The Last Man in Russia

1 They took our grandfather’s land

So one morning in summer 2010 I woke up in an old Soviet hotel in the city of Bryansk, far to Moscow’s west.

It was hot. The buildings were wavering in the heat before I even left the bus station, where tanned, shirtless bus drivers shouted their final destinations as if they could persuade arriving passengers to cancel their travel plans and go with them instead. The route to Berezino was complex. First I sat on a packed minibus, which took me to a large shop. Then an elderly bus rattled to a town covered in grey cement dust. This was Fokino. Then another bus took me to Berezino itself. We stopped on the edge of a dusty yard, flayed by the sun and dominated by a five-storey apartment block. Two large-bosomed women stood beneath its balconies and argued.

My goal was to find Father Dmitry’s surviving relatives, but I had not up to now given much thought to how I would do that once I got here. My normal approach is to turn up, look inquisitive and hope someone takes pity on me. I walked towards the two women, and idled past them. They ignored me. One or two people were still by the bus stop, so I walked back towards them, passing the two women once more. Again, no one looked at me.

‘What are you doing?’

I turned to see a handsome woman of about forty, eyes crinkled with amusement, all dressed in black despite the weather. She was sitting on a bench in the shade of the bus station.

‘I saw you come in on the bus, and then walk over there, and walk back here, and now you’re standing around. What are you doing?’

She looked friendly, so I explained the nature of my quest: I was looking for relatives of Father Dmitry, and wanted to understand how his upbringing had made him the way he was. She shook her head. There were no Dudkos round here. But she had nothing much to do for the next few hours so she took my hand and marched me across the baked plain of the yard to meet her mother.

‘I’m called Galya,’ she said.

It was only after we had rung her mother’s doorbell for some time that she remembered that it was a Saturday. Her mother, it transpired, was a Seventh Day Adventist and would be praying with her sister, Galya’s aunt. We marched back down the staircase and across to a second apartment block – the ground in between was full of vegetables ripening early in this intense heat – where we found the old women. They wore headscarves and cardigans, and were sitting on an old sofa with the Book of Revelation open in front of them.

They had never heard of any Dudkos, and had lived here all their lives. This was not good. Nonetheless, I decided to come away with something and got my notebook out anyway. Anna Vasilyevna, Galya’s aunt, was born in 1922 – the same year as Father Dmitry. Nina Vasilyevna, who had twelve other children besides Galya, was three years younger. This, I thought, could at least be a chance to find out about life under occupation. This whole area was taken by the Germans at the very start of Hitler’s war. Father Dmitry had spent two years under German occupation, and all old people would have shared his experiences of foreign rule.

Except they did not want to talk about that. They wanted to talk about their faith, and about grandchildren – in that order.

‘I started to believe in God in the wartime. The bullets were flying. Our uncle Matvei brought the faith back from the army. He did not drink or smoke. He gave up vodka, and he stopped stealing or lying,’ said the aunt.

I looked round at Galya, who was giggling silently. I began to suspect this was a practical joke she had set up to pass the time.

‘They will burn everything. Now there is freedom of religion, if we live long enough the pope of Rome will come and kill us.’

She looked pleased, as if this would be a very satisfactory way to end her life. Then Galya’s mother started reciting names.

‘Vita, he’s first. Write it down. Then Olya and Natasha.’ I looked at Galya, confused. She mouthed the word ‘grandchildren’. I blinked and wrote the three names down. ‘Tanya, Sveta, Ira, Nina, Zhenya, Vasya, Yulia, Maxim, Igor, Denis.’ The list went on and on until it finally finished: ‘Nadya, Veronika, Misha. How many’s that?’

I counted them. There were twenty-eight.

‘Exactly. Twenty-eight. And eighteen great-grandchildren.’

An argument ensued about whether there were eighteen or nineteen. We went over the list thrice more. The aunt’s husband had been killed in the war, so she had no grandchildren and she eventually tired of such a sterile debate. She turned back to the faith, and my mind drifted a little. I looked at the generations: thirteen children, twenty-eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren. That is the kind of contraction happening everywhere in Russia. If every couple has just one child, then the generation size halves, which is more or less what had happened here.

It could not have been more different when these two old women were born. Industry and railways had brought unprecedented mobility to Russia in the years before the revolution, but the villages where they started their lives had still changed little since the Middle Ages. The fertility level was high – comparable to that of Somalia today, where each woman has more than six children – and 80 per cent of Russia’s population were peasants.

Although serfdom – the slavery that tied peasants to the villages and gave landlords almost limitless powers to punish them – was scrapped in 1861, the peasants were still not free to move. They had to pay off the debt incurred by buying their freedom, and were collectively liable as villages for the sum. Few wanted to leave anyway. The communal pull was so strong that successive well-wishers from both ends of the political spectrum retreated before their stubborn attachment to their old ways of life, the yearly division of land, the Church, folk medicine.

Death rates remained high. Mothers smothered unwanted babies in bed. Babies were left in the care of their siblings, who often rocked their cradles so hard they fell out and died. Diarrhoea was treated by hanging children up by their legs and shaking them violently. ‘Outie’ belly buttons were spread with dough so mice could nibble them off. In most homes, more than half the children died. The poorer families, according to one eyewitness account of life in a Russian village in the late nineteenth century, often welcomed the deaths of infants with the words: ‘Thank goodness, the Lord thought better of it.’

It was a life of superstition. Any outsiders were distrusted and opposed. Local officials could flog adults on their bare bottoms for the most minor of offences. The eyewitness, an aristocrat called Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, described how in one village near her home pigs dug up the body of a baby that had been murdered.

‘No action was taken in the matter. Peasants do not like criminal investigations and keep quiet even when they know something.’

Officials could demand taxes before the harvest if they wanted, and would then confiscate property when the peasant in question could not pay. When the revolution came, the peasants rose up and seized the lords’ lands, as well as that of any profitable neighbours who had made money from the few agricultural reforms imposed before World War One. The Bolsheviks, who understood nothing of the countryside, declared war on them, seizing their grain and causing famine. Somewhere between 10 and 14 million people died of hunger in the four years after 1917.

These old women were living witnesses to the history of their nation, its triumphs and its tragedies, but sadly they did not much want to talk about it.

‘Now there is freedom of religion, but there is little time. When they smashed up the church, they imprisoned the priests,’ said Galya’s aunt, slapping my foot and chuckling.

Her sister chipped in: ‘The pope of Rome will soon announce a census of religions.’

The aunt was not to be outdone. She summoned all the breath in her lungs and intoned: ‘They will come and kill us.’

Both old women burst out laughing. Galya leaned over to kiss them on their pale cheeks. They adjusted their headscarves, and we left, leaving them sitting on the sofa companionably discussing their imminent demise. The photograph I took could just as easily be from a hundred years ago. Galya looked at me, shrugged and giggled.

I tried to give up the quest at this point and go back to Bryansk to regroup, but Galya was having none of it. Although born here, she visited rarely and wanted to show the peculiar Westerner off to all her old friends. So it was that we boarded another bus, which took us beyond the end of the metalled road, to Pupkovo.

There had been no rain for weeks, and the road was pale dust with a strip of yellowing grass up the middle. I could not imagine how anyone reached Pupkovo in the thaw, when a winter’s worth of snow melted all at once, but then the thaw itself was hard to imagine in this brutal heat. Chunks of the fields on either side of the bus broke off into the air, floating on a wavering mirage.

When the bus stopped at the entrance to the village, there was desolation. A standing cross marked where the communists had knocked the church down. The church had stood until 1937, the cross said, so I wondered briefly if this was where Father Dmitry had worshipped as a boy. We strode down a slight slope into the village, where houses ringed an artificial pond. Most of the houses lacked glass in their windows; some of them lacked roofs. The place was all but abandoned and it was clear Galya was not the only person to have left Pupkovo.

‘There used to be a club there,’ said Galya, pointing at one building, which had been part of the collective farm. Now she was not smiling. ‘But there’s no one left to dance any more.’

We could hear laughter, however, and skirted the pond to a little cabin that had been built out over its surface. A shiny German car stood outside. A glistening fat man in tight shorts and nothing else waved us in, welcomed Galya by name and passed his bottle of beer into his left hand so that I could approach him and shake his right. He did not stand up or otherwise move. His was the expensive car parked on the lane. That and the large gold cross on a gold chain around his neck showed him to be a man of means. Galya explained my mission. The man turned to his two companions and to a child who was turning kebabs on the barbecue.

‘Dudko? Who the fuck was Dudko? Wasn’t he from the Kaluga region?’

The men simpered. The child stared.

‘He was from the Kaluga region. Come on, we’ll hire a forester’s truck. Get some fucking beer, and some meat and have a barbecue. It’s not fucking far through the forest,’ he said with a grin, and a lunge towards Galya.

Galya’s face was set. She declined without giving me a chance to come up with a plausible excuse. We had people to meet, she said, and took me by the hand once more.

‘Galya, why aren’t you wearing a fucking cross? Aren’t you Russian? Where are you going? Have a fucking beer.’

She towed me out of the cabin and back on to the path. Her good mood, already soured by the sight of her home village, was gone.

‘See that,’ she said. ‘Some example to his son. That was his son there, the one who said nothing. He’s got a pregnant daughter at home with no husband, and he’s sitting here drinking beer. No education. It was people like him who burned down my house, and look at him there with his cross. Oh, Russia, Russia.’

We turned left, her leading, on to a path across the fields, or what had once been fields. They butted on to the village houses but grew only rank grass.

‘Everything used to grow here,’ she said. Her voice was tight and her steps fast. ‘See there: potatoes. Over there: tomatoes. Here was beetroot. And now, nothing. It’s just ruined, like this whole country, and that man is there with his money and his beer.’

The sandy soil was exposed along the path, but otherwise this farmland had turned into wilderness. There was no human mark left.

‘No one will even harvest this hay. Why bother? There’s nothing to eat it.’

The path dipped down into some trees, where a small chapel sat in the shade. It was built of softwood planks and roofed with clear plastic. Inside was a well, made of circular concrete segments and choked with foul green slime. It was an evil-looking place to hold baptisms.

‘He built it,’ said Galya, with a jerk of her head back towards the pond. ‘He’s in the cement business.’ She paused to make sure I had understood. ‘Business,’ she repeated with invisible inverted commas around it.

A man was clearing weeds from a path that approached the far side of the well. Galya greeted him as Vasilyevich – son of Vasily – and explained my goal. He shrugged at the name Dudko. No Dudkos here, he said, but he had some papers on local history at his house if I was interested.

It was the first lead all day, and I accepted with enthusiasm. So, we walked back past the pond, the fat man, his car and his gang, whose hails Galya ignored. News of Galya’s visit spread quickly, and as we waited for Vasilyevich to bring out the papers, four or five women gathered: all of them were old friends of hers. There was no one else in the village. None of them had heard of the Dudkos. I was feeling a bit light-headed in the burning heat and began wondering whether Father Dmitry had existed at all.

The papers on the church were interesting, but Vasilyevich had no copies, so I looked through them, gave them back and turned to go. Galya and I would need to walk back to Berezino from wherever we were, so that I could find a bus back to Bryansk. There would be no further buses from here that day.

The earth track passed between further fallow fields. There was no cultivation here at all – just grass – and almost no livestock: only the occasional cow. The whole population seemed to have given up farming. We heard a car approaching from behind us. At the wheel was the man with the papers.

‘A friend of my wife came after you left,’ he said, addressing Galya instead of me. ‘She used to work for the post office. Apparently, this used to happen to letters sometimes. There are two Berezinos in the Bryansk region. The other one is over by Unecha, near the border with Belarus, spelled Berezina, with an “a”.’

It made sense. Berezino comes from the word for birch tree, and Russia has a lot of birch trees. It is a village name that could easily be repeated many times. Galya looked at me. The giggle was back.

‘Two Berezinos? And you’ve come to the wrong one,’ she said. She looked profoundly amused. The lines at the corners of her eyes were even deeper than before. She hooted with laughter and put her arm around me.

‘How far have you come to go to the wrong village? From London?’

