The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (47 page)

table-tennis table, and me. It was

eerie. I felt like I had strayed on to

the set of a horror film. Despite the

cold and the snow, therefore, I

cinched my coat tight around my

face and walked into the forest.

The tracks of the car that had

brought me here were already

covered, and I followed not so much

a road through the forest as an

absence of trees. There was really

only one direction to walk in, and so

I walked in it. After a quarter of an

hour of silent progress, the forest

opened up to a vast empty field and,

just visible through the curtains of

snow, was a church.

There was something perfectly

Russian about the view before me. If

a Hollywood producer wanted an

opening for a film, a backdrop for a

fur-swaddled Anna Karenina and

her troika to tell viewers that they

were in Russia, that they could only

be in Russia, then this sawtooth line

of conifers, the bulging domes of

this church, this vast empty white

field and this drifting snow would

have been it. This is the Real Russia,

to Russians and foreigners alike. No

one thinks of the giant glass-roofed

malls on the edge of Moscow as

being primordially Russian. They do

not even think of the endless ranks

of grey apartment blocks as being

properly Russian. When they think

of Russia, they think of flatness, and

forest, and wild places, and snow

and always, somewhere, on the edge

of the shot, a church like this one.

The Hollywood producer might

be tempted to linger on the scene for

a while, but it was minus 20 and

snowing hard, so I was not. I hurried

towards the church. It was a

Saturday evening, so a service

would be due at some point and that

meant a priest would be in

attendance. A priest might know

where I could find Father Vadim.

Two old women stood on the

rough wooden boards of the

church’s floor. A few candles

flickered before some of the icons. A

pyramid screen shielded the holy

core of the building, and a priest was

bustling about. It was some time

before I realized that a service was in

progress and that I was a third of the

congregation. The faithful of Unecha

had clearly been deterred by the

blizzard and I could not blame them.

The church’s radiators did not even

take the edge off the cold.

After the service had stuttered to

an end the priest, a suspicious-

looking man with a vicious face and

ginger beard, was brusque with me.

He had no love, it seemed, for

people with foreign accents and

bright-red

coats

who

asked

questions. Father Vadim’s parish

was in Old Guta, he snapped, and

was there anything else?

‘No, nothing else, thank you.’

He turned away without a word.

By that stage it was dark, and it was

a long cold worrying walk through

the trees before I saw the lights of

my hotel in its little clearing. I was

the only customer in the restaurant

and thus spoiled the evening of two

waitresses and a barman. They got

their revenge, however, by failing to

tell me that I needed to order

breakfast the night before if I wanted

something to eat in the morning.

Supper had not been substantial,

so I was hungry even before my taxi

came to pick me up the next day. It

was the same driver who had driven

me here in the first place and, when I

told him I wanted the church in Old

Guta, he said: ‘Oh, you mean Father

Vadim’s place?’ I was clearly losing

my touch. Taxi drivers always know

more than you expect.

He chattered away as we skirted

Unecha and plunged into more

forest, but I only listened enough to

make polite noises. The trees here

were thick and bleak, pines and

birches. Some birches were dead and

had fallen to make curved half-

arches over the banked road. We

were

the

only

travellers

that

morning, and did not see another car

until we arrived in Old Guta.

The village was spread out, with

the church just one house among

many. A cross above the door was

the only sign that it was anything

special. The pink-painted porch

contained embroidered banners on

poles like those carried by trade

union marchers, except these bore

the bearded faces of Jesus or

Orthodox saints. I could hear the

service, so I nervously pushed open

the door into the interior, only to be

met by the worried face of a man

with rugged white hair and a jutting

moustache.

‘Leave it open a little, Zhanna

Mikhailovna is feeling bad,’ he said.

Here was a largish room, 6

metres by 3, with twenty-five or so

worshippers packed in. I wormed

my way to the back, and examined

my surroundings. Prints of icons had

been pasted on to 2mm fibreboard.

A huge white peasant stove blasted

out heat. The floor was plain knotty

pine. It was hot: a fug of beeswax

and incense and people and smoke.

The screen protecting the holy place

was more fibreboard and, as I

looked, Father Vadim processed out,

a battered face in his mid-forties

above an immense tangled beard and

a vast green and gold cloak.

Most of the congregation were

older women, though half-a-dozen

uncovered male heads stood out

among the headscarves. The chants

faded backwards through the room,

starting loudly at the choir at the

front, all the way to silent me. The

hand gestures of the ritual passed out

like ripples in a pond. The people

looked and sounded like a unit, what

a church should be, and surely what

a church would have been like in

these villages before the revolution.

