The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (7 page)

different culture.

‘When the Germans came here in

1941, they looked at us and said ai-

ai-ai. All these Russian children are

naked. They were a badly fed army,

and they asked my mother for eggs.

And she said there were no eggs,

because there was no grain for the

chickens. They were soldiers just

like ours,’ said Germangenovich.

He could speak a little German

that he had learned at school, so he

often spoke to the soldiers, he said.

They had nothing good to say for

Hitler, or for Stalin. Neither side

wanted to fight. They said they

wanted to grab Hitler and break him

over their knees.

The Germans, he said, took their

pig. Before the Germans came the

whole village had been called out to

dig

anti-tank

defences

around

Unecha. ‘We were digging anti-tank

pits when suddenly there’s a

motorcycle, and then the planes, and

then tanks with the black crosses on

them. It was hot, like today. A

German tank driver comes out, with

a red scarf. He saluted and said

“Guten tag.”

‘Then the general came and told

us not to be scared, that he had come

to free us from the Bolsheviks. Our

people were very glad really, despite

what you read in the history books

now. There would not be a collective

farm again. They gave us our land,

and reopened our churches. And this

general said they would not shoot

Unecha if no one shot at them.

‘The Germans gave us land,

divided up the horses. We started to

grow wheat. In 1942 and 1943 we

had a great harvest, we kept it for

ourselves, and the Germans took

meat, chickens and pigs. They

opened the churches, and people

went to churches to pray. We chose

our own mayors, police. The mayor

was our neighbour. The Germans

made us work sometimes, carrying

wood or resurfacing the road, but it

was not so bad.’

The Germans brought order,

according

to

Germangenovich’s

account, which more or less tallies

with most academic studies I have

read. He described how the Germans

shot one of his neighbours for

stealing a pig. And, he said, they

killed the Jews – a fact he related

deadpan, as if it did not bother him.

That was in November 1941 and

March

1942

when

Sonderkommandos

7b

and

7a

rounded up the Jews in Klintsy,

Oryol and Bryansk.

‘They killed the few Jews that we

had here, and the gypsies. There was

one young Jewish lad, but he left, so

it was just the old ones left behind.

All the Jews worked in the town,

they traded, they didn’t work with

their hands. There were maybe a

hundred in the city – they were

killed.’

In a sudden rush of memory, he

flicked back to the start of the war:

‘The Germans had dropped all these

leaflets on us. They published

newspapers as well. They had

agitators who worked hard. “Destroy

the Yid politicians,” the leaflets said.

They threw leaflets from planes, I

remember.’

Later I decided to look up those

leaflets in the Lenin Library in

Moscow. I found a section –

formerly classified – of ‘special

materials’, newspapers published by

the Germans under occupation,

which people like Germangenovich

would have read. Sure enough there

was a photograph of children and

adults running after airdropped

leaflets tumbling through the air.

Perhaps he was among them.

The newspapers were a glimpse

into a vanished life of a non-Stalinist

Russia in the 1940s. There were

jokes (‘What is the punishment for

bigamy? Two mothers-in-law’), lists

of church services, and accounts of

how the peasants were using their

private land. Every issue had lists of

people missing – wives, children,

mothers – and the names of those

looking for them.

‘Konstantin Mitenkov from the

village of Kamenki . . . informs his

wife that he is alive and healthy,’

said one notice.

Most of the pages, of course,

were

filled

with

orders

and

propaganda. All typewriters were

confiscated and town-dwellers were

banned from venturing into the

countryside. Jews were blamed for

everything,

over

and

over,

particularly for the repression dealt

out by Stalin’s N K V D security

service. A picture of an Orthodox

priest featured the caption: ‘When

the healthy body of the accused

person survived the six weeks of

torment, he had to appear before the

tribunal of the N K V D, which

included in its make-up only Jews.’

Anti-Jewish

campaigns

in

Slovakia,

France,

Norway

and

elsewhere were described in horrible

detail, as was a build-up of anti-

Semitism in the United States.

Russians were exhorted to unite with

the Germans against this supposed

mutual enemy. It was clear that not

everyone swallowed the message. A

decree promised death to anyone

who sheltered Soviet partisans, and

deprivation of rations to anyone who

did not register themselves with the

authorities.

But some Russians did go along

with

the

Nazis.

There

were

photographs of Russians in German

uniform. ‘They know who is really

to blame for the war,’ one paper

said; ‘fighting alongside the German

soldiers and their allies, they are

aiming for one goal: to destroy

Jewish Bolshevism and give peace to

the Russian land.’

The Soviet troops returned to

Unecha on 23 September 1943.