I stood stupidly in the sun. I could not help but smile. Galya’s laughter was irresistible. I was probably already a local legend: the daft foreigner with a notebook who couldn’t read a map.

‘Get in,’ the man said. ‘I’ll take you to the bus stop. You’ve got a long trip if you’re going all the way to Unecha.’

Galya, who was still giggling, left me at the bus stop. She wanted to have a proper conversation with her mother and thought the old women might have calmed down by now. I could hear her still chuckling as she walked away. At last the bus came, and I was heading in the right direction.

When I finally found the narrow road to Father Dmitry’s real home village, far to the west and a day’s journey away, it was possible to imagine that nothing had changed here not only since he was born in 1922, but for centuries before that too. Conifers formed a spiky horizon all round. Potatoes sprouted from sandy fields. Sparse crops of barley ran right up against the walls of log-built houses.

But the impression was illusory. The peasants here in western Russia were some of the doughtiest enemies the Bolsheviks ever faced. They had to be prised away from their ancient customs like a child from its mother. The assault on them was merciless, their defeat was total, and their lives changed for ever. In the face of the onslaught, peasants clung to all that they could salvage: to their faith, Orthodox Christianity.

Orthodoxy is made up of ancient rituals and chants and processions that believers lose themselves in. Icons are objects of adoration, and churches have tiered screens to separate the priest conducting the mysteries from the waiting faithful. Orthodoxy claims descent from the faith of the earliest times, which is why it is so resistant to change – a characteristic reinforced in Russian villages where reform remains distrusted.

Father Dmitry never wrote much about his childhood, but from what he did record it is clear that his home was deeply religious. His father, an ordinary farmer with a stubborn face in photographs, kept a Bible in the house. His small son would secretly read it to himself. He played at being a priest, taking an ember and a candle, and filling the hut with smoke. He gave communion from a glass of water to all his friends, who treated the event, he said much later, with great solemnity.

Playing was not something they did much of, in those days, however. The Bolshevik state was only newly established, and its economy was wrecked by civil war and international blockade. Before the revolution, the government had barely troubled the peasants, beyond demanding taxes. Once the tax collectors were gone for the year, the only official they saw was the constable. The Soviets were different.

Communist officials confiscated the peasants’ crops to feed the cities. They had machine guns and the farmers were powerless to resist them. One winter, troops came and took the last wheat from Father Dmitry’s family: the grain they needed to live on and to plant for the next year. His father, the bearded tyrant who ruled his household and read the Bible, lay on the ground and wept. Dmitry, his brothers and his mother wept too.

His sister was married by then, but her husband left for Ukraine to try to find food for his wife and young child. He was not heard of again. Abandoned, she struggled into the nearby town of Unecha with her baby to beg for food from the townsfolk. The baby cried and cried. He needed to be fed, she said, as often as a kitten. Her milk dried up, and she tried to appease him with water but he cried still more.

Finally, the baby calmed and slept. Her begging had failed and she had fed him nothing, but at least he was not uttering the unignorable screams of a hungry infant. She struggled on in her fruitless quest for food. It was only when she got back home that she realized he was dead. Desperate with grief, she ran to her own mother. She walked around their hut in her grief, until she found an edible plant in the garden. She dropped to her knees to eat it, but Dmitry was too fast for her. He ran out into the garden and slammed her round the head with a pole.

‘What did you do that for?’ his mother demanded.

‘We all want to eat,’ he replied. He wrote later that he was pleased he had defended their food store, even from his own sister.

The family had planted rye, which they guarded jealously until it grew large enough to be eaten. The children awoke one day to find their grandmother had broken into their garden and was eating the immature seeds. She could barely walk she was so hungry, but the brothers drove her out of their crop like a cow. When they had pushed her out, they began to throw lumps of earth at her. She sank to her knees and cursed them.

Dmitry’s grandfather was also a religious man, and he built his own church out in the fields where he recited what he could remember of the old services. He was hungry and begged food. Their neighbours beat him and he lost his mind. The children then teased him and laughed at him, throwing stones. Once he caught Dmitry and thrashed him.

When Dmitry was already in his teens, he and his father gathered to mark Easter, the holiest date in the Orthodox calendar. Dmitry held his homemade cross while his father read the holy service. Stalin’s government wanted to force the peasants to give up their own property and merge it into a single collective farm. The new farms would be efficient and mechanized, and would provide the food surpluses the Soviet state needed so that it could industrialize. In effect, the peasants’ labour, livestock and land would be taken from them and used by the government for someone else’s benefit.

It is not surprising that many of the peasants wanted nothing to do with the new farms, but the government was determined. It sent squads of city folk into the villages to force the peasants to take part.

Recalcitrant peasants were taxed at a rate 70 per cent higher than their collectivized neighbours and, even after selling all their valuables, could rarely afford to pay what the state demanded. That is what happened to Father Dmitry’s father, who refused to join the collective. He was charged with tax evasion. His insistence on maintaining the old religious rites was added to the charge sheet. He was, under the new legal code on the young judge’s desk, conducting religious propaganda. He and Dmitry had to walk 3 kilometres to the courthouse in another village.

‘Why have you not paid the state?’ asked the judge.

‘I have not paid, yes… there’s nothing to pay with… I live badly,’ his father replied.

‘And why don’t you join the collective farm? There you will live better.’

‘Well, I can go into the farm, if I have to.’

The judge gave him two years in jail. He was one of the approximately 25 million Soviet citizens repressed – shot, deported, imprisoned, exiled – in the years between Stalin seizing power in 1928 and dying in 1953. That is an eighth of the Soviet population, approximately two people for every three families. Tens of millions more suffered by association. As relatives of ‘enemies of the people’, the families of the convicted prisoners too were denied many of the rights of citizens. Dmitry, the son of a class enemy, knew that his troubles were in many ways only now beginning.

After his father’s conviction, they sat for a while but had nothing to say. When Dmitry returned home alone, his mother was inconsolable. The sentence was extended, and those two years became four. The boys begged and stole food to keep themselves alive.

The collective farms were key to Stalin’s plans to turn the Soviet Union into a modern state capable of standing up for itself. They would break the old traditions, forcing the peasants to do the state’s will and to become pliant proletarians. They would also create a surplus of food to be exported so the Soviet Union could import the tools and equipment needed to modernize the economy. In this they succeeded. By stealing the peasants’ food, the government won its crash industrialization. As Stalin’s supporters say: when he arrived, Russia had wooden ploughs; when he died, it had the hydrogen bomb. The collective farms were not a long-term success, however. By the end of communism, Moscow was paying as much for imported grain as it was earning from exporting oil. Grain yields per hectare were a third of those in Germany, although the Soviet Union had some of the richest land in the world.

From a cultural and social perspective, things were even worse. Or so I heard from Vasily Germangenovich Shpinkov, universally known as Germangenovich, from the village of Kazashchina. Kazashchina is a couple of kilometres to the west of Berezina. On my way to see him, I walked past a stork’s nest, a dense umbrella of sticks. Storks are supposed to bring good luck, but this one did not seem to have helped the village. Almost every house was boarded up or rotting.

Germangenovich was born in 1926, making him four years Father Dmitry’s junior. If he was busy when I arrived, he showed no sign of it, since he sat me down, squeezed on to the seat next to me and began to talk as if he had been waiting for me his whole life.

He had a strange twisted nose, scarred in the way I imagine a serious explosion would scar it. His grey hair was thick but chaotic. His eyes were bright. I had plenty of time to examine him since he believed in the bigger picture. His life story started with Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava. That was in 1709.

He was a Cossack and proud of it, and he pointed out to me his reproduction above the door of a painting in which Cossacks are shown writing a rude letter to the Turkish sultan. He wanted me to know that the tsars had been good people, and told me so at length. I had to write it all down, since he waited for me to do so after every sentence.

As a result, my notebook is full of pages of information on tsaristera serfs, when peasants were tied to their village and forced to give their labour to their lord for three days a week.

‘In 1931, Stalin brought in a second serfdom. He took the land, he took the livestock and he left the people with just a quarter of a hectare. And people did not have to work only three days a week for their masters like under the old system, but all the time, plus the churches and priests were destroyed.’

He was talking directly into my face, so I had a close view of his nose. His eyes were alive either side of it.

‘I remember how they forced people into the collective farm. The chairman of the village council sat at a table with a pistol which he said was for the enemies of the people, who were those who did not want to join the collective farm. I was six years old and was up on the stove.’

He gestured to the huge flat-topped stove that dominated the room. Traditional peasant houses such as this one are built around the stove. It projects into every room and keeps them warm in the wintertime. In very cold weather, the family sleeps on top.

When the chairman had finished his speech and everyone shouted ‘Praise Stalin, praise the revolution!’, Germangenovich’s grandmother told them they were all fools, that nothing good would come of it; that it was not for life, it was for death. Her curses made no difference. The government took over all the barns, and all the livestock. It even took people’s wedding rings, the state’s desire for currency was so strong.

‘We had to give our cow to the state, and my mother got two and a half metres of cloth, which she used to make shirts for my father. That was the payment for our cow: a couple of shirts. When my father took the horse to the collective farm, we cried, we children. He knew that the horse would die, because it would have no master, no one would look after it. Our horse went to the common barn, and they took our land, and this is where the starvation came from.’

There were seven people in his family: his parents, him, his three siblings and his grandmother. They ate herbs and weeds to stave off hunger. His father did not have the money to buy an exercise book, so they went semi-naked and barefoot to their lessons without anything to write in.

‘The children were weak, many could not go to school. They were naked and hungry, and refused to leave the house. How can you walk when your legs won’t move? At school, they gave out bread. They had a list, and they divided children up. The poorest got bread, but me and my brother were so-called middle peasants so we got nothing.’

Middle peasants were the group of people between kulaks – the supposedly rich oppressors, who were often ordinary farmers whose hard work had allowed them to own slightly more than their neighbours, and who were sent off to die in Siberia and the north – and the Bolsheviks’ favoured poor peasants.

The classifications were based on a report that Lenin wrote in the late nineteenth century. He was a committed Marxist, and saw the laws of class struggle all around him. That led him to the erroneous conclusion that peasants were dividing into classes – kulak, middle and poor – thanks to the government’s abolition of serfdom and various other limited agricultural reforms.

In fact, peasants distributed their land afresh every year, with families receiving a share proportional to the number of people in their household. That imposed equality and the differences Lenin observed were transient developments brought about by temporary increases in some families’ sizes that would be erased when young men left home or old men died.

The peasants he labelled as rich were rarely rich enough to employ labour, and in any case distrusted the habits required to get ahead in business. Besides, as Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia noted, any surplus wealth tended to go on vodka, which had the habit of returning the relatively rich to the ranks of the poor once more.

Even if stratification into classes did occur, it was wiped out by the revolution and subsequent disturbances. Peasants stole their rich landlords’ belongings, then the Bolsheviks stole what was left. There were no kulaks, no middle peasants and no poor peasants. There were just peasants, and all of them were in dire condition.

For the Bolsheviks, however, what Lenin wrote was true, and the communist government set targets for how many kulaks needed to be ‘dekulakized’ so as to establish fairness in the countryside. In June 1931 alone, 101,184 families were resettled from their homes to remote areas. The population of the Narym territory in Siberia increased from 120,000 to 300,000 in less than three months as the kulaks poured in, with no allowances made to feed the new arrivals in the long Siberian winter.

The kulaks were often the peasants with the best handicraft skills. With their departure, the villages lost their most skilled and accomplished residents, as well as much of their livestock, since many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals rather than hand them over to the state. Lacking animals to work the land or supply manure for fertilizer, the peasants’ grain crops collapsed, while grain seizures continued. That caused a new famine.

Germangenovich cut a piece off the loaf of bread on the sideboard – 9 centimetres square, a bit bigger than a packet of cigarettes, though not as deep. That was the ration that he did not get. The bread was on a tray in school, and only the poor peasant children got any.

‘My brother asked for some and they refused him. So he just grabbed two bits of bread off the tray and ran. While they chased him, he ate one bit and the second he hid under his shirt and gave to me. That was a true brother.’

