The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (58 page)

The Father Dmitry quotes here

are

taken

from
Our Hope
, a

collection of his sermons published

in the West in English (and in

Russian as
O Nashem Upovanii)
. A

description of the debris of Father

Dmitry’s first church, following its

demolition, is in the introduction to

Bourdeaux’s
Risen Indeed
.

The 1972 sermon is from

Religion

in

Communist

Lands
,

Volume 1, nos. 4–5. The other

descriptions

are

from

‘An

Eyewitness Account’ in
Religion in

Communist Lands
, Volume 4, no. 2;

and from an article by Anatoly

Levitin-Krasnov

found

in

the

Memorial archives and originally

published

in
Vestnik

Russkogo

Khristianskogo Dvizheniya
in 1974.

The lonely struggle of Soviet

Jews for emigration is described in

Beckerman’s
When They Come for

Us We’ll Be Gone
. The letter by the

‘Jewish woman’ is by L. A. Gold

and is dated 5 May 1974. It comes

from the Memorial archives.

CHAPTER 5: REDS ADMIT BAN

OF REBEL PRIEST

The details of shops selling meat,

fruit and vegetables versus shops

selling alcohol come from White’s

Russia Goes Dry
, as do most

references to alcohol statistics in this

chapter. The quotes from
Moskva–

Petushki
are taken from the English-

language version published in 1998

by Faber & Faber under the title

Moscow Stations
.

The quotes from the sermon

preached in Kabanovo are from the

Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo

Dvizheniya
, no. 118 from 1976. The

quotes

from

Father

Dmitry’s

confessions, here and elsewhere, are

from his notebooks published as ‘Na

Skreshchenii Dorog’ in the
Collected

Works
.

Details on the number of

abortions and government policy

towards them come from Lutz,

Scherbov

and

Volkov

(eds.),

Demographic Trends and Patterns

in the Soviet Union before 1991
,

from Eberstadt’s
Russia’s Peacetime

Demographic Crisis
, from Feshbach

and Friendly’s
Ecocide in the U S S

R
, and from Feshbach’s
Ecological

Disaster
.

The Sakharov quote is from his

essay ‘Progress, Coexistence and

Intellectual Freedom’, which I found

in Salisbury (ed.),
Sakharov Speaks
.

The protests by Shafarevich and by

Yakunin

and

Regelson

were

published in
Religion in Communist

Lands
in 1976 and are available

online

at

www.biblicalstudies.org.uk
.

CHAPTER 6: THEY BEHAVED

LIKE FREE MEN

The Father Dmitry quotes here are

from his self-published newspaper
V

Svete Preobrazheniya
. A little more

on his car crash in 1975 can be

found

in
Religion in Communist

Lands
, but it remains a mysterious

incident.

Details on the Helsinki Accords

and the formation of the Helsinki

Groups are from Andrew and

Mitrokhin,
The Mitrokhin Archive
,

Beckerman’s
When They Come for

Us We’ll Be Gone
(which is also my

source

for

the

quotes

from

Shcharansky),

Tompson’s
The

Soviet

Union

under

Brezhnev
,

Ho rv ath ’s
The Legacy of Soviet

Dissent
and Lourie’s biography of

Sakharov.

The Amalrik quote is from

Boobbyer,
Conscience, Dissent and

Reform in Soviet Russia
.

The text of the interview with the

New York Times
was published in

Russkoe Vozrozhdenie
, no. 2, 1978.

The press-conference transcript is in

Letters from Moscow: Religion and

Human Rights in the U S S R
by

Yakunin and Regelson.

Details

on

the

abuse

of

psychiatry come from Fireside’s

Soviet

Psychopris
ons,

from

Rothberg’s
The Heirs of Stalin
, from

the

Medvedevs’
A Question of

Madness
, from Alexeyeva’s
Soviet

Dissent
,

from

Shimanov’s
Notes

from

the

Red

House
,

from

Nekipelov’s
Institute of Fools
and

from

Gorbanevskaya’s
Selected

Poems
.

The story of the Soviet Union’s

support of Lysenko’s quack biology

can be read in Joravsky’s
The

Lysenko Affair
and Medvedev’s
The

Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko
.

CHAPTER 7: IDEOLOGICAL

SABOTAGE

Andropov’s

war

against

the

dissidents is dealt with well in

Andrew

and

Mitrokhin,
The

Mitrokhin Archive
.

CHAPTER 8: IT’S LIKE A

PLAGUE

Keith Richards’s autobiography
Life

is well read on the audiobook,

mainly by Johnny Depp. Of many

audiobooks I have listened to on

long train journeys, it may be my

favourite.

For Poland’s experience during

and after the Soviet invasion, I relied

on Kochanski’s
The Eagle Unbowed

and on Applebaum’s
Iron Curtain
.

Mochulsky’s
Gulag Boss
is not

entirely reliable, since it was written

much later as a justification of his

own role in the camps, but is the best

we have.

