The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (16 page)

dairy closed eight or nine years ago.

You could get milk cheaper from the

south.’

He pointed to the derelict barns,

empty-windowed, that had once

protected the village’s dairy herd

from the weather. The Soviet Union

had created a collective farm up

here, despite the near-impossibility

of carving food out of this poor soil

in the three months of summer. It

gave employment to the locals until

the early 1990s, but could not

survive the transition to a market

economy.

The people who laid the bricks

for the barns and houses must have

thought

they

were

creating

something permanent, that they were

taming

nature.

An

electricity

substation, built for the collective

farm, had ‘1977’ set into its side in

lighter-coloured bricks. You only

put a date on the side of a building if

you intend it to outlive you and

speak to future generations. Perhaps

the man who laid those bricks

imagined children in a hundred years

mouthing the numbers and being

amazed by how old it was.

If he did, he will not be getting

his wish. The bricks were rotting,

and the mortar had fallen out. No

wires led to it, and the roof was

slipping off. Before long it would be

another lump in the fields like the

old camp morgue which Merzlikin

led us past.

We walked through the village’s

own cemetery with fresh graves and

plastic flowers, down a slope and up

into the trees. And here, the

mosquitoes came in their thousands.

The hum around my veil became a

scream as we passed into the

prisoners’ graveyard. Row after row

of little metal signs, and occasionally

a cross, marked the graves. Some of

the humps had personal monuments

erected since 1991 by relatives:

Ukrainian

names,

mostly,

and

Lithuanians too.

But most graves had nothing to

identify them. These were Russians,

and their nation did not have the

desire

of

the

Ukrainians

and

Lithuanians to remember the victims

of the Soviet Union as martyrs.

The records noting who is buried

where are not perfect. Often people

seeking to reinter a body find it does

not belong to the person they’re

looking for. A Lithuanian general –

Jonas Juodišius – is buried here

somewhere, having been imprisoned

for being a Lithuanian general.

When Lithuanians came to try to

repatriate his remains, they could not

find him, so they left him be and

erected the monument on this

foreign soil instead.

Hryhorii Lakota, a bishop from

the Ukrainian Uniate Church, which

is

Orthodox

by

ritual

but

acknowledges the pope, was buried

here too. His crime was his refusal to

accept Russian Orthodoxy. He has

been canonized, and his body moved

to Kiev.

Moss and horsetails grew among

the graves, and I traced the rows of

humps, reading the few names that

had been picked out for separate

commemoration, while trying not to

overlook the 99 per cent that had

not. Here was Punin, Akhmatova’s

lover and the man who did not share

Karsavin’s warm feelings towards

mosquitoes. And here was Karsavin

too. Tanya stood by his grave,

planning her memorial.

‘It is like a debt to my father and

mother,’ she said. She had come a

long way to repay it, and would be

back next year to see it done.

We sat in the schoolroom and

drank a bottle of vodka that Nikolai

Andreyevich had brought. Then we

ate our lunches. I was secretly

pleased when Tanya asked for one

of my sandwiches.

The year before, Merzlikin said,

workmen had come to repair the

school, which is an important

building since children from remote

villages have to live here as well as

study. They had done a very poor

job. He pointed to damp stains

which had started in the corner of

the room and now spread across

much of the ceiling.

‘It was not like this before,’ he

paused, for emphasis. ‘Before they

repaired the roof. This building

won’t last long now unless they

come back and do it properly.’

I think we were all rather

affected by our experience in the

cemetery, though we had spent only

an hour or so among the hundreds

of graves, because Tanya and I got

into a pointless squabble over

whether British people or Russian

people

were

more

cultured.

Perversely, we were each arguing

the merits of the other’s nation.

Merzlikin hovered around us, his

kind

eyes

concerned

by

this

inexplicable disagreement.

The

vodka

drunk,

the

sandwiches eaten, we walked back to

catch our evening train. Nikolai

Andreyevich continued his lecture

on the journey back, and Tanya and

I let it wash over us, tired out by the

day. Despite my mosquito armour, I

had rings of bites around both

ankles, where they had found the

weakness of the single layer of sock.

I fingered them, trying to relieve the

itching without scratching. There

were nineteen bites on my left ankle,

and seven on my right. My scalp felt

like a moonscape beneath my hair.

They had bitten through the cloth of

my hat so many times I could not

distinguish the individual bites. I was

feeling unsteady.

‘You have the mosquito fever,’

said Nikolai Andreyevich. ‘It will

pass.’

I had been in Abez for seven

hours, and half of those had been

inside, and I had mosquito fever and

felt unsettled. Prisoners stayed up

here for years.

