The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (41 page)

twist in his position rendered him

less believable anyway.

Without friends to talk to, or the

debates he loved so much, he was

thrown back on to his newspaper,

into which he poured his anguish.

His family – his son Mikhail, his

daughter Natalya, his wife Nina –

was still around him, but they did

not provide the debate he wanted.

That had come from his spiritual

children.

‘Has no one called?’ I ask

Natalya, my angel of a

daughter, who had circled

around Lefortovo prison

when

I

was

inside,

protecting me from troubles

and misfortunes.

‘No, papa, no one has

called.’

Left alone, his guilt chewed away at

him.

‘The telephone is quiet. No calls

and no one comes. They just judge

me. They judge. They judge.’

In his newspaper, he tried to

explain the choice he had made, how

he had tried to reconcile the biblical

instruction to ‘render unto Caesar’

while also remaining true to God.

This is a difficult issue to square for

any theologian, but particularly so in

the

Orthodox

tradition,

which

developed in the Byzantine Empire

where the emperor was the protector

of the Church. There was no

theological defence against an atheist

government, since the government

was assumed to be the shield of the

Church. Priests had no tradition of

rebellion, of asserting the Church’s

authority against the government, as

the Catholic and Protestant clerics in

the West did.

He was faced with two different

instructions – obey the government,

and obey God’s law – but could not

obey both of them. He was, as a law-

abiding man and an Orthodox

Christian, torn between them. In the

1970s, he had raised God’s laws

above human laws. Now, however,

the K G B had reminded him

forcefully of the power of human

laws, and he was pulled in two

directions.

‘You are violating the rules of

the fight. Instead of ideological

methods,

you

are

using

administrative,

legal,

punitive

measures,’ he wrote in an imaginary

dialogue with the K G B that he

composed around this time.

Before his arrest, his newspaper

had described the collapse of a

community in real time. Now, it was

describing the collapse of an

individual. I could not – despite the

lack of pen to take notes, despite

feeling sick – stop reading. The sun

flickered in my eyes through the

trees and the cabin window, and the

words were brutal, like a long,

sliding car crash lasting hours.

We stopped in a small village,

where a red-brick church with a

cross was the centrepiece of a row of

houses. I took the opportunity to

retrieve my pen, and read on.

‘We all need confession. But

who will confess first? Everyone is

called to confession, but let someone

else confess. And no one even wants

to

understand

my

confession.

Everyone is leaving, I am left almost

alone, just with my family, and even

Mikhail wants to go to Moscow.’

Mikhail, his son, was angry and

told him what everyone was saying.

‘What they are saying is that

your books should be burned, that

no one should come to you, that you

cannot be a spiritual father,’ Mikhail

said. Father Dmitry replied that he

did not believe it, but his son

insisted: ‘They are sparing you, a lot

tougher things were said as well.’

And Father Dmitry began to get

angry. His friends would not forgive

him. No one was coming to see him,

and he could not believe this was out

of

choice.

Someone

must

be

stopping his old friends from

coming.

‘I don’t understand, what is this?

Revenge? And for what? Are they

fulfilling someone’s orders, or just

inspired by the spirit of evil? Are

they stripping their father bare to

laugh at their father?’

It was a beautiful day now. The

roads were almost empty, and

nothing moved in the wide flat

landscape ahead of us, just the puff

of exhaust from a car a couple of

hundred metres in front. It was hard

to reconcile the beauty around me

with the pain on the page.

‘Christians are leaving another

Christian in sorrow. I understand

that my sorrow is a bit different, that

it’s not the kind to inspire sympathy.

And anyway I’m not talking about

sympathy, but do you really not

understand that they are dividing us,

to drive in a wedge, to play on our

mistakes?’ he wrote. But he himself

was as much to blame as any of

them, accusing his old friends of

abandoning him, of obeying orders,

of anything he could think of.

His

community

was

truly

shattered. The lesson was clear:

totalitarianism

does

not

allow

independence. It cannot. Even the

smallest attempt to assert autonomy

is a threat to the whole. Father

Dmitry had understood this in the

1970s, which is why he encouraged

hope and trust. Those are the only

weapons that can be used against a

state determined to destroy society.

Father Dmitry had thought he

had been serving his nation by

spreading

trust,

and

fighting

abortion and despair, but, in doing

so, he was defying the state. And

that was not allowed. That was why

he had to be crushed. His fate

parallels the fate of his whole nation.

