Books and Arts; Book Review;The end of the Soviet Union; Walking dead;
The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation.By Oliver Bullough.
Stagnation, writes Oliver Bullough in his haunting account of the late Soviet Union, is not sexy. Biographies of Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev abound, but nobody has written seriously about Leonid Brezhnev, on whose watch the Soviet Union sank into drunken decay. The author of a definitive book about the tortured history of the north Caucasus (“Let our Fame be Great”), Mr Bullough has a good sense of how the traumas of Russia's past affect its present. His new book is a mixture of travelogue and biography, as he traces the life of Father Dmitry Dudko, an Orthodox priest who exemplified both resistance to Soviet rule and defeat at its hands.
The Orthodox hierarchy in the post-war Soviet Union was tainted by collaboration with the KGB. For those repelled by the sterility and corruption of the official ideology, religion was part of the axis of resistance. So the authorities kept the lid on, and religious practice beyond the liturgy was risky.
Father Dmitry, whose post-war theological studies had been interrupted by eight years in the gulag, was a striking exception. He preached passionately and lucidly. He fostered discussion and roused his flock against the degradation, despair, abortions, alcoholism and promiscuity of Soviet life. He resolutely opposed anti-Semitism. Jews were “sacred friends”, he said. In the early 1970s his sermons became a sensation, published in the West and in samizdat in the Soviet Union. The Communist authorities objected. He defied them. They exiled him to a distant village. His flock followed him there. The authorities moved him again. And on it went.
He began to see the Soviet system as the source of his country's ills. In 1977 he told the New York Times of the “diabolic storm” that had broken on his country. “Our nation has become corrupted, the family has fallen apart, the nation has got drunk, traitors have betrayed each other.” That was true. But by the late 1970s detente was ending. Fame in the West was no protection. Even a lone independent-minded priest was an existential—and intolerable—threat for the brittle Soviet leadership. The fledgling dissident movement was systematically crushed—by imprisonment, exile, coercive psychiatry or ferocious pressure on family members.
In January 1980 Father Dmitry was arrested. His friends prayed; the West protested. But he emerged six months later, a changed man: a zealous, repentant patriot who, in a sensational television broadcast, admitted to working with foreign powers against the Soviet state. Worse, he denounced his friends and helpers.
It was a huge propaganda coup for the regime. He showed no signs of torture, drugs or exhaustion. One of his followers wrote an open letter accusing the KGB of the “murder of my spiritual father”.
Mr Bullough explains the mystifying conversion. The KGB played on his fears of renewed imprisonment and separation from his family. A skilful interrogator, Vladimir Sorokin found and enlarged the “chink” in his victim's soul: patriotism. Surely no true, law-abiding Russian could side with the enemies of his country?
Later Father Dmitry was filled with remorse. But it was too late. Dogged by loneliness and guilt, and unable to resurrect his crusade for trust, hope and faith, he descended into the fetid swamps of Russian nationalism, wallowing in the paranoid anti-Semitism he had once eschewed. The brave, happy and confident man of the 1960s and 1970s became a miserable racist, a campaigner for hatred and nihilism.
Mr Bullough largely succeeds in using this sad tale as a metaphor for the fate of the Soviet Union. He weaves the woes of past decades into his journeys to wretched villages, along with the lies and greed in the metropolis. Father Dmitry may be all but forgotten in modern Russia, but his old self would have plenty to say about it.