The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (28 page)

the spirit of the Russian people,’ said

an article by a Russian Orthodox

priest published on 11 April 1943,

which listed fifty-five churches

restored and twenty-nine priests

appointed. In June, an article

announced a training course for

wouldbe priests.

By 19 August, in the last copy in

the archive, fifty-eight churches

were open and thirty-five priests

operating.

However,

if

Father

Dmitry was tempted to celebrate that

fact with a poem, he did not do it

here. There was no poem or article

under his name that I could find, nor

a poem called ‘Song from a Cellar’

published

anonymously

or

otherwise.

The Nazis also issued another

newspaper with the title the
New

Way
. It was published in Riga,

Latvia, but I thought I might as well

scan through it anyway. Its first

edition had a map of Europe,

featuring an enormous Germany

stretching from Romania to the

North Sea. Photos showed happy

Russians surrendering, and Russian

youths cleaning German boots with

smiles on their faces. There were no

poems by Father Dmitry here either,

nor in another paper called the
New

Times
published in Vyazma, nor in

New Life
, or any of the other

forgotten publications issued under

the Nazis on the thin and fragile

wartime paper.

‘It was probably just a libellous

article,’ the helpful librarian told me.

She had become quite involved in

my search, and shuttled back and

forth with piles of these strange old

newspapers.

I returned to my Formica desk

and sat with the long drawer from

the card index in front of me. I was

tempted to agree with her that the

Literary Gazette
’s accusation was a

crude lie. It was a strange lie, since if

you are going to libel someone and

try to blacken their name, it would

seem more sensible to make up a

really dreadful crime for them to

have committed.

According to people quoted in

one of Father Dmitry’s books, for

example, at one point in the 1970s

the police alleged during private

conversations that he had murdered

children on the Nazis’ orders. That

was proper defamation, which could

really damage someone. I mused on

why they had not made that

allegation public. My imagination

started to get tied in knots.

Maybe it was the irrelevance of

the poetry offence that meant I

should doubt its veracity. Perhaps

the K G B were acting in the

knowledge that since people know

big lies are supposedly more

believable than small lies, then small

lies are actually more effective as

libel. Could it be an advanced double

bluff? Or a triple bluff? They had

after all had decades of experience in

deception. This, I imagined, is the

kind of paranoia that must have

swirled in everyone’s mind in the

1970s. In trying to keep one logical

step ahead of the opposition, you

began to see shapes in a fog of

suspicion that gets thicker the further

you go.

I willed myself to snap out of it,

and wrote down a conclusion. From

the evidence available, I wrote, the

allegation that he wrote poems for

the Nazis looks like a lie. There, I

could leave and get on with other

things. I breathed out, and gathered

up my notebooks. But then I

doubted myself again, pulled out the

long drawer full of the dog-eared

index cards and scanned through

them one last time, checking off all

the names of the Nazi papers to

make sure I had missed nothing.

In doing so, I accidentally flicked

past the cream-coloured divider

marking off the next section of the

index. Before I had time to rectify

my error, my eyes automatically read

the index card my clumsiness had

revealed. There, staring back at me,

were the words
In the Light of the

Transfiguration
. That was Father

Dmitry’s self-published newspaper.

I forgot all about the Nazi poem and

whether it existed or not. Surely they

didn’t have Father Dmitry’s words

here? In the Lenin Library? I

bounded back to the issue desk,

filled in a request form and handed it

over to my friendly ally.

‘Have you found it?’ she asked.

‘No, but I’ve found something

better. It’s his own newspaper, I

think.’

She shook her head, chuckled at

the strangeness of foreigners and

walked back through the door to the

restricted section. This could be truly

extraordinary

luck.

The

Lenin

Library was the official reference

library for academic researchers. It

did not concern itself with the

dissidents’

self-published

documents. I had been informed that

the Lenin Library possessed no such

archive, and yet here one was. I

mused over how it could have ended

up here at all. Perhaps it had been

deposited here after some long-ago

K G B investigation ended. Maybe a

secret Christian archivist in this

bastion of scientific communism had

stashed

it

among

the

more

respectable papers.

When she finally brought me the

brown

envelope

stuffed

with

documents, I pulled them out with

trepidation. I need not have worried,

however; it was the real thing. I had

seen some issues of the newspaper in

Father Dmitry’s collected works, but

they were incomplete and they

lacked the immediacy of seeing a

genuine hand-typed, carbon-copied

version.

This was an original. It was

typed out – if not by Father Dmitry

himself, then by someone who knew

him well. It was clearly the work of

an

amateur.

