The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (8 page)

Maria, a tall woman in a russet

headscarf and violently patterned

blue and green dress, had been quiet.

She sat holding her father’s hand,

curls of hair emerging over her

forehead. She had clearly felt she

had nothing to say on the subject of

the 1930s, but life today was a

different matter.

‘Life is poor, we don’t live, we

survive. We count pennies. One

daughter studies in college, the other

has finished eleven classes and needs

to study in college too. And pay?

Well, give health to my grandfather.

You have to pay to study. The

grandfather pays. I don’t work. My

husband earns 10,000 roubles a

month. Can you really live on

10,000?’

A monthly salary of 10,000

roubles is about £200.

‘Just for accommodation we pay

5,000. A kilogram of meat costs 260

roubles. How can anyone live on

5,000? Milk is 20 roubles a litre.

And

we

need

clothing. And

everything. We don’t live. We

survive. The girls are beautiful, they

want to look good. And milk is more

expensive in winter.’

I pulled a new notebook out of

my bag, and they began to talk

among themselves. Even in the bad

times, they said, children were born,

but now the village was dying.

Vladimir, who had a habit of

laughing at things that did not seem

funny, chuckled: ‘The death rate is

conquering the birth rate.’

Maria talked over him: ‘There’s

no work. Most people work in

Moscow on the building sites. That’s

men. Women work in shops. It’s

very hard to find work. My

daughters finish school, and college,

so as to get a job in a shop. God

willing.

One

is

working

in

marketing,

the

other

in

the

commercial section. And without

higher education you can’t even

work in a shop.’

Vladimir laughed again. ‘The

bad life left with the Soviet Union,

but the good life did not come, it did

not come.’

I took some photos of the family

before leaving. Vladimir stood with

his vulnerable, baby-blue eyes,

flanked by the two cousins. I then

walked out of the church and back

down Berezina’s street. Most of the

houses were single-storey squares

set in their own gardens. A five-

storey block, of the standard Soviet

design found everywhere from

Armenia to the Arctic, towered over

them, but most of its balconies

lacked washing lines. They were

empty.

The fields either side of the lane

were mainly given over to potatoes,

but one field of barley stood by the

main road. I barely recognized it at

first, being accustomed to barley

how my grandfather grew it, in

tightly

regimented

blocks

surrounded by raw earth. Here the

sandy soil was choked with grasses

and wild oats that shaded into the

barley with no clear division

between crop and weed.

It was only when I stopped and

looked up and down the road that I

realized I had no clear plan how to

get back to Unecha. I had got a lift

here with a fellow guest at the hotel

who was driving to Moscow, but

now I would need public transport.

There was a bus stop on the other

side of the road: an open-fronted,

heavy-roofed shed, which had lost

its benches. A plank was balanced in

a corner to be sat on. I sat on it for a

while, and waited for a bus to come.

It was uncomfortable.

Cars passed about every three

minutes. A bus passed after twenty

minutes, and another half an hour

later. They ignored my waves. I read

more of Father Dmitry’s memoirs as

I waited. He had little more than his

brother to say about the German

occupation.

The Germans dissolved the

collective farms, he wrote, and the

farmers worked for themselves

again. The chairman and secretary of

the collective farm, who had testified

against

his

father’s

religious

activities, even started to visit the

newly

reopened

church.

Life

improved.

I put the papers away, and

walked to the edge of the forest.

There was a building there I wanted

to look at. The fields were fallow,

and the enormous barn was rusty

and decaying. This had once been a

major grain silo, with five hoppers

controlled by switches, to load grain

on to trucks. The electric circuits had

been plundered long ago and the

fuse boxes were clogged with old

birds’ nests, the copper wire stolen.

Dozens of wagtails had set up home.

They did not mind me, but another

bird that I did not recognize

complained as I poked about: ‘Tut

tut cheep tut tut cheep.’

Four rooks mobbed a buzzard on

the margin on the trees, the dense

saw-toothed wall of conifers. Swifts

screamed overhead and mice scuttled

in the long grass. The old collective

farm was heaven for wildlife, but

hostile for humans. No trucks had

been driven here for years and years.

I looked over to the bus stop and

saw that a woman was now waiting,

which made me suspect a bus was

due.

In Unecha, I sought a ticket on

the night train to Moscow. From the

capital, I would find my way to the

Orthodox Church’s seminary near

by. I was late at the ticket office,

however, and only top bunks were

available. Top bunks are torment

when the weather is hot, since the

heat in the carriage is trapped under

the roof, but I took one anyway. I

boarded the train at midnight and

hoisted myself on to my shelf. I was

quickly soaked in sweat, but I dozed.

