The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (46 page)

prisoners left in his country, and he

was close to telling the truth,

although full rehabilitation did not

come until the 1990s. Controversial

themes were up for discussion in

ways they had not been since the

revolution.

Father Dmitry entered into that

with enthusiasm. This was when he

elaborated his theories about the

Jews’ responsibility for all his

nation’s ills.

‘It is not that he went into

politics, but politics came to him,’

said Petrovsky. Among the people

who attended his discussions at the

end of the Soviet period was

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a firebrand

nationalist christened by Father

Dmitry,

and

whose

misnamed

Liberal Democrat Party – it is neither

liberal nor democratic, rather the

opposite – became the first registered

opposition party in the Soviet Union.

Although

this

was

before

Zhirinovsky’s more controversial

remarks, such as that Russia and

Germany should once again carve

up Poland between them, and before

his friendship with a former member

of Hitler’s SS, the politician was still

a noxious combination of Soviet

nostalgia and racism. Petrovsky

attempted to explain away Father

Dmitry’s friendship with him –

‘People asked whether he would go

into a beauty contest, and he said

that to save a soul he’d go

anywhere’ – but in truth, by the end

of the Soviet Union, Dudko’s views

now had more in common with the

extreme right than with anyone else.

By April 1992, a few months

after the Soviet empire’s collapse, he

was appearing at demonstrations

with chauvinist politicians, and was

appointed spiritual adviser to a new

newspaper

called
Day
,

which

combined communism, Orthodoxy

and anti-Semitism into a single

package.

In

May

1992,
Day

reprinted
The Protocols of the Elders

of Zion
, a hoax document detailing a

plot (in fact invented by the tsar’s

secret police) by Jews to take over

the world, in what was surely the

Protocols’
first publication in Russia

since the Nazi-sponsored papers of

wartime. A week or two later, it

reprinted an interview with Hitler.

‘The newspaper
Day
is showing,

like no other, what is being done to

the country,’ Father Dmitry wrote in

one of his columns. It seemed that,

having lost his chance to rally people

around a message of hope, he had

launched a campaign of nihilism and

hatred instead. Now he was even

lamenting the collapse of the

totalitarian state that he had once

urged his followers to boycott.

There was such a powerful

strong country, the whole

world respected it, and some

people were even afraid,

and now they just laugh at

its helplessness.

There was the K G B.

People were scared just of

the sound of it, and now no

one is scared, and the K G B

is seen as guilty before

someone, before ‘them’.

There

was

the

communist party, millions-

strong, ruling, which just

had to say one word to be

listened to, and now not

only does no one listen, but

it’s on trial.

I asked Petrovsky how it was that

Father Dmitry could support the K G

B when they had ruined not just his

life, but the lives of so many of his

friends. He had, after all, been

imprisoned in the north for almost a

decade just for writing a poem.

Petrovsky shrugged, and his face set

a little more. The conversation was

clearly going along the path he had

expected, but that did not mean he

was enjoying it.

‘He said that in the camp he did

not die of hunger. There was always

a ration, but that under this new

system people were dying of hunger.

The communists were better than

these times, and he said that under

the communists there was less

temptation.’

That was nonsense, and he knew

it. Millions of people died in the

camps from hunger, or from

deliberate neglect, or from diseases

caused

by

their

weakened

conditions. Father Dmitry himself

worked in a camp hospital where

prisoners did just that. Petrovsky

grimaced when I confronted him

with the weakness of the argument.

His own grandfather had died in the

camps in 1937, he said, but Father

Dmitry felt he had earned the right to

criticize or support the communists

as and how he wished.

The early 1990s got worse for

Father Dmitry and for millions of

other Russians. With Boris Yeltsin in

the Kremlin, ill-thought-through and

corrupt privatization deals were

launched in an attempt to break the

back of the communist system.

Inflation, all but unknown in Soviet

times, wiped out savings and the

purchasing power of fixed incomes.

Pensioners who had been assured

that they would be looked after were

forced to sell their belongings to buy

food. Bewilderingly, unemployment

appeared where previously everyone

had been guaranteed a job. Often

those still in employment had to wait

months to get paid, while their

factories’ new owners used the

money to fund lavish lifestyles

detailed in the vibrant new press.

Where before the sardonic jokes

that Russians swapped had been

about their leaders, now they were

about ‘New Russians’, the philistine,

moneyed beneficiaries of the 1990s:

‘How much did that tie cost?’

‘$500.’ ‘Ha, I got the same one for

$700.’

