The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (30 page)

even he began to question their good

faith. He had tried to banish distrust

beyond the church walls, but it was

back, creeping under the door like a

cold draught from the winter

outside.

‘I start to wonder, is it not

someone’s provocation: to break the

unity of my spiritual children? First

there

were

arguments,

ethnic

differences, and now they depart.

This must be to someone’s benefit.’

He was getting suspicious and

distrustful. He was beginning to

think like the people he was fighting,

and as soon as he did that he had

lost. His whole battle was based on

using his own methods, not theirs.

The K G B were chipping away

before their final assault.

He tried to shore up his position

but a week later it was worse.

Threats were exchanged between

members of the congregation. The

Sunday discussion had been full of

alarm, and his distrust grew. ‘Who

knows, maybe someone planned this

so as to disunite us,’ he wrote. And

the ‘ethnic question’ – the Jewish

question,

anti-Semitism,

racism,

everything Father Dmitry had tried

to banish – reared up. The

discussion ended with slammed

doors, with shouting, despite his

appeal that they needed to love each

other, to keep everyone in their

hearts.

He wrote later how it appeared.

Russians said: ‘You only have

Jews with you.’

And Jews asked: ‘How can you

keep all these anti-Semites?’

This internal division, he wrote,

was not accidental. Someone had

been sent to dig into the fault-line in

his congregation, to use the old

tactics of divide and rule. Distrust

was all around him now. It was

almost the end of the year, and on 16

December he prayed that 1980 and

the new decade would bring his

spiritual children back to him, and to

each other. By now, fewer people

were coming to his discussions, and

he had plenty of time to think.

Eventually I began to read the

last stapled-together document in the

envelope. He could not sleep, he

wrote, and he heard the bells strike

the quarter-hours. The police were

following ever more closely those

who came to his church, and he

recounted a conversation between an

arrested man’s wife and a state

investigator. When she told him she

wanted a big family, he scorned her.

‘Only

scoundrels

have

big

families,’

the

investigator

said,

allowing Father Dmitry to end his

newspaper and the year on his

favourite theme: the threat to the

future of the Russian people.

‘That is why our families are

shrinking. We will go far with these

morals, until the last person eats the

last person.’

That was the end. There were no

more copies in the envelope. I would

need to find an eyewitness to

describe what happened next. For

that, I would need Father Alexander.

We met, along with the two Zoyas,

senior and junior, and Father

Vladimir at a sushi restaurant just

outside Moscow. The contrast was

strange. Father Alexander’s bearded

face and black robe were like

something from the Middle Ages.

The flashy decor and plates of

highly priced fish were pure twenty-

first-century Russia.

He sat next to me, and told his

story with enormous enthusiasm. He

kept making barely comprehensible

jokes, patting me on the back to

make sure I understood them. He

edged ever closer to me as he did so,

squashing me against the wall and

grabbing my left arm. Zoya junior

took advantage by occasionally

swooping on his sushi, so every time

he turned back to his plate he looked

slightly puzzled by there being fewer

than there should have been.

He talked intermittently about

their life in Grebnevo. About how

they ate together, chatted, drank tea

and read God’s law. About how half

of them were Jews, and half

Russians, about their arguments, and

about how Father Dmitry stood

above them all, and took no sides.

Then on 14 January 1980, in the

evening, Father Alexander was

arrested. Zoya senior fled to Father

Dmitry with their children. Father

Dmitry went to find out what was

going on. A policeman met him at

the station: ‘We knew you would

come,’ the policeman said. The

police had no intention of releasing

Alexander, but they knew that Father

Dmitry looked out for his flock, and

respected him for it.

Father Dmitry went home, and in

the morning the police came for him

too. They detained him directly after

he had finished conducting the

service, bundled him into their car

and took him away. He was told he

was just being taken to the city for

his flat to be searched, and his wife

Nina went with him. They did not

take him to his flat, however, but to

the Lubyanka – the K G B’s granite-

edged headquarters that looms over

Moscow from its hilltop.

A search team was, in their

absence, ripping up his flat, as well

as the houses of Father Alexander

and Father Alexander’s mother, and

the

flats

of

their

friends

Ovchinnikova,

Kuzmina,

Glemyanov,

Chapkovsky,

Kapitanchuk and Nikolaev. Dozens

of agents took part.

Father Dmitry’s wife Nina sat all

day in the lobby of the Lubyanka,

waiting for her husband’s release. It

was only in the evening that she was

told he had been arrested and taken

to Lefortovo, the K G B’s prison. He

had vanished from sight, and would

have to fight on his own now.