The government moved many of the villagers a few hundred kilometres into Ukraine, where there would apparently be work and food. They walked into the houses assigned to them, he said, to find the tables laid and the beds made. The Ukrainians had all died of hunger, and their fields were unworked.

In the winter of 1932–3, the death rate in some parts of Ukraine was thirteen times higher than normal. Russia was better off, but only just. In its worst-affected parts the death rate was nine times higher than normal.

In 1932–3, somewhere between 5 and 6 million people died, making it the worst single famine of the century until China surpassed it in 1958. Grain production that year was around 60 million tonnes, but the five-year plan demanded 106 million tonnes and the plan could not be changed, so grain seizures by officials continued despite the evidence of starvation. Desperate peasants fled the villages for the towns, where rations were better. The government, which had abolished internal passports with the revolution, sent the peasants back to their homes and reintroduced travel permits. Now only town-dwellers would have the right to live in towns, and peasants would be tied to the land by their lack of documentation. For Germangenovich, it was serfdom come again.

Stalin’s lack of sympathy for the starving peasants, whom he referred to as ‘peasants’ in inverted commas as if to accuse them of being impostors, was shown when, in a private telegram, he said they were Polish agents seeking to blacken the Soviet Union’s name. Ukrainian officials followed his lead and said the peasants were starving because they were lazy. Some 21,000 top officials, meanwhile, had access to special shops in the cities where delicacies were still available. Closed Shop No. 1 served the Moscow elite.

While officials ate caviar, the boy Germangenovich was killing vermin to try to stop them eating the grain that was left.

‘We were ordered to kill mice, and we got given a book if we brought in a hundred mouse tails. It was a plague of mice,’ he said. ‘That is how we lived. Up to the war.’

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, finding the Russian troops totally unprepared. The invaders’ advance was quick and devastating. By 17 August, they had seized Berezina. The same disregard for logic that had led the Bolsheviks to starve millions of peasants had also persuaded them to purge the highest ranks of the army, leaving the officers untrained and scared to take the initiative.

The Germans took whole armies of Soviet troops prisoner, of whom 2.8 million would be dead by early 1942. It was one of the most spectacular military disasters in history, and it exposed Father Dmitry and Germangenovich to the German army and an entirely 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 NKVD 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 NKVD, 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.’

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 flee the city all summer, head out at weekends. This Saturday morning, my carriage was packed with them and sweltering. Temperatures reached 39 degrees in late July 2010. In a few weeks’ time, fires in the forests and in dried peat bogs around Moscow would choke the city.

As the train set off with a rattle, I sweated against the plastic seat back and resented the couple opposite me whose legs were trespassing into my space.

I had been at a dreadful party hosted by a British diplomat the night before and had, in a fit of revenge against everyone in the world, got drunk and boorish. This morning I was still irritable. My eyes itched and my brain ached. As we rumbled out of the Kursk station, a procession of hawkers entered our carriage and loudly failed to interest us in the items they had for sale: nylon socks, potato peelers, radios. A gypsy boy came and played the accordion so badly I was tempted to pay him to go away.

The sun shone on the forest as we left the city behind.

The seminary at Zagorsk did not open immediately after the restoration of the Orthodox Church. At first instruction was given in Moscow. The first time that Father Dmitry and his classmates got to see the ancient seminary buildings was in May 1947, when they took this same railway line to celebrate mass in the glorious Assumption Cathedral, built under Ivan the Terrible and the centrepiece of Russia’s holiest monastery.

That was where I was going on that baking-hot train. The trees flicked past the window. The grass beneath them was dry and sparse. There was a lot of summer still to come, and it was already the hottest since records began. In a couple of weeks, Russia would ban wheat exports in anticipation of a disastrous harvest and the world’s food prices would soar in response.

The couple opposite me whose legs I had resented were now asleep. They were middle aged and heavy set. He wore a light-blue shirt and flat cap, while she wore a flowery dress and looked hot and flustered even with her eyes closed.

I too tried to doze, but I kept being knocked by other passengers. They were fare-dodgers, pushing up the train in the hope we would stop soon and they could run down the platform around behind the ticket inspectors to the already checked rear of the train. Their chances were slim. The inspectors worked in a team of four: two women and two burly men to keep order.

The woman opposite had tucked her arm through her husband’s. She did not remove it even when asked to show her ticket, as if she were worried he might be stolen. Their tickets checked, she closed her eyes and laid her head back on his shoulder. He did not wake up, and slept with a slight smile. Their fondness for each other improved my mood considerably.

After an hour and a half of slow rattling we pulled into Sergiev Posad, a little town with factory chimneys and apartment blocks. I could not face walking far in the heat, so I asked a taxi to drive me to the great walled fortress of the monastery complex, then felt stupid for paying 150 roubles when the journey took less than a minute.

The monastery was founded here more than six centuries ago, when a young man built a wooden chapel. He was St Sergei, after whom the town was named. His asceticism did not stop him networking with princes, however. They asked him to bless their armies, and he secured a reputation as a national religious leader.

The complex has come a long way since Sergei’s day, having been ruled by a succession of equally canny hierarchs and thus endowed with land and wealth by generations of tsars and aristocrats.

Today, it is a perfect fairy-tale mix of heavy white walls – to guard the monks against the threats of the world, such as a Tatar attack in 1408 and a Polish siege 200 years later – then, soaring above them, the elegant gold bulb of the Assumption Cathedral, topped by a cross so heavy it needs guy wires. Either side of the entrance gate, which is as weighty as any castle’s, the icons are sheathed in clear plastic marked by hundreds of lipstick smears where women on pilgrimage stop to kiss them. As I walked in, thousands of pigeons strutted among the feet of the faithful, occasionally flying up to their roosts in the arrow slits of the high walls.

I had asked Oleg Sukhanov, press officer at the seminary, to show me around and was already late. He was large and moustached and wore black. He did not seem to mind my lateness, however, and bustled me through the crowd flowing into this perfect little city of Orthodox architecture.

The seminary was off to our right, through a garden. Inside, stairs stretched up to the first floor. The stairwell was screened by heavy mesh, like in a prison, as if to prevent suicides. It struck a jarring note, but I had no time to ask about it, since at the first landing Sukhanov strode left down a dark corridor lined with photographs of the seminary’s alumni.

He showed me the dormitory: vaulted roof, whitewashed walls, unvarnished parquet floor. Each bed had a chair at its foot. They were so close together only a narrow bedside cupboard could fit between them. A handful of students were relaxing, wearing high-collared jackets like military cadets. The room did not look like it had been redecorated since Father Dmitry’s day. The only new furniture was a row of cheap laminated wardrobes, the doors of which were already hanging askew.

My tour was at high speed, and next stop was the chapel. According to legend, when King Vladimir, who was to become the Russians’ first Christian ruler after his conversion in 988, wanted to choose a religion, he sent emissaries to investigate all the faiths of his neighbours: Latin and Greek Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The embassy that sailed to Constantinople was so dazzled by the gold and ritual and incense of Hagia Sophia that they rushed back to tell him all about it. Theirs was an experience that visitors to Orthodox cathedrals still revel in today.

‘When we stood in the temple,’ they are said to have told him on their return, ‘we hardly knew whether or not we were in heaven, for, in truth, upon earth it is impossible to behold such glory and magnificence; we could not tell all we have seen; there, verily, God has His dwelling among men, and the worship of other countries is as nothing. Never can we forget the grandeur which we saw. Whoever has enjoyed so sweet a sight can never elsewhere be satisfied, nor will we remain longer as we are.’

That was convincing enough for Vladimir. He converted to the Greek version of Christianity in a decision no doubt helped along by the Byzantine emperor offering one of his daughters as a bride. On entering that chapel in Sergiev Posad, I could see what those envoys had meant. Sometimes Orthodox churches are gaudy and vulgar, but this one was sublime. A sky-blue vaulted roof glowed gently in sunlight pouring through a glazed lantern. Frescoes of angels and saints sucked my eyes towards the ranks of gold-framed icons on the screen. An elegant chandelier dominated the middle of the space. Two women bowed in their whispered prayers. Another woman carefully straightened narrow yellow candles that were bending slightly in the warmth of the day.

Father Dmitry, raised in a village faith of whispered prayers in homemade churches, would have been entranced by the majesty of this chapel. I craned my neck back and traced the paintings and the structure. It was magnificent: awe-inspiring and calming all at once.

In a classroom down the corridor, trainee priests stared and giggled at laptops like students all over the world. A sombre oil painting of an intense religious discussion loomed on the wall behind them, with peasants clustered around a cross in a dark room. The students were young, handsome and in high spirits.

Sukhanov and I returned to the corridor with the photographs. Father Dmitry’s year was the first picture on the left, because they were the first students to enter the seminary after it reopened. All the other years had formal portraits of the students and teachers gathered together. This one had eighteen separate pictures, which had clearly been gathered after the students had already left. Some of them were identified by name but most were not, and I could not find Father Dmitry among them.

Later accounts relate how he always loved talking and debating, a trait he learned from the father and grandfather that had introduced him to Christianity. They had taught him that religion is a living thing, something to be discussed and celebrated. His father had taught him phrases from the Bible, and they had explored them, asking what they meant. He must have been a rambunctious presence in class, and that alone was enough to make him stand out. In 1940s Russia, people who wanted to survive did not talk openly to strangers. Even relatives needed to be treated with caution.

Soviet children were raised on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a young boy whose body was found on the edge of his village in the Urals in 1932. According to the story pieced together (some say, invented) by the police, Pavlik had informed the authorities that his father, a poor peasant, was forging documents allowing kulaks to pass themselves off as ordinary citizens. On the basis of the evidence, his father was exiled. Pavlik was then murdered. Four of his family members – his grandparents, a godfather and a cousin – were executed for the crime, which was said to have been a bloody act of revenge.

The story, which is likely to have been fabricated but which was passed off as true, was turned into an opera, songs, plays and biographies. School groups visited Morozov’s grave, and children were encouraged to believe that snitching on your own father was valuable if your father was working against the state. Martyrdom in the service of communism was the highest ideal. Stories such as this one established a generation gap between new, young Soviet people and the old patriarchal villages of their parents.

As the historian Orlando Figes put it: ‘for anyone below the age of thirty, who had only ever known the Soviet world, or had inherited no other values from his family, it was almost impossible to step outside the propaganda system and question its political principles’.

Father Dmitry, however, had 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 KGB.

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 KGB as an agent of influence, according to documents smuggled out of Russia by former KGB 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 KGB 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 KGB, said in 1991 that only 15–20 per cent of priests refused to work with the security organs. Priests who refused to help the KGB were not promoted, and thus were denied access to the highest positions. The last two Soviet-era patriarchs – Pimen and Alexy II – were full KGB 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.

After Father Dmitry’s arrest, and while in detention, he dreamed of Stalin with an axe, teaching his friends how to kill people. He dreamed of being brought before Stalin in his underwear. ‘My conscience would not allow me to admit my guilt,’ he wrote later of his dream encounter with the dictator. ‘To speak the truth would mean to undergo torture. I decided to speak the truth. How can I speak untruth when there is so much suffering, when I am standing before him with bound hands, and he continued to teach those around him how to punish? And I woke up with that feeling.’

He was not able to express such nobility at his real trial, though he won the small triumph of stopping his tormentors from swearing in his presence. He tried to justify his poem’s criticism of Stalin by saying that atheists killed the spirit of people, but it was not an argument that won him much ground.

Eventually the prosecutor told him to write down his confession, to write the words ‘I consider myself to be guilty. I slandered Soviet reality.’

But Father Dmitry refused. He said that he did not consider himself guilty: ‘I spoke the truth. Come with me, and I will show you what is being done. I will show you my suffering father, I will show you the exhausted people.’

It did not sway his accusers. He got ten years in the gulag for distributing anti-Soviet poems. There was no appeal. The village lad had been through starvation, brutality, the imprisonment of his father, destitution, war, occupation, conscription, injury, arrest and now imprisonment. He was only twenty-six years old, and his life was still ahead of him.

As my train waited at one of the little stations on the way back to Moscow, an express thundered past in the opposite direction. Despite the noise they make, Russian trains are rarely very quick, and I had plenty of time to read the destination boards bolted to the side of each carriage: Vorkuta.

