The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (25 page)

a mouthful of soup, ‘and of course it

was scary, but we were together.’

Father Dmitry wrote later of the

kind of tactics the K G B used

against him. Marina, one of the

congregation,

was

repeatedly

summoned and questioned about

him;

then

her

mother

was

summoned;

then

her

younger

brother; then the family’s friends

and neighbours. It was designed to

drive people away from Father

Dmitry, who wrote to his spiritual

children to reassure them, and to

raise their spirits.

‘The

godless

have

used

everything: libel, forgery, traitors

among

the

priesthood,

but

everything has been without result,

and now they have moved to their

favourite method: violence, physical

force. But as was said long ago:

physical force is powerlessness. In

their powerless fury, they don’t

know what to do.’

Father Dmitry had learned about

violence himself in 1975 on a trip he

made with Alexander and a couple

of others. They all wanted to drive to

Bryansk, to Berezina, to Father

Dmitry’s home village, to see his

brother and his relatives. The four of

them squeezed into a Zapo-rozhets, a

small, rickety, noisy Soviet car.

Alexander and a doctor friend were

in the back. Father Dmitry and the

driver were up in front.

When they set off down the main

road to Bryansk, a barrier was across

the road. It looked new, as if it had

just been installed, and they had to

make a 400-kilometre diversion. It

was a daunting prospect, but they

were determined. Perhaps the driver

got tired on this extended journey, or

perhaps it was too dark. He did not

see that a truck had been parked

across the road until it was too late.

‘We crashed into the back tyre.

They were right in front of us. They

wanted to kill us. Both of Father

Dmitry’s legs were broken below the

knee,’

said

Alexander.

It

is

impossible to know now if the crash

was really an assassination attempt

or just a strange accident, but they

could be forgiven for thinking the

worst. A black car had been

following them, and a bus arrived

soon after the accident, full of people

who laughed at them, at how the

God-botherers

had

got

in

an

accident.

They were taken to a hospital

intended only for workers at a

nearby nuclear power station, and

left untreated all night.

After lunch and back in Father

Vladimir’s white Toyota, we drove

through

Shchelkovo,

the

drab

apartment blocks sliding past. It

merged almost without a break into

Fryazino, with more apartment

blocks, then into Grebnevo, where at

least the houses were smaller.

I could see Father Vladimir’s

eyes flitting around, as he looked for

things he recognized. At last we

mounted a small rise, and he sighed.

We stopped on the edge of a beaten

stretch of earth that faded into a

garden. Ahead of us was a gate, and

beyond was the dome of the church.

He sat for a while without getting

out of the car, smiling.

Zoya senior was there before us,

looking up at the church. ‘It’s

beautiful,’ she said. And it was. The

green dome on its white and ochre

columns was proud against the blue

sky. Bright summer vegetation filled

in the scene. ‘When Father Dmitry

first came here, he was with his wife

Nina and she gaped at this. She

thought they had been mistaken –

she told Father Dmitry to check they

had come to the right place.’

Father Dmitry took up his new

post here in April 1976, a time when

the Cold War was getting distinctly

colder. The early 1970s had been

marked by détente, when the two

sides wished to trade with each other

and

resolve

their

differences.

Washington was losing the Vietnam

War and facing massive anti-war

protests at home. It did not want

diplo matic trouble abroad as well.

Henry Kissinger, national security

advisor and later secretary of state,

was not interested in ideology or in

lecturing the Soviets on how to

behave. He wanted good relations,

and both sides wanted to spend less

money on weapons.

The culmination of détente was a

summit in Helsinki in August 1975,

where almost all European countries,

as well as Canada and the United

States, signed a series of accords

recognizing each other’s borders,

and

establishing

a

multilateral

framework for negotiations (it later

became

the

Organization

for

Security

and

Co-operation

in

Europe).

This was a triumph for Moscow,

which had long wanted the West to

recognize the existence of a separate

East

Germany

and

its

own

dominance of the eastern half of the

continent. Almost as an afterthought,

the signatory countries tacked on an

agreement to respect basic human

rights.

These

obligations

were

nothing new for the Soviet Union.

Its own constitution contained most

of the freedoms guaranteed in a

democracy, and it had signed up to

the founding documents of the

United Nations, with their guarantees

for all human rights. Officials had

never kept these old promises,

however, and Brezhnev himself told

journalists he had no intention of

enforcing the new ones.

