The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (44 page)

liking, I’ll be there,’ he said,

defeated at last. He wrote about this

conversation many times in later

years, as if unable to forget about it.

The fight to save the Russian people

was off. He would go along with the

K G B, do their bidding, anything to

get out of the hole he had dug for

himself. The state could encourage

abortion, spread alcoholism, sow

distrust at the heart of family life,

and he would not object.

‘That is correct,’ said Sokolov.

‘But look out, don’t even think

about fooling us.’

The next day came the telegram

from the bishop. He had a church,

just

outside

Moscow,

at

Vinogradovo. It was, he wrote, a

miracle. But he must have known it

was not. And he knew whom to

thank for it. He owed his new life to

the K G B. He overlooked the fact

that it was the K G B who had

destroyed his old life. That had been

a thousand years before. He was

their creature now. It had taken them

a while, but they had dug out the

vein of defiance that had crossed his

character, and created yet another

compliant servant for the state.

In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Winston

Smith, the central character, is

subjected to Room 101 and has his

defiance broken, just as Father

Dmitry was subjected and broken.

After countless sessions of torture,

his interrogator tells him: ‘We are

not content with negative obedience,

nor even with the most abject

submission.

When

finally

you

surrender to us, it must be of your

own free will. We do not destroy the

heretic because he resists us: so long

as he resists us we never destroy

him. We convert him, we capture his

inner mind, we reshape him.’

That could have been written

about Father Dmitry, and so perhaps

could a later passage, when Winston

Smith finally breaks: ‘two and two

could have been three as easily as

five, if that were what was needed’.

If two and two cease to add up to

four, then everything stops having to

make sense. All you have to do is

stop thinking and you are free.

‘How easy it all was! Only

surrender,

and

everything

else

followed. It was like swimming

against a current that swept you

backwards

however

hard

you

struggled,

and

then

suddenly

deciding to turn round and go with

the current instead of opposing it,’

was how Orwell imagined it.

He wrote in
Nineteen Eighty-

Four
that the future could be

imagined as a boot stamping on a

human face for ever, and that was

what the K G B promised. They had

endless power and could torment

people for as long as they wanted.

They could torment people until they

realized

for

themselves

that

resistance was not just futile but

wrong. It is a terrifying image, and

Orwell’s

description

of

the

destruction of Winston Smith’s

character is remarkably similar to

what happened to Father Dmitry, but

here he went too far. Humans are not

machines. You cannot stamp on their

faces for ever. If you deny people

hope and trust and friendship, then

they sicken and despair. People will

not breed in captivity.

After his destruction, Winston

Smith went to a bar and drank – ‘It

was his life, his death, and his

resurrection. It was gin that sank him

into a stupor every night, and gin

that revived him in the morning’ –

alone and avoided. In the Russian

case: for gin, read vodka.

Father Dmitry now had none of

the young intellectuals around him

with whom he had so loved to

debate. They had abandoned him, or

been imprisoned, or emigrated to

Israel. He still wrote, but there was

no one to read what he produced or

to argue with his conclusions, so he

held debates with himself. He wrote

the questions and then provided the

answers: ‘There is only God. My

hope in my friends has fallen to a

minimum.’

‘The K G B agents did their

business. I was left alone, solitary. I

still continue my discussions, I look

for new techniques, but people don’t

come and the level of the discussions

has fallen,’ he wrote.

His writing became ever more

bitter,

as

he

lamented

his

abandonment.

He

wrote

long

statements to his old friends. His

justification for his actions changed

as the years passed. At first, he

admitted his guilt and begged

forgiveness. He said he was scared

of imprisonment, and that he had

been weak. Later, he tried to explain

it away. He stopped admitting his

faults. He had had no choice. He was

a priest. To break with the Church

would have meant damnation.

Breaking with them would

mean to end up outside the

hierarchy, without service,

without the sacraments, like

a member of a sect. They

said they would expel me,

that was their defence. I

would have been forced to

live and die without the

sacraments. That scared me.

That was the choice I stood

before. I did not want to

suffer, and so I rejected

everything

I

had

said,

saying

directly

and

strangely that it had been

anti-Soviet and libellous and

now I suffer all the more.

My suffering could only be

understood by a mother

who by fate was forced to

reject her own children. My

children – my books – were

despotically taken from me.

And, like an unfortunate

mother, I am scared to call

those children mine.