Perhaps hours later, I was dragged

from sleep by the man from the

lower bunk tugging at my arm and

shouting.

‘You’re pissing on me, you’re

pissing on me,’ he yelled.

Stung by guilt, I reached under

the bedclothes. They were dry, and I

denied it as forcefully as I could.

We looked at each other in the

gloom, unsure of what to say next.

He turned back and pulled his

mattress off his bed, cursing. I was

definitely not to blame, but I could

see the dark patches of damp on his

sheets. Then a savage flare of

lightning lit the compartment and,

almost instantly, thunder cracked

directly overhead. The flash showed

torrential rain pouring down the

window of the compartment and,

now I listened, I could hear the

drumming of the drops on the roof,

louder even than the rattle of the

wheels.

Rainwater was pouring through

the ventilation hatches on top of the

carriage, through the ceiling, down

the partition, through the gap

between my bunk and the wall and

on to his bed. I held out my finger to

feel the water. It was already a

substantial waterfall and the volume

was increasing. I tucked my sheets

away from the torrent, turned on to

my right side and looked out at the

storm.

Every

few

seconds,

a

lightning flash would fix the conifers

of the forest into a cutout, like the

backdrop to a fairy-tale. The

temperature had dropped with the

storm’s arrival, and I felt rather snug

on my dry top bunk. I curled up in

my blanket and dozed off, listening

to the curses of my neighbour as

more and more water drenched his

sheets.

2

A double-dyed anti-Soviet

To Father Dmitry, fresh from his

village, the capital of the Soviet

Union was something wonderful.

Moscow might have been semi-

destroyed by World War Two, its

people living in rags and surviving

on porridge. But it was still the

biggest and richest city he had ever

seen.

‘Moscow seemed to me to be a

fairy-tale town,’ he wrote later.

And the fact he could become a

priest must have seemed a fairy-tale

also. He had grown up at a time

when religion was a secret activity,

conducted in fields or at night.

Churches still loomed over many

towns and villages, but more often

than not they were used as

storerooms or factories or hospitals.

The seminary owed its rebirth to

the

deal

struck

between

the

Orthodox Church and Stalin at the

height of World War Two. Although

Stalin was by this stage marshal of

the Soviet Union, responsible for the

defence of the world’s largest

country in the worst war it ever

fought, he summoned three of the

surviving four bishops to a late-night

meeting in September 1943, and

insisted that they train new priests.

Stalin himself had studied at a

seminary long before the revolution.

He had got top grades and was even

a highly praised choirboy for a

while, which may have explained his

enthusiasm.

‘Why don’t you have cadres?

Where have they disappeared to?’ he

mused, according to a later history

of

the

Orthodox

Church.

Presumably he was being sarcastic,

since his own security service had

arrested, imprisoned and shot them

all. His sarcasm could have given the

new patriarch Sergei a golden

opportunity to protest that thousands

of his fellow believers were in the

gulag. The patriarch was too

cautious, however, knowing that if

he protested he might join them.

‘One of the reasons is that we

train a person for the priesthood and

he becomes a marshal of the Soviet

Union,’ he said. He was referring to

Stalin.

It was grotesque flattery, but

appears to have worked in setting a

jocular tone. The meeting lasted until

three in the morning, with the

dictator

reminiscing

about

his

schooldays

in

pre-revolutionary

Georgia. That year, 1943, his

government restored the Church as

an official body. Some monasteries

reopened when the war finished.

And the seminary was opened too.

At first it was based in Moscow, and

then it was moved to a monastery in

Zagorsk – a town 70 kilometres to

the north-east of Moscow now

known by its pre-revolutionary

name of Sergiev Posad.

The train I caught to Sergiev

Posad had none of the snug comfort

of the sleeper from Unecha. It was

one of the many electric suburban

shuttles that take Russians from

Moscow to their country houses in

the forests and villages outside the

great city. These dachas are a cult in

Russia, and some Russians spend

months

growing

vegetables

or

raising poultry like their peasant

ancestors.

Those

farmers’

descendants still love the taste of

homegrown food.

It has long been lucky for the

country that they do. In 1940, the

private patches that peasants were

allowed to keep produced almost all

of the eggs and milk they consumed,

as well as half of the potatoes and

milk

for

everyone

else,

thus

compensating for the inefficiency of

the collective farms. By 1990,

privately produced food made up

more than a quarter of all the food

produced in Russia, despite being

grown on less than 2 per cent of the

land area. In times of economic

collapse, Russians have had the

backstop of their own gardens to

keep them alive.

Russians with jobs, who cannot