‘I went to church. I was in the

choir during the occupation,’ said

Germangenovich. ‘Then the reds

came back and closed the church and

took the priest away and killed him.

The priest was old, old, but he was

taken away immediately when the

reds came back. They took away our

police too, and our mayor. Some got

shot, some got sent to the north to

die of hunger. All of us young

people got conscripted into the

army.’

It must have been a strange

liberation for men like Father Dmitry

and Germangenovich. Occupation

had been – although fraught and

dangerous – a time of unprecedented

freedom and prosperity. Hitler’s

government hated the Russians, but

the German army was keen to

protect its rear and secure food

supplies, so it treated civilians better

than Hitler ordered it to do. It

provided

building

material

for

churches, and doubled the size of the

peasants’ personal plots of land

where they grew their food.

I

wondered,

after

hearing

Germangenovich, how much the

German

propaganda,

with

its

relentless slurs against the Jews and

the communists, had affected him.

‘After the war if people had

asked how the Germans were I

would have said they were good.

But no one ever asked me.’

Germangenovich

and

Father

Dmitry

were

all

immediately

conscripted into the Soviet army,

with its relentless demand for new

soldiers. Father Dmitry arrived at the

front as the rawest of recruits

directly after the Soviet army had

liberated Berezina. This was after

Stalingrad, when the Soviets had

broken the Nazis’ back. But there

was a lot of fighting still to come and

the soldiers would need to march all

the way to Berlin. That march was

chaotic and brutal, as the Soviet

troops

delighted

in

avenging

themselves on the Germans who had

killed their comrades and destroyed

their homes.

Again this is a time that Father

Dmitry did not linger over in his

memoirs, but he did write that he

was revolted by the mass rape of

women in newly taken towns, and

by the obscene language used by his

fellows. He wrote not of battle but of

saving

an

icon

from

being

destroyed, and about how soldiers at

night cough like sheep. He refused

to join the Komsomol, the Young

Communist League, because he was

a believer. He claimed never to have

fired a shot in anger. Then he was

injured. A shell fragment entered his

leg and, while in hospital, he

contracted typhus fever. His military

career was over.

He returned to Berezina, but life

had changed. Stalin was aware of the

role the Orthodox Church had

played in winning support for the

war effort. He allowed the German-

opened churches to remain open, so

there was somewhere for Father

Dmitry to worship.

He was a war veteran with a

pension, but there was no work for

him. Months went by. He reported to

the military commission, but they

had no orders for him. That was

when he saw the advertisement that

changed his life: an Orthodox

seminary was taking applications for

trainee priests in Moscow, the first

such intake for decades. This was

part of Stalin’s bargain with the

Orthodox Church. Father Dmitry

applied, was accepted and left for

Moscow. He was gone by the time

his brother Vladimir returned from

the front.

‘He had gone to Moscow and

gone to study in the seminary. This

was in 1944, when the war was

going on still,’ Vladimir told me

when I was in Berezina. ‘It was very

hard to study there, to get in there.’

I met Vladimir after church in

Berezina one Sunday. I was late for

the service so I sat outside, waiting

for it to end. While I was sitting in

the

morning

sunshine

reading

through Father Dmitry’s memoirs,

the priest unexpectedly stepped out

into the sunshine. He was still

holding the incense and a candle, but

was talking into his mobile phone.

‘We’re still holding the requiem,’

he told his caller, promising to call

back later. He gave me a quizzical

look and turned back inside. A

chicken strutted round from the back

of the church, pecking at the dust on

the path.

At last, the service was over and

the priest came out to ask who I was.

I explained my interest in Father

Dmitry,

and

he

pointed

out

Vladimir. Vladimir in turn called

over his daughter Maria. Maria

hailed Lidiya, daughter of one of

Dmitry’s sisters, perhaps of the

woman he had smashed round the

head and driven out of their garden.

We sat in the church building, which

was deliciously cool now the day

was heating up, and I asked them

what had made Father Dmitry the

man he was. Vladimir’s hearing was

bad, and his accent was thick. Lidiya

had to repeat my question to him,

her accent spongy with the soft ‘g’

of peasant Russia.

‘Our parents were believers, and

they implanted the faith in us

children. I remember my father was

reading the Psalms, I was small, but

I learned Psalm number 50 by heart

because I heard how he read it,’

Vladimir said. He had very clear

blue eyes, like a child’s.

Lidiya filled in for him. She was

born in 1938, so presumably she

was repeating his memories anyway:

‘They took our grandfather’s land,

his horse. They took everything.

Life was bad then, though it’s not

much better now.’