The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (31 page)

are granite, made of sharp-edged

blocks. Above them are six rows of

windows poking out of an ochre

façade, with a broad cornice along

the top. A grand entrance pierces the

front, while smaller doors give

access to the sides. At the back is a

towering

entrance

for

trucks,

blocked by high barred gates and

guarded at all times by policemen.

Presumably, this entrance was busy

during the K G B’s heyday.

The front windows face towards

the

Kremlin.

They

previously

overlooked

a

statue

of

Felix

Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet

security service, but he was toppled

in

1991.

Officials

occasionally

mutter about putting him back.

To the right of the Lubyanka’s

front elevation as you look at it,

there is a large rock on a low plinth.

This was brought from Solovki, the

first

island

in

the

gulag’s

archipelago, and erected as a

memorial to the K G B’s victims.

You

reach

it

through

the

underground

walkways

that

honeycomb the space underneath

Lubyanka Square. They are full of

kiosks selling cheap lingerie, pirate

D V Ds, baked goods and electrical

components. The rock does not get

as much passing trade as the kiosks.

It is large and grey and smooth.

I have been inside the Lubyanka

on two occasions, both times for off-

the-record briefings with members

of the F S B. The chats yielded

nothing of interest from a news

perspective, but were fascinating

nonetheless. This had after all been

the inner sanctum of the K G B,

then, as the F S B is now, second

only to the Kremlin as a source of

power in Russia. On both occasions

I entered through a small side

entrance, was scrutinized by a

security guard through thick glass

and was left sitting on a chair for

five or ten minutes until my escort

arrived. Then my documents were

checked and I was given leave to

pass through a turnstile and climb a

grand staircase to a first-floor

corridor lined with doors. We turned

towards the front of the building and

entered a large office. It had a huge

desk at the far end. That desk was,

one guide told me, just how

Andropov had left it. This was in

fact Yuri Andropov’s office.

Yuri Andropov was head of the

K G B from 1967 to 1982, and thus

ran almost the entire campaign

against the dissident movement.

Next

to

the

phone

was

a

switchboard, two metres wide and

covered in different coloured buttons

that could connect him to any of his

subordinates

anywhere

in

the

country. From this desk he co-

ordinated the exile of Sakharov to

Gorky;

the

arrest

of

Jewish

nationalists who wished to go to

Israel; the harassment of Father

Dmitry and his friends in their

church community in Grebnevo.

Even before he headed the K G

B, he had been ambassador to

Hungary, and thus responsible for

crushing the Hungarians’ attempt to

loosen the Soviet embrace in 1956.

He helped send the tanks and

soldiers into Budapest and cowed the

nation for a generation. As chairman

of the K G B, he did the same to

Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the

Prague Spring attempted to create a

more flexible kind of socialism.

These two experiences of uppity

satellites showing worrying degrees

of independence convinced him that

the Soviet Union was engaged in a

death struggle with imperialism, in

which the fight against dissidents

was a key front.

Not everyone in the Politburo –

the leading organ in the state –

shared the full extent of Andropov’s

paranoia.

Many

thought

the

government’s critics could be won

over by generous treatment and

benefits. Andropov disagreed, and

his K G B were merciless. They kept

up surveillance and harassment of

anyone they suspected of ‘thinking

otherwise’,

as

the

dissidents

themselves termed their activities.

His

aim

was

to

extract

confessions from the K G B’s

opponents, to make them admit that

they were not honest strivers after

truth and justice, but foreign spies

bent

on

undermining

their

homeland. His agents were highly

skilled. They were allowed to detain

suspects without charge for months,

and could use those long spells of

inactivity

to

undermine

the

dissidents’ resolve. The dissidents in

response drew up precise guidelines

of their own for how to engage with

interrogators,

approaching

the

conversations in full knowledge of

how dangerous they were. Natan

Shcharansky, the Jewish activist,

was a highly skilled chess player and

plotted his approach in the same way

he would plot a match.

Yuri Orlov, founder of the

Moscow Helsinki Group, outlasted

his

interrogators,

and

was

honourably defiant to the last. ‘I rely

on my own inner conviction, on my

experience and on my thoughts,’ he

said. It did not save him from a

seven-year sentence, but it meant he

kept true to himself and inspired

fellow dissidents to do the same.