Our carriage was hitched to the

Moscow train, and I wanted to go

and find my bunk and lie down and

sleep, but I felt bound by politeness

to sit on this hard seat for the two

hours to Inta and listen to Nikolai

Andreyevich.

‘There, that was a camp,’ he said,

‘there were 30,000 people living

there.’ He pointed through the grimy

window at an unremarkable stretch

of tundra.

‘Up there was an aerodrome.’ He

pointed to a slight rise above the

track. ‘See see see see see the

embankment. Now you will see a

bridge.’ Pause. ‘There was another

bridge there before.’

At last, at Inta, they left me to

continue my journey alone, and I

picked my way down the train to my

bunk.

4

The generation of change

Back in Moscow, I recognized

Alexander Ogorodnikov as soon as I

saw him, although I had previously

no idea what he looked like. The

man walking towards me – tall, slim,

bearded, rimless glasses – looked

like a filmmaker, a ladies’ man or a

Soviet dissident, and Ogorodnikov

had been all three.

Mutual friends recommended

Ogorodnikov to me as a man who

could tell me about Moscow in the

years after Father Dmitry had been

released from prison, the years after

Stalin’s death. I wanted to know

how religious believers had been

treated, and how they had behaved

towards each other. We shook hands

and he ushered me out of the cool of

the station into the flaying heat of

Moscow. If anything the city was

even hotter now I was back from

Abez. The tar melted like chocolate

and the air throbbed on streets

designed for parades not shade.

We stopped off in a supermarket,

where he chose herring, biscuits, tea

and bread before walking me to his

home: a flat near the top of a nine-

storey block. His kitchen window

commanded a view of other nine-

storey blocks and, in the distance, a

factory chimney with four horizontal

stripes.

He was curious to know why I

wanted to talk to him and, when I

told him, he said he too was

planning a book about the 1960s and

1970s. For almost all Russians who

remember the Soviet Union, those

decades now glow like a golden age.

Most people remember them for

their stability, for holidays, jobs and

even a degree of access to consumer

goods.

For

the

likes

of

Ogorodnikov, the memories are

different: those were the heyday of

Soviet dissent.

All

over

the

world,

the

generation that grew up after World

War Two proved rebellious and

iconoclastic. The Soviet Union may

n o t have seen the kind of protests

witnessed in Paris, Prague or

Chicago, but young people still tried

to change the world in their own

way. Poets, writers and historians

like Solzhenitsyn circulated their

work in illicit copies. When they

were

arrested,

their

friends

publicized

their

trials

and

imprisonment with fresh home-

printed pamphlets.

Older dissidents like Andrei

Sakharov – a nuclear physicist

whose anger at unnecessary Soviet

bomb tests morphed into concern

about the denial of rights to Soviet

citizens – acted as a focus for

younger men and women. They

made

contact

with

Western

journalists

and

diplomats

who

helped them smuggle their writings

out of the country. Everything they

did ran counter to the direction

desired by their government.

Some of their actions were

deliberately high profile, such as a

protest on Red Square by eight

people against the invasion of

Czechoslovakia in 1968. They knew

almost all their fellow citizens would

criticize them, in the same way their

fellow citizens criticized the Czechs

for not being grateful for the Soviet

army’s help in defeating the Nazis.

One participant recorded how a

pleasant-looking blonde woman saw

their protest and joined in the chorus

of ‘scum’ directed towards them.

‘People like you should be

stamped out. Together with your

children, so they don’t grow up as

morons,’ the woman said.

But the protesters did not care.

They wanted to show that not

everyone in their country believed in

force being used to defeat the

popular uprising of the Prague

Spring.

‘We had already crossed over to

the other side. Freedom was the

dearest thing on earth to us,’ a

participant said, according to a book

prepared

later

by

Natalya

Gorbanevskaya,

one

of

her

comrades.

Other dissidents favoured smaller

actions: reading poems, collecting

information on Stalin’s victims,

studying

their

nation’s

ancient

traditions. Their discretion made

little difference to the government,

however, which saw them all as

dangerous and used the police, the K

G

B,

prosecutors

and

even

psychiatrists against them.

The men who governed the

country had all risen to the top under

Stalin, when thousands of top

officials were dragged off and shot

as spies on the flimsiest of evidence.

They found themselves in senior

positions after the last major purges

took place in 1937–8 and knew

instinctively that innovation and free

thought were dangerous. After all,

everyone who had thought freely in

the 1930s had been killed. Stability

was the new spirit of the times. The

rapid and bewildering changes of the