The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (42 page)

thirty houses, of which three were

habitable. The rabbit house was the

only one permanently lived in

though, and the other two were

clearly only used at the weekend,

probably as country retreats for

Muscovites. Of the rest, some were

rotting, their walls buckling and

window frames stolen for fuel.

Others were still weather-proof, but

forlorn, with trackless snow piled to

the window sills. There would be no

balalaika music here now, not even

any drunkards such as the one

Father

Dmitry

had

described.

Baydino was another one of the

villages in the statistics, and was all

but dead.

In fact, the Tula region is the

core of the cancer that is eating away

at the Russian population. It has just

2.2 people of working age for every

one pensioner, which is the worst

figure in all of Russia, but one that

the country as a whole will exceed in

just a few years. The number of

pensioners compared to working

adults is increasing all over the

industrialized world, but nothing like

to this extent. As a comparison, in

2010, Great Britain had 3.6 people

of working age for each pensioner,

while the United States had 4.5 –

more than twice as many as the Tula

region. Only the Pskov region has a

population that is contracting faster

than Tula’s. It has the highest ratio

of deaths to births in the country,

and the second lowest fertility level.

It is, in a word, dying.

Tracing my own footprints back

through the village, I tried to

decipher the directions I had been

given. Father Dmitry’s house was

clearly

one

of

three

adjacent

buildings that formed a line on the

side of the village nearest the road,

so I waded into the snow in one of

t h e gardens, to look more closely.

By this stage, I had lost all feeling in

my toes, and I had my padded hood

cinched tight over my face to hold

my scarf over my mouth. Just my

eyes were exposed to the cold. I

ploughed forward. The snow was

waist deep here, and I realized the

best way to make progress was

almost to lie on it, walking on my

knees rather than my feet and

supporting my weight on my

stomach. I did not even to try to lift

my legs clear at every step. If I

walked on my feet, sometimes the

crust would support me, but I would

invariably crash through halfway

into the next step, which made

extricating myself far more difficult

than if I just ploughed forwards like

a cow.

The first house fitted all the

requirements except that the porch

pointed the wrong way. Just a few

small panes of glass were missing

from a decorative window, but that

had been enough to let the weather

in. The floorboards of the porch

were rotten, and trash had blown

through. This house was still

together, but would not be for long.

I pushed on to the next house.

Really, I should have gone round

back by the road, but it was taking a

long time – five minutes to go 20

metres – to get anywhere, so I just

dived through the hedge that

separated

their

gardens,

and

floundered round to its front door. It

was hard work, and I began to sweat

under my coat. I released the hood a

little, and suffered as my feet

warmed and the blood flowed back

into my toes. Some snow had

pushed down into my boots and was

melting, which made me feel all the

colder.

This second house was definitely

not the one, being the wrong shape,

so I repeated my hedge dive to get to

the third. They all three looked more

or less the same: cream-painted

walls, single storey, porch, two

rooms. But this last house was the

most damaged of the three. A whole

window was missing, so I heaved

myself over the sill and inside,

where there was only a light dusting

of snow. It was a relief to be able to

walk

without

wading.

In

the

bedroom, two old wire bedsteads

lacked mattresses. A wardrobe still

held some cheap summer dresses,

and a row of their matching belts

hung from a rail. A Formica-

laminated cupboard stood up against

a wall, its doors open. Here were

toothpaste tubes, and bottles of

iodine,

and

a

glass

full

of

toothbrushes. A magazine from

1981 – the same year as the last

edition

of

Father

Dmitry’s

newspaper – was piled on top of

some school-books. A girl called

Galina had done her Russian

homework here.

On the wall behind the cupboard

was a swallow’s nest.

As I prepared to hoist myself

back into the snow, I noticed, among

the wreckage of dozens of dead

butterflies on the windowsill, an

empty bottle of vodka and a half-

used bubble packet of hypodermic

needles.

I retraced my way back through

my trench to the house of the cats,

and started again. At the end furthest

from the river the houses were even

more damaged, without roofs, full

inside and out with snow, and with

no chance of any traces remaining of

their previous owners. I gave up,

walked back out to the road and

down to the car. In a brief panic, I

worried that the driver might have

got bored and left me in the cold, but

he was still sitting there patiently

with a cigarette. Just as I was about

to get in, I noticed that smoke was

now blooming from the chimney of

the first house I had passed: the one

with the rabbits and the barking dog.