Not all dissidents were as stern

and unyielding as him. In 1973, K G

B

agents

managed

to

extract

confessions from Pyotr Yakir and

Viktor Krasin, who had been

compiling the underground human

rights

journal

the
Chronicle of

Current Events
. Although Krasin

had written the handbook for

arrested dissidents, telling them to

admit nothing, he was finally broken

over months of detention. They

grilled him repeatedly, extracting

tiny concessions from him, holding

out the chance of meetings with his

wife and family. They were ably

assisted by an informer sent in as a

cellmate. Eventually, tiny step by

tiny step, they overcame both

Krasin’s and Yakir’s resistance and

sent them back to their old friends as

changed men.

‘We forgot the basic truth that

we are citizens of the U S S R and

are bound to respect and keep the

laws of the state,’ said an appeal that

Krasin wrote from inside prison.

According to K G B records,

fifty-seven

dissidents

were

summoned for interrogation as a

result of evidence given by the two

men. Confronted by Krasin and

Yakir, forty-two of them also

capitulated.

The amount of resources put into

the case – thousands of hours of

agents’ work, hundreds of books,

rolls and rolls of tape for recordings

– was enormous, but it was fully

justified from Andropov’s point of

view. When senior dissidents such as

these recanted their views, the

demoralization among their friends

was deep. And Krasin’s recantation

was so total that some of his former

comrades wondered if he had been a

K G B plant all along.

This did not always work.

Solzhenitsyn never broke, despite

near-constant surveillance – the

results of which Andropov reported

to the Politburo regularly. Neither

did Sakharov, and nor did the

religious

dissidents

like

Ogorodnikov.

For Andropov, any act of

freethinking was dangerous, as he

himself laid out in a speech in 1979,

less than a year before Father

Dmitry’s

arrest.

He

said

that

Westerners often asked why, if the

Soviet Union had built socialism,

and was strong and prosperous, it

felt so threatened by people who did

nothing more than hold prayer

meetings, write letters or draw

pictures. Did this not suggest the

government was actually rather

weak? Not at all, Andropov replied.

The secret of the Soviet Union’s

survival was constant vigilance.

‘We simply do not have the right

to

permit

even

the

smallest

miscalculation here, for in the

political

sphere

any

kind

of

ideological sabotage is directly or

indirectly intended to create an

opposition which is hostile to our

system – to create an underground,

to encourage a transition to terrorism

and other extreme forms of struggle,

and, in the final analysis, to create

the conditions of the overthrow of

socialism.’

That meant that, although Father

Dmitry saw himself as a simple

priest, the K G B saw him as an

existential threat. Today’s religious

believer was tomorrow’s terrorist.

Was he aware of how seriously the

K G B took him when he passed

through the doors of the Lubyanka

that day in January 1980?

This was not the first time he had

been picked up by the K G B and

brought here. Back in 1948, when

he was a student and had written an

unwise poem about Stalin, this was

the scene of the interrogation that

sent him to the gulag.

Sitting on a low wall and looking

at

the

Lubyanka

building,

I

contemplated Father Dmitry’s state

of mind in those first hours. He had

been picked up at his church. He had

thought he was being taken to his

flat. He was instead taken to the

Lubyanka, and on to Lefortovo.

Everything was being done to keep

him off balance.

Did his own personal experience

of the horrors he would face if he

were sentenced to prison help his

resolve or undermine it? I thought

back to Abez, to the dying village in

the Arctic where the mosquitoes

whined around my head and bit

through my socks.

And I thought about Alexander

Merzlikin, our bearded guide to the

graveyard where Karsavin and the

others

were

buried,

and

a

conversation we had had as we

waited on the platform for the train

back south. A dozen or so local

people stood patiently, making no

movement, while Tanya and I waved

madly around our heads, trying to

keep the mosquitoes off.

‘I don’t know how they can

stand the mosquitoes,’ I had said to

Merzlikin, gesturing at the others. ‘I

don’t know how you can stand

them.’

He smiled and shrugged. He was

not a man of many words.

‘And I can’t imagine what it’s

like in winter,’ I added, slightly

lamely.

He nodded: ‘Unless you’ve been

here, you can’t.’

That was the problem, I realized.

Father Dmitry knew what he was up

against. He knew what a Russian

prison was like in winter. But I did

not. I could not appreciate the

horrors he had lived through, nor the

events that had shaped his mind. I

needed to go back to the north, to

see what it had been like for him in

the cold and dark.

WINTER

8

It’s like a plague

A Russian train in winter is a far

better place than the same train in

summer. With snow and the long

dark night outside, inside was snug

and warm. In summer, a top bunk is

torment, but now I was happy to

wrap myself in my blanket and, if I