The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (19 page)

to finding texts and puzzling out

their meanings.

This is alien to Orthodox

tradition, which stresses hierarchy

and the importance of priests in

administering the sacraments. If

these new young believers were to

be truly Orthodox, they needed

churches to attend, but where could

they find one that sated their energy,

their intelligence and their questing

spiritual hunger?

That was when Ogorodnikov

heard about a church on the edge of

Moscow, in an old cemetery, where

an unusual priest was actually

preaching to parishioners. Russia’s

Orthodox Church never had much

of a tradition of preaching, even in

pre-revolutionary times, but there

were always itinerant preachers, holy

fools who rejected the world and

travelled from town to town,

enlightening crowds at markets and

crossroads. The priest was cast from

that same rebellious, truth-telling

mould.

He was Father Dmitry.

‘In his services, in these talks, it

was like being alive,’ Ogorodnikov

said, the wonder still audible in his

voice. ‘The Church had lost so

much, there were so many martyrs,

but it was quiet about it. Sermons

were censored and had to be as

abstract as possible. Priests had to

talk in an incomprehensible language

in the sermons. It was like they were

not addressing the people, but

something they could not see. If the

words entered into your soul, so you

heard the meaning, so you felt Christ

in your heart, then the priest would

be banned, he would be sacked, and

you know he would not be able to

find work, feed his wife. It was a

dangerous situation.’

Although Father Dmitry had

been

in

the

camps,

he

was

rehabilitated in 1956 and his criminal

record erased. That meant he was

free to finish his religious training

and get a job as a priest. His original

church at Transfiguration Square

was blown up, but he got a job in

another one less than a kilometre

away and there he administered to

his parishioners as best he could.

People of all ages, he said later, kept

coming to him with questions about

depression, about alcoholism, about

abortion and violence.

One night, he had the radical idea

of treating the questions he kept

being asked not individually but

collectively. Many of them were on

the same themes, after all. If he

could gather the afflicted people

together, not only would they hear

his words of comfort, but also they

would feel support from each other.

On 8 December 1973, he

encouraged the attendees of his

regular Saturday service to write

down questions – ‘about what you’d

most like us to talk about, about the

questions you have, about your

doubts, about the things that puzzle

you’ – that they would like him to

answer. The questions covered every

topic he had hoped for: from the

practical (‘Where can I find a

Bible?’) to the theological (‘They’ve

flown in spaceships but didn’t see

God. Where

is

God?’),

and,

increasingly, to the personal too

(‘Father, I’m a drunk. My family is

gone, my life is shot, and yet I can’t

stop drinking . . . What should I

do?’).

Ogorodnikov was astonished.

‘This

was

completely

unexpected, and when Father Dmitry

answered our questions publicly, it

was like a mouthful of water, it was

so unusual, you had a sense that it

was not true, it was hard to believe

that in Moscow there was suddenly a

place you could freely speak out.

And the most important thing is that

the public came to these talks, and

these were people you never saw in

church, serious intellectuals, and not

just intellectuals. There were a lot of

Western correspondents – you could

tell them by their clothing. Everyone

else wore black and grey, so you

could tell them immediately.’

The day after our conversation I

went out to see the church he had

been talking about. From the sun-

blasted tarmac of Transfiguration

Square, site of Father Dmitry’s first

church (the one that was blown up

during Khrushchev’s anti-religious

campaign), I walked past the

Mossovet cinema, along the tram

tracks, and there it was, through a

fine gateway. Before entering, I

wandered into the attached cemetery,

mainly to enjoy the shade under the

trees. Although still early, the heat

was building again.

From the graveyard, I walked to

the church, a fine pink building, with

a green roof. A plaque told visitors it

had been built in 1790 and was

protected by the state. Inside was

cool relief from the dry furnace of

the

street.

Old

women

wore

headscarves tightly knotted under

their jowls. Young women’s heads

were covered more artfully, their

scarves showing the contours of

their hair.

The sanctuary, and the icon-

covered screen that protected it, was

off in the left-hand corner of a wide,

shallow room. It was an awkward

arrangement, reflecting the fact that

the church had been cut in half to

allow Old Believers – members of an

ancient Orthodox sect – to share it

with the official Orthodox. I had in

fact initially entered the Old Believer

side of the building, and been faced

with a young man in peasant garb

crossing himself and bowing to the

altar repeatedly. I waited for him to

stop so I could ask him if I was in

the right place, but he kept going for

two or three minutes, so I left and

found someone else.