Vorkuta is in the far north and, if I wanted to retrace Father Dmitry’s route into the camps of the gulag, I would need to take that train too. After his sentencing, he was sent up the rails to Inta in the Komi Republic, at the northern end of the Ural Mountains. By the late 1940s Komi was one vast prison, where the tundra took the place of a fence: frozen solid in winter, impassable swamp in summer.

Back in Moscow, the returning Muscovites from my train streamed on to the platform of the Kursk station. Progress was slow, held up by a crowd that had gathered to watch an old drunk arguing with three fashionable teenagers. He was furious at some slight, and two policemen had to hold him back as he tried to swing punches. The teenagers’ smug smiles and the officers’ chuckles simply enraged him all the more.

Eventually, the policemen tired of the game and released his arms, at which point he collapsed on to the grimy, soggy tarmac and wriggled like a turtle on a jar, shouting abuse as the three teenagers walked away. I went inside to buy my ticket north.

3 Father Dmitry was K-956

From my upper bunk, the forest shuffled past very slowly. Every kilometre a sign – a square of metal or a neat little lozenge of concrete – told me how far we were from Moscow, with smaller signs counting off the tenths of a kilometre in between. I mused about how much paint it must take to keep them bright and shining, and what on earth they were for. The only reasonable explanation was to provide something of interest for passengers on the train to look at, but it seemed an incredible amount of effort for such a minimal reward. After a kilometre or two, they lost their appeal almost entirely.

The town of Inta, where Father Dmitry served his sentence for writing poems, is 2,000 kilometres from Moscow. Getting there would take thirty-six sweltering hours. I scribbled a calculation, that is 55 kilometres an hour; another calculation: 34 miles an hour. If that was our average between Moscow and Inta, it was no wonder it felt like we were going slowly. You can drive more quickly in many built-up areas, and this was very far from being a built-up area. There were no houses of any kind. The trees were dense and monotonous: solid, prickly and dark.

Sometimes we would rattle through villages, clutches of log-built houses huddled close to the tracks. But fewer than half the houses had anything planted outside. Most were still secure against the weather, their roofs were whole, but no one lived there. If someone did, they would have filled every available hectare with potatoes against the winter. Outside the villages the fields were choked with weeds: no livestock, no crops. The only farm animals I saw all day were a dozen geese in a garden.

One of the most striking statistics about modern Russia is that, of the 153,000 villages in the country in 1989, some 20,000 have been abandoned. Another 35,000 have fewer than ten people. The population has fallen faster in cities, however, meaning that the proportion of Russians living in villages has actually gone up over that period. This is a practically unique example of a modern, developed country deurbanizing.

The economy of the far north has all but vanished. It was based on subsidized coal mines and, now the subsidies are gone, as are most of the factories that burned coal, so the mines have not been able to stay open. In Soviet times, workers received special high wages for working in the north, but those rates are gone too. The knock-on effect of the mine closures has touched everything the Soviets created in the Arctic. Shops cannot stay open without people to buy their goods. Factories cannot stay open so far from their markets. The railway line I was travelling on was built to tie the Arctic into the Russian economy but, that whole day, the only two other trains I saw were passenger trains. There were no goods being shipped either north or south.

Somewhere to the north-west of me, in 1923, the OGPU security service, which would later be renamed the NKVD, then the KGB, then the FSB, opened its first labour prison. That first link in what became the chain of gulag camps was on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. It opened when Father Dmitry was just a year old. The island camp held several thousand men by 1925.

But feeding and guarding prisoners in such a remote location was expensive. The government in Moscow needed every rouble to build its new economy. The camps would have to pay their way. That meant that, over time, they were forced to evolve into profitable enterprises. They did this by a key innovation: feeding prisoners a quantity of food proportionate to the amount of work they did. This killed off weaklings early, meaning that non-productive inmates did not have to be carried by those strong enough to fell timber, make bricks, dig coal or do any of the other tasks left to prisoners in the fastnesses of the Soviet state.

It was economically successful, since it meant camps could be pushed into areas barely habitable and exploit their resources for the first time. Decades later, this expansion was chronicled by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army officer jailed for making jokes about Stalin, who became the historian of the camp system. After his release in the 1950s, he collected accounts from other former inmates, and welded them together into a great sprawling epic of oral history that he called The Gulag Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn compared the camp system itself to a cancer, spreading from its original point of mutation on the Solovetsky Islands – colloquially known as Solovki. Camp officials were aggressive cancer cells, the camps they set up were the secondary growths. Instead of voyaging up blood vessels and lymph canals as cancers do in the body, the metastasizing prison system spread up railways and rivers.

‘In the summer of 1929 an expedition of unconvoyed prisoners was sent to the Chibyu River from Solovki,’ he wrote. ‘The expedition was successful – and camp was set up on the Ukhta, Ukhtlag. But it, too, did not stand still on its own spot, but quickly metastasized to the north-east, annexed the Pechora, and was transformed into UkhtPechlag. Soon afterwards it had Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, and Vorkuta sections – all of them the bases of great independent future camps.’

The conditions, he wrote, were ‘twelve months of winter, the rest summer’. The camps expanded rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s, when the likes of Father Dmitry’s father were imprisoned. But they became still worse in the 1940s when the war stretched the country’s resources and left even free citizens hungry, let alone prisoners. Work norms increased, while food rations were cut. According to statistics published later, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, which was one in four of the prison population. In 1943, the death rate improved slightly, and only one in five prisoners died: 267,826 people.

Solzhenitsyn wrote how nothing was wasted on human comforts, not even to honour the dead. ‘At one time in Old Russia it was thought that a corpse could not get along without a coffin. Even the lowliest serfs, beggars, and tramps were buried in coffins,’ he wrote. ‘When at Inta after the war one honoured foreman of the woodworking plant was actually buried in a coffin, the Cultural and Educational Section was instructed to make propaganda: work well and you, too, will be buried in a wooden coffin.’

More than two million people died in the camps of the gulag during the war years, many of them building this railway line I was travelling on. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its troops rapidly overran the rich coal fields around Donetsk in Ukraine. Stalin’s government, in desperate need of fuel, charged the prisoners with laying rails across the tundra to Inta – founded in 1942 – and to Vorkuta. The rails laid, the prisoners that survived worked in the mines to produce the coal to keep the factories churning out bombs and guns.

The soldiers and the factory workers are honoured now. Surviving veterans are greeted by the president every Victory Day, afforded special privileges, given medals. Its triumph in World War Two has, if anything, become ever more sacred to the country as the years have passed. The role of the prisoners in forging that victory has been all but forgotten, however, even though many of them had committed no crime at all and worked harder than anyone. They were guilty only of being slightly richer than their neighbours, or of failing to join a collective farm, or of telling a joke. Their torment is largely unacknowledged in Russia today.

Although Vladimir Putin in 2010, during his spell as prime minister between his two stints as president, made The Gulag Archipelago compulsory reading for schoolchildren in their eleventh year, he does not encourage modern historians to delve into the past. The KGB’s files are closed to all but a chosen few, and there has been little acknowledgement of the oppressors’ guilt from Russia’s new supposedly democratic government.

As the train rattled along, I had a strange feeling that the suffering of every one of those forgotten victims had, because it was unacknowledged, hung around in the air like the spirits of unburied children. The haze would be purple, I thought, and so dense that no breeze could disperse it. As fresh prisoners came to replace those who died at work, the suffering built up into a great pulsing tube. The tube followed the railway line, until it became an artery linking the cancerous organs of the camp system. To the north it flowed round the bump of Inta, before ending in the coal fields of Vorkuta. To the south, it converged with dozens of other tubes at the great beating heart of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square. From there, arteries spread in all directions. Some stretched east and north through Siberia to the camps of Norilsk; others went beyond that to the far east and over the sea – where the purple congealed on the waves in a loathsome slick – to the nightmares that were Magadan and Kolyma.

As I lay sweating on my damp bunk, the hallucination became real for a second, and I could see the purple outside the windows, filtering the sunlight pouring into our carriage. My neighbours did not notice it. Perhaps they were used to it. Almost everyone in the north is a prisoner, or the child of a prisoner, or the wife of a prisoner, or the friend of a prisoner, or the jailer of a prisoner. The purple miasma clings to them all, and affects how they speak and behave. It makes them cautious and unfriendly and distrustful. It was only me, the visitor, who could see it.

Most of my neighbours on the train were returning from holiday, still wearing T-shirts bearing the names of Russia’s seaside resorts in the Caucasus: Sochi, Anapa, Tuapse. In the two bunks beneath me was a middle-aged couple – he had a moustache, she had tight shorts. They kept themselves to themselves, and rebuffed my occasional attempts to chat. In fairness, my overtures were self-serving. If I had made friends with them, I could have occasionally sat on their bunks. As it was, I not only had no one to talk with to pass the time, but had to pass the time lying on my bunk looking at the trees and checking my speed calculation.

Our station stops were entirely random. We would pull into what looked like a decent-sized town and chug out again after a couple of minutes. Then we would wait for half an hour at a platform carved out of the forest, where there were no shops and no one got on or off.

My two neighbours alighted at the stop for Syktyvkar and were replaced by two muscled lads in their twenties. Much to my delight, they invited me down to sit with them, meaning I could get off my sweaty mattress for the first time that day. They regaled me with tales of working on the North Stream gas pipeline, which will pump gas to Western Europe.

We drank beer and they swapped tales of industrial accidents. A comrade had slipped off the top of the pipe and broken his leg. A foreman had stepped back to check a weld, fallen off the scaffolding and broken his back. The other one laughed at that. It was far worse, he said, working for foreign contractors, since they make you check your welds until there are no leaks at all, and that takes hours.

One of them, Sergei, came from Inta and had nothing to say in its favour.

‘It’s a dying town,’ he said, and asked where I would be staying. I mentioned the name of the hotel, and he just laughed. ‘If you can call it a hotel.’

My heart sank a little as I climbed back to my bunk for the night.

When I awoke – it was hard to call it morning, since it never gets dark in summer this far north – the black humps of the Ural Mountains had heaved themselves over the horizon to the east. They were streaked with snow, and looked menacing and old.

The man who drove me from the station to town pointed out the last working coal mine. Otherwise, the town was sinking back into the swamp it was born of.

‘I used to work in that one,’ he said, as we passed another shuttered working.

Father Dmitry, like most of the prisoners who came through here, worked in the mines. The pressing need for coal of the war years had passed by the late 1940s. Coal was far more accessible and of better quality in Ukraine. But the logic of power in the gulag meant that the bosses’ empires were untouchable. To close the mines here would have deprived someone of influence, so the coal was hewn out of the ground, loaded on to trucks and sent south to feed the Soviet machine, whether it was needed or not.

One story Father Dmitry liked to tell was how, in the coal mine, he asked the lift operator to hold the controls while he spoke to people on the level below. He lay on the ground, with his head over the shaft and shouted down to them. He focused on the conversation and did not notice when a comrade screamed for him to get back, that the lift was coming. The lift operator had forgotten his promise, and the cage was speeding down towards the back of his head. At that point, a Moldovan called Stan screamed ‘in a voice’, Father Dmitry wrote, ‘of the kind used at the front’.

He looked back, and the cage passed within inches of his face. ‘Everyone was terribly worked up, but I was calm, I somehow did not sense the danger. I still don’t.’

Father Dmitry arrived in the camps in 1948, the year the government cracked down in earnest on the freedoms Soviet citizens had come to enjoy during the chaos of World War Two. To show how alien this was to what was happening elsewhere in the world, 1948 was the year when Britain founded the National Health Service, when the United States gifted Marshall Aid to Western Europe, and when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1948, the Soviet government divided the inmates in two. The prisoners called ‘criminals’ – those guilty of murder, rape and other ordinary crimes – were now housed separately from those convicted of political crimes. The number of ‘politicals’, who now got a tougher routine, had increased. Among the camp inmates were hundreds of thousands of returning prisoners of war – traitors for having surrendered in battle. There were also unruly elements from all the lands – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, East Prussia, Bessarabia, Karelia, Poland and so on – that had been added to the Soviet empire after the war. They were all put to work.

