The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Puzzled, I walked back to the car, unable to understand how the fire had lit itself without a person being at home. It was only that evening that I guessed the owner had probably been in all the time, but had not wanted to open their door to someone mad enough to spend two hours wading through waist-deep snow and breaking into derelict houses.

  On our drive back to Arsenevo, my driver told me that he had worked for seventeen years as a coal miner near Tula, and now had a monthly pension of 8,000 roubles. That is around £160 and, as a comparison of how far out of whack the local economy is, my grim hotel room in Tula cost me 6,200 roubles for my two nights’ stay. When he dropped me off back at the bus station, I gave him two 500-rouble notes, and realized as I did so that that was half a week’s pension. My driver told me there was no other work, all the farms were closed, and the sausage factory that used to exist had gone with them. Food is imported now, he said.

  While waited for the bus back, a three-year-old girl in a pink jacket so puffed up that she could barely move her arms commanded the little bus station. She talked incessantly to her father, delighting in the sound of the Russian words ‘to Tula, to Tula’. Her father, keen for a break, phoned his wife and handed his daughter the phone. She then became silent and refused to say a word until he took the phone away. He finally did so, and ended the call, at which point she nattered away again as before. Her father’s eyes met mine in a mute shrug, and then the bus came.

  She was the only child I had seen all day. I made a point of looking out for more, but did not see any.

  The bus back to Tula was not the modern sleek model of the morning, but an old doddery Soviet-era Icarus. The temperature inside was the same as that outside – minus 32 – and, if it warmed up during the journey, it did not warm up by much. It was far too cold to read or to take notes, so I sat with my double-gloved hands pushed up into my sleeves and nurtured the ember of warmth into a steady glow.

  I could not help but muse on Father Dmitry as our bus retraced our morning route back from the bleak fields. The evening light had none of the mellow warmth of the morning. The fields were flat and greyish. The trees were gloomy, and there was no colour or warmth anywhere in the world.

  My mind kept piecing together little snippets from the newspaper I had been reading that morning. I had been so mesmerized by the misery that Father Dmitry was pouring on to the page that I had allowed the actual events of his life to wash over me: the summonses to the prosecutors, the insults from his friends, the abusive letters.

  Now, though, I had time, and I began to see a picture emerge of a second narrative contained in the newspaper besides the misery. The story gradually formed itself on the long bumpy journey, but was still an amorphous shape when the Icarus made a heroic effort to crest the slight rise into Tula’s bus station.

  Back in Tula, I walked the road from the bus station to the centre of town, partly because I had not realized how long it was, and partly because I wanted to think some more. At the end, I turned right and found a bar in a shopping centre. I occupied a table in the corner, as far as possible from a group of rowdy Armenians playing billiards. I spread out my papers, ordered a beer and began to read.

  I went back to that moment just after his release from detention, when a woman came screaming that his former disciples wanted to kill him. The next day he had a meeting with a senior figure in the K G B, at his own request. Worried about his safety, and about a threat to his life from people who had been his friends, he turned for help to the authorities.

  ‘I said to them, that I am being threatened, they want to kill me,’ he wrote later.

  The K G B man did not appear to believe the threat, but did offer to take him back into detention for his own protection, and that was a crucial moment. Before his arrest, Father Dmitry was urging a boycott of the state. Now he was turning to it for help against his own friends.

  It is clear from Father Dmitry’s own account that the K G B used a disorienting good cop/good cop approach, which worked better than they could have imagined on a priest who was alone and friendless and desperate and guilty. They spoke to him kindly and politely as if he was their old chum. They discussed the disagreements he had had with the state, and how he disliked its atheistic policies.

  ‘Yes, we are guilty before you,’ a senior K G B official told Father Dmitry. ‘And not only that, the state is guilty before the Church.’

  How could he resist these entreaties, when he had no other friends? He wrote that he had asked for forgiveness but that his friends would not even talk to him. And here were K G B agents admitting all of the crimes that he had been accusing the state of committing for so long. Perhaps he had been wrong about them? And, if he was wrong about them, who else was he wrong about?

  Distrusted by his friends, after his release from detention he began to sympathize with his persecutors. It was a coup for Sorokin – the investigator – who shared the first name and patronymic of Father Dmitry’s brother. Father Dmitry later wrote that he came to regard Sorokin as his second brother.

  The K G B could control who came to see him at Baydino. They knew the community he had lived in, and they recognized its fault-line between Jews and Russians, that there had always been mutual distrust no matter how Father Dmitry tried to contain it and, without him realizing it, they exploited that.

  ‘At last the Jews came to me. At first a young man from Kiev. He said that people are still reading my books, and he asked nothing, he just looked at me. I came to life a bit. The Russians just pester me all the time, but the Jews sympathize,’ Father Dmitry wrote.

