The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (3 page)

by the hypocrisy of corrupt officials

who promised a bright future for

others while enjoying the fruits of

the present themselves. The Russian

state was killing hope, and humans

cannot survive without it. In the

vacuum, people reached out for

anything available, including God.

The hunger for religion . . .

was not a result of the

efforts of the church, but

rather of the decay and

corruption

of

official

ideology. It spread over the

entire country and affected

all social groups. Enormous

numbers of people tried to

fill the resulting spiritual

and intellectual vacuum with

alcohol, others tried to fill it

with the most diverse kind

of activities, from gardening

to philosophy.

The Russian Orthodox Church, like

the official hierarchies of the

Muslim,

Jewish

and

Buddhist

congregations in the Soviet Union,

h a d been

infiltrated

by

and

subordinated to the state. Although

communists had begun by assaulting

religion and imprisoning priests,

Stalin realized during World War

Two that the patriotic appeal of

defending the faith was a useful

mobilizer of men.

The Orthodox Church was not a

monolith, however. Among its

priests were some who did not

support the government slavishly in

all things, as their bishops did. And

among those priests was a man

called Dmitry Dudko – Father

Dmitry, to his friends. Alexeyeva

described him in her book, so I read

his work. He, I realized quickly, was

an exceptional man.

While the state was engaged in

producing reports on how well it

was doing, and the dissidents were

engaged in proving it wrong, Father

Dmitry was quietly comforting the

miserable and the downtrodden. And

he was not just a compulsive

comforter; he was a compulsive

writer. He left notebooks and articles

and sermons: hundreds of thousands

of words. These ranged from

accounts

of

parishioners’

confessions

to

autobiographical

sketches, to poems, to sermons.

They are a priceless source for

anyone seeking to understand how

communism, a movement intended

to perfect humanity, turned into a

system of oppression and misery.

The communism he describes is

not one that aims for a radiant future,

despite its claims. The Soviet state

was, in fact, almost perfectly

designed to make people unhappy. It

denied its citizens not just hope, but

also trust. Every activity had to be

sanctioned by the state. Any person

could be an informant. No action

could be guaranteed to be without

consequence.

Father

Dmitry

preached friendship and warmth and

belief to his parishioners, and

inspired a generation to live as

humans and not as parts of a

machine.

And Father Dmitry, I realized, as

I read his books and delved into his

world, was more than a witness and

an agitator. His life story – from his

birth in a Russian village after the

revolution, to his death in Moscow

in 2004 – is also the history of his

nation.

He

lived

through

collectivization, the crushing of the

80 per cent of Russians that were

peasants. He served as a soldier in

World War Two, when millions of

peasants

died

defending

the

government that had crushed them.

He spent eight years in the gulag, the

network of labour camps created to

break the spirit of anyone who still

resisted. He rose again to speak out

for his parishioners in the 1960s and

1970s, striving to help young

Russians create a freer and fairer

society.

Those decades are little written

about today, but they are central to

Russia’s population crisis, so those

are the decades this book focuses on.

It is not a biography of Father

Dmitry, nor is it a history of the

Russians’ twentieth century. Instead,

it is something in between. Father

Dmitry’s life, for me, is the life of

his nation in microcosm. In tracing

the life and death of Father Dmitry, I

am tracing the life and death of his

nation.

How did Russia become a

country where my friend Misha

considers it acceptable to drink a litre

of brandy before embarking on a

day’s work? And how did it become

a country where no one finds that

strange – a country where brandy is

on sale beside fried eggs, sausage

and bread at breakfast time? One

man’s alcoholism is his own tragedy.

A whole nation’s alcoholism is a

tragedy too, but also a symptom of

something far larger, of a collective

breakdown.

Public

life

in

Russia

is

stubbornly dishonest. Transparency

International’s yearly survey ranks

countries on a 10-point scale, where

10 is very clean and 0 is highly

corrupt (New Zealand came top in

2011 with 9.5, Somalia and North

Korea came last with 1). Russia has,

since the survey began in the 1990s,

consistently scored between 2.1 and

2.8, putting it in the company of

Nigeria and Belarus, and below the

likes of Syria, Pakistan and Eritrea.

Russians

consider

themselves

civilized Europeans, but have to

endure the humiliation of daily

encounters with officials that belong

in a squalid dictatorship.

I once asked Kolya, a friend of

mine, what he would do first if he

became president. Kolya is jovial

and loud, so I expected he would

announce something funny. Perhaps

he would legalize polygamy for

people whose names begin with a K.

