The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  The Washington Post’s reporter, trying to explain what he had seen, called this ‘one of the heaviest blows to be struck in recent years against the struggling Soviet human rights movement’. ‘Dudko occupied a unique and important place in the spectrum of influential dissidents who have risked jail to speak out for individual freedoms within this authoritarian system,’ the article said. ‘Unlike the wooden and forced performances given by other dissidents who have recanted in recent years, Dudko looked and sounded both eager and intent upon recanting his crimes.’

  Keston College, a UK-based organization researching the oppression of Soviet believers, refused to draw any conclusions from the appearance, apparently reluctant to confront the possibility that he might have been speaking voluntarily. Keston had been at the forefront of keeping Father Dmitry’s fate in the world’s eye, and its publicity had helped have him praised in Britain’s House of Commons by a Foreign Office minister, as well as in the United States and elsewhere.

  ‘Father Dmitry’s “confession” is, perhaps, the greatest body-blow suffered by the Orthodox Church since . . . 1971,’ Keston said.

  The propaganda advantages to the Soviet authorities are obvious. A trial in court would have only reinforced Father Dmitry’s unique position among believers. There is also considerable mileage to be gained in the international relations sphere. The ‘confession’, whether genuine or not, is a slap in the face to the West, which has been vocal in protesting the arrest of Father Dmitry. It is also a direct blow at Father Dmitry’s individual supporters in the Soviet Union and the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in the U S S R, who have stressed that Father Dmitry’s activities were of a purely spiritual, and not political nature. Prometheus has been bound, and his terrible punishment appears to be just beginning.

  And that night, while Time was showing him rejecting his life’s work, printing presses all over the Soviet Union were churning out copies of Izvestia, the country’s second newspaper after Pravda. The article he wrote for that only took up a quarter of a page, but it resonated around the world. It was proof of Father Dmitry’s surrender.

  Under the banner headline ‘The West Wants Sensations’, Father Dmitry calmly and methodically destroyed himself. ‘In January 1980 I was arrested by the organs of state security for anti-Soviet activity. At first I denied my guilt, and announced that I had not spoken against the Soviet government, and that as a priest I am fighting against Godlessness. But then I understood, I was arrested not for my faith in God, but for a crime.’ He acknowledged that he had done harm to his country, and thanked the government for the patience it had shown towards him over the years. He should, he now realized, have been working with the state and not against it.

  He wrote that he had told himself, ‘You are fighting against all criminality: drunkenness, hooliganism, moral decay, for the strengthening of the family . . . but you are not being blamed for this, the Soviet government is fighting this too.’ He had always said the reason he did not work with the state was because it was spreading distrust, profiting from the sales of alcohol, encouraging abortion. Now, he had changed his mind.

  And he apologized to the bishops too. He said he had been wrong to lecture them when he should have been listening and obeying. By publishing books abroad, he had given ammunition to the state’s enemies. ‘Do you really think that in the West they understand us better than we understand ourselves? Even the ethnic Russians who live there, they long ago lost touch with their homeland and what is happening here.’

  He rejected his self-published newspaper. He rejected the books he had written. He named specific foreigners – a journalist from the New York Times, an American professor, a Belgian bishop – who had helped him, at significant risk to themselves, by smuggling his writings out the country. He named foreigners who had tried to bring foreign-published works into the country and who campaigned for believers’ rights. And he rejected them all. ‘I now understand that foreigners who interfere in our internal affairs will bring us nothing but harm.’ He banned the further publication of his books. He wanted to make a clean break with the past, and to start again with a new message. There would be no more talk of boycotts, of resistance.

  ‘We live on Soviet land,’ he wrote in conclusion.

  And we must obey the laws of our country. Disobedience to its laws will above all bring harm to our country, disperse our internal strength, and bring unnecessary suffering. We must think not just of ourselves, but of our families, of those who travel with us . . . now, when there is an external danger, we need all to unite and work together with our government and our people, which were given us by God and before whom we are all responsible.