Father Dmitry, a half-educated peasant boy, was locked up as a political prisoner and thrown together with professors and officers and priests from all over Eastern Europe. The camps were full of Poles, Balts and Germans, and even the occasional Westerner marooned here by bureaucracy.

It was a university, and many of the lessons were brutal. One professor, Father Dmitry wrote, complained about his treatment and was locked in the punishment cell immediately. The punishment cell was four walls and no roof – in winter. The professor came out chastened and never spoke up again. They were called by number – Father Dmitry was K-956 – not by name, and worked fourteen-hour days until they were skeletal and exhausted.

One Lithuanian became so emaciated that he gained extra rations, but he did not eat them. Something inside his brain had snapped. He squirrelled them away in his suitcase, until he was sent to the hospital wing and died.

Prisoners could receive one letter a year. They had ten minutes to eat lunch.

‘From this hard life a lot of people became grasses, informers, so as to somehow ease their lives: many of them were killed. One Lithuanian informer was killed when he had just a month until his release.’

From the earliest days of the camps, prisoners had found solace in religion. The violence between different groups of prisoners, and from guards, encouraged individuals to form groups, to seek out like-minded inmates to share their troubles with. The rituals of Christianity helped many of them find comfort, and helped encourage them to believe in a world outside the fences and tundra that surrounded them.

‘I stayed joyous and optimistic for a long time, and then I too suffered these bleak thoughts, that I would never get out of there… My only release was that there was another life, there was God. He sees all our sufferings. When I told the prisoners that our sufferings would end, they looked at me like I was a baby who doesn’t understand life. And when I told them I had been at the front – so as to say that I wasn’t a baby – they didn’t believe me.’

When Father Dmitry was in Inta the prisoners lived in long wooden barracks. Those are all but gone now, having rotted into the muck like many of the buildings that replaced them. The conditions in the Russian Arctic are so severe that the weather will find the smallest weakness in a building, squeeze its way in like an infection and reduce it to a hump of masonry and wood in just a few years.

My car dropped me off outside the Northern Girl hotel, identified by a sign above a doorway in a block of flats near the central square. The lobby housed a cosmetics kiosk. At the reception window was a blonde woman who clearly spent much of her spare time trying out the kiosk’s products.

I had not reserved a room, but that was fine. The price was 1,800 roubles – about £36. That seemed steep, but it was manageable. I handed over my passport. That was when she realized I was a foreigner, and I needed to pay a ‘coefficient’ of three. She consulted her calculator.

‘That means 5,400 roubles,’ she said with finality.

Many Soviet institutions once had a double price scale, with foreigners made to pay vastly higher prices than locals, but it is now supposed to be illegal. I told her so. I told her I would not pay over £100 for a hotel in Moscow, even if it had a spa, pool and sauna, and refused to pay her charge. She rang her administrator, who came down and tried to ring the manager. He was not there, so she rang the former manager, who expressed surprise that he was being consulted on a business he had nothing to do with, and rang off. She then, inexplicably, rang the Federal Migration Service, who also could not help. I would still, they told me, have to pay the 5,400 roubles. I refused.

At this point, and seemingly randomly, the administrator offered me a revised coefficient of 1.2, which allowed them to save face and me to save money. We had a deal.

It was only when I was sat on the chair in my bedroom, which had a single bed, a chair and a kettle and was on the ground floor facing a yard, that I realized that – in half an hour of haggling – neither of the women had expressed any interest at all in my visit to Inta. This was a small town, in a wilderness, an overnight train journey from the nearest airport, with no tourist amenities or business opportunities. And yet, they were acting as if foreigners swanned in and out all the time. This was a blow, since hotel receptionists tend to be a key source of help in a new town. On my way out, I tried to engage the heavily made-up woman in conversation. The few miners left, she said, earn 20,000 roubles a month sometimes but normally around 14,000.

The town’s coal is no longer in demand, and the shafts are largely worked out. The population peaked above 60,000 in 1989. Now only half that many people are registered as living in Inta, and many of those really work somewhere else. The trend is repeated in Komi as a whole. At the end of the Soviet period, one and a quarter million people lived in this region. Now there are 950,000 – a population decline of 25 per cent in twenty years.

I hoped the receptionist might ask about me about what I was doing in her crumbling town. But she showed no more interest in me than she had the first time round.

My fallback plan was Inta Museum, which would I hoped be full of information on the gulag. After all, the town had no other history, and the exhibits would have to include something. Here too my foreign nationality cost me extra, though I got my money’s worth, since they had no 50-rouble tickets. The woman behind the cash desk had to tear out separately five 10-rouble tickets along the edge of her ruler. Another woman was ready to take my coat but I was not wearing one. It was far too hot for anyone to be wearing anything more than a shirt, and I was the only visitor, so she was presumably not having a very busy day.

The museum’s first room was devoted to the Soviet Union’s Victory in World War Two, under the slogan ‘The victory was forged in the gulag too’. There was a photo of the order signed on 22 July 1941 which had kept all prisoners locked up for the duration. That order kept Father Dmitry’s father in the camps for an extra five years on top of his four-year sentence. The exhibit did not mention the two million gulag prisoners who had died forging the victory.

The room devoted to coal had a roundabout way of showing the drop in the workforce. Coal production had dropped from 9,099,000 tonnes in 1989 to 4,851 tonnes in 2001. During that period each worker had become almost twice as efficient. I did not need to do the sums to realize the heart had been ripped out of the town.

An old woman walked the museum with me. She turned on the lights in each room; sat down to check I examined all the exhibits; turned off the lights after me. I trudged round, then asked if the director was in her office and whether I might speak to her. She was not. And no one else would have anything to tell me, apparently.

The director’s secretary gave off the air of someone who received so many requests for access that she would rather corral all the visitors into one group before allowing them past. I would have to come back. It was to be another two days before I finally made it into the director’s presence.

The day stretched before me, so I set out to explore. Every building looked tired. The one bit of fresh paint I saw – bright orange used to smarten up an arch leading into an otherwise ordinary courtyard – had been defaced with the single scrawled word ‘cock’, and a crude sketch of male genitalia. Walking on, I headed for two factory chimneys that dominated the town. Built of dark brick, one bore the date 1952 and a red star. Father Dmitry must have seen this being built. Perhaps he had helped build it. The factory – a power station – was not working, and I briefly wondered if the only thing more depressing than a belching factory chimney was a non-belching factory chimney, before ordering myself to cheer up.

A minibus slowed down enticingly so I climbed on board and rode to the end of the line on a whim. Here the apartment blocks were invisible, and the Great Inta River surged past, muscles flexing beneath its khaki surface. This had once been a region of wooden houses and gardens on the bluff above the river. They were rotten and collapsed now, the gardens choked with stagnant grass. The entrance gates to the Kapital coal mine gaped, and the mine’s lift tower stood a hundred metres away. Thickly lagged pipes rose up over the gates into a square-sided arch. The pipes were lifted high to allow trucks to pass safely underneath, but no trucks had come this way for years.

At the end of a long track was a cemetery, filled with Lithuanian names and birch trees. The mosquitoes poured out of the damp grass, covering my arms and clustering at my ankles. They were stupid and easy to kill, not like the streetwise ones in Moscow that know how to hide on dark patches so you cannot spot them against the background. But here they swarmed in such numbers that I could not keep up with them and I was bitten a dozen times in a minute. A path led through the wood, between the graves, to a monument of a woman in Lithuanian national dress bearing a ball in her left hand. On the back, in several languages, it said, ‘To those who did not return’.

Although the gulag is generally imagined to have been unbearably cold, for many prisoners it was the blood-sucking parasites during the summers that caused the most torment. The writer Oleg Volkov, on lying down to sleep on his first night on Solovki, was appalled to see bedbugs dropping on to him from the ceiling. There were so many he could not sleep, and went outside. There the clouds of mosquitoes were equally intolerable.

Guards used the mosquitoes as a punishment, stripping off recalcitrant prisoners and tying them to posts in the forest. Their whole bodies would swell up. As I fled the graveyard I had a glimpse of that torment. The mosquitoes might not blot out the sun but, given the chance, they could swell your face enough to turn you blind.

For half an hour I waited for the bus to return. Then I got tired of beating off the mosquitoes and walked.

There did not seem to be much else to do, so I retreated to the Barakuda bar and took out the thick bundle of papers that is Two Years in Abez, a memoir by A. A. Vaneyev, a former inmate of a camp a few dozen kilometres to the north of here, and an account of life inside. I had been carrying a few books around with me, including Father Dmitry’s various volumes of memoirs and a couple of books on the gulag. Vaneyev’s manuscript was the only one I had yet to read, so I ordered a beer and settled in.

The book is mainly a description of the writer’s relations with Lev Karsavin, a religious philosopher who fled St Petersburg after the 1917 revolution. After wanderings in Europe, he found a new home in Lithuania which, between the two world wars, was an independent state. He learned Lithuanian and became an inspiration to a generation of Orthodox writers.

In 1939, Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe between them, and Stalin got Lithuania – as well as eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia and various other places that took his fancy – while Hitler got western Poland and a free hand with France. This inglorious episode is one that modern Russia prefers to forget. The two dictators fell out a couple of years later, and their armies would chew Lithuania to pieces between them over the course of World War Two. Eventually, however, Stalin came out on top and thousands of patriotic Lithuanians ended up here: many of them, like Karsavin, for ever.

One of the strangest quirks of the gulag was that, although it took no interest in keeping prisoners alive when they were healthy, it provided hospitals to nurse them back to health when they were sick. Karsavin, born in 1882 and thus an old man when he was arrested in 1949, never left the hospital.

The memoir’s main theme is how life continued in the camp. Professors of all subjects and priests of all religions were happy to discuss their disciplines with each other and anyone else who was interested. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, bitterly cold in the winter and plagued by mosquitoes in summer, but it was a strange kind of haven from the horrors Stalin unleashed on the Soviet Union in his last paranoid years.

‘When they brought us here,’ Vaneyev wrote, ‘all of these circumstances created a terrible impression. With time, however, they became somehow familiar and did not stop us living. And life went on in its own way, not so much independent of the circumstances, but finding its own unexpected way within them.’

The strange side-effect of the influx of educated people from all over Russia and Eastern Europe was that the camps had a freedom absent in the Soviet Union as a whole. Stalin’s last year featured crackdowns on, among others, biologists who believed in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection through inherited characteristics. Stalin favoured the non-scientific but ideologically purer Trofim Lysenko, whose idea that you could pass on to your children characteristics you had acquired during your lifetime squared with the communists’ desire to perfect human beings.

One of Stalin’s last acts was to unleash an anti-Semitic campaign against the Jews, marked by the arrests of Kremlin doctors who were allegedly plotting against him. Stalin had come to believe that Jewish nationalists were all American spies and wanted them dismissed from their jobs and arrested.

In the gulag, however, none of this mattered since everyone shared the same miserable conditions, Russians, and Jews, Darwinists and charlatans alike. The bedside of the ailing Karsavin became a debating club and a university for young men like Vaneyev. In one of the most touching exchanges, the doctor orders the debaters out of his hospital ward when a winter evening has gone on too long.

‘It is so cold, is it not time to go to your homes?’ Then he paused. ‘Oh my God. What have we come to, when we call these barracks home, where your only home is a bed and a table. Terrible, terrible. And this is by our standards comfort, most people don’t even have this.’

People, infinitely adaptable, found a way to survive even here. They even adapted to the mosquitoes. There are stories of the insects swarming in numbers large enough to suffocate reindeer; of reindeer herds so maddened they will drown in rivers to escape the bites. People of Vaneyev’s age called the mosquitoes Messerschmitts after the German fighter planes, and delighted in killing them. One evening Vaneyev sat with Karsavin in the open air, along with Nikolai Punin, husband of the poet Anna Akhmatova, when a mosquito alighted on the professor’s bald head. Karsavin did not brush it off, but allowed it to drink his blood and fly off.

‘You are like a Buddhist,’ Punin remarked.

‘Not in everything,’ Karsavin answered. ‘However, I definitely sympathize a little with the Buddhists’ attitude to small living things.’