An attempt by hardliners in 1993

to block this headlong progress

ended with Yeltsin sending tanks to

bombard parliament and imposing a

new constitution in which he could

rule largely unchallenged. Father

Dmitry’s newspaper, which had

supported the attempted coup, was

banned

and

relaunched

as

Tomorrow
, but continued the same

campaigns against the changes that

were

dramatically

altering

the

country.

Newly

rich

bankers

and

businessmen like Boris Berezovsky,

Mikhail

Khodorkovsky

and

Vladimir Potanin flaunted their

wealth, while millions of ordinary

workers were paid late or not at all.

By the mid-1990s, Russian men

were dying on average seven years

earlier than during the anti-alcohol

campaign, and the birth rate dropped

from an average of 1.6 children per

woman to 0.8. If such a birth rate is

maintained, every generation will be

less than half the size of the one

preceding it.

By 1996, Yeltsin’s popularity

rating was in single figures and he

faced

a

strong

challenge

in

presidential elections from Vladimir

Zyuganov

and

his

revitalized

communist party. As it turned out,

Yeltsin would win comfortably by

brokering every deal he could,

including effectively giving away

Russia’s most valuable assets to the

big businessmen.

But while it still looked like there

might be a fair fight, Father Dmitry

offered his own advice to the

Russian electorate. It was not now a

surprise that he advised his readers

to

vote

for

the

communist

Zyuganov, but the reasoning he used

shows how much he had changed.

He started off by defining Russia

as Orthodox. He admitted that

people of other faiths lived in

Russia, such as Catholics and

Muslims, but he denied they were

Russian. ‘For the Catholics,’ he

wrote, in reasoning that might raise

eyebrows in Ireland or France,

‘country makes no difference, they

are citizens of the whole world. With

Muslims it is a little harder, they love

a particular country. But what

country? That’s up to them. If they

live in Russia, which has been

Orthodox since time immemorial,

then they should dance off out of

here.’

He then summarized recent

history. He said that Russians love

their homeland and could not

conceivably have done anything to

harm it, so therefore someone else

must have been to blame. And who

might that have been?

‘Who stood in the government,

in the propaganda, in the conducting

of repression? Was it not people

with Jewish names? There was only

an

insignificant

percentage

of

Russians. There is of course nothing

more to say. But the reply will come

that it was people with Russian

names who destroyed the churches.

Yes, maybe they were destroyed

with Russian hands, but not with a

Russian

head,’

he wrote. His

reasoning was exactly the same as

that used by his K G B tormentors in

1980.

It

was

the

Jews,

his

interrogator had said, who were

giving the orders that were causing

his misery. And his Russian captors

had no choice but to obey. It had

been the Jews, they had said, who

had wanted to send him to prison.

And now Father Dmitry was

parroting it back. The Russians had

just been obeying orders.

So, to recap, he was advocating

the expulsion of Russia’s 20 million

Muslims, almost all of whom live in

their ancestral homelands, which

were conquered by Russia between

the

sixteenth

and

nineteenth

centuries. And he was saying that the

Soviet repression of the Russians

was the fault of the Jews.

Any readers wondering what this

had to do with the presidential race

did not have long to wait. He was

analysing

which

of

the

two

candidates would do the most to

support Orthodoxy and oppose

everything else. That, it turned out,

would be Zyuganov, despite the fact

that Yeltsin was the one who went to

church, and the one who had given

the Church its freedom, while

Zyuganov was a communist, and

thus a member of the party that had

destroyed

the

Church.

Why?

Because Yeltsin had had dealings

with the West for too long.

Zyuganov would not pollute the

country with foreigners.

‘He is a patriot with an Orthodox

style, who supports the thousand-

year culture. And that is what our

enemies are afraid of, that the

Orthodox would make up with the

communists, then it will be the only

force, and then God-fearing Russia

will be mighty and indivisible.’

Petrovsky was not the only new

disciple attracted to Father Dmitry in

the 1980s. I had heard of another

one while visiting Father Dmitry’s

home village in the summer. He was

called Father Vadim, and it was he

who had reopened the church in

Berezina in the mid-1990s.

Where was he now though? That

I did not know. Unecha, the little

railway town, does not have many

hotels. The relatively convenient

ones were full of railway workers

coming in or passing through and so

I ended up in the Amber Hotel,

which was not so much a hotel as a

forest base. Cut off, surrounded by

trees and falling snow, it was silent

and as primeval as a 1970s concrete

mock-Finnish construction could

conceivably be.

The hotel had several floors of

rooms, a restaurant, a receptionist, a