It was a community, I realized –

the kind of community that Father

Dmitry had wanted to create. It was

small and unpretentious, but it was

itself and that was what mattered.

When the worshippers lined up to

take communion, a stocky man with

swept-back hair gestured to me to

join the queue in front of him. I

declined, smiling.

‘Go on, don’t be scared,’ he said

with a smile of his own.

‘No no,’ I said, searching for a

reason not to go. ‘Um, I’m a

Protestant.’

He shied away as if I had tried to

kiss him, and spent the rest of the

service on the other side of the room

watching me in confusion. Candles

were passed out from the front, and

a kind-eyed woman pressed one on

me.

‘With the love of God,’ she said,

and I took it. I liked standing there

with a candle, part of a little

twinkling constellation of people

joined together by friendship and

trust in this church on a Sunday

morning.

It

was

simple

and

affecting, far more so than the grand

processions and choreography of a

cathedral, and I felt a little flicker of

hope. Perhaps, far below the radar,

such groups are operating all across

Russia and will provide the trust and

friendship Russians need to rebuild

their society from the wreckage left

by the K G B.

After the service, Father Vadim

and I bundled into a minibus. He

had no car, and a long way to get

home, so a worshipper gave us a lift,

through Unecha and down the long

straight that heads east. The wind

blew tendrils of snow across the

tarmac ahead of us, and every

passing car was trailed by a blizzard.

Otherwise, it was a cold clear day.

Father Vadim’s house was more

untidy than anything I have ever

seen. Boxes and paper and general

stuff were strewn on every surface,

but he clearly did not mind. He

swept a space on a chair clear for

me, then sat down too. His mother

put the kettle on, then joined us.

She had, it transpired, worked in

a library in Moscow and had asked

Father Dmitry if he would give a

lecture there. This was 1990, still

Soviet times, and asking a priest to

address a crowd was a brave thing to

do.

‘I had believed for about a year,’

said Father Vadim, ‘and that was

when I met him. He was small and

not as dramatic as I thought he

would be. The first thing he made

everyone do was pledge sobriety

because our country is falling apart.

He said that we had lost our sense of

self and were drinking too much.’

Father Vadim’s grey cat had got

over its suspicion of me, and now sat

on the table taking darts at my pen.

‘This was his way to save the

country. He was very worried for

Russia, and he said spirits were the

big danger. It was fine for me, I had

not drunk for a few years anyway,

and after this meeting I said I wanted

to be christened, so he took me to his

flat and christened me.’

Vadim went with him to church,

and enjoyed it. He enjoyed the sense

of community. At that time, Moscow

was suffering from the severe

economic policies at the end of

communism. He said he did not

really understand Father Dmitry’s

desire to launch into politics. He just

wanted a monk’s life, somewhere in

a village, where things would be

simpler.

There are a lot of souls that need

saving. A book by three Russian

sociologists describes how, in 1974,

one in eight children born in villages

were officially registered as disabled

because of exposure to alcohol
in

utero
. That sounds terrible enough,

but the situation has now got so

much worse that all the categories

used by such previous studies have

become useless.

‘The situation is apparently past

the point when diagnoses like

“drinking”, “binge drinking” and

perhaps even “alcoholism” reflect

the true meaning of the problem.

What is going on today is more aptly

described as “pervasive human

degradation”,

“profound

degeneration of a genetic pool”, and

so on. While such qualifications may

sound
harsh, they are not off the

mark at all,’ they wrote.

Father Vadim wanted to help

and, when the chance came to serve

in Father Dmitry’s home village, he

grabbed it.

‘Our villages are dying. There is

no help from the government. It is

closing the schools, the medical

centres. There are no farms, just a

few people work and that’s all. This

drunkenness keeps growing, and

people have lost their sense of life.

People either leave to find work, or

they get drunk,’ he said. ‘It used to

be men who drank but now women

have started to as well. This

degradation is serious. You do not

notice it so much in towns, but in

villages there is nothing. In the

1980s there were children, schools,

but now it’s all gone. A house here

would cost you 5,000 roubles.

That’s with a garden. In fact, offer

someone your mobile phone and

they would happily exchange it for a

house. Only old people are left, and

they’re dying.’

I asked him what he thought of

the government, which has, after two

decades of doing nothing, finally

launched policies to save the Russian

population. Vladimir Putin, in his

spell as prime minister, promised to

stabilize the population at 143

million, but by the time he said it that

number already looked unrealistic.

Putin

has

boasted

of

improvements to the birth rate – a 20

per cent increase in the number of

children being born – and credited