  On my return from the Arctic, I visited Tanya Podrabinek, the Muscovite I had befriended in the north the previous summer, at her home in the Moscow suburb of Elektrostal. There her husband Kirill told me how Father Dmitry’s Izvestia article sped through the camps system, and was used by prison guards to assault dissidents’ morale. By summer 1980, Kirill was close to the end of a three-year sentence he had received after he and his brother Alexander refused to abandon their investigations into military hazing and punitive psychiatry.

  ‘It was three weeks before the end of my term, and the prosecutor came to talk to me. This was in 1980, in June, and he brought me that copy of Izvestia, the newspaper,’ Kirill said.

  I had a spare photocopy of the article and handed one to Kirill, and we sat and read it through together. It was the first time Kirill had seen it since that June day in 1980 when he was anticipating his imminent release. He finished and handed it back. He seemed keen to get rid of it as quickly as he could.

  ‘The prosecutor gave it to me, and he said: “Look, what your friends are saying,”’ Kirill said. ‘I told this prosecutor that Dudko was a priest and not a fighter. Perhaps I was not fair because among those priests there were tough ones too, but I think the prosecutor understood.’

  It is obvious why the prosecutor showed the article to Kirill. This was a propaganda coup for the government of almost unparalleled magnitude. A senior dissident was calling on anyone who opposed the government to give up the struggle and obey its orders. All over the country, political prisoners were being shown the article and offered a deal: surrender and be released. Kirill refused to surrender, however, and retribution was swift. A new court case was quickly arranged, and he received three more years under the law that criminalized any comments deemed to be anti-Soviet. He had been careless in whom he spoke to.

  Although Father Dmitry’s betrayal of his ideals did not work on Kirill, the Soviet government expected it to have a major effect on society at large. It was better even than a show trial, with the staged humiliation and then execution of an opponent. By breaking a dissident, parading them and releasing them, you showed that the reward for submission was a new life, rather than death. Previously, in the 1930s, the state had just wielded its power to crush opponents. Now, it had learned finesse.

  Father Dmitry also addressed a letter to the patriarch, dated the same day as the Izvestia article, which was published with presumably deliberate understatement on page 40 of the Patriarchate’s official journal. ‘My first words are: forgive me,’ Father Dmitry wrote. He signed off with the words: ‘the humble novice of Your Holiness, who is not worthy of calling himself a priest but, if you will allow it, I will dare to sign myself, the unworthy priest D. Dudko’.

  Patriarch Pimen, the man before whom he abased himself and whom he was asking for forgiveness, was someone who had praised the ‘lofty spiritual qualities’ of Andropov, the K G B chairman who locked Christians in mental hospitals. Patriarch Pimen had singled out the ‘titanic work in the cause of international peace’ done by Brezhnev, under whom the Soviet Union invaded both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He had won the Order of the Red Banner for his ‘great patriotic activities’, at a time when his priests were being arrested. If anyone needed forgiveness it was the patriarch, but it was Father Dmitry who was asking for
it.

  On 21 June, the day after his television appearance, he was released from prison. He had been inside just over six months. His wife Nina told foreign journalists that he was tired and turned them away when they tried to talk to him. A couple of days later he released a statement for them: ‘Leave me in peace, stop trying to pull me into some kind of politics, I am just an Orthodox priest, and one on Russian soil.’

  Tanya’s husband Kirill refused to judge Father Dmitry for what he had done, but was ruthless in his assessment.

  ‘I just think he was weak. There are several different elements here. If you are weak, do not invite attack. That is the first thing. Secondly, it is one thing if you just answer for yourself, it is another if you answer for others. Around Dudko was a group of young people that he had gathered around himself, and his recantation was a heavy blow to them.

  ‘He showed weakness, and that was far from harmless to those around him. The prosecutor came with this statement to me, for example. And the third element, which is the most important, is that if you show weakness, you should retire from public life afterwards. You should not shout out again, but he did live a public life afterwards and that is not good.’