He sat and thought for more than a

minute. He stared at his glass of beer

and toyed with a cigarette.

‘I would kill myself,’ he said at

last, without a trace of a smile.

It is hardly surprising that

Russians

have

long

been

unenthusiastic about politics. In one

yearly survey from the Levada

Centre, a polling organization, the

options to choose from are ‘life isn’t

so bad, you can survive’, ‘life is bad,

but you can endure’ and ‘enduring

our

calamitous

situation

is

impossible’. There has been a slow

move from the third category to the

second since the late 1990s, but the

fact that those are the only categories

does not suggest that this is a

country happy about the future.

In this book, I ask how this came

about. It is not only a journey into

the past, however, because the

Russian population crisis could have

enormous consequences for the

future. In the Chinese province of

Heilongjiang there are more than 38

million people. In Russia’s Maritime,

Amur and Birobidzhan regions,

which border it to the north and are

collectively not too much larger,

there are around 3 million people. If

that number keeps falling, then it is

easy to wonder if the Chinese might

think the Russians do not want that

land and decide to take it from them.

The modern world has never had to

confront a situation where a country

does not have enough people to

support itself any more.

In Father Dmitry’s life story,

therefore, I have sought other

answers too: is there hope for the

future? Is the damage inflicted on the

Russians reversible? Can a new

generation, raised without the dead

dogma of communism, kindle a new

kind of state, where people are free

to be themselves?

It is possible to imagine the kind

of state where Russians might be

happy to live, work and have

children: the only kind of state that

could have a future. It is what Father

Dmitry was trying to build when he

preached

in

the

churches

of

Moscow, and when he prayed in the

K G B’s camps. That is why I set off

to follow the tracks of Father Dmitry

and his friends, north to the gulag,

east to the Urals, but first of all west

to the village of his birth: Berezino,

in the forests of Russia’s ancient

heart.

SUMMER

1

They took our grandfather’s land

So one morning in summer 2010 I

woke up in an old Soviet hotel in the

city of Bryansk, far to Moscow’s

west.

It was hot. The buildings were

wavering in the heat before I even

left the bus station, where tanned,

shirtless bus drivers shouted their

final destinations as if they could

persuade arriving passengers to

cancel their travel plans and go with

them instead. The route to Berezino

was complex. First I sat on a packed

minibus, which took me to a large

shop. Then an elderly bus rattled to a

town covered in grey cement dust.

This was Fokino. Then another bus

took me to Berezino itself. We

stopped on the edge of a dusty yard,

flayed by the sun and dominated by

a five-storey apartment block. Two

large-bosomed

women

stood

beneath its balconies and argued.

My goal was to find Father

Dmitry’s surviving relatives, but I

had not up to now given much

thought to how I would do that once

I got here. My normal approach is to

turn up, look inquisitive and hope

someone takes pity on me. I walked

towards the two women, and idled

past them. They ignored me. One or

two people were still by the bus stop,

so I walked back towards them,

passing the two women once more.

Again, no one looked at me.

‘What are you doing?’

I turned to see a handsome

woman of about forty, eyes crinkled

with amusement, all dressed in black

despite the weather. She was sitting

on a bench in the shade of the bus

station.

‘I saw you come in on the bus,

and then walk over there, and walk

back here, and now you’re standing

around. What are you doing?’

She looked friendly, so I

explained the nature of my quest: I

was looking for relatives of Father

Dmitry, and wanted to understand

h o w his upbringing had made him

the way he was. She shook her head.

There were no Dudkos round here.

But she had nothing much to do for

the next few hours so she took my

hand and marched me across the

baked plain of the yard to meet her

mother.

‘I’m called Galya,’ she said.

It was only after we had rung her

mother’s doorbell for some time that

she remembered that it was a

Saturday. Her mother, it transpired,

was a Seventh Day Adventist and

would be praying with her sister,

Galya’s aunt. We marched back

down the staircase and across to a

second apartment block – the ground

in between was full of vegetables

ripening early in this intense heat –

where we found the old women.

They

wore

headscarves

and

cardigans, and were sitting on an old

sofa with the Book of Revelation

open in front of them.

They had never heard of any

Dudkos, and had lived here all their

lives.

This

was

not

good.

Nonetheless, I decided to come away

with

something

and

got

my

notebook

out

anyway.

Anna

Vasilyevna, Galya’s aunt, was born

in 1922 – the same year as Father

Dmitry. Nina Vasilyevna, who had

twelve other children besides Galya,

was three years younger. This, I