The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (21 page)

an

independent Christian society. It is

not just that we had lunch or

something, we lived the life, you

understand.’

5

Reds admit ban of rebel priest

I missed my train to Kabanovo, the

village where Father Dmitry was

exiled when he lost his church in

central Moscow. The next train

would not leave for another hour,

but it was already waiting at the

platform so I sat in my seat and felt

the carriage heat up as the sun grilled

the roof. I was careful to select a

place on the shady side.

Other passengers were filing in.

Most of the men – like me – had

bought bottles of beer, to keep them

going on their journeys out to their

dachas. It was too early in the day

for vodka, which was a relief.

Vodka needs company, but beer can

be

drunk

alone.

Beer-drinking

neighbours would allow me to read

Father Dmitry’s sermons in peace.

Russia has, of course, always

been famous for drinking. One of

the first mentions of the nation in all

history – in the tenth century –

features King Vladimir in Kiev

rejecting Islam because ‘drinking is

the joy of the Russians. We cannot

exist without that pleasure.’ Books

about

pre-revolutionary

villages

describe how drinking was the major

form of entertainment. If peasants

had savings, they spent them on

vodka. Their drinking was largely

restricted by their spending power,

however, so alcohol consumption

became self-limiting. If peasants got

rich, they got drunk, which meant

they got poor, which meant they got

sober.

Before 1917, duties on alcohol

provided up to 40 per cent of

government revenue and Lenin

pledged to ban the trade, since it was

blocking the nation’s path to

communism. That proved hard to

do, however. Like the tsarist

autocracy before it, the Soviet Union

struggled to provide consumer

goods and found alcohol a useful

way to make money from its

population. By 1925, alcohol was a

state monopoly, and by 1940 there

were more shops selling alcohol than

fruit, meat and vegetables put

together.

It did not stop there. Production

of spirits trebled between 1940 and

1980, and the consumption of all

alcoholic drinks – including wine

and beer as well as vodka and

brandy – increased eightfold. Most

of this growth was in the Russian

heartland,

rather

than

on

the

traditionally Muslim fringes of the

empire where drinking was less

popular. Wages were rising and

living standards too, as the damage

caused by the war was repaired and

stability allowed economic advances.

Thanks to the more humane style

adopted by the government after

Stalin’s death, it became almost

impossible to get sacked, and

Russians got paid whether they

turned up to work drunk or sober.

There was no longer a limit on how

much people could drink, and

alcoholism became epidemic.

The

novelist

Venedikt

Yerofeyev, in his underground

masterpiece of the late 1960s

Moscow–Petushki
,

satirized

the

standard working week of his cable-

laying gang as follows: ‘We would

play brag one day, drink vermouth

the next, play brag again the third

day, and on the fourth back to

vermouth again . . . Needless to say,

we didn’t lay a finger on the cable

drum – in fact if I’d so much as

mentioned

touching

the

drum,

they’d

have

pissed

themselves

laughing.’

Conspiracy theorists speculate

that the state liked a drunken

population, since that made the

Russians easier to control. That may

be true, and it is certainly the case

that the government was hooked on

the revenue from drinking as much

as the population was hooked on the

oblivion it gave. Taxes earned from

alcohol were greater than the defence

budget by the early 1970s.

The trouble was, of course, that

the same drinking that was financing

the government was destroying the

population. Alcohol was blamed for

a third of car accidents, and four-

fifths of deaths on the roads. Almost

all sexually transmitted infections

were linked to alcohol consumption.

If you look at the figures for

how long Russians have been

expected to live, the high point to

date – just under seventy years –

came in the early to mid-1960s. Life

expectancy spiked upwards again in

the 1980s, briefly surpassing its

1960s level, through only by a

couple of months, when Mikhail

Gorbachev severely restricted access

to alcohol, but fell back once more

when the campaign was unwound.

By 1994, the average Russian was

predicted to live for sixty-four years,

and the average Russian man for less

than fifty-eight.

In 1965, the first year for which

the Russian government presents

statistics, 119,170 Russians died

from ‘external causes’ (car crashes,

murder,

suicide,

poisoning,

drowning), the majority of which are

connected to alcohol. By 1995, that

number had almost tripled. In 1965,

a total of 419,752 Russians died

from

problems

with

their

cardiovascular system, which are

often caused by drinking and

smoking. By 1995, that number had

more than doubled.

National security was at risk too:

ground crews apparently would

siphon off the pure alcohol in fighter

jets’ de-icing fluid and replace it

with water, causing the planes to

crash.

