The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (5 page)

hails Galya ignored. News of

Galya’s visit spread quickly, and as

we waited for Vasilyevich to bring

out the papers, four or five women

gathered: all of them were old

friends of hers. There was no one

else in the village. None of them had

heard of the Dudkos. I was feeling a

bit light-headed in the burning heat

and

began

wondering

whether

Father Dmitry had existed at all.

The papers on the church were

interesting, but Vasilyevich had no

copies, so I looked through them,

gave them back and turned to go.

Galya and I would need to walk

back to Berezino from wherever we

were, so that I could find a bus back

to Bryansk. There would be no

further buses from here that day.

The earth track passed between

further fallow fields. There was no

cultivation here at all – just grass –

and almost no livestock: only the

occasional

cow.

The

whole

population seemed to have given up

farming.

We

heard

a

car

approaching from behind us. At the

wheel was the man with the papers.

‘A friend of my wife came after

you left,’ he said, addressing Galya

instead of me. ‘She used to work for

the post office. Apparently, this used

to happen to letters sometimes. There

are two Berezinos in the Bryansk

region. The other one is over by

Unecha, near the border with

Belarus, spelled Berezina, with an

“a”.’

It made sense. Berezino comes

from the word for birch tree, and

Russia has a lot of birch trees. It is a

village name that could easily be

repeated many times. Galya looked

at me. The giggle was back.

‘Two Berezinos? And you’ve

come to the wrong one,’ she said.

She looked profoundly amused. The

lines at the corners of her eyes were

even deeper than before. She hooted

with laughter and put her arm

around me.

‘How far have you come to go to

the wrong village? From London?’

I stood stupidly in the sun. I

could not help but smile. Galya’s

laughter was irresistible. I was

probably already a local legend: the

daft foreigner with a notebook who

couldn’t read a map.

‘Get in,’ the man said. ‘I’ll take

you to the bus stop. You’ve got a

long trip if you’re going all the way

to Unecha.’

Galya, who was still giggling,

left me at the bus stop. She wanted

to have a proper conversation with

her mother and thought the old

women might have calmed down by

now. I could hear her still chuckling

as she walked away. At last the bus

came, and I was heading in the right

direction.

When I finally found the narrow

road to Father Dmitry’s real home

village, far to the west and a day’s

journey away, it was possible to

imagine that nothing had changed

here not only since he was born in

1922, but for centuries before that

too. Conifers formed a spiky horizon

all round. Potatoes sprouted from

sandy fields. Sparse crops of barley

ran right up against the walls of log-

built houses.

But the impression was illusory.

The peasants here in western Russia

were some of the doughtiest enemies

the Bolsheviks ever faced. They had

to be prised away from their ancient

customs like a child from its mother.

The assault on them was merciless,

their defeat was total, and their lives

changed for ever. In the face of the

onslaught, peasants clung to all that

they could salvage: to their faith,

Orthodox Christianity.

Orthodoxy is made up of ancient

rituals and chants and processions

that believers lose themselves in.

Icons are objects of adoration, and

churches have tiered screens to

separate the priest conducting the

mysteries from the waiting faithful.

Orthodoxy claims descent from the

faith of the earliest times, which is

why it is so resistant to change – a

characteristic reinforced in Russian

villages

where

reform

remains

distrusted.

Father Dmitry never wrote much

about his childhood, but from what

he did record it is clear that his home

was deeply religious. His father, an

ordinary farmer with a stubborn face

in photographs, kept a Bible in the

house. His small son would secretly

read it to himself. He played at being

a priest, taking an ember and a

candle, and filling the hut with

smoke. He gave communion from a

glass of water to all his friends, who

treated the event, he said much later,

with great solemnity.

Playing was not something they

did much of, in those days, however.

The Bolshevik state was only newly

established, and its economy was

wrecked

by

civil

war

and

international blockade. Before the

revolution, the government had

barely troubled the peasants, beyond

demanding taxes. Once the tax

collectors were gone for the year, the

only official they saw was the

constable.

The

Soviets

were

different.

Communist officials confiscated

the peasants’ crops to feed the cities.

They had machine guns and the

farmers were powerless to resist

them. One winter, troops came and

took the last wheat from Father

Dmitry’s family: the grain they

needed to live on and to plant for the

next year. His father, the bearded

tyrant who ruled his household and

read the Bible, lay on the ground and

wept. Dmitry, his brothers and his

mother wept too.

