The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (10 page)

inherited other values from his

family, and that made him no Pavlik

Morozov. He did not inform on his

own father, although his father

attended secret religious ceremonies,

nor on his grandfather.

By the end of the 1940s, the

gulag camps all across the Soviet

Union contained more than 2.5

million people – a million more than

in 1945 – and a similar number of

people were in internal exile. From

the second half of 1948 onwards, the

police began rearresting former

political prisoners by the alphabet.

‘I have long noticed your anti-

Soviet spirit. You have read one or

two sermons, and you’re already

conceited. You want to reshape

everything,’ said the professor who

taught the students how to preach.

Dmitry, when asked his opinion of

the Bolshevik killing of the tsar and

his family, replied that it was brutal,

and that he pitied the children. That

was an unwise thing to say, and by

now the authorities had their eye on

him. He had always loved writing.

Inspired by the Psalms, he used

poems as a way of exploring the

same issues he liked to debate: his

country, history, God.

One older fellow student asked

to read his poems. Dmitry, a village

boy and untrained in the ways of the

security services, assented. The

student handed the poems to the K G

B.

Prosecutors seized on a poem of

his that described Stalin as an

‘executioner’

and

the

‘first

destroyer’. Father Dmitry’s brother

Vladimir gave me a package of

poems in Berezina, but I could not

find this one among them. Perhaps

he destroyed any other unwisely

political ones long ago. The poems I

was given had gently nationalist

themes, but nothing so outspoken.

‘Russia, I think of you always /

and I am greatly concerned for your

destiny,’ says one. Another tells how

he loves Russia for ‘her tears, which

she shares with him’. I wondered

how many of these poems had been

read by his fellow students.

In the corridor of photos, I took

out a torch so we could better see the

faces in the pictures. One of these

men informed on him to the police.

Who knows what reasons led him to

denounce his fellow student? Often

informers were people who were

themselves at risk of arrest –

children of kulaks, or members of

supposedly suspicious minorities

such as Jews or Poles – who were

forced

to

denounce

or

be

denounced.

Then again, a seminary with its

concentration of believers was likely

to have been a particular focus of

suspicion, and agents would have

kept a close watch on what was

happening there. In the 1940s, there

is said to have been at least one

informer for every six or seven

families in Moscow as a whole, and

the Church would have been under

still closer scrutiny. Perhaps then the

man who sent Father Dmitry to jail

was just doing it for money or a

better flat.

The night before his arrest,

Father Dmitry wrote later, he

dreamed that a cross came towards

him, that he carried it on his right

shoulder and that it became heavier

and heavier, until he woke up. He

was arrested in central Moscow

while calling on a sick friend.

He had to wait until Stalin’s

death

before

studying

at

the

reopened seminary in Sergiev Posad.

He was arrested before Easter 1948,

and the seminary did not move out

of central Moscow until the autumn.

His troubles are not mentioned in

the official history of the college.

Stalinism is too embarrassing an

episode to be remembered at all in

fact, and the book describes the

1940s simply as a busy time when

the trainee priests had to share their

premises with several educational

establishments already based in

Sergiev Posad. The chapel was home

to a social club, the historian wrote,

and students played ball on the open

ground between the seminary and

the cathedral.

‘The schoolchildren with their

cries

and

running

about,

the

grownups hurrying about their

affairs, the students playing their

games – all of this created an

atmosphere of vanity, of hubbub,

having nothing in common with a

monastery. On top of this was a club

built next to our bedrooms and

classrooms,’ he wrote. A reader

knowing nothing of the context

would assume these were the only

difficulties the priests faced, and the

book

does

not

record

Father

Dmitry’s arrest or the undoubted

lesson it must have taught the others

of the dangers of speaking out.

The book does list Father Dmitry

as graduating from the seminary, the

first part of the institution. But he is

not listed as having finished the

second part of the college – the

academy – until 1960. There is no

explanation why it took him a

decade longer than anyone else to

complete his education, but those

were the years he spent in the camps.

I stepped out of the seminary,

musing over the strange amnesia that

had settled over the place. I walked

out of the green gates and pushed

through

the

crowds

to

the

Assumption Cathedral, where the

students worshipped and sang the

liturgy on Father Dmitry’s first visit

here.

The sweet smell of perfume and

the cool gloom were a comfort after

the heat, glare and dust of the yard.

Candles flickered, lighting the pillars

as they towered up to the dome. A

huge heavy gold screen bore rank

after rank of saints in their strange,

stylized clothing.