‘They held me for fifteen days,’

said Father Alexander. ‘The K G B

told me later they had no problem

with me.’ The jokes and backpatting

were over while he remembered it,

and how Father Dmitry vanished

from their lives.

With the arrest, and the searches

and the harassment, the dissidents’

publicity machine barely survived. It

was down to Father Vladimir and his

friend Georgy Fedotov to tell the

world what had happened. Fedotov

told the foreign correspondents, and

was then himself arrested and held in

a mental hospital.

Father Dmitry’s other friends at

liberty

were

tireless

in

their

campaign for him, nonetheless.

Already on the day of his arrest, they

organized dozens of signatures

under an appeal to Christians of the

Whole World. ‘The appearance of

Father Dmitry in our country and in

our times cannot be understood but

as a miracle to redeem Russia and

the whole modern world. The mind

cannot

comprehend

the colossal

influence that Father Dmitry has had

on the spiritual life of our nation,’ it

said. The list of signatures showed

his wide appeal. Most of the names

were Russian of course, but there

were Jewish names too, as well as

Soviet Muslims and Ukrainians.

‘The worst plagues of our life:

attacks on the Church, the collapse

of the family, alcoholism, abortions,

all of this appeared in Father

Dmitry’s sermons as a reflection of

the battle between good and evil.’

Their appeals reached the world.

The London
Times
on 23 January

quoted a letter written by Father

Dmitry just before his arrest, which

he had clearly been expecting.

‘Sound the alarm! Silence and

compromise are not tactical steps,

they are betrayal . . . If anything

happens to me, let this letter be my

message.’ The article went on to

describe dozens of other dissidents

from all over the Soviet Union who

were swept up in this vast operation.

They

included

Tatyana

Shchipkova, ‘a member of an

unofficial seminar on religious

philosophy, who was sentenced to

three years’ hard labour’. There was

Mikhail Solovov, ‘who took part in

an attempt to put up independent

candidates

in

the

last

Soviet

elections’. There was Malva Landa

of the Moscow Helsinki Group,

Rolian Kadiyev, of the exiled

Crimean

Tatars,

and

other

discontented people from Lithuania

to Leningrad to the Arctic.

A week later, in an article

headlined

‘Father

Dudko:

The

Flower

of

Russia’s

“Religious

Spring”’,
The Times
praised the

steadfastness of his fight to save his

people. ‘In almost every sermon

Father Dudko refers to the key

problems of Soviet society: the high

divorce

rates,

widespread

alcoholism,

hooliganism

and

criminality among the young. His

solution is a stable family life,’ the

paper wrote.

His arrest made headlines in

newspapers across North America,

from the
New York Times
to the

Ottawa Citizen
, and his name was

repeatedly paired with that of

Sakharov, the most famous of all the

dissidents, who was now exiled to

Gorky.

His

exile

and

Father

Dmitry’s arrest were the clearest

possible signs of the regime’s

confidence. The K G B could now

get rid of anyone they wanted, the

papers said, even those previously

deemed ‘untouchable’.

The Olympics was scheduled for

Moscow that summer and, in the

wake of the invasion of Afghanistan,

many Western countries were under

pressure to boycott the Games.

Campaigners added the fates of

Sakharov and Father Dmitry to the

charge sheet against Moscow and

indeed a U S-led boycott went

ahead, ruining the Soviet Union’s

party, in what was supposed to be its

triumphant ascent to the pinnacle as

host of the world’s biggest festival.

All of this, of course, was

unknown to Father Dmitry. While

his spiritual children fought and

prayed for him, while K G B agents

gathered

evidence

and

while

Western journalists kept his name in

the headlines, he was in a cell in the

K G B’s prison of Lefortovo waiting

for interrogation.

7

Ideological sabotage

The Lubyanka building, to which

Father Dmitry had been taken, then

dominated and still dominates north-

central Moscow. If the democratic

Russian government that took power

after 1991 had wanted to change the

country and to commemorate the

victims of the previous regime it

might have opened this building to

the public or turned it into a

museum. I have often thought how

wonderful it would be to see groups

of children running in and out of the

forbidding front gate, exorcizing the

ghosts of the past with their laughter.

The post-1991 government did

not turn it into a museum, of course,

or throw open its doors. Instead, it

left it as it was. It is still the

headquarters of Russia’s security

agency and is still off limits to

ordinary citizens.

When I lived in Moscow, I

walked past it every day on my way

to and from the office. If I was

talking on the phone when I did so, I

would

lose

the

signal

as

I

approached the towering façade. It

would only return when I was a

good 50 metres beyond. The F S B,

as the K G B’s main successor

agency is now known, takes no

chances.

The Lubyanka’s first two storeys