‘If you love mosquitoes, you should have driven that one off before it got too fat,’ Punin replied.

At that moment, a second mosquito landed on Punin. ‘You’ll never make a Buddhist out of me,’ he said, and killed it.

Back at the museum, the director’s secretary was once more coldly obstructive to my attempts to gain access to her boss. Eventually, enough time passed and she relented, though if I thought my troubles were over, I was wrong. The director – Yevgeniya Ivanovna Kulygina – greeted me with all the warmth of a border guard. I had expected her to be friendly, to be glad someone was taking an interest in the gulag, so it came as a shock when she demanded my passport and my press accreditation, insisting that I explain myself and the nature of my journey. I told her I was trying to trace the movements of Father Dmitry, at which point she asked me what I already knew.

Cross with my reception, I then described what I knew of his life in ludicrous detail, from his birth in Berezina to his father’s imprisonment, to his service in the army, his education in Moscow and finally his arrival here.

‘Well then, you know more than us,’ she said coldly, and told me there was nothing more she could do to help. I was spoiling for an argument, and she was swelling like a thundercloud, when the door opened and a second woman walked in, middle aged and short haired. She greeted the director as Zhenya, the diminutive of her first name, and introduced herself to me as Tanya Podrabinek.

Surprised by being greeted warmly for the first time since my arrival in Inta, I told her that I knew a man called Alexander Podrabinek in Moscow. Were they by any chance related?

He was her brother-in-law. And it was as if a switch had flicked. Yevgeniya Ivanovna’s frown vanished. She sank back in her chair and smiled. Tanya put the kettle on, and suddenly it was decided that we should all go to Abez the next day together, because – apparently – Father Dmitry had spent time in the camp there. The table filled with pie and coffee, and the room with buzz. At times, there seemed to be more conversations than people, especially with the arrival of Nikolai Andreyevich, a greying man summoned for my benefit. He was renowned for his knowledge of the gulag camps and lectured everyone with good-natured persistence.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna had delighted earlier in telling me I would never make it back to Moscow, that train tickets would be unobtainable and that I was mad to have come all this way without a return berth. Now, she was on the phone reserving me a ticket.

After a couple of cups of tea, she tried to talk me out of leaving at all. I should marry a local girl, she said, and suggested a few candidates. I shrugged apologetically. I was married already.

‘Ah, no problem, she can move here too and you can live like political exiles. Phone her up now and invite her,’ she said, holding out the phone.

An hour earlier I had been sitting on a hard bench in the gloomy lobby failing to gain access to this very room. Three-quarters of an hour earlier, we had been on the brink of a full-scale row. Now it was like we had been friends for ever.

I had read many times about how, in the Soviet Union, access to almost anything was a function of who you knew, but I had never witnessed such a dramatic example of it. If Tanya had walked in ten minutes later, or had failed to mention her surname, I would never have achieved anything. As it was, I was having a great time. I reached for another piece of pie. It was made with berries that grew on the tundra and was delicious.

Nikolai Andreyevich was all the while piling relevant books and magazines in front of me. It became rather overwhelming. When I mentioned that I would like to talk to someone who had known Inta in the years when Father Dmitry was here, he grabbed the phone and began to make calls.

That was why an hour or two later, he and I were sat at a small table in a sixth-floor flat. David Badaryan had had little warning of our arrival, but our welcome was warm: stew, rice, cutlets, cheese, ham, tomatoes, bread and shot glasses for the vodka we had brought with us.

He was an Armenian from Tbilisi, and had been arrested in August 1942 aged seventeen and sentenced to a decade in the gulag for some non-specific anti-Soviet activity (‘They accused me of being in anti-Soviet groups. I was a teenager. What groups could I have been in?’). He was in the Urals for six years before arriving in the town in the same year as Father Dmitry.

‘A lot of people said it was bad and of course it was. But when they brought us here, we thought it was heaven. There were barracks to live in, and a bathhouse. When we came to the Urals we lived in a tent, in winter. Some mornings you would wake up with your hair frozen to the bed,’ he said.

He wore a blue shirt and dark-blue jacket. He had a neat moustache and almost no hair on his head at all.

‘My first impression of Inta was the cold, but then I saw the northern lights. You cannot imagine. They went round round round, up up up up then down. You never see them like this now, it is rare. It was so beautiful, but so cold. It was minus 50, minus 52 sometimes.’

He worked in a deep mine, 300 metres down, for four years. He showed me a photo of himself in 1949. He had been a handsome man, with thick dark hair pushed back from his brow.

He said they lived in barracks in groups of fifty or sixty, and one to a shelf. They played backgammon a lot, and clustered near their one big stove in winter. If you worked near your barracks, you could come back for lunch, but often you did not have time and only got fed at the end of your fourteen-hour day.

‘Sometimes though I am thankful I came to the camps. I survived. My friends from Tbilisi who went into the army all died. They were conscripting people born in 1924 when I was arrested. I was born in 1924 as it happens, but my parents registered me in March 1925. I don’t know why they did that, but that’s why I didn’t go to the front. But you know the camp was hard. All we got was just 600 grams of black bread, soup and porridge. In Inta, they started giving us potatoes.’

The phone rang at this point and he held a long conversation about medicine for his legs, which would cost him 3,500 roubles unless he could find someone to buy it in Moscow, where it was cheaper. His pension is 19,000 roubles a month, so the potential saving was a major issue and he took his time about discussing it.

Nikolai Andreyevich and I drank some vodka. He held out his hands to show me. They were pitted with strange marks where the flesh was sucked in between the bones. He too, it transpires, had been a miner.

‘Who would go to their death in the mine for pennies?’ he asked.

Badaryan nodded: ‘Look at me, I have grey hair. Look at my hands. These are not from a good life. I survived by a miracle myself. If you were a miner, it meant you were somebody. This nation now is completely ruined. The future of the town is under threat even. If there was a good boss it wouldn’t die, but…’ He tailed off.

The two of them talked about the one coal mine that is left in Inta, and which provides fuel for the power station and the central heating plant. When that mine closes, the heating plant must close too, since it is built to burn only local coal, with its high clay content. Coal from Ukraine would burn too hot and ruin it. Without a heating plant, without a mine, the town would have to close. Without a town, the villages near by would vanish, and the tundra would return to how it was before the gulag, with just the graveyards and the humps of rotted buildings to show for the decades of human endeavour.

Nikolai Andreyevich and I walked back between the towers of the apartment blocks and he showed me where a stadium had been planned, but never built. Three stray dogs watched us as we walked past.

That evening, I sat with Father Dmitry’s writings and looked up more references to his time here and how he got on in the camps. His camp’s hospital became – as for Karsavin – a meeting place for the religious believers, and Father Dmitry went there often.

‘The priest whom I met was a real treasure for me. He was attentive by nature and soon he got a job for another priest in the hospital. After a hard day’s work, I would go to him, after roll call, and we would talk about everything.’

They celebrated Easter in the infirmary, with the service led by the priest who worked there.

‘We took communion, and I sensed an extraordinary joy. We separated then, when it was already getting light, and the camp was plunged into a strong, twilight dream.’

One time he described how he and a Ukrainian nursed a Lithuanian back to life. Another time he described how a Spaniard – it is not clear what he was doing in the camp – said all Russians love slavery, and then escaped.

‘They caught him, shot him and left him there on the watchtower so all the prisoners could see.’

Father Dmitry was always a compulsive writer. Despite having been imprisoned for writing poems, he kept writing them. He hid his poems in an old suitcase, but no hiding place was safe in the camps. Guards found the stash of poems during a search.

‘We are arresting you,’ he was told.

‘What? Have I not already been under arrest for six years?’

‘That’s nothing, we’re arresting you anyway.’

He was kept in a prison cell where a harsh light shone into his eyes at all times. Most of his fellow prisoners were there for murder or attempted murder.

‘A Lithuanian who killed informers was young, eighteen years old, tall, thin, spoke with a bass voice. He knew he was not long for this world, he had tuberculosis, and he wanted to kill as many evil people as he could before he died. He was kind, he was a believer, he missed his Lithuania, and was not as evil as a murderer should be.’

The prisoners were not allowed to go out or to lie down during the day so they took turns telling each other everything they knew. They loved to talk about murder and rape, using the ferociously obscene and all-but-incomprehensible jargon of Russian prisons. Father Dmitry asked to be put in solitary confinement to escape them, but nothing came of it.

Every now and then he would be summoned for interrogation, when his investigator would also swear at him. But these insults about his poems, some of which criticized Stalin, came as a relief after the conversation of his comrades.

‘How could you allow yourself to commit such slander? The name of Stalin is spoken with gratitude in China, across the whole world, he is the leader of humanity, and you call him a butcher,’ his investigator shouted, according to Father Dmitry’s later account. ‘Just think what you look like. You’re like Christ when he was on the cross. You have no blood in your face, you’re a skeleton, and you will die here if you don’t repent. Admit everything. Tell me you’re guilty.’

Father Dmitry admitted nothing, even when they brought in new investigators to increase the pressure on him, or when they brought in friends who had been twisted into accusing him of organizing a revolt in the camp.

‘What do I have to fear? I am not some criminal, these are my beliefs,’ he told them.

When the court case came he expected the worst: execution or a new term of twenty-five years as a minimum. When he received a mere ten years on top of his existing sentence, he was surprised. He had already been inside for six years, now he would have another decade to learn how a Soviet citizen should behave.

Tanya, the sister-in-law of my friend in Moscow, had instructed me to bring a packed lunch for our trip to Abez the next day. So, in the minutes before they came to collect me, I made egg mayonnaise sandwiches. Lacking a kitchen I fell back on one of the cooking techniques I had learned as a student. I took the lid off the electric kettle and hoped the fuse would hold out long enough to boil some eggs.

Tanya was a pianist, and an Inta native. We sat on the train, if you can call a single carriage pulled by an engine a train, and she told me about her teacher: Olga Achkasova. Achkasova’s parents moved to Germany when she was a child, and she married a German before World War Two. She survived the Nazi period without being arrested, but fell foul of Berlin’s communist liberators. When she saw the first Soviet soldiers, she welcomed them in Russian. They arrested her, tried her and sent her off to the north.

We sat around a table: Tanya, Nikolai Andreyevich, a local hunter and me. Nikolai Andreyevich fetched out his map and used the opportunity to ask the hunter if he knew any gulag burial sites that were not marked. Since retiring, he has studied the gulag system and tried to create a database of the prisoners’ final resting places. Most of the camps were closed after Stalin’s death and their buildings have vanished into the swamps, which makes finding them now all but impossible. In a way, an alternative future for Russia is buried with them out there in the tundra. Almost all the brightest people from every industry and every town served time in the gulag, and many of them died. Those who survived learned habits of obedience the country has never shaken off, while those who were not imprisoned – and who were thus complicit either in locking them up or in profiting from their labour – prefer not to talk about it. Amnesia and sullen obedience are two of the crucial characteristics of modern Russian politics, and who can say how the country would have developed had these camps never existed?

Nikolai Andreyevich is one of a tiny number of Russians who want to reveal that shameful past, and hunters are a crucial source for him. They have often seen these old graveyards, and this man traced the line of the rivers with his finger, suggesting sites for him to check.

By 1948, the year of Father Dmitry’s arrival, the railway headquarters was at Abez, where the central hospital stood and where the weaker prisoners like Karsavin were concentrated. The first prisoners to build the railway voyaged up the rivers by barge, along with the rails and sleepers. The main camps therefore sat where the line crossed a river.

Nikolai Andreyevich was one of those rare people in Inta who had not sprung from the gulag. He had come here voluntarily from Ukraine. Perhaps because the gulag’s history was not personal to him, he had become fascinated by it.

‘I love history. I read all the time. I worked in the Young Communist League, the party. In the army I was the political worker. And then I came to the north in 1978. Then in the 1980s, the papers started to print memoirs, there was new openness. We knew there had been camps, but you could not talk about it,’ he said. ‘I collected these writings like a book lover.’

His interest had become all-consuming. He now takes children on trips to hunt for graveyards, and erects crosses on the graves he finds.