Jesus said, when asked whether it

was correct to pay taxes, ‘Render

unto Caesar the things which are

Caesar’s, and unto God, the things

that are God’s.’ It is an injunction

that theologians have struggled to

interpret ever since, as it apparently

demands complete obedience to the

government while also demanding

obedience to God.

Western theologians come from

a tradition where the pope ruled the

Church and kings ruled countries.

They are able to separate the two

kinds of authority and create a

doctrine of resistance to secular

authority if conscience demands it.

But Orthodox theologians have

never had that luxury, making the

bishops’ task of relating to a

government that explicitly wanted to

destroy the Church very hard.

Orthodox Churches draw their

lineage back to the traditions of the

Byzantine Empire when the emperor

was both the ruler of the state and

the protector of the Church. There is

no theological basis for rebelling

against the government, since it is

assumed to be from God, even when

that government is sworn to the

Church’s destruction.

‘Every religious idea, every idea

of God, every flirting with the idea

of God, is unutterable vileness,’ said

Lenin. ‘Millions of filthy deeds, acts

of violence and physical contagions

are less dangerous than the subtle,

spiritual idea of a God decked out in

the smartest “ideological” costumes.’

Stalin’s

restoration

of

the

Orthodox Church was marked by

the almost complete penetration of

the hierarchy by the security organs.

Patriarch Alexy I, who headed the

Russian Orthodox Church after its

restoration, was highly valued by the

K G B as an agent of influence,

according to documents smuggled

out of Russia by former K G B

archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.

‘The Russian Orthodox Church

supports the totally peaceful foreign

policy of our government, not

because the Church allegedly lacks

freedom, but because Soviet policy

is just and corresponds to the

Christian ideals which the Church

preaches,’ said Patriarch Alexy in

1955.

Bishops remained sycophantic to

the end, praising Khrushchev and

later communist leaders even while

the K G B were arresting Christians.

Where now the Catholic Church in

Poland is able to praise believers

who

were

oppressed

by

the

communist government, and to expel

collaborators, the Orthodox Church

in Russia has a much harder time.

This is partly because it does not

have a core of leaders who resisted

the government.

Anatoly Oleynikov, the last

deputy chairman of the K G B, said

in 1991 that only 15–20 per cent of

priests refused to work with the

security organs. Priests who refused

to help the K G B were not

promoted, and thus were denied

access to the highest positions. The

last two Soviet-era patriarchs –

Pimen and Alexy II – were full K G

B agents.

Even though the communist

regime is gone, the Church is still

unsure how to relate to those priests

like Father Dmitry who were

imprisoned for the faith. As the little

history of the seminary shows, it

often finds it easier to ignore the fact

that they ever existed.

This identification of the Church

with the state was not new of course.

The Church had been almost

completely suborned to the tsarist

state

as

well.

But,

before

communism, it could pretend to be

serving God by doing so, since the

tsarist government supported the

Christian faith. The Soviet state was

committed to eradicating religion,

and expended considerable effort in

attempting to do so. According to

Father Dmitry, his fellow priests

being trained in Sergiev Posad only

very rarely put up a fight against the

state’s atheism.

‘They made informers out of the

students at the spiritual academy, and

out of priests. They called them in

and started to play on their sense of

truth, on their love of the homeland,

promised them better positions.

Sadly, positions in the Church,

although the Church is separated

from the state, are assigned by the

secular authorities,’ Father Dmitry

wrote later. ‘I was never called in

anywhere, not when I studied in the

academy, nor when I became a

priest. One academy student who

gave in to them, a weak-willed but

kind man, told me in secret that I

was considered a double-dyed anti-

Soviet, a desperate person.’

The name of the man who

informed on Father Dmitry was

Vasily

Petrovykh.

Petrovykh

graduated in 1947 and served as a

priest in a remote village in the

Kostroma region to the east of

Moscow, which was not much of a

reward for co-operating with the

security services. Still, he had a wife

and two sons, so perhaps he was not

given a choice. Besides, co-operation

was so widespread that not everyone

who helped the security services

could be given a high-profile job.

Back on the station platform,

cheap posters announced special

church services in aid of those in

prison; for those suffering from

depression, apathy, desolation and

suicidal thoughts; and for the dead.

The

Church,

despite

its

long

repression

and

then

its

close

association with a brutal regime, has

returned to its role as the comforter

of the lowest in society.