The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  There was such a powerful strong country, the whole world respected it, and some people were even afraid, and now they just laugh at its helplessness.

  There was the K G B. People were scared just of the sound of it, and now no one is scared, and the K G B is seen as guilty before someone, before ‘them’.

  There was the communist party, millions-strong, ruling, which just had to say one word to be listened to, and now not only does no one listen, but it’s on trial.

  I asked Petrovsky how it was that Father Dmitry could support the K G B when they had ruined not just his life, but the lives of so many of his friends. He had, after all, been imprisoned in the north for almost a decade just for writing a poem. Petrovsky shrugged, and his face set a little more. The conversation was clearly going along the path he had expected, but that did not mean he was enjoying it.

  ‘He said that in the camp he did not die of hunger. There was always a ration, but that under this new system people were dying of hunger. The communists were better than these times, and he said that under the communists there was less temptation.’

  That was nonsense, and he knew it. Millions of people died in the camps from hunger, or from deliberate neglect, or from diseases caused by their weakened conditions. Father Dmitry himself worked in a camp hospital where prisoners did just that. Petrovsky grimaced when I confronted him with the weakness of the argument. His own grandfather had died in the camps in 1937, he said, but Father Dmitry felt he had earned the right to criticize or support the communists as and how he wished.

  The early 1990s got worse for Father Dmitry and for millions of other Russians. With Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, ill-thought-through and corrupt privatization deals were launched in an attempt to break the back of the communist system. Inflation, all but unknown in Soviet times, wiped out savings and the purchasing power of fixed incomes. Pensioners who had been assured that they would be looked after were forced to sell their belongings to buy food. Bewilderingly, unemployment appeared where previously everyone had been guaranteed a job. Often those still in employment had to wait months to get paid, while their factories’ new owners used the money to fund lavish lifestyles detailed in the vibrant new press.

  Where before the sardonic jokes that Russians swapped had been about their leaders, now they were about ‘New Russians’, the philistine, moneyed beneficiaries of the 1990s: ‘How much did that tie cost?’ ‘$500.’ ‘Ha, I got the same one for $700.’

  An attempt by hardliners in 1993 to block this headlong progress ended with Yeltsin sending tanks to bombard parliament and imposing a new constitution in which he could rule largely unchallenged. Father Dmitry’s newspaper, which had supported the attempted coup, was banned and relaunched as Tomorrow, but continued the same campaigns against the changes that were dramatically altering the country.

  Newly rich bankers and businessmen like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Potanin flaunted their wealth, while millions of ordinary workers were paid late or not at all. By the mid-1990s, Russian men were dying on average seven years earlier than during the anti-alcohol campaign, and the birth rate dropped from an average of 1.6 children per woman to 0.8. If such a birth rate is maintained, every generation will be less than half the size of the one preceding it.

  By 1996, Yeltsin’s popularity rating was in single figures and he faced a strong challenge in presidential elections from Vladimir Zyuganov and his revitalized communist party. As it turned out, Yeltsin would win comfortably by brokering every deal he could, including effectively giving away Russia’s most valuable assets to the big businessmen.

  But while it still looked like there might be a fair fight, Father Dmitry offered his own advice to the Russian electorate. It was not now a surprise that he advised his readers to vote for the communist Zyuganov, but the reasoning he used shows how much he had changed.

  He started off by defining Russia as Orthodox. He admitted that people of other faiths lived in Russia, such as Catholics and Muslims, but he denied they were Russian. ‘For the Catholics,’ he wrote, in reasoning that might raise eyebrows in Ireland or France, ‘country makes no difference, they are citizens of the whole world. With Muslims it is a little harder, they love a particular country. But what country? That’s up to them. If they live in Russia, which has been Orthodox since time immemorial, then they should dance off out of here.’

  He then summarized recent history. He said that Russians love their homeland and could not conceivably have done anything to harm it, so therefore someone else must have been to blame. And who might that have been?

  ‘Who stood in the government, in the propaganda, in the conducting of repression? Was it not people with Jewish names? There was only an insignificant percentage of Russians. There is of course nothing more to say. But the reply will come that it was people with Russian names who destroyed the churches. Yes, maybe they were destroyed with Russian hands, but not with a Russian head,’ he wrote. His reasoning was exactly the same as that used by his K G B tormentors in 1980. It was the Jews, his interrogator had said, who were giving the orders that were causing his misery. And his Russian captors had no choice but to obey. It had been the Jews, they had said, who had wanted to send him to prison. And now Father Dmitry was parroting it back. The Russians had just been obeying orders.

  So, to recap, he was advocating the expulsion of Russia’s 20 million Muslims, almost all of whom live in their ancestral homelands, which were conquered by Russia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he was saying that the Soviet repression of the Russians was the fault of the Jews.

  Any readers wondering what this had to do with the presidential race did not have long to wait. He was analysing which of the two candidates would do the most to support Orthodoxy and oppose everything else. That, it turned out, would be Zyuganov, despite the fact that Yeltsin was the one who went to church, and the one who had given the Church its freedom, while Zyuganov was a communist, and thus a member of the party that had destroyed the Church. Why? Because Yeltsin had had dealings with the West for too long. Zyuganov would not pollute the country with foreigners.