‘We put a cross as a memorial mark. We take two birch trees, take the bark off them, and then we chop down all other trees for 20 metres around so it is visible. In this sense the cross is a symbol. It is a symbol of the suffering these people went through. They all suffered, whether they were criminals or political prisoners,’ he said.

Tanya was on a similar mission. Karsavin had inspired her to such an extent that she had decided to organize for a monument to stand on his grave. For her, this trip was both a pilgrimage and a reconnaissance.

As our train crawled through the tundra, Nikolai Andreyevich pointed out the sites of the vanished gulag world. ‘There was a hospital, and where the trees are is a graveyard, you see. There was a woman’s camp there, and they lived up on that rise. See there that river, there was a camp there as well.’

The tundra opened as we approached the bridge, affording us our first view since we had left Inta. Grass and weeds lined the banks. The Ural Mountains, humped and smooth and white-flecked like killer whales, rose in the distance.

‘There, wait, wait, wait, there in that pier of the bridge, there’s a body. The criminals cemented in a comrade of theirs, just there,’ Nikolai Andreyevich said.

The trees closed around us once more. They were scrubby birches, with the spiky silhouettes of conifers on the horizon.

‘Abez’, Nikolai Andreyevich told me, ‘is within seven kilometres of the Arctic Circle, so you can pretty much say we’re now in the Arctic.’

We crossed the River Usa on a long clanking steel-framed bridge, and halted on the far side. A dozen people alighted: hunters, railway workers and us, carrying our packed lunches. A bearded man in thick glasses and camouflage greeted us. This was Alexander Merzlikin, a local with a piercing, thoughtful air, who keeps a watch over the graveyards when he is not out hunting in the wilds.

We walked over the stagnant pools of the marsh along a raised path of planks. Heather rose around us, and green scum rimmed the pools. Hundreds of mosquitoes swarmed up, nosing on to our arms and ankles, nestling in our hair.

‘Wait until you get to the graveyard,’ said Alexander, sardonically. He was smoking. ‘This is nothing.’

We dropped off our bags of lunch at the school, and donned hats he gave us. Made of nylon with a wide brim, they were screened to keep the mosquitoes off our faces. I put on my cagoule, buttoned the sleeves tight and tucked my trousers into my socks. My only bare flesh was my hands, and I could police them with ease. I was safe from the swarm, I thought.

Abez was a neat collection of houses around the two-storey buildings of an apartment block and the school. A gaggle of children cycled between the houses, clad only in shorts and T-shirts. I felt rather overdressed in my mosquito armour, but the insects’ hum as they hunted a weak point was constant and I was grateful for the protection.

‘There were 1,500 people living here before,’ said Merzlikin. I was hearing that word ‘before’ a lot. It means ‘before the end of the Soviet Union’. ‘Now there are 400. The dairy closed eight or nine years ago. You could get milk cheaper from the south.’

He pointed to the derelict barns, empty-windowed, that had once protected the village’s dairy herd from the weather. The Soviet Union had created a collective farm up here, despite the near-impossibility of carving food out of this poor soil in the three months of summer. It gave employment to the locals until the early 1990s, but could not survive the transition to a market economy.

The people who laid the bricks for the barns and houses must have thought they were creating something permanent, that they were taming nature. An electricity substation, built for the collective farm, had ‘1977’ set into its side in lighter-coloured bricks. You only put a date on the side of a building if you intend it to outlive you and speak to future generations. Perhaps the man who laid those bricks imagined children in a hundred years mouthing the numbers and being amazed by how old it was.

If he did, he will not be getting his wish. The bricks were rotting, and the mortar had fallen out. No wires led to it, and the roof was slipping off. Before long it would be another lump in the fields like the old camp morgue which Merzlikin led us past.

We walked through the village’s own cemetery with fresh graves and plastic flowers, down a slope and up into the trees. And here, the mosquitoes came in their thousands. The hum around my veil became a scream as we passed into the prisoners’ graveyard. Row after row of little metal signs, and occasionally a cross, marked the graves. Some of the humps had personal monuments erected since 1991 by relatives: Ukrainian names, mostly, and Lithuanians too.

But most graves had nothing to identify them. These were Russians, and their nation did not have the desire of the Ukrainians and Lithuanians to remember the victims of the Soviet Union as martyrs.

The records noting who is buried where are not perfect. Often people seeking to reinter a body find it does not belong to the person they’re looking for. A Lithuanian general – Jonas Juodišius – is buried here somewhere, having been imprisoned for being a Lithuanian general. When Lithuanians came to try to repatriate his remains, they could not find him, so they left him be and erected the monument on this foreign soil instead.

Hryhorii Lakota, a bishop from the Ukrainian Uniate Church, which is Orthodox by ritual but acknowledges the pope, was buried here too. His crime was his refusal to accept Russian Orthodoxy. He has been canonized, and his body moved to Kiev.

Moss and horsetails grew among the graves, and I traced the rows of humps, reading the few names that had been picked out for separate commemoration, while trying not to overlook the 99 per cent that had not. Here was Punin, Akhmatova’s lover and the man who did not share Karsavin’s warm feelings towards mosquitoes. And here was Karsavin too. Tanya stood by his grave, planning her memorial.

‘It is like a debt to my father and mother,’ she said. She had come a long way to repay it, and would be back next year to see it done.

We sat in the schoolroom and drank a bottle of vodka that Nikolai Andreyevich had brought. Then we ate our lunches. I was secretly pleased when Tanya asked for one of my sandwiches.

The year before, Merzlikin said, workmen had come to repair the school, which is an important building since children from remote villages have to live here as well as study. They had done a very poor job. He pointed to damp stains which had started in the corner of the room and now spread across much of the ceiling.

‘It was not like this before,’ he paused, for emphasis. ‘Before they repaired the roof. This building won’t last long now unless they come back and do it properly.’

I think we were all rather affected by our experience in the cemetery, though we had spent only an hour or so among the hundreds of graves, because Tanya and I got into a pointless squabble over whether British people or Russian people were more cultured. Perversely, we were each arguing the merits of the other’s nation. Merzlikin hovered around us, his kind eyes concerned by this inexplicable disagreement.

The vodka drunk, the sandwiches eaten, we walked back to catch our evening train. Nikolai Andreyevich continued his lecture on the journey back, and Tanya and I let it wash over us, tired out by the day. Despite my mosquito armour, I had rings of bites around both ankles, where they had found the weakness of the single layer of sock. I fingered them, trying to relieve the itching without scratching. There were nineteen bites on my left ankle, and seven on my right. My scalp felt like a moonscape beneath my hair. They had bitten through the cloth of my hat so many times I could not distinguish the individual bites. I was feeling unsteady.

‘You have the mosquito fever,’ said Nikolai Andreyevich. ‘It will pass.’

I had been in Abez for seven hours, and half of those had been inside, and I had mosquito fever and felt unsettled. Prisoners stayed up here for years.

Our carriage was hitched to the Moscow train, and I wanted to go and find my bunk and lie down and sleep, but I felt bound by politeness to sit on this hard seat for the two hours to Inta and listen to Nikolai Andreyevich.

‘There, that was a camp,’ he said, ‘there were 30,000 people living there.’ He pointed through the grimy window at an unremarkable stretch of tundra.

‘Up there was an aerodrome.’ He pointed to a slight rise above the track. ‘See see see see see the embankment. Now you will see a bridge.’ Pause. ‘There was another bridge there before.’

At last, at Inta, they left me to continue my journey alone, and I picked my way down the train to my bunk.

4 The generation of change

Back in Moscow, I recognized Alexander Ogorodnikov as soon as I saw him, although I had previously no idea what he looked like. The man walking towards me – tall, slim, bearded, rimless glasses – looked like a filmmaker, a ladies’ man or a Soviet dissident, and Ogorodnikov had been all three.

Mutual friends recommended Ogorodnikov to me as a man who could tell me about Moscow in the years after Father Dmitry had been released from prison, the years after Stalin’s death. I wanted to know how religious believers had been treated, and how they had behaved towards each other. We shook hands and he ushered me out of the cool of the station into the flaying heat of Moscow. If anything the city was even hotter now I was back from Abez. The tar melted like chocolate and the air throbbed on streets designed for parades not shade.

We stopped off in a supermarket, where he chose herring, biscuits, tea and bread before walking me to his home: a flat near the top of a nine-storey block. His kitchen window commanded a view of other nine-storey blocks and, in the distance, a factory chimney with four horizontal stripes.

He was curious to know why I wanted to talk to him and, when I told him, he said he too was planning a book about the 1960s and 1970s. For almost all Russians who remember the Soviet Union, those decades now glow like a golden age. Most people remember them for their stability, for holidays, jobs and even a degree of access to consumer goods. For the likes of Ogorodnikov, the memories are different: those were the heyday of Soviet dissent.

All over the world, the generation that grew up after World War Two proved rebellious and iconoclastic. The Soviet Union may not have seen the kind of protests witnessed in Paris, Prague or Chicago, but young people still tried to change the world in their own way. Poets, writers and historians like Solzhenitsyn circulated their work in illicit copies. When they were arrested, their friends publicized their trials and imprisonment with fresh home-printed pamphlets.

Older dissidents like Andrei Sakharov – a nuclear physicist whose anger at unnecessary Soviet bomb tests morphed into concern about the denial of rights to Soviet citizens – acted as a focus for younger men and women. They made contact with Western journalists and diplomats who helped them smuggle their writings out of the country. Everything they did ran counter to the direction desired by their government.

Some of their actions were deliberately high profile, such as a protest on Red Square by eight people against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They knew almost all their fellow citizens would criticize them, in the same way their fellow citizens criticized the Czechs for not being grateful for the Soviet army’s help in defeating the Nazis. One participant recorded how a pleasant-looking blonde woman saw their protest and joined in the chorus of ‘scum’ directed towards them.

‘People like you should be stamped out. Together with your children, so they don’t grow up as morons,’ the woman said.

But the protesters did not care. They wanted to show that not everyone in their country believed in force being used to defeat the popular uprising of the Prague Spring.

‘We had already crossed over to the other side. Freedom was the dearest thing on earth to us,’ a participant said, according to a book prepared later by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, one of her comrades.

Other dissidents favoured smaller actions: reading poems, collecting information on Stalin’s victims, studying their nation’s ancient traditions. Their discretion made little difference to the government, however, which saw them all as dangerous and used the police, the KGB, prosecutors and even psychiatrists against them.

The men who governed the country had all risen to the top under Stalin, when thousands of top officials were dragged off and shot as spies on the flimsiest of evidence. They found themselves in senior positions after the last major purges took place in 1937–8 and knew instinctively that innovation and free thought were dangerous. After all, everyone who had thought freely in the 1930s had been killed. Stability was the new spirit of the times. The rapid and bewildering changes of the 1930s and 1940s were over: the war was won, and the great new industrial cities were built.

After Stalin died in 1953, most of the gulag camps were closed. Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev felt able to condemn his methods, and tried to introduce a more humane form of communism, sacking incompetent and corrupt officials, altering the system, chivvying people along rather than murdering them.

In 1956, he gave what was called the Secret Speech, though its contents were known across the country and beyond in weeks. In it, he criticized Stalin’s cult of personality and the great purges of 1937 and 1938. He did not admit to all the regime’s crimes – perhaps because he was implicated in most of them – but it was still the first admission that the Soviet Union had done anything wrong, and it jolted communists all over the country.

Some 98 of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected at the 1934 party congress had been arrested and shot, he said. And 1,108 of 1,966 delegates at that congress had been arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes.

‘Many thousands of honest and innocent communists died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such “cases”, as a result of the fact that all kind of slanderous “confessions” were accepted, and as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others,’ Khrushchev said, even singling out individual judges for censure. ‘He is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and morally completely degenerate. And it was this man who decided the fate of prominent party workers,’ he said of one.

He urged ordinary communists and other Soviet citizens to believe that the party was now back on the right track, but the shock of finding out even a partial truth about what had happened caused many people to see the country with fresh eyes.

Leonid Plyushch, for example, was a member of a unit of the Young Communist League, targeting crime and prostitution. He was rocked by the Secret Speech, almost as much as he was when the head of his unit raped a prostitute.