  Father Vladimir’s assessment at the time was far harsher. When Father Dmitry, his spiritual father, had been in detention, he had battled to keep his plight noticed in the world’s media at considerable risk to himself. It had, it seemed, all been for nothing.

  ‘I would not say they fooled him, rather they broke him. I stopped going to see him then. A lot of people left and did not come back, they all said he had been broken. And if he was broken, then he was not from God because a martyr should not be broken,’ he said, still with his head lowered.

  10

  The K G B did their business

  Inside Father Dmitry’s flat, behind the door closed against the journalists, he faced his family. His wife, ever understanding, was just pleased to have him back. But his son – who would grow up to be a priest himself, but at the time was a student who had faced harassment of his own for his Christian beliefs – was angry, red in the face. Even his eyes were red, Father Dmitry wrote later.

  ‘What is wrong with you? Have you gone mad?’ his son demanded.

  ‘What? Well, you’re still young. And how would you survive without me? I haven’t rejected God and the Church,’ Father Dmitry replied.

  ‘I don’t know what I will do now at college. I would like to vanish off the face of the earth.’

  One of Father Dmitry’s spiritual children expressed the shock and concern of them all in an open letter: ‘I, Marina Lepeshinskaya, accuse the organs of the K G B of the murder of my spiritual father.’ The Western journalists kept coming to the door, asking to see him, just to see what he looked like, just to talk to him, to ask him to explain himself, but Father Dmitry stayed in his room.

  On the second day, he wrote, he hid away and cried, as he began to see quite how enormous a step he had taken. His wife’s sister, walking home, was grabbed by a terrified woman who said that his former disciples wanted to kill him because he had sold them out. His sister-in-law rushed home. He told her that there was nothing to worry about, but they still went outside to check, and he decided never to sleep alone in case the threat was real.

  Perhaps, while he stayed inside, he re-read the statement he had written for Izvestia, and saw the names of the people, people who had previously considered themselves to be his friends, whom he had accused of wanting to undermine the state and wanting to harm the Russian people.

  Desperate in his guilt, he wrote to one of them, Archbishop Vasily of Brussels. ‘If you had told me that I would behave like this, then I would have considered it as slander. But it appears that I overestimated my powers, I have fallen so low, like no one before me,’ he wrote. ‘I have never suffered such torments as now. I now know from my own experience what hell is. I am ready to do anything to correct the situation, but I don’t know how.’

  He did not want to see journalists, and he did not want to see accusing faces around him, so he fled to the countryside, where he issued a statement for his spiritual children. He tried to summon up the old fire, the old arguments, as if nothing had happened. ‘The first thing I beg of you is don’t separate, have love for each other. Forget your personal grievances, forget your ethnicity. Now we need to unite like never before in the face of this danger,’ he wrote, in words that he could have written a year earlier.

  But how could they trust him, let alone unite around him, when he had named their closest foreign allies in print? The obvious question they would all be asking would be: who else did he betray? He had had months of interrogations and plenty of time to list every single one of his friends for the K G B files. Then, the second thought would have been even more worrying still. If the group’s leader could crumble, then so could anyone. And if anyone could collapse and give their secrets away, then how could anyone trust anyone at all? The group of friends had held together in his absence by campaigning for his release, and by keeping his plight in the headlines. Now, they did not even have that to unite them.

  They were stunned by one still more enormous question: why did he do it? How had a man who had been so brave for so long surrender so willingly? It is a question that still divides his old friends.

  Alexander, Zoya junior’s father, was possibly the only one of his spiritual children who did not desert him and he refused to admit that Father Dmitry had done anything wrong: ‘I was not sad, I was pleased. He showed he was a true son of his homeland and his Church. It was not a fall, it was a confirmation. By shaming himself before pagans and non-believers he told the whole world he was a believer.’

  But he was speaking three decades after the event. In Lefortovo itself, Father Dmitry had been subject to the whole range of K G B tricks to make him change his mind. He had a cellmate accused of currency speculation. This was one of the K G B’s favourite ploys. Currency speculation was a crime, but one that no one had moral qualms about. That meant anyone would happily chat to a black-market moneychanger. The man played on Father Dmitry’s fears of imprisonment, and urged him to co-operate. What harm could co-operation do?

  He also had an extremely convincing interrogator called Vladimir Sorokin. Once the cellmate had persuaded Father Dmitry to at least talk to his interrogator, which took six weeks or so, then Sorokin enlarged the chink to gain access to his soul.

  Sorokin produced writings by a theologian called Yevgeny Divnich, who had been imprisoned first by the Gestapo and then by the K G B. He had been a friend of Father Dmitry’s in the camps, but had not been released after Stalin died. Divnich held out against the K G B for more than two decades. He once told Father Dmitry that if a day went by without him somehow harming the Soviet state, then he considered the day wasted.

  But he too surrendered in the end, ground down by the system and by decades in the camps. ‘My Christ supports the Soviet government,’ Divnich wrote in words that Father Dmitry later quoted approvingly. ‘It is impossible to defeat the Soviet government with one’s own primitive powers. Opposition is a primitive power, and obliges you to unite with foreigners and that is treachery, you must betray your homeland.’

  That was the choice that Father Dmitry was given. As a Russian, he wanted to support Russia. As a Christian, he wanted to oppose the Soviet Union. But, if he opposed the Soviet Union, he was allying with foreigners and thus fighting against Russia. He had to choose, therefore, between his religion and his country and he chose his country. That was how he himself justified his choice.

  ‘I am all the same a patriot’ was one of the things that the television showed him as saying. But his resolve collapsed on the outside, when he understood what he had done.

  On fleeing Moscow, he was stuck miserable in the village of Baydino in the Tula region, where he had a house. I went to find it.

  The Tula bus station was bitterly cold. Minibuses stood in ranks in a yard of compacted snow, more grey than white. Bus information was hard to ge
t hold of. I could get to Arsenevo, which was most of the way to Baydino. From there, the woman at the enquiries window told me, there might be a bus or I might have to make my own way. It was minus 32 when I left the hotel. I had donned two sets of long underpants, as well as my usual vest/T-shirt/jumper/jacket combination on top. As I waited for the Arsenevo bus to edge out of line and come forward for passengers, I mused on the strange disconnect between my face, which was pinched and sharp with cold, and my legs, which were slightly too warm.

  I had reading material in my bag. Father Dmitry, when he hid away in Baydino, wanted to reach out to his disciples. So he started publishing his newspaper once more. He would have to send it out by the mail, which meant it could be intercepted and would have little effect, but it was important to his self-respect that he did something. So, on 9 November 1980, after almost a year’s gap in publication, his In the Light of the Transfiguration came hammering off his typewriter again. And I had it with me.

  The minibus finally admitted the handful of us heading for Arsenevo. I arranged myself carefully, wedged up against the wall of the cabin, coat zipped up to the top, hat pulled down, scarf tightened. Both gloves – the thin inner and the padded outer – were on my left hand, but only the thin inner one was on my right, so I could hold the pen and take notes.

  I blackened everything honest, direct and brave. I provoked irritation in people’s souls, maybe even curses. I have cut off my own support, the bough I was sitting on, as the popular saying goes. I have opened the door wide to all illegality, to the spread of Godlessness in our land. By the example of my failure, I have as a priest blessed the existence of Godlessness in our land, and I have refused Christ. That is how it is, and I need to address it directly. You can serve only Christ, it is impossible to serve anyone else in any way [Father Dmitry wrote in a ‘confession’]. I am a priest, I answer not only for myself, but I answer above all for my spiritual children, I answer for my fellow countrymen, I answer for the whole world, since God gave me the right to speak to the whole world.