  ‘He is a patriot with an Orthodox style, who supports the thousand-year culture. And that is what our enemies are afraid of, that the Orthodox would make up with the communists, then it will be the only force, and then God-fearing Russia will be mighty and indivisible.’

  Petrovsky was not the only new disciple attracted to Father Dmitry in the 1980s. I had heard of another one while visiting Father Dmitry’s home village in the summer. He was called Father Vadim, and it was he who had reopened the church in Berezina in the mid-1990s.

  Where was he now though? That I did not know. Unecha, the little railway town, does not have many hotels. The relatively convenient ones were full of railway workers coming in or passing through and so I ended up in the Amber Hotel, which was not so much a hotel as a forest base. Cut off, surrounded by trees and falling snow, it was silent and as primeval as a 1970s concrete mock-Finnish construction could conceivably be.

  The hotel had several floors of rooms, a restaurant, a receptionist, a table-tennis table, and me. It was eerie. I felt like I had strayed on to the set of a horror film. Despite the cold and the snow, therefore, I cinched my coat tight around my face and walked into the forest.

  The tracks of the car that had brought me here were already covered, and I followed not so much a road through the forest as an absence of trees. There was really only one direction to walk in, and so I walked in it. After a quarter of an hour of silent progress, the forest opened up to a vast empty field and, just visible through the curtains of snow, was a church.

  There was something perfectly Russian about the view before me. If a Hollywood producer wanted an opening for a film, a backdrop for a fur-swaddled Anna Karenina and her troika to tell viewers that they were in Russia, that they could only be in Russia, then this sawtooth line of conifers, the bulging domes of this church, this vast empty white field and this drifting snow would
have been it. This is the Real Russia, to Russians and foreigners alike. No one thinks of the giant glass-roofed malls on the edge of Moscow as being primordially Russian. They do not even think of the endless ranks of grey apartment blocks as being properly Russian. When they think of Russia, they think of flatness, and forest, and wild places, and snow and always, somewhere, on the edge of the shot, a church like this one.

  The Hollywood producer might be tempted to linger on the scene for a while, but it was minus 20 and snowing hard, so I was not. I hurried towards the church. It was a Saturday evening, so a service would be due at some point and that meant a priest would be in attendance. A priest might know where I could find Father Vadim.

  Two old women stood on the rough wooden boards of the church’s floor. A few candles flickered before some of the icons. A pyramid screen shielded the holy core of the building, and a priest was bustling about. It was some time before I realized that a service was in progress and that I was a third of the congregation. The faithful of Unecha had clearly been deterred by the blizzard and I could not blame them. The church’s radiators did not even take the edge off the cold.

  After the service had stuttered to an end the priest, a suspicious-looking man with a vicious face and ginger beard, was brusque with me. He had no love, it seemed, for people with foreign accents and bright-red coats who asked questions. Father Vadim’s parish was in Old Guta, he snapped, and was there anything else?

  ‘No, nothing else, thank you.’

  He turned away without a word. By that stage it was dark, and it was a long cold worrying walk through the trees before I saw the lights of my hotel in its little clearing. I was the only customer in the restaurant and thus spoiled the evening of two waitresses and a barman. They got their revenge, however, by failing to tell me that I needed to order breakfast the night before if I wanted something to eat in the morning.

  Supper had not been substantial, so I was hungry even before my taxi came to pick me up the next day. It was the same driver who had driven me here in the first place and, when I told him I wanted the church in Old Guta, he said: ‘Oh, you mean Father Vadim’s place?’ I was clearly losing my touch. Taxi drivers always know more than you expect.

  He chattered away as we skirted Unecha and plunged into more forest, but I only listened enough to make polite noises. The trees here were thick and bleak, pines and birches. Some birches were dead and had fallen to make curved half-arches over the banked road. We were the only travellers that morning, and did not see another car until we arrived in Old Guta.

  The village was spread out, with the church just one house among many. A cross above the door was the only sign that it was anything special. The pink-painted porch contained embroidered banners on poles like those carried by trade union marchers, except these bore the bearded faces of Jesus or Orthodox saints. I could hear the service, so I nervously pushed open the door into the interior, only to be met by the worried face of a man with rugged white hair and a jutting moustache.

  ‘Leave it open a little, Zhanna Mikhailovna is feeling bad,’ he said.

  Here was a largish room, 6 metres by 3, with twenty-five or so worshippers packed in. I wormed my way to the back, and examined my surroundings. Prints of icons had been pasted on to 2mm fibreboard. A huge white peasant stove blasted out heat. The floor was plain knotty pine. It was hot: a fug of beeswax and incense and people and smoke. The screen protecting the holy place was more fibreboard and, as I looked, Father Vadim processed out, a battered face in his mid-forties above an immense tangled beard and a vast green and gold cloak.

  Most of the congregation were older women, though half-a-dozen uncovered male heads stood out among the headscarves. The chants faded backwards through the room, starting loudly at the choir at the front, all the way to silent me. The hand gestures of the ritual passed out like ripples in a pond. The people looked and sounded like a unit, what a church should be, and surely what a church would have been like in these villages before the revolution.

