of the baby, was released, and she told Western journalists about the protest. The Western papers and radio stations splashed with it. It was rare to see any kind of crack in the monolith of the Soviet Union. But their protest simply heightened the division between dissidents and mainstream society, which mostly approved of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and thought the Czechs should be more grateful for the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.

  ‘It was very strange,’ Gorbanevskaya told me. ‘My name became famous and there was this big noise about me, and it was like they could send troops into Czechoslovakia but they could not arrest me.’

  At that time, the Kremlin was still embarrassed by unfavourable media coverage. That kept Gorbanevskaya safe, although she was eventually thrown out of the country. Dissidents like Sakharov became skilled at using the Western radio stations and newspapers to their own advantage, and a group of brave activists kept the protest movement alive for a decade. It was under cover of that embarrassment that Father Dmitry’s free community developed. The Soviet government no longer had the heart to kill thousands, tens of thousands, of people to squash an idea, and any other technique was less effective.

  It took the K G B more than a decade to penetrate and demoralize and finally crush the dissidents, culminating of course with the arrests of Sakharov and Father Dmitry.

  As I sat and listened to Keith describing Swinging London, a long line of snow along a telephone wire slipped and fell. At first, it dropped as one long cylinder, but it broke up as it accelerated, so, by the time it hit the snow beneath, it was just a cloud of powder. Mammal footprints trotted through the forest beneath the wire. A little later we mounted a bluff, and I could see for kilometres over the snow and trees. No one lived there.

  Father Dmitry was not sent to the camps in 1980. Instead, they kept him in the relative comfort of a cell in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. Within its high walls, he was free to contemplate his future during the days of inactivity, interrupted only by occasional interrogation. He knew, as he lay there, that his fate was in his own hands. He must have dwelled on the potential misery of a fresh term in the camps, back in the cold, stripped of the church where he served and the love of his children. In 1980, he would turn fifty-eight. Imprisonment would be a heavy burden for him to bear. He had no idea when he would see his friends again.

  9

  The unworthy priest

  Every one of Father Dmitry’s friends remembered the next time they saw him, however. Father Vladimir’s shoulders fell slightly when he told the story. He looked down at his hands on his lap.

  ‘Yes, I saw him on television,’ he said. ‘Someone rang to say they were showing him on television, so I turned it on. There were a few of us and we watched. It was a shock.’

  It was an e
xperience he shared with citizens of the whole Soviet Union. Moscow at that time only had three television channels. Other regions had fewer. That meant tens of millions of people would have seen Time, the most popular daily television programme in the country, on 20 June 1980. Most of them probably heard of Father Dmitry for the first time that evening. Although he was famous among dissidents, and among religious believers, this was his first appearance on a national media channel. The vast majority of Soviet citizens would have had no idea who he was.

  They would have seen a plump man with a beard, a stereotypical Russian priest, happily reading out a prepared statement, then answering questions from a man off-camera called Sergei Dmitryievich. What Father Dmitry said would have satisfied the most hawkish Soviet Cold War warrior, because he rejected everything he had ever stood for. He admitted the ‘systematic fabrication and dissemination abroad of anti-Soviet materials’. He admitted being a tool of the West working to destroy the Soviet state. This was not like the show trials of the 1930s. He did not look traumatized, thin, pale or disoriented. On the contrary, the most shocking thing was that he looked himself.

  Throughout the conversation, he smiled and appeared entirely content with what he had done. He looked well fed. Dissidents watching said it would have been better if he had been bloodied and bruised. At least it would have made sense. He was admitting to crimes that could bear a prison sentence of seven years, yet he seemed happy. His appearance was so at variance with what he was saying that observers wondered if he had been given a euphoria-producing drug.