The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  This peculiar ritualized battle has been all but forgotten in Russia today. If you have not read the history of the dissident movement, and do not understand the complex relationship between the officials’ equal but opposite desires to punish the prisoners while avoiding publicity, it makes no sense at all. Spodin, however, as he guided us around Perm-36, spoke of the prisoners like the heroes they were.

  ‘Everything was done to break their spirits, to demean them, but they resisted.’

  Further down the track was the Special Regime camp, which made the ordinary Tough Regime barracks seem luxurious. Here the cells were gloomy, their windows fitted with downward-slanting slats so prisoners would never see outside. The cell walls were plastered with uneven concrete – called ‘fur’ in prison slang – to make them ugly and uncomfortable to lean against. The exercise yard is a square of three paces by three paces. Its walls are three metres high, and topped with a mesh of barbed wire, meaning inmates here would never see anything but sky and walls.

  ‘When I was a teenager, I thought this was a warehouse,’ said Spodin. ‘There were never any people, it was so quiet, it was only later I realized it was a camp. Our parents used to say people were locked up because of the war. They never told us these were political prisoners or anything.’

  As we walked out of the barracks and back into the open air, Spodin described his own family’s experiences of repression. His father’s parents came from Ukraine and were sent to the Urals in 1934 during the collectivization campaign. Some of his father’s siblings remained behind, and he had aunts and cousins in Ukraine whom he had never met. His family was lucky, however: at least the children had been able to remain with family members.

  ‘The state often isolated the parents and raised the children itself. The state wanted to create a culture of informers,’ he said.

  His confession unlocked something in the other members of the tour, and people began to volunteer details about their own past.

  ‘My grandmother was also repressed,’ said a burly man in a blue T-shirt.

  ‘My family was from Ukraine too, but was sent here,’ said a woman in a red dress.

  This is the kind of experience the museum directors want to provide for everyone. They want to make ordinary people realize that the country’s history is their history too, and that it stretches forward to today. As we walked out, we saw a group of nine officers from the O M O N, Russia’s riot police, all in uniform. They were beginning a tour of their own. These are the government’s enforcers, and their image is of mindless, brainwashed thugs. Yet here they were, standing patiently while a young woman explained the repressive system of the Soviet state.

  ‘Those are the kind of comrades who really need this place,’ said the burly man in the blue T-shirt, with an emphasis on the word ‘comrades’. Everyone laughed.

  The director of the museum is Viktor Shmurov, a heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He is a historian and was the first person to spot the unique possibilities of the Perm-36 site. Since it dates back to the Stalin years, it has the wooden barracks and facilities of the original gulag camps, which is why he was so keen to preserve it.

  He and his friends, short of cash and building materials, even managed to get the camp’s old sawmilling equipment working. They ran a timber business in the early 1990s, ploughing the profits back into the camp. The Russian word for a saw bench – pilorama – gives its name to the yearly festival.

  ‘This has been a gradual process. We were building the museum for a long time, and it was hard. We wanted to present it in a positive way,’ he said. In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of the museum’s opening, they organized a concert.

  ‘I don’t like speeches, congratulations, things like that, but we invited a lot of bards and poets to perform. They went on to the stage, it was a beautiful concert and that is how Pilorama started.’

  Two years later, they brought in political experts and activists to hold discussions and the shape of the festival was created: music, film and free conversation, all on a site where previously none of these things had been possible.

  ‘Here are thousands of free people who behave absolutely as free people,’ he said. ‘If Pilorama is ever cancelled, it will show things have got very bad here, something will be rotten in Denmark. But I have no doubt that we will continue.’

  One festival does not equal political freedom, but it is a start. If the winter of protests does lead to Russia’s sclerotic politics becoming a little livelier, it could have an important impact on Russia’s population crisis. Estonia had similar health problems to Russia (though not quite as bad) when part of the Soviet Union. After independence, the life expectancy of the average Estonian man initially sank, but then soared to all-time highs. You can see a similar pattern in other communist countries that have joined the European Union: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia. Prosperity and democracy does seem to be a good way to wean a population off massive alcohol abuse.

  The Pilorama discussion sessions inevitably focused on the winter election season, with highly technical statistical presentations showing how fraud had been committed, and what ordinary citizens could do to stop it. The mobilization of thousands of Muscovites to observe the polls had forced electoral officials to behave more honestly, the experts explained, proving it with graphs and photographs. In the December election, the results from Moscow followed no conceivable statistical logic. It was clear officials had falsified the returns. By March, however, the curve was almost identical to that seen in a Western European election. Officials had been forced to record accurate results. It was a heady demonstration of the power of free citizens to affect their own destiny.

  Every one of the sixty chairs was full, and another thirty or forty people were standing at the back.

  It is a mark of the importance of the event that a group of young people from a Kremlin-linked youth group attempted to sabotage the discussions, asking aggressive questions and accusing the speakers of serving foreign interests. Sergei Kovalyov, a human rights veteran who served time in Perm-36 in the 1980s, fielded the remarks with admirable restraint, considering one of the young men was wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt. I could not help wondering what would happen if a man of a similar age wore a swastika into Auschwitz.