Reading those words I felt sorry for

him, but I no longer liked him. It

was hard to like him. Yakunin was

in prison. Ogorodnikov was in

prison. Sakharov was in internal

exile. Solzhenitsyn was in exile

abroad. But it was Father Dmitry

demanding sympathy because he

had teamed up with the K G B to

stay out of prison, done their work

for them and undermined his

friends. It did not look good, and his

spiritual children did not come back

because of it. And that made him

angry.

‘Despite everything,’ he wrote,

as if he had been wronged

somehow, ‘I love all people, I worry

about them, especially about my

own Russian people, about my own

Russia.’

He invented a counterpart, Father

Peter he called him, with whom he

could hold long imaginary debates

that confirmed his own viewpoint.

But the debates were not like the old

ones. Father Peter did not challenge

his views. Before, Father Dmitry had

insisted on tolerance and trust, but

now he ventured further up the path

of prejudice and racism the K G B

had opened for him. This fictional

counterpart asked him what he

thought about the world, and about

the faith, and about everything.

Father Dmitry conflated himself and

his country – ‘What happened to me

taught me a lot, just as what has

happened to our country should

teach us a lot’ – and he was looking

for someone to blame for the fate of

both.

Before the K G B warped him,

he had looked for solutions. He was

not interested in finding those to

blame

for

the

demographic

catastrophe, the alcoholism, the

abortion. He just wanted to unite

everyone, to end hatred and to build

a community. Now, with his

community

scattered

in

all

directions, and himself left alone, he

concentrated on finding culprits.

And he had been well taught by

the K G B. He blamed the Jews.

‘Do you really not see that they

are to blame for everything? It is not

an accident that Marx was a Jew, and

the creator of communism and

atheism. If you try just to say that,

everyone considers you an anti-

Semite,’ Father Dmitry said. It is

hard to believe that this bigot is the

same man who had so fought against

prejudice and racism just a year or

two before.

11

I look at the future with pessimism

The K G B gave Father Dmitry a

church in Vinogradovo, a village

outside Moscow that has now been

absorbed into the capital’s northern

suburbs. I arranged to go there with

Zoya junior, the daughter of Father

Alexander. She was the young

woman who had been dragged from

her bed by her mother, Zoya senior,

and forced to cook us lunch. She is

also, as it happens, Father Dmitry’s

goddaughter and has a letter from

him in her flat.

‘I congratulate you, Zoya, on the

birth of your namesake Zoya. Let it

be so, her name is Zoya. You will

always remember yourself in her.

God preserve you. I wish you strong

and flourishing health. Your spiritual

father Dmitry Dudko,’ the letter says

in his chaotic handwriting, above the

date 27 February 1982. It sits on a

fashionable

Japanese-style

sideboard.

By 1982, Father Dmitry was

installed in the new church, with

Alexander and Zoya senior as two of

his few remaining spiritual children.

When I asked Alexander why they

had remained with Father Dmitry, he

seemed confused by the question.

Father

Dmitry’s

televised

confession, he said, had merely been

proof of his spiritual worth. Father

Dmitry

made

no

mention

of

Alexander in his writings from the

early 1980s, although he did

describe that single disciple who had

stayed with him because ‘he doesn’t

understand anything anyway’, and I

have wondered if this was a

reference to Zoya’s father.

Be that as it may, it seemed

appropriate

to

be

visiting

Vinogradovo with her. She looks

like her father, in so far as a

beautiful woman in her twenties can

look like a middle-aged bushy-

bearded Orthodox priest. She wears

a gold cross around her neck and is

an educated and sharp representative

of Russia’s new middle class. She

works as an interior designer, drives

a smart German car, and picked me

up outside a metro station at the end

of the line.

She

had

never

visited

Vinogradovo before, or if she had

she had no memory of it. She

programmed it into her satellite

navigator,

which

squawked

directions at us as we drove out of

Moscow towards the great ring road

that sweeps traffic around the capital.

Out here on the city perimeter are

vast new developments of tower

blocks and shopping complexes. The

architecture,

despite

occasional

whimsies of towers and turrets, is

joyless. You know that, while the

walls may look clean and unspotted

now, in a couple of years they will

be as flaky and damp-stained as their

Soviet-made predecessors.

When approaching the city, these

towers meld into a solid wall, rearing

out of the virgin forest. While Russia

is shrinking and its villages are

dying, Moscow is booming. Here is,

according to some estimates, 80 per

cent of the nation’s wealth. The oil

and gas money is a fountain

showering Italian clothes, French

wine and German cars on the elite,

and offering work to everyone else

as long as they are prepared to get