‘I was a very active member of the Komsomol and a communist by conviction, but when I learned of the exposure of Stalin’s crimes it had a tremendous impact… I felt the ground had moved from under me, and then the idea: it should never happen again – which stayed with me for many years.’

Khrushchev attempted to allow such disoriented citizens to speak out, and even permitted the reality of the gulag to appear in print. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel of an ordinary peasant in the camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in November 1962. Khrushchev was mercurial, but this was concrete proof that he intended to open discussions on previously forbidden themes.

But all of this alienated the senior bureaucrats. They too had been implicated in Stalin’s crimes and felt Khrushchev was going too far. Besides, they disliked the prospect of being sacked and no longer feared rebelling if they would not be killed for it. Khrushchev had promised communism would be built, more or less, by 1980. But then he was forced out in 1964, and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who promised stability. Under Brezhnev, change stopped altogether. Communism was postponed and replaced by the concept of ‘developed socialism’. The state would not wither away, as Marx had predicted it would, for many many years. The party was needed to guide the revolution for the foreseeable future, which meant everyone got to keep their jobs. The class of 1937 dug in on the summit of the state. It would rule the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev. Young people were frustrated that their paths to promotion were blocked by increasingly old men.

Ogorodnikov was eager to start down the track of his life story but kept being derailed by the glorious confusion of his kitchen. His wife was trying to spoon soup into Andrei, their three-year-old, who had a mass of hair, no trousers and lots to say.

Then an Uzbek man arrived to discuss the reception centre for homeless men he and Ogorodnikov had set up. After a couple of minutes of that, we switched to police corruption. We all had anecdotes to tell, but the Uzbek beat us flat with a story about being randomly detained in Astrakhan and forced to work in the police chief’s garden for three days until his non-existent debt to society was deemed paid.

Lunch was soup and bread, and Ogorodnikov recited a long grace. He and the Uzbek then vanished to talk business, and I made faces at Andrei whenever he peeked around the corner of the corridor.

At last I had Ogorodnikov to myself: his wife went out, the Uzbek left, and Andrei lay down for a nap. I studied Ogorodnikov while he made more tea. He had the long hair and beard of an Orthodox priest but none of their over-ripe sleekness. He was born in 1950. He looked burned by the sun, and hardened by it.

‘My generation was the generation of the change. You understand,’ he started.

Growing up in the 1960s, the post-war children, he and his friends were part of the global wave of protest. Like their counterparts around the world, they were living in unprecedented prosperity and peace. Obviously, their wealth did not compare to that of contemporaries in North America or Western Europe. There was no mass ownership of cars for Soviet citizens, no transistor radios or cheap fashion. But they were still considerably more prosperous than their parents or grandparents had been. The generation before them had suffered the privations caused by World War Two. The generation before that had struggled through collectivization. Ogorodnikov and his friends had food and clothes, and could be proud of their country’s achievements: sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, the hydrogen bomb.

Ogorodnikov grew up in Chistopol, a little railway town on the edge of Siberia, and was not immediately a dissident. Indeed, as a child, he had no cause to complain about his life at all. He was far away from the rarefied world of Moscow intellectuals, and was a pure product of the Soviet system. If the country had a future it was in people like him: bright and committed. It took him a long time to rebel.

‘We were all raised in Soviet ideology,’ Ogorodnikov went on. ‘I was completely devoted to the Soviet idea and Marxism. For me, I had the ideals of communism. To understand how deep this went into me, when I was sixteen a girl wrote me a note, a love letter, in which she chided me, telling me that Pavka Korchagin would not have behaved the way I had done. And for her it was a real example of how to live.’

Korchagin was the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s socialist realist novel How the Steel was Forged, which presented a glorious narrative of the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. Young Russians were inspired by his example to dream of building the new world order just as Westerners of the same generation were dreaming of running away and heading for the horizon like Jack Kerouac. Members of the Young Communist League signed up in their thousands to work on massive construction projects like the Baikal–Amur railway line. Many young Russians at the time would have jumped at the kind of offer Ogorodnikov received when he was eighteen: to hold a senior post in a Young Communist detachment helping build a new truck factory on a tributary of the Volga at Naberezhnye Chelny.

Through mass education, which reduced illiteracy from near universal to almost non-existent, the Soviet Union succeeded in inspiring its youth to great feats of effort. Stalin called writers the ‘engineers of the human soul’, and he was right. Books like Ostrovsky’s created a loyal army for the state, and Ogorodnikov at the time was completely unaware of how cleverly he had been indoctrinated by heroes such as Pavka Korchagin.

‘For me he was a serious realistic life model, you understand. She was condemning me by saying that I was not behaving like a revolutionary hero. This was my girlfriend, in a love letter.’

Ogorodnikov was bright, driven by the desire to improve his country and rescue it from its enemies. He joined the Pioneers – where children paraded in red neckerchiefs and boasted of being ‘Always Ready’ just like Boy Scouts in the West were told to ‘Be Prepared’ – and then the Young Communist League. But that was not enough for him and, aged fifteen, he and his friends formed the Young Communists’ Militant Wing. They wanted to clean up their rough railway town, where too many people drank and fought and swindled, far from Moscow’s watchful eye.

‘We fought with non-socialist remnants, with non-Soviet ways of life,’ he said, mocking the Soviet jargon. ‘There were these fops, these dandies, and we had a lot of authority. But don’t laugh; this was very serious. Two of my comrades were killed by bandits. They tried to kill me too. We risked our lives.’

On 15 November 1968, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the daily newspaper for Soviet youth, with millions of copies printed daily, devoted the centre of its front page to one of those deaths. Sasha Votyakov, the paper wrote, had remonstrated with two ‘boorish, arrogant, and drunken’ men who refused to buy bus tickets. They followed him off the bus and killed him.

‘Imagine what Komsomolskaya Pravda was, there were 60 million copies printed every day across the whole country, the youth paper. And imagine, there was an article about me on the first page with the headline “Valour Patrol”.’

He might be from a small and remote town, but this was enough to qualify him as a high-flyer. In the late 1960s, he was already living the communist dream, creating his own legend. He was defending the revolution. Once he beat up a friend who had had sex with a female classmate in the Pioneers’ room. They were welcome to have sex of course, that was their business, but they should never have used the Pioneers’ banner as a sheet. They had fucked on the flag, and needed to be taught a lesson.

Another time, some locals were out in the middle of town in winter. It was cold and they were warming their feet on the eternal flame, which burned to commemorate those who had died defending the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikov was not having that. ‘So I go up to this group of people, and they think I’m joking, and they laugh. And I then, I knock one of them so badly that I put him on his knees and make him promise that he will never come to this eternal flame again, or use bad language or anything.’

Ogorodnikov was enjoying his tale, and the effect it was having on me. I had come to meet a religious dissident and was listening to a fervent communist. His flow was broken, however, when Andrei, still not wearing any trousers, trotted into the kitchen, presented me with a toy pirate, hesitated and trotted out again. Ogorodnikov laughed, and promised to hurry his tale along.

He had been unusually committed, he said, but he insisted that he had not been totally abnormal. Cynicism had not yet set in by the late 1960s, and everyone he knew believed in communism. In that, they were not alone. Even the dissidents were communists. They might have disagreed with their government’s tactics, but that did not mean they objected to its goal of establishing a society where everyone lived equally.

‘I regard communism as the only goal that can be put forward by the modern mind; the West has been unable to put forward anything like it,’ said dissident Andrei Sinyavsky at his trial in 1966. The government was about to jail him simply because he had written something it did not like, but he still supported its ideology.

There is purity and naivety in this kind of dissidence. Soviet officials saw CIA plots and foreign intervention in the dissident movement, but most of these young people were simply idealists who wanted everything to be better for everyone, not only for themselves. If people like Sinyavsky criticized the authorities, or people like Ogorodnikov beat up cold people for warming their feet, they did so honestly, because they wanted to improve the system, not for money or advancement. It is a crucial distinction. They saw problems and they tried to correct them, and they met their friends and debated how best to do so. It did not occur to them that the state did not want their help, and they had to be forcibly shown the error in their doctrine.

By the time Ogorodnikov went to university, a lot of officials were no doubt thinking it was time he learned to shut up. For the Soviet hierarchs, the revolution had been won. That meant Ogorodnikov was a revolutionary without a revolution, and that is a dangerous breed. The government had no need for such as him. It needed passive, non-complaining workers to run the machine that supported the top officials.

‘Life was cynical. The leaders understood it was all a lie; it was money and a career. Public service was for their good, not for the good of society. The holiday homes of the Young Communist League had already become brothels, you understand,’ said Ogorodnikov.

He lasted two months studying philosophy at the university in Sverdlovsk before being expelled. It was a disillusioning experience. He had got to university to find that the Young Communist League was dominated not by tireless strivers such as himself, but by mini-politicians, people using the system to climb the ladder of party and state, people who wanted wealth and power.

Bureaucrats, secure in control of their empires, began to divide up the system, to morph into mafia groups. Organized crime spread, and disillusionment with it. Ogorodnikov was out of step with the times. He was not the man to work patiently at politics behind closed doors, to swap favours and to pay bribes. He needed crowds and applause and action. He had created a discussion club at university, where they read poems by authors who were already dissidents, or who had never been rehabilitated. That was unacceptable, even for a rising star such as himself, and he was thrown out of the Young Communists as well as out of university. He was back in Chistopol, with the KGB watching him. They found unofficial literature during a search of his house, and opened a criminal case. It was looking grim.

He still wanted to go to university, however. Theoretically this should have been impossible, but there were chinks in the Soviet system’s armour if you knew where to stab. It was slow and lumbering, whereas he was quick and decisive. He worked out a plan to outwit the authorities. He wanted to get into university in Siberia, which was probably far enough away for the security services to lose track of him. In order to be sure, however, he decided to distract their attention. He went to Moscow first, where he made as much noise as he could.

Playing for the highest stakes, he applied to VGIK, the Soviet Union’s film school and one of its most prestigious centres of higher education. He knew he would be refused entry. He just wanted to distract the KGB from his real plan. Bizarrely, and in testament both to his charm and to the KGB’s incompetence, he got in.

‘It was a miracle,’ he said simply, describing how he was one of the lucky people picked out of the hundreds of applicants. And his life became something wonderful. Expulsion from Sverdlovsk had been a blessing. He was a handsome student at one of the country’s top universities. He had a generous stipend. Women wanted him, and their mothers encouraged them. He had so much money that he could fly off to a Black Sea resort for a break, fly home for an exam, then fly off on holiday again.

‘I had a mass of girlfriends. VGIK was like a key to every door. In the Soviet Union, cinema was everything, and when you said you were at VGIK, and had good clothes, and so on, well, mothers really wanted you to marry their daughters. In hotels where there were no rooms, they would find a room for you, and so on. When there were no plane tickets, they found them for me.’

He no longer believed in the communist ideals of his teenage years. Who would after seeing the corruption, inefficiency and cynicism he had encountered? But who cared? He was young, rich and clever, living it up in the capital of a superpower.

These trainee Soviet aristocrats needed to learn how to produce high-quality films that would satisfy the ideological requirements of the old men at the top of the party. They also needed to know what the Soviet Union was up against, propaganda-wise. That meant they had special viewing rooms for Western films that the general public never saw.

One day in spring 1973, they sat down to a treat: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, a version of the Bible story by a gay communist Italian, and a modern classic. It is a stunning production, full of genuine landscape, and broken faces. Pasolini’s Christ, played by a Spanish student, is a pretty boy, a gentle revolutionary, railing against hypocrisy, begging for a return to spiritual values and honesty.

The music alone must have been a revelation. Ogorodnikov would have already known the Prokofiev, Mozart and Bach. But Odetta’s ‘Motherless Child’ cuts the soul like a saw, while Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar mends the wounds. ‘Gloria’ by a Congolese choir adds drama to the scenes of rapture. The screening was supposed to warn Ogorodnikov, to demonstrate the West’s propaganda techniques and show him how to counter them. Instead, it converted him.

Christ, as presented by Pasolini, is a young dissident, with pure revolutionary yearnings