  ‘It would be very good if we had decommunistication, like they have had denazification,’ said Kovalyov after he had finally extricated himself from the discussion. ‘You see the support that there still is for the Soviet Union, and among people that were not even born at its height. They were all born after the death of Stalin, and even after Khrushchev. The oldest among them is probably only forty. There are some people among them you can talk to, but their emotions keep getting in the way.’

  He was on his way to the toilet when I interrupted him. It is a rectangular building in the corner of the camp, where inmates had squatted at twelve squalid concrete holes above a noisome pit of slurry. I asked him if it was not peculiar to be using the same toilet again after all these years away.

  ‘That was the only toilet, and you had to walk from the barracks over there. It is a long way, particularly in the cold, and many of the old men had dirtied their clothes before they reached it. Think how long it would take someone if he had a walking stick,’ he said. ‘In fact, if you don’t stop asking me questions, I risk the same fate.’

  The popular weekly Arguments and Facts had launched a publicity campaign against Pilorama, running an interview with a former prison guard who rubbished the dissidents’ claims to have been treated badly here. Vladimir Kurguzov is chairman of the Council of Veterans of Perm-35, by which he means the people who served as guards over the dissidents, rather than the dissidents themselves. His testimony was intended to be aggressive but was unintentionally rather sad, revealing an old man who has been left behind by events. He boasted of the dissidents he had jailed, including Kovalyov, and then described seeing Kovalyov again.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ he had asked. Kovalyov said he did not.
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br />   ‘That cannot be. I abused you in Perm-35 and 36, how can you not remember your major oppressor? I worked here for days on end, everything came through me. So why don’t they remember the main monster?’ he replied. He may have been trying to be sarcastic, but was clearly offended by how history had flipped round. He had been in a position of power, and was now one of life’s losers, while Kovalyov is fêted around the world.

  He insisted that conditions in the camp had actually been very pleasant, that the dissidents ate better than most people in the country and had had nothing to complain about.

  ‘They were in the warm and dry, they ate at a table with a tablecloth, having previously looked at a menu. Apart from that their books were published abroad. When they needed new glasses, they declared a hunger strike or refused to work. Therefore, people did not die in our camp, like they did in Kolyma,’ he said.

  It was a telling comment, with its total incomprehension of the motivation of people he had seen every day for years. He seemed unable to understand that it was the fact of being locked up that was the problem, not the conditions. If you have been imprisoned for writing a poem, no amount of tablecloths is going to make you happy about it. The difference between this Kurguzov and the likes of Kovalyov is – ironically, considering the positions they used to occupy – that between a slave and a free man.

  Kurguzov, like the young men sent to disrupt the Pilorama discussions, insisted that the festival was funded from abroad (it is, in fact, mostly supported by the local government) to harm the image of Russia. That is an argument that only works if you look the wrong way down the telescope. If you turn it round you see, not the shameful fact of the camp, but the heroic resistance of the inmates. The attendees of the festival preferred to focus on the trust and respect among the former prisoners, rather than the whining of their former guards.

  The festival had erected a stage in the centre of the camp, and the performers could look down the length of the barracks to the front gate. I had wondered who would play for the finale, expecting an earnest bard with a guitar and a songbook of protests. Fortunately, the organizers knew their audience better than that, and out came Markscheider Kunst, a Russian ska band with a horn section exuberant even by the magnificent standards of the St Petersburg music scene.

  Their two drummers whipped out their irresistible rhythm, while the saxophone and trumpet sent a torrent of glorious brass through the old cells, between the bars, over the fences and into the forest beyond. No evil spirit of the past could withstand such joyful playfulness, and the crowd whooped along. A young woman at the front jumped up and down, her long glossy dark hair whipping back and forth in time with the music.

  They are not a political band, but it was hard not to notice the lyrics to their anthemic ‘Krasivo Sleva’. ‘Winter is ending, we’ll start again from the beginning, winter is ending, winter is ending,’ they sang, and once again the horns blasted out their glorious crescendo.

  The night before, my tent had been one of hundreds by the river in a field noisy with music, laughter and singing. Beneath all those sounds though, from the other tents, from all directions, had come the muffled but unmistakable sounds of young Russians getting busy making a new generation.

  Postscript

  It was 28 June, the anniversary of Father Dmitry’s death, and I went looking for his grave in Moscow’s Friday Cemetery.

  I cut left and right, trending downhill along paths pushed through the mass of granite. Graves were piled together in vast numbers. It looked impossible that there could be room for as many people below the ground as were commemorated above it. Fifty-year-old graves were wedged up against ones from last week.

  Close to the ragged wall that separated the cemetery from, by the sound of it, a major highway, a crowd of fifty or so people were already gathered. A young woman, seeing my camera, showed me through and pointed out Dudko’s grave – 24 February 1922 to 28 June 2004. His life had coincided, more or less, with that of the Soviet Union.