CHAPTER 9: THE UNWORTHY

PRIEST

Details on the Podrabineks’ trials can

be found in the
Chronicle of Current

Events
, and other reactions to Father

Dmitry’s recantation of his views

can be seen in Google’s news

archive. I have not been able to find

a video recording of Father Dmitry’s

television appearance, so I have

relied on contemporary observers’

descriptions of his appearance.

CHAPTER 10: THE K G B DID

THEIR BUSINESS

The quotes from Father Dmitry are

from his
Podarok ot Boga
, ‘Vernost

v

Malom’

and
V

Svete

Preobrazheniya
.

The quote accusing the K G B of

killing the ‘spiritual father’ is from

t h e
Chronicle of Current Events
.

Father Dmitry wrote about Divnich

in
Nash Sovremennik
.

CHAPTER 11: I LOOK AT THE

FUTURE WITH PESSIMISM

The

Gorbachev

anti-alcohol

campaign is described in White’s

Russia Goes Dry
, and its spectacular

demographic effects are dealt with at

length by Eberstadt in
Russia’s

Peacetime Demographic Crisis
. The

corrupt

privatization

deals

and

crooked 1996 presidential elections

are well described in Freeland’s
Sale

of the Century
and Hoffman’s
The

Oligarchs
.

The three Russian sociologists

are Ioffe, Nefedova and Zaslavsky,

and

their

book

describing

degradation in the countryside is
The

End

of

Peasantry?

The

Disintegration of Rural Russia
.

CHAPTER 12: THEY DON’T

CARE ANY MORE

Details of Ogorodnikov’s torments

in the 1980s can be found in his
A

Desperate Cry
. That covers more

ground than my account of his life,

which more or less ends in the mid-

1970s. The life story of Alexander

Men is described in Roberts and

Shukman (eds.),
Christianity for the

Twentieth Century
. He was a

fascinating and humane man, who

deserves to be better known. The

details of K G B infiltration of the

Orthodox Church are from Andrew

and

Mitrokhin’s
The Mitrokhin

Archive
,

and

from

Ellis’s
The

Russian

Orthodox

Church:

Triumphalism and Defensiveness
.

CHAPTER 13: MAKING A NEW

GENERATION

Some of the finest writing on the

winter protests in Moscow was by

Julia Ioffe in the
New Yorker
. The

British journalist mentioned in the

account of the Pussy Riot trial is

Tom Parfitt, whose coverage of the

winter of protests for the
Daily

Telegraph
was also superb. Other

journalists whose work I appreciated

include

Miriam

Elder

of

the

Guardian
and Shaun Walker of the

Independent
.

‘Krasivo Sleva’ is found on the

Markscheider Kunst album of the

same name. I would recommend St

Petersburg ska as something purely

joyful to anyone who needs cheering

up.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Helen Conford at Penguin

for editing sensitively but forcefully.

Thanks also to Lara Heimert, my

editor at Basic, for her faith in me,

and to my agent Karolina Sutton at

Curtis Brown.

This book has involved a lot of

time sitting in libraries and travelling

in Russia, and I am very grateful to

the Society of Authors’ Authors

Foundation for giving me the John

Heygate award, which helped pay

for me to do both.

I have shamelessly trespassed on

people everywhere I have gone. I

have been bought drinks, given

food, told stories and driven to

places I could not otherwise have

reached. Through this, I have come

to a far greater understanding of

Russian culture than I previously

possessed,

and

for

that

understanding and that hospitality I

am profoundly grateful.

In Moscow, thanks to Amie

Ferris-Rotman,

Antoine

Lambroschini, Tom Parfitt and

Simon Ostrovsky for having me to

stay. Thanks also to Tanya and Kirill

Podrabinek for their generosity. In

Perm,

thanks

to

Alexander

Ogaryshev, and to Masha, Kolya

and Slava. In Abez, thanks to

Alexander and Natasha Merzlikin

and their family. In Inta, thanks to

Yevgeniya Kulygina and to Nikolai

Andreyevich. In Unecha, thanks to

Tamara Fyodorovna and her family.

In Bryansk, thanks to Yuri Solovyov

for his insights.

In Cambridge, thanks to the

extraordinary Marina Voikhanskaya.

An evening with her inspired two

very different books.

Massive thanks to Xenia Dennen,

Michael Bourdeaux and Larisa

Seago, all formerly or currently

working at the Keston Institute.

Their patience and help allowed me

to obtain documents I could never

otherwise have found.

Staff members at the State Public

Historical Library of Russia and the

Russian State Library (the Lenin

Library) in Moscow were helpful far

beyond the call of duty and

cheerfully subverted their own

photocopying rules when faced with

a bit of pleading. The people at

Memorial

in

Moscow

were

magnificent and shared their huge

archive with me. I also appreciated

the services of the British Library

and the London Library.

Every person mentioned in the

text is identified by his or her own

name, apart from my friend Misha in

the Introduction, whose name I have

changed.

To create a clear narrative, I have

taken some liberties with the order in