‘No one should try to dictate to

other people . . . the manner in

which they ought to manage their

internal affairs,’ he said after signing

the treaty. He seemed to think it

would have no significance beyond

the paper it was written on.

Some senior K G B officials,

including K G B head Yuri

Andropov, thought differently. They

warned Brezhnev about the risks of

signing

up.

They

said

these

obligations might give the dissidents

and critics in the West new tools to

use against Moscow, but Brezhnev’s

government – intoxicated by its

success in winning recognition of

the borders the Soviet Union had

imposed on Eastern Europe after

World War Two – ignored them.

The dissidents, ever imaginative,

soon proved Andropov right. In

October 1975, Sakharov won a

Nobel Peace Prize, giving the

dissidents a morale boost. Over the

next two years, they formed Helsinki

Groups to monitor the Soviet

Union’s

compliance

with

its

obligations

under

the

Helsinki

Accords – the first in Moscow under

Yuri Orlov, the others in Ukraine,

Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic

States. They knew these groups were

illegal, but they presented them as

civil

initiatives

to

assist

the

government, and they could claim to

be doing so under a treaty Brezhnev

had himself signed up to.

Every report they wrote was

written dispassionately, singling out

the

particular

clauses

of

the

agreement that had been violated. It

was a severe embarrassment for the

K G B, and Father Dmitry was in no

mood to make the agents’ job any

easier.

If officials had hoped that, by

giving him a place in this elegant

church, built in the late eighteenth

century, they could persuade him to

shut up, they were disappointed.

This was closer to Moscow than

Kabanovo, just 30 kilometres away

from the city, and even larger

crowds of worshippers came to hear

him speak, and to enjoy the freedom

of true discussion.

‘We discussed everything freely,

not needing to look around us,

expressing ourselves in our own

language. It was like we lived

outside the state. It was as if our

country wasn’t militantly atheist.

This freedom amazed one schoolboy

from

Leningrad.

He

at

first

announced that he was an atheist,

that he could not believe, but after

spending three days with us, he

asked to be christened, and became a

militant believer,’ Father Dmitry

wrote later.

The state’s pressure did not of

course let up, no matter what Father

Dmitry thought about it. The

dissidents’ underground newspaper

– the
Chronicle of Current Events
–

repeatedly detailed the police raids

on his home and those of his friends,

just like it recounted the arrests of

Jewish

activists

and

Ukrainian

nationalists and the exiling of

scientists and writers. Police officers

marched through the church during

services, taking photos and making

recordings. Police volunteers in red

armbands jostled the worshippers as

they filed into the church.

But Father Dmitry and his

friends were together, and they were

not afraid. In the words of Andrei

Amalrik, one of the founders of the

Moscow Helsinki Group and a

prolific

writer,

‘The

dissidents

accomplished something that was

simple to the point of genius: in an

unfree country they behaved like

free men, thereby changing the

moral atmosphere and the nation’s

governing traditions.’

The police might be outside, but

inside the dissidents had each other,

and they had their radios. They

could hear about themselves on the

B B C, and sometimes they could

even read about themselves in the

Soviet press.

In April

1977,

the
Literary

Gazette
, one of the Soviet Union’s

top publications and – K G B

defectors later revealed – one that

could always be relied upon to print

whatever

the

security

services

wanted, launched a fresh assault on

Father Dmitry, Ogorodnikov and

other friends of theirs. Considering

that he was supposedly just a village

priest, and the others were ordinary

citizens,

it

was

a

vastly

disproportionate response. But the

government had to do something.

The repeated reports on foreign

radio were in danger of turning

Father Dmitry into the country’s

most authoritative religious figure.

The
Literary Gazette
’s story used

the standard Soviet technique of

heavy irony to undermine its targets,

and combined it with excessive use

of quotation marks to cast entirely

unfair doubt on them. Father Dmitry

was always called ‘Father Dmitry’,

for example, and his friends were

not described as very respectable,

they were ‘very respectable’.

The effect is certainly comic, and

as I sat in the library reading the old

yellowed pages I laughed at the

memory of a story my wife once

told me. She is a doctor and had a

colleague who would, when bored,

use the same technique employed by

the

Soviet

propagandists

and

highlight random words in a

patient’s medical notes to amuse later

medical teams (patient came in with

a ‘friend’, complaining about a sore

‘knee’ and other ‘symptoms’). It is

not a sophisticated form of humour,

more suited to an exhausted doctor

on a night shift than supposedly the

best propagandists in the world.

The paper quoted some of Father