  It was a community, I realized – the kind of community that Father Dmitry had wanted to create. It was small and unpretentious, but it was itself and that was what mattered. When the worshippers lined up to take communion, a stocky man with swept-back hair gestured to me to join the queue in front of him. I declined, smiling.

  ‘Go on, don’t be scared,’ he said with a smile of his own.

  ‘No no,’ I said, searching for a reason not to go. ‘Um, I’m a Protestant.’

  He shied away as if I had tried to kiss him, and spent the rest of the service on the other side of the room watching me in confusion. Candles were passed out from the front, and a kind-eyed woman pressed one on me.

  ‘With the love of God,’ she said, and I took it. I liked standing there with a candle, part of a little twinkling constellation of people joined together by friendship and trust in this church on a Sunday morning. It was simple and affecting, far more so than the grand processions and choreography of a cathedral, and I felt a little flicker of hope. Perhaps, far below the radar, such groups are operating all across Russia and will provide the trust and friendship Russians need to rebuild their society from the wreckage left by the K G B.

  After the service, Father Vadim and I bundled into a minibus. He had no car, and a long way to get home, so a worshipper gave us a lift, through Unecha and down the long straight that heads east. The wind blew tendrils of snow across the tarmac ahead of us, and every passing car was trailed by a blizzard. Otherwise, it was a cold clear day.

  Father Vadim’s house was more untidy than anything I have ever seen. Boxes and paper and general stuff were strewn on every surface, but he clearly did not mind. He swept a space on a chair clear for me, then sat down too. His mother put the kettle on, then joined us.

  She had, it transpired, worked in a library in Moscow and had asked Father Dmitry if he would give a lecture there. This was 1990, still Soviet times, and asking a priest to address a crowd was a brave thing to do.

  ‘I had believed for about a year,’ said Father Vadim, ‘and that was when I met him. He was small and not as dramatic as I thought he would be. The first thing he made everyone do was pledge sobriety because our country is falling apart. He said that we had lost our sense of self and were drinking too much.’

  Father Vadim’s grey cat had got over its suspicion of me, and now sat on the table taking darts at my pen.

  ‘This was his way to save the country. He was very worried for Russia, and he said spirits were the big danger. It was fine for me, I had not drunk for a few years anyway, and after this meeting I said I wanted to be christened, so he took me to his flat and christened me.’

  Vadim went with him to church, and enjoyed it. He enjoyed the sense of community. At that time, Moscow was suffering from the severe economic policies at the end of communism. He said he did not really understand Father Dmitry’s desire to launch into politics. He just wanted a monk’s life, somewhere in a village, where things would be simpler.

  There are a lot of souls that need saving. A book by three Russian sociologists describes how, in 1974, one in eight children born in villages were officially registered as disabled because of exposure to alcohol in utero. That sounds terrible enough, but the situation has now got so much worse that all the categories used by such previous studies have become useless.

  ‘The situation is apparently past the point when diagnoses like “drinking”, “binge drinking” and perhaps even “alcoholism” reflect the true meaning of the problem. What is going on today is more aptly described as “pervasive human degradation”, “profound degeneration of a genetic pool”, and so on. While such qualifications may sound harsh, they are not off the mark at all,’ they wrote.

  Father Vadim wanted to help and, when the chance came to serve in Father Dmitry’s home village, he grabbed it.

  ‘Our villages are dying. There is no help from the government. It is closing the schools, the medical centres. There are no farms, just a few people work and that’s all. T
his drunkenness keeps growing, and people have lost their sense of life. People either leave to find work, or they get drunk,’ he said. ‘It used to be men who drank but now women have started to as well. This degradation is serious. You do not notice it so much in towns, but in villages there is nothing. In the 1980s there were children, schools, but now it’s all gone. A house here would cost you 5,000 roubles. That’s with a garden. In fact, offer someone your mobile phone and they would happily exchange it for a house. Only old people are left, and they’re dying.’

  I asked him what he thought of the government, which has, after two decades of doing nothing, finally launched policies to save the Russian population. Vladimir Putin, in his spell as prime minister, promised to stabilize the population at 143 million, but by the time he said it that number already looked unrealistic.

  Putin has boasted of improvements to the birth rate – a 20 per cent increase in the number of children being born – and credited his government’s policies for it. But most of that increase was really just an echo of the anti-alcohol campaign of the 1980s. The birth rate increased under Gorbachev, and that baby boom meant a bulge in the number of parents two decades later and thus more children. But the effect will be temporary. Soon the parenting generation will be those born after 1991, when the number of Russians born halved. To stabilize the population, those women would have to start having heroic numbers of children, and there is no sign of that happening.

  The government needs to restrict alcohol sales but, mindful of what happened to Gorbachev when he tried to do so with vastly greater state resources behind him, it is cautious in doing so.

  ‘We hope in God and for a miracle because nothing good now comes from our own brains. The government really does nothing, no one in the country believes in the government. I look at the future with pessimism.’