His sister was married by then,

but her husband left for Ukraine to

try to find food for his wife and

young child. He was not heard of

again. Abandoned, she struggled

into the nearby town of Unecha with

her baby to beg for food from the

townsfolk. The baby cried and cried.

He needed to be fed, she said, as

often as a kitten. Her milk dried up,

and she tried to appease him with

water but he cried still more.

Finally, the baby calmed and

slept. Her begging had failed and she

had fed him nothing, but at least he

was not uttering the unignorable

screams of a hungry infant. She

struggled on in her fruitless quest for

food. It was only when she got back

home that she realized he was dead.

Desperate with grief, she ran to her

own mother. She walked around

their hut in her grief, until she found

an edible plant in the garden. She

dropped to her knees to eat it, but

Dmitry was too fast for her. He ran

out into the garden and slammed her

round the head with a pole.

‘What did you do that for?’ his

mother demanded.

‘We all want to eat,’ he replied.

He wrote later that he was pleased he

had defended their food store, even

from his own sister.

The family had planted rye,

which they guarded jealously until it

grew large enough to be eaten. The

children awoke one day to find their

grandmother had broken into their

garden and was eating the immature

seeds. She could barely walk she

was so hungry, but the brothers

drove her out of their crop like a

cow. When they had pushed her out,

they began to throw lumps of earth

at her. She sank to her knees and

cursed them.

Dmitry’s grandfather was also a

religious man, and he built his own

church out in the fields where he

recited what he could remember of

the old services. He was hungry and

begged food. Their neighbours beat

him and he lost his mind. The

children then teased him and laughed

at him, throwing stones. Once he

caught Dmitry and thrashed him.

When Dmitry was already in his

teens, he and his father gathered to

mark Easter, the holiest date in the

Orthodox calendar. Dmitry held his

homemade cross while his father

read the holy service. Stalin’s

government wanted to force the

peasants to give up their own

property and merge it into a single

collective farm. The new farms

would be efficient and mechanized,

and

would

provide

the

food

surpluses the Soviet state needed so

that it could industrialize. In effect,

the peasants’ labour, livestock and

land would be taken from them and

used

by

the

government

for

someone else’s benefit.

It is not surprising that many of

the peasants wanted nothing to do

with the new farms, but the

government was determined. It sent

squads of city folk into the villages

to force the peasants to take part.

Recalcitrant peasants were taxed

at a rate 70 per cent higher than their

collectivized neighbours and, even

after selling all their valuables, could

rarely afford to pay what the state

demanded. That is what happened to

Father Dmitry’s father, who refused

to join the collective. He was

charged with tax evasion. His

insistence on maintaining the old

religious rites was added to the

charge sheet. He was, under the new

legal code on the young judge’s

desk,

conducting

religious

propaganda. He and Dmitry had to

walk 3 kilometres to the courthouse

in another village.

‘Why have you not paid the

state?’ asked the judge.

‘I have not paid, yes . . . there’s

nothing to pay with . . . I live badly,’

his father replied.

‘And why don’t you join the

collective farm? There you will live

better.’

‘Well, I can go into the farm, if I

have to.’

The judge gave him two years in

jail.

He

was

one

of

the

approximately 25 million Soviet

citizens repressed – shot, deported,

imprisoned, exiled – in the years

between Stalin seizing power in

1928 and dying in 1953. That is an

eighth of the Soviet population,

approximately two people for every

three families. Tens of millions more

suffered by association. As relatives

of ‘enemies of the people’, the

families of the convicted prisoners

too were denied many of the rights

of citizens. Dmitry, the son of a class

enemy, knew that his troubles were

in many ways only now beginning.

After his father’s conviction,

they sat for a while but had nothing

to say. When Dmitry returned home

alone, his mother was inconsolable.

The sentence was extended, and

those two years became four. The

boys begged and stole food to keep

themselves alive.

The collective farms were key to

Stalin’s plans to turn the Soviet

Union into a modern state capable of

standing up for itself. They would

break the old traditions, forcing the

peasants to do the state’s will and to

become pliant proletarians. They

would also create a surplus of food

to be exported so the Soviet Union

could

import

the

tools

and

equipment needed to modernize the

economy. In this they succeeded. By

stealing the peasants’ food, the

government

won

its

crash

industrialization.

As

Stalin’s

supporters say: when he arrived,

Russia had wooden ploughs; when

he died, it had the hydrogen bomb.

The collective farms were not a

long-term success, however. By the

end of communism, Moscow was

paying as much for imported grain

as it was earning from exporting oil.

Grain yields per hectare were a third