  Here was a mixed crowd: women in headscarves, young and old; men in open-necked shirts, some bearded, most not. There was Father Mikhail Dudko, Father Alexander and Father Vladimir, all in the sweeping robes of their office. They donned pectoral crosses. Father Mikhail slipped a golden cloth around his neck, and the service began.

  The light-blue fences placed around many of the graves interrupted the unity of the congregation, which was forced to cram itself in where it could. But the Orthodox chant was glorious for all that. Father Mikhail’s cracked voice led the chant in a strained falsetto; then the lovely many-level response mingled itself with the wind in the trees.

  The Old Slavonic chanting had its usual lulling effect. The antiquated language made it easy to concentrate on the purity of the sound, not the meaning of the sentences, rather like going to see the opera in a language you do not speak. Father Alexander took over after a while, his nostrils were flared slightly and his bushy beard did not obscure the pure good looks that Russian soldiers have in World War Two newsreels.

  ‘Dear fathers, brothers and sisters. Today, we honour the memory of Father Dmitry. Today, we have made a pilgrimage to this holy place where Father Dmitry, his body is buried. His soul is always with us, because he did a lot for us, he strengthened us, he united us. Is this not true? In the hardest conditions of persecution, he supported us. And thanks be to God that we are once more together,’ the priest said, warming to his theme. ‘He was a true father, he worried about his children. That’s how he was, and this affected us also. He gathered us in, and treated our spiritual diseases. He had a particular faith, a particular spirit. We honour him with kind memories, bright memories, we pray for him.’

  A mutter of prayer passed through the worshippers, whose attention was completely fixed on the priest. He passed the gold cloth to Father Vladimir, and the chant renewed itself. White incense smoke swirled among the gravestones. The crowd begged with their sweet voices for forgiveness from God in the manner that Russians have prayed for centuries, ever since the first king in long-ago Kiev adopted the faith of the Greeks.

  The wind sighed in the trees, and the sunlight danced on the gravestones. The horrible heat of the day did not penetrate down here. The chanting lulled me again as it faded in and out. Today’s Moscow might be a bustling city of banks and billboards and Bentley showrooms, but this felt like the Russia that had endured for centuries before banks were even thought of.

  When the ceremony was over, a small group of women came over to quiz me gently on who I was and what I was doing. I explained my interest in Father Dmitry, and my concern over the falling population, and they began to tell me about how they had met him and what he meant for them and how much he had cared about the dying Russian nation.

  ‘When I first went to his house, I was amazed, just by what it looked like at first. There was this terrible mess, but that was just on the surface. His whole family, well, they paid no attention to these domestic things. I completely did not understand. If you had something, you had it; if not, not; for me it was really strange. They lived in a sort of non-material way. That was the first thing,’ one woman called Ksenia told me.

  A second woman chipped in: ‘When you entered their family, you entered a different world.’

  Ksenia again: ‘That’s where it all started.’

  And the second woman interrupted: ‘It was like the earth opened.’

  Ksenia confirmed that: ‘Yes, it opened, and I began to, I’m talking about myself, I began to grow. There were all these discussions, that went deeper, deeper, deeper.’

  Another woman, with a drawn middle-aged face, a few strands of hair falling out of her headscarf, stepped towards me. It was not easy to approach because of the narrow paths between the graves, but she was determined. She wanted, she said, to tell me her story.

  She had been married, she said, only a short time when her husband began to drink. He drank vodka every day, and came home staggering and violent. All her attempts to stop him had come to nothing, a
nd her life was horrible. That was when she met Father Dmitry.

  ‘I saw him, and, how to say, he was like, he shone, he glowed with light, you could shut your eyes and see him; this was love, he glowed with love. He was white-haired, his hair was all like this,’ she said, waving her hands around above her head with a broad smile. She had met him, she said, in the late 1980s when Father Dmitry was holding prayer meetings at which he made lists of the people present and made them promise not to drink. It was the dam he erected against the vodka engulfing the country and the misery engulfing himself.

  ‘I want to tell you what happened with me,’ she said. ‘So listen. When I went to him, I wrote down my question, and he used to answer all the questions that we wrote down. I used to go there, and it became winter, and it was dark and my son said he could not let me go alone, and would come with me to escort me. I said to him that he needed to relax, that he was always working, that he came home late, that he could not come, but he said he wanted to come with me. And he started to come too, and I said to the priest: “I don’t drink but my husband drinks and I have come for him. I want you to write him down on your list.”’

  Father Dmitry refused, saying that her husband had to come himself to pledge sobriety. She went home and begged and begged her husband, but he refused and refused.

  ‘Until one beautiful day I asked him and he agreed. This was like a miracle. We get to the train station, he doesn’t turn back. We get to the bus stop, he doesn’t turn back. He gets to the library and he doesn’t turn back,’ she said, her eyes gleaming.

  They had sat at the back of the library where Father Dmitry held his meetings, and she had gripped her husband’s hand. He was distrustful of the gathering, as if it was some kind of cult.