There had been no smoke before, so

this could only mean someone was

home. The driver said no one had

passed him, and I had seen no one,

but smoke was smoke. Excited to

find a human at last I strode back

down the beaten path, and knocked

on the door. There was no answer,

so I tried another door. There was

still no answer.

Puzzled, I walked back to the

car, unable to understand how the

fire had lit itself without a person

being at home. It was only that

evening that I guessed the owner had

probably been in all the time, but

had not wanted to open their door to

someone mad enough to spend two

hours wading through waist-deep

snow and breaking into derelict

houses.

On our drive back to Arsenevo,

my driver told me that he had

worked for seventeen years as a coal

miner near Tula, and now had a

monthly pension of 8,000 roubles.

That is around £160 and, as a

comparison of how far out of whack

the local economy is, my grim hotel

room in Tula cost me 6,200 roubles

for my two nights’ stay. When he

dropped me off back at the bus

station, I gave him two 500-rouble

notes, and realized as I did so that

that was half a week’s pension. My

driver told me there was no other

work, all the farms were closed, and

the sausage factory that used to exist

had gone with them. Food is

imported now, he said.

While waited for the bus back, a

three-year-old girl in a pink jacket so

puffed up that she could barely

move her arms commanded the little

bus station. She talked incessantly to

her father, delighting in the sound of

the Russian words ‘to Tula, to Tula’.

Her father, keen for a break, phoned

his wife and handed his daughter the

phone. She then became silent and

refused to say a word until he took

the phone away. He finally did so,

and ended the call, at which point

she nattered away again as before.

Her father’s eyes met mine in a mute

shrug, and then the bus came.

She was the only child I had seen

all day. I made a point of looking

out for more, but did not see any.

The bus back to Tula was not the

modern sleek model of the morning,

but an old doddery Soviet-era

Icarus. The temperature inside was

the same as that outside – minus 32

– and, if it warmed up during the

journey, it did not warm up by

much. It was far too cold to read or

to take notes, so I sat with my

double-gloved hands pushed up into

my sleeves and nurtured the ember

of warmth into a steady glow.

I could not help but muse on

Father Dmitry as our bus retraced

our morning route back from the

bleak fields. The evening light had

none of the mellow warmth of the

morning. The fields were flat and

greyish. The trees were gloomy, and

there was no colour or warmth

anywhere in the world.

My mind kept piecing together

little snippets from the newspaper I

had been reading that morning. I had

been so mesmerized by the misery

that Father Dmitry was pouring on

to the page that I had allowed the

actual events of his life to wash over

me:

the

summonses

to

the

prosecutors, the insults from his

friends, the abusive letters.

Now, though, I had time, and I

began to see a picture emerge of a

second narrative contained in the

newspaper besides the misery. The

story gradually formed itself on the

long bumpy journey, but was still an

amorphous shape when the Icarus

made a heroic effort to crest the

slight rise into Tula’s bus station.

Back in Tula, I walked the road

from the bus station to the centre of

town, partly because I had not

realized how long it was, and partly

because I wanted to think some

more. At the end, I turned right and

found a bar in a shopping centre. I

occupied a table in the corner, as far

as possible from a group of rowdy

Armenians playing billiards. I spread

out my papers, ordered a beer and

began to read.

I went back to that moment just

after his release from detention,

when a woman came screaming that

his former disciples wanted to kill

him. The next day he had a meeting

with a senior figure in the K G B, at

his own request. Worried about his

safety, and about a threat to his life

from people who had been his

friends, he turned for help to the

authorities.

‘I said to them, that I am being

threatened, they want to kill me,’ he

wrote later.

The K G B man did not appear to

believe the threat, but did offer to

take him back into detention for his

own protection, and that was a

crucial moment. Before his arrest,

Father Dmitry was urging a boycott

of the state. Now he was turning to it

for help against his own friends.

It is clear from Father Dmitry’s

own account that the K G B used a

disorienting good cop/good cop

approach, which worked better than

they could have imagined on a priest

who was alone and friendless and

desperate and guilty. They spoke to

him kindly and politely as if he was

their old chum. They discussed the

disagreements he had had with the

state, and how he disliked its

atheistic policies.

‘Yes, we are guilty before you,’

a senior K G B official told Father

Dmitry. ‘And not only that, the state

is guilty before the Church.’

How could he resist these

entreaties, when he had no other

friends? He wrote that he had asked

for forgiveness but that his friends

would not even talk to him. And

here were K G B agents admitting all