From Father Dmitry’s first days

as a priest, he kept notebooks, little

accounts of meetings. He mentioned

no names, just described a woman,

or an old woman, or a child, or a

man, in encounters that provide

unique flashes of insight into private

life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Official literature was still full of

Soviet advances in healthcare and

the extensive provision of leisure

facilities. Father Dmitry’s notebooks

tell a different story: despair. Stalin’s

re-engineering had failed to make

the Russian soul happier. Instead it

was sick. Father Dmitry’s notebooks

record the squalid crimes they

committed and the procession of

horrors that filled horrible lives.

‘An

old

woman

came

to

confession. She did not give her

child the breast. He died. She had

two abortions,’ said one entry.

In another he told a drunkard not

to drink.

‘When you drink, you forget a

little,’ the drunkard replied. ‘I don’t

see the point of not drinking.’

Father

Dmitry

had

been

preaching for more than a decade

when, in the early 1970s, his

sermons

began

to

gain

more

attention

and

the

likes

of

Ogorodnikov began to attend. He

was part of a small group of

believers – Gleb Yakunin, Anatoly

Levitin-Krasnov and Alexander Men

were the others – who wanted to

revitalize the faith, to make it

relevant to modern people and to

reach out to the casualties of the

Soviet experiment. They had a lot of

work to do.

Before the 1917 revolution, the

Orthodox faith was so conservative

and ignorant that it was largely

confined to the illiterate. Most

educated Russians had abandoned

the Church for Marxism and

materialism. Now, in the 1960s and

1970s, the trend was reversed. It was

Marxism that was sterile and corrupt.

One atheist wrote, after attending

Father

Dmitry’s

church,

‘the

immorality of Soviet society, its

inhumanity and corruption, its lack

of a moral code or credible ideals,

means that Christ’s teaching comes

through to those who it reaches as a

shining contrast. It stresses the value

of the individual, of humaneness,

forgiveness, gentleness, love.’

Marxism was now the official

ideology and it became the target of

the same kind of revulsion that had

once been aimed at the Church.

Father Dmitry compared the death

and horror he saw and heard about

every day to a war, but a war with

no clear enemy.

‘There are other difficulties,

perhaps as great as times of war,’ he

said in one sermon recorded in

1972, ‘pervasive sin, when vice, like

rust or vermin, is corrupting our

values and morally crippling the

rising

generation,

when

moral

standards are disintegrating, when

drunkenness,

hooliganism

and

murder are increasing.’

Khrushchev had briefly spoken

out about Stalin’s crimes. His was

only a partial account – he did not

mention his own role, for example –

but even that vanished when he fell

from power. Under Brezhnev, the

victims of the K G B were expected

to keep their mouths shut. For Father

Dmitry, that meant their wounds

would

fester.

He

believed

in

openness, and in talking about what

no one else mentioned: his own eight

and a half years in the camps, the K

G B agents standing among the

parishioners while he addressed

them, or the police trying to block

access to his services.

‘What a mob of them there was,

in and out of uniform, and all

gathered just to prevent people from

entering the church,’ he said in his

third question-and-answer session.

This was heady stuff. No one else

acknowledged publicly the way

police officers abused their powers

to harass ordinary Russians. ‘As a

priest, I must defend the faithful

when they undergo persecutions of

any sort. I, the shepherd, must

defend my sheep from the wolves.

As long as the atheists act like

wolves, I’ll come out against them.’

He stressed hope, and the

impossibility of living without it.

Why stay sober if tomorrow will be

no better than today? Why have

children if the future they live in will

be as miserable as the present we

have now? The important thing was

to believe that tomorrow could be

better. As he answered one alcoholic

who wrote him a question: ‘I ask all

of you in church right now to pray

for

such

unfortunate

people.

Surround them with your attention

and warmth. Remember that saving

such a person is the greatest of

deeds.’

He realized that trust between

people is what makes us happy. Any

totalitarian state is based on betrayal.

It needs people to inform on each

other, to avoid socializing, to interact

only through the state and to avoid

unsanctioned meetings. This was

unspoken of course. No official

came out and said the communist

state

survived

only

because of

suspicion, distrust and slander, but it

was true. The greatest enemy of the

state was its own people. If they

began to trust each other, it could not

command their fear and obedience.

The misery that Father Dmitry

heard

in

confession

was

the

symptom of the state’s policy. No

one trusted anyone, and that is a

parlous way to live. People were

living in solitary confinement in the

middle of crowds, and it was killing

them. Father Dmitry set out to break