Through the twentieth century, the

government in Moscow taught the

Russians that hope and trust are

dangerous, inimical and treacherous.

That is the root of the social

breakdown that has caused the

epidemic

of

alcoholism,

the

collapsing birth rate, the crime and

the misery.

Father

Dmitry

understood

quickly,

on

emerging

from

detention, what had happened to

him. He understood that he had been

a danger to the state, and why the

state had to isolate him or destroy

him. The concepts of trust, hope and

faith were too dangerous to be

allowed to flourish. Most Russians

caught in the national decline did not

have his awareness. They drank or

fought without knowing why life

was so miserable. Father Dmitry

tried to rebuild the old community,

to get working again. He appealed in

what was left of his newspaper for

unity, for his spiritual children to

come back, and for them to try

again. But who would come back to

him now? It was too late.

On 22 February 1981, he typed

his last issue. He said he had to stop

publication so as to keep his secrets

to himself from now on, but I think

he was just depressed that no one

read his paper. He had certainly

shown no desire to hide secrets in

the past. I finished the page. It was

incredibly cold.

In Arsenevo, it turned out that

buses to Baydino did exist, but that

they would not do me much good.

There was one in the morning,

which I had missed by more than an

hour, and one back in the evening,

for which I would have to wait six

hours. If I were to wait for the

evening one, I would still have no

way of getting back again unless I

was prepared to spend the night

there. The temperature was if

anything even lower out here in the

countryside, and my breath was a

thick cloud in the waiting room, so

sitting around was not an attractive

option. I walked out into the cold

and looked for a taxi. There was no

shortage. Half a dozen men were

waiting in their cars for non-existent

customers, and I hired the first: a

stocky driver with a moustache in a

white Zhiguli.

It was eerie outside the little

town. The cold was so intense that

the upper branches of the birch trees

were covered in hoar frost, as

delicate as the first leaves of spring

but white and sparkling. Sometimes

the low sun caught a tree just so, and

then every crystal would light up

and the whole glowing tree was

transformed into something more

magical than any neon display.

Sometimes the birches were a dark

screen along the road, and then I

could see between them to the vast

featureless fields, their snowy crust

unscarred. At other times the road

ran

through

a

dense

wood,

threatening in black and white.

There were no other cars on the

road, which stretched ahead of us in

a straight, desolate line. A black

figure appeared on the horizon after

a while and trudged onwards

without stopping as we drove past.

He was the only sign of life we saw

for the whole half-hour it took to

reach the village.

We turned right, following the

sign for Baydino, then crossed a

small iced-over river and stopped on

the far side. The driver gestured to a

line of houses that paralleled the

road. That was it, Father Dmitry’s

refuge when the storm broke over

him.

‘Quiet, monotony, fresh air, the

absence of a mass of people, two or

three women walk by, a boy runs

past, sometimes a drunkard passes,

totally inoffensive, just swaying

slightly: after the city’s din and fuss,

it was unusual,’ he wrote later,

before going on to describe their

first evening. ‘Some young voices

unexpectedly began to sing, and they

played on the balalaika. They sang

for a long time, and then were quiet.

Calm, quiet, and nothing else. For

my children it was boring, my wife

was also dissatisfied, but I felt like I

was in heaven.’

I had specific instructions to help

me find the house he had lived in. I

knew which way its door pointed,

how many fir trees were in its

garden and what colour it was

painted.

I did not anticipate the search

would take me long, so I asked the

driver to wait and stepped into the

cold. The field was knee deep in

snow, but villagers had beaten a path

across the field towards the nearest

house. I could tell from the

footprints that the path was regularly

used by a woman (or by a man with

small feet), but I could not see her

anywhere in the yard of the house,

where the only sign of life was a dog

who barked frantically from a locked

shed. The yard also contained a huge

log pile, next to a shed that had until

r ecen tly contained rabbits. Their

hutch was empty. Perhaps the

woman had taken them to market on

the morning bus.

My instructions said Father

Dmitry’s house was the one with

conifers in the garden, but there

appeared to be pines all along the

track that formed the backbone of

the village. Finding his place was

going to be slightly harder than I had

anticipated. The shovelled path

ended after the rabbit woman’s yard,

and I followed the tracks of an

animal, which turned out to be a cat,

since four of the creatures were

looking at me from the locked yard

of a house. A car in the yard was

piled with so much snow you could

hardly tell it was a car. Apart from

the cats, there were no other signs of

life. By the time I reached the top of

the village, mine were the only

human footprints.

The village contained about