Misspellings

were

stamped over with rows of capital X

X Xs, and each edition had a hand-

drawn cross in the masthead. It was

like taking a time machine back to

the heady days of freedom at

Grebnevo. After the fog of the Nazi

and Soviet lies, it was a clear, crisp

morning.

The threat circling around him

was clear on the very first sheet of

the very first paper, dated Sunday, 3

June 1979. A priest called Vasily

Fonchenkov, he wrote, had joined

Yakunin’s Christian Committee for

the Defence of Believers’ Rights,

whose statements Father Dmitry

regularly republished. The Christian

Committee had been founded in

December 1976. It worked in

partnership with the Helsinki Groups

and tried to publicize the troubles

that believers of all denominations

faced in living their daily lives:

arrests, sackings, harassment.

The K G B were acutely sensitive

to information leaking into the West

that revealed any persecution of

believers, much of which came from

the Christian Committee. Yakunin

had kept the group small, with just

three or four members, to prevent

penetration, but that tactic had failed.

Defectors

later

revealed

that

Fonchenkov, though a priest, had

been recruited nine years earlier by

the K G B’s Fifth Directorate and

given the codename F R I E N D.

They did not know it at the time but,

by admitting this false friend,

Yakunin had given his enemies

access to the very heart of their free

community, and their every move

would now be reported back to the

K G B.

Flicking through the pages of

Father Dmitry’s newspaper – each

issue was three sheets of paper,

stapled together, typed on just one

side – was like fast-forwarding

through 1979. On 17 June, there is

an account of Father Vladimir being

arrested again, although of course at

that time he was just a student called

Vladimir Sedov, not yet a priest. The

police did not know how to deal

with him. Officers still believed the

old stereotype that only ignorant old

women went to church, and had

failed to learn that educated young

Russians flocked to see Father

Dmitry in their dozens.

‘How can you be a believer if

you have higher education?’ he was

asked by the police.

‘Today it is people with higher

education who believe, only dunces

don’t believe,’ he replied with

commendable cockiness, and was

held for three days without charge.

On 24 June, Father Dmitry

conjured up an amusing contrast in

generation gaps. In the 1920s, he

described a grandmother being

challenged by her grandson in the

act of hiding an icon under her

pillow. The grandson then ripped the

cross from around her neck, leaving

his grandmother in tears. In his

imaginary scenario for the 1970s,

the roles are reversed: a communist

grandfather challenged his Christian

granddaughter.

‘I have heard, I have been told,

you have been christened,’ the

grandfather says. ‘How could you?

You

don’t

think

about

your

grandfather at all, what will happen

to me?’

Having provoked a few chuckles

with that, Father Dmitry then warned

his congregation to be careful of the

unknown men who were attending

his services, in case they were agents

sent to undermine the congregation.

Then he ended with the account of a

religious man who was locked up in

a mental hospital for five months,

and given eight of the dreaded

injections of sulphazin, the 4 per

cent suspension of sulphur in peach

oil, which was prescribed to induce a

fever and torment the patient.

He wrote about anything that

concerned him: about religious

festivals, about persecution and

about the decline of his nation into

alcoholism. A train crash was caused

by the driver being drunk. ‘History

has not known such a number of

railway

catastrophes

as

are

happening at the moment.’

And

there

were

constant

reminders of the danger that the

wolves in uniform posed to his

flock. In August, a spiritual daughter

of his wrote about being summoned

by the K G B and questioned for

four hours about Father Dmitry and

his sermons. The three agents told

her not to tell anyone, but she wrote

to her priest anyway.

‘It is interesting what their aim is

in

summoning

her.

We

do

everything openly, anyone can come

and listen. It is clear they are

searching for lying witnesses. Well,

whatever, let them search,’ he wrote.

He was confident in the loyalty of

his friends.

A week later the same woman

recounted a second summons, and

the K G B’s threat to try her under

Article 70 – anti-Soviet activity – of

the criminal code, if she did not

testify that Father Dmitry himself

was engaged in anti-Soviet acts. The

threat was clear, but he ignored it.

He had more important subjects, like

a woman who prayed in the church

every day.

‘Everyone around her drinks:

husband, father, even her fourteen-

year-old son. She does not know

what to do. Only the church gives

her the strength to bear this

unbearable cross.’

The impression grew upon me,

as I turned the pages, of an

embattled community strengthened

by the pressure upon it, and of

Father Dmitry as the cheerful,

smiling centre, the rock on which

they could all stand. He printed a