And look at the army, saviour of

Russia on the many occasions when

foreign invaders have coveted its

wealth. Russia’s most sacred holiday

is Victory Day. Every year, soldiers

goose-step over Red Square on 9

May to mark the 1945 triumph over

Adolf Hitler. Wave after wave of

Red Army troops threw themselves

at the German positions defending

Berlin that year, clambering over the

bodies of their comrades. Finally, the

Germans broke and fell, allowing the

Russians to wave their red flag from

the Reichstag and establish the

Soviet Union as a superpower.

That could not happen now. In

1990, some 1.021 million potential

Russian soldiers were born. In 1999,

that number had dropped to 626,000

– a fall of almost two-fifths in less

than a decade. For comparison, since

we were on the subject of World

War Two, almost 150,000 more

babies were born in Germany in

1999 than in Russia, even though

there are far fewer Germans than

Russians and even though Germany

is itself afflicted by a shrinking

population.

It is as if Russia’s army had

already suffered a series of major

defeats before even picking up a

gun. You cannot fight a war without

soldiers and, to breed more troops,

you need mothers to have babies. In

mid-2009, Russia had 11.7 million

women in their twenties. By 2015,

that number will have fallen to 6.9

million – that’s another two-fifths

decline.

In the last sixteen years of

communism, 36 million Russians

were born and 24.6 million died. In

the first sixteen years of capitalism,

those figures were more or less

reversed: 22.3 million Russians were

born and 34.7 million died. If you

plot a graph, in which the number of

people alive is laid out according to

their date of birth, with the youngest

at the bottom and the oldest at the

top, Russia looks like one of those

rocky stacks in the North Atlantic,

undermined by the waves until its

huge overhang threatens to collapse

altogether. The base of Russia’s

diagram – children – is washed

away, and the consequences are

almost impossible to predict.

And then there is alcohol’s effect

on the economy. Some estimates

from the late Soviet period had a

third of the workforce absent at any

one time thanks to over-drinking.

‘Drunks are to be found on the shop

floor more and more frequently. At

some enterprises, special brigades

have been formed to “grab” those

who have drunk too much and stop

them getting to their machines, to

prevent accidents. They drink during

working hours, they drink after

work,’ one Soviet economist said in

1981. ‘This is the ultimate lack of

respect for work, the ultimate

negative attitude to it.’

Visitors to Russia remarked on

the drinking, but foreigners’ travels

were restricted, and few people

guessed how deep rooted the

problem had become. The cost to the

state from drinking was estimated,

by 1985, at 160 billion roubles,

which was four times the revenue

from alcohol, and only then did the

government wake up to the problem.

In Brezhnev’s time, the official

response was embarrassment. State

statisticians stopped listing vodka as

a separate item on the yearly sales

digest when its sales climbed too

high. They instead lumped vodka

into ‘other’ with ice cream, coffee,

cocoa and spices, which instantly

made ‘other’ the largest item on the

list.

Their

inaction

allowed

alcoholism to become epidemic, and

sufferers turned elsewhere for help,

including to Father Dmitry, as

evidenced by the questions he read

out in his sermons.

‘I know that abortion is a sin . . .

but I’m afraid with my drunk of a

husband – what kind of child will I

have? Do we allow abortions in such

cases?’

The train was filling up, and

vendors pushed past trying to

interest us in their wares: an

eggwhisk-shaped back massager,

magazines, ice cream. A man sat

down opposite me, then his wife. He

was large and our knees touched. He

had a two-litre bottle of homemade

w i n e , opened it and downed a

couple of inches. He offered it to

me, but I gestured to the beer bottle

tucked between me and the side of

the carriage. He nodded, and left me

alone.

Three more people joined us on

our benches. There was no room for

my bottle, and I put it on the floor. A

sharp-angled metal ashtray jutted out

in front of me and I could either

wedge my knee against it or lay my

thigh alongside it. Either way, it cut

into my leg. I was uncomfortable

before we had even set off, and my

buttocks were numb by the time we

reached the city limits.

The train rattled through parched

fields. My plan to avoid the sun had

failed. The train had swung round

and I was in the full glare. The beer

was beginning to make me nod, and

the sun was battering the right-hand

side of my scalp. Despite the

discomfort and the crush, I fell

asleep.

Every weekend Father Dmitry’s

disciples took this two-hour train

journey. It was a long way to come

to hear a sermon, but his was the

only one on offer. I awoke before

Kabanovo, and alighted with a

dozen or so others on to a long

platform lined with a picket fence.

I walked through the village,

along the dusty shoulder of a busy

road. On either side were the kinds

of solid brick buildings owned as

weekend

houses

by

wealthy

Muscovites. Bare-chested men were

watering

their