  Who was this mysterious Jew from Kiev? And who were the others who came later and showed him documents printed in his defence? He was glad that they had come and grateful for their sympathy. When they brought statements for him to sign, he signed them ‘mechanically’, he wrote later, hardly reading them.

  Father Dmitry was turning back and forth, grateful first to his K G B friends, then to his anti-Soviet Jewish friends, and he wanted to please them all. His attempt to excuse himself to the foreign bishop he had incriminated in his Izvestia article, and then the statements he gave to the Jews – which were inevitably found in a raid on a flat in Moscow, although he had not intended them to be published – angered the security services, who called him in once more. Although they had released him, they had not closed his case. He was still at risk of prosecution.

  ‘We have made a mistake, we thought about closing the case, but now these new statements,’ his investigator Sorokin said. ‘But well, how can you write this? Who will believe you anyway? One day he’s like that, another day, he’s different. And anyway we don’t mean you any harm, why did you write this?’

  Lacking the mechanical process of serving in church to fill his time, or the discussions with the faithful that he had enjoyed so much, his hours were empty. There were only so many statements he could write, and his newspaper only came round once a week. He wanted to work, to chant the holy mysteries of Russian Orthodoxy, to light the incense, to process behind the icon screen and to dispense the ritual bread and wine.

  This was the K G B’s trump card, and they did not wait long to play it. Sorokin and another senior agent drove out to Baydino to see him.

  ‘I’m going to take a holiday and come here to relax, it’s so good here,’ said the other agent, Anatoly Trofimov.

  ‘You’re welcome, we’ll holiday together,’ said Father Dmitry. They took chairs and went to sit under an apple tree. That was in late summer, a time unimaginable as I sat in frozen Tula, and the trees I had seen as skeletons that morning would have been heavy with fruit.

  ‘We have already seen the church in which you will serve, we have photos,’ Trofimov said. The conversation moved on, but the dart went straight to Father Dmitry’s heart. The K G B were the gatekeepers to a future for him, a chance to escape the unchanging misery he was in.

  The misery worsened because, while he was sitting under apple trees in Baydino, his old friend and fellow priest G
leb Yakunin was on trial in Moscow. He expected to be called as a witness, and worried and worried about how he would speak. Would he admit to meeting foreigners? Or would he defend his comrade? Then the trial ended. Yakunin got five years. Father Dmitry had not been summoned, and the worrying had been for nothing. And he did not come out of the contrast well. Yakunin had not appeared on television to recant his views, but had endured his ordeal and stayed true to his ideals. That was almost worse for Father Dmitry than having to speak against him in court.

  Rumours churned in Moscow. People said that he had refused to go to the court to defend Yakunin, and he could hardly bear it. He and his wife decided to go to see Ira, Yakunin’s wife, to sympathize and to explain. But on the way he changed his mind.

  ‘Go on your own,’ he told his wife.

  ‘What, are you scared?’ she asked.

  ‘No, but go alone anyway.’

  He was summoned to the K G B once more to talk to Sorokin. He had asked for books at Baydino, and they had sent him a pile of atheist brochures, books about Rasputin, the mad monk who advised the last tsar and his family, books by priests who had given up the faith and turned atheist. He was angry, accusing them of promising him a church and not giving it to him.

  ‘How long have I been at liberty? And you don’t let me serve for a single day, and you said you would give me a church straight away,’ he said. ‘I am ready to do anything. Prison is as scary to me now as my situation. Being shot would be better.’

  It was the K G B’s moment. Sorokin took him aside and they went to Trofimov, the big boss. Trofimov shook his head over all these statement he had signed and given to the Jews who came to see him. Those had complicated the case. Without them, everything would be fine. Nonetheless, Trofimov was prepared to take him into his confidence.

  ‘Do you really not understand that the Jews want to put you in prison, but with our hands? And we don’t want to imprison you. God grant that you reconsider,’ he said.

  ‘It’s interesting that an atheist K G B man should say “God grant”,’ said Father Dmitry.

  ‘God grant,’ repeated Trofimov, the clever man. ‘Go and reconsider.’

  Sorokin left him to stew on that for a while. Father Dmitry was still trying to make up with his spiritual children. Eight of the ethnic Russians among them came to tell him their complaints. Their complaints were about Jews, and the weakened Father Dmitry was less able to rein in their prejudice.

  ‘You cannot even stand next to a Jew,’ one of his disciples spat out.

  ‘I don’t know much about theology,’ said another, ‘but what upset me the most is that you tried to make us embrace the Jews.’

  The next morning he felt so weak that he could not get up, and he had to say his morning prayers in bed.

  A while later, the K G B summoned him back. He was to speak to Trofimov again. This was a conversation so secret even Sorokin was not allowed in on it. The K G B were finally taking Father Dmitry completely into their hearts, and here was an even higher boss, Sergei Sokolov, to do it. A young woman brought tea and cake, and the two agents appeared to sit patiently while Father Dmitry said grace, then to business.

  In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell created Room 101, which contains the ‘worst thing in the world’. The room’s contents were different for every individual and, when they were unleashed, that individual’s resistance finally crumbled away and they became a pliable servant of the state. Father Dmitry’s Room 101 contained anti-Semitism. He had tried for decades to banish hatred of the Jews from his mind, but the K G B summoned it back and, in conversation after conversation, they destroyed him with it.

  ‘You are surrounded by Jews, and they have no love for Russia. And, you know, we would never have interfered with you if you had not had around you people who then go abroad and raise anti-Soviet hysteria,’ said Sokolov. He was talking about Jews who were emigrating to Israel, Europe and America and buttressing the increasingly hardline political stance being taken by Ronald Reagan in Washington and the likes of Margaret Thatcher in Europe. He was telling Father Dmitry that it was the Jews, not the K G B, who were to blame for his suffering.

  Father Dmitry tried to oppose this logic, saying that among those who left the country were patriots. He mentioned Vladimir Maximov, a dissident writer who was forced to emigrate after spending time in a psychiatric hospital, saying that he had written good poems full of love for Russia. Vladimir Maximov, it should be noted, could hardly have had a more ethnically Russian name.

  ‘Did you know Maximov was a Jew?’ Sokolov shot back.

  Father Dmitry said that, no, Maximov was a Russian, that he was one of his spiritual children.

  ‘He’s a Jew,’ said Sokolov. ‘I knew his mother well.’

  Father Dmitry was near the end of his resistance now. He had resisted the anti-Semitism and hate he had been brought up with, the hate under Stalin, the hate under Hitler, and the prejudice from his spiritual children. But this was too much. He had already been lured into humiliating himself on television by an appeal to his patriotism. Once he had given in to that, it was a short step to join the K G B’s paranoia and start seeing the plots they saw.

  Father Dmitry mused. ‘Yes, we all need to unite now to defend the honour of Russia. We have many enemies.’ One of the K G B men asked him what united them, what they had in common. He thought about it and replied: ‘We are all Russian.’

  In the Russian language there are two words that we translate as ‘Russian’. One is rossiyanin or, its adjective, rossiisskiy, which means ‘someone from Russia’ or ‘of the Russian state’. The other is russkiy, which is used as both a noun and an adjective, meaning ‘ethnic Russian’, or ‘of the Russian language’. He used russkiy. A Russian Jew is a rossiyanin, while Father Dmitry was russkiy. This was what Father Dmitry decided he had in common with the K G B men.

  They brought up the possibility of him finally getting a new church again, and what he would do if he got one. He said he would fight alcoholism, he would uphold the spirit of the people. In short, he was saying he would act just as he had done before his arrest. But then he tailed off. He realized that was not the answer they were looking for.

  ‘Well, you will see yourselves. Facts will show. If it’s not to your liking, I’ll be there,’ he said, defeated at last. He wrote about this conversation many times in later years, as if unable to forget about it. The fight to save the Russian people was off. He would go along with the K G B, do their bidding, anything to get out of the hole he had dug for himself. The state could encourage abortion, spread alcoholism, sow distrust at the heart of family life, and he would not object.

  ‘That is correct,’ said Sokolov. ‘But look out, don’t even think about fooling us.’

  The next day came the telegram from the bishop. He had a church, just outside Moscow, at Vinogradovo. It was, he wrote, a miracle. But he must have known it was not. And he knew whom to thank for it. He owed his new life to the K G B. He overlooked the fact that it was the K G B who had destroyed his old life. That had been a thousand years before. He was their creature now. It had taken them a while, but they had dug out the vein of defiance that had crossed his character, and created yet another compliant servant for the state.

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith, the central character, is subjected to Room 101 and has his defiance broken, just as Father Dmitry was subjected and broken. After countless sessions of torture, his interrogator tells him: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.’

  That could have been written about Father Dmitry, and so perhaps could a later passage, when Winston Smith finally breaks: ‘two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed’. If two and two cease to add up to four, then everything stops h
aving to make sense. All you have to do is stop thinking and you are free.

  ‘How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it,’ was how Orwell imagined it.

  He wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future could be imagined as a boot stamping on a human face for ever, and that was what the K G B promised. They had endless power and could torment people for as long as they wanted. They could torment people until they realized for themselves that resistance was not just futile but wrong. It is a terrifying image, and Orwell’s description of the destruction of Winston Smith’s character is remarkably similar to what happened to Father Dmitry, but here he went too far. Humans are not machines. You cannot stamp on their faces for ever. If you deny people hope and trust and friendship, then they sicken and despair. People will not breed in captivity.

  After his destruction, Winston Smith went to a bar and drank – ‘It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into a stupor every night, and gin that revived him in the morning’ – alone and avoided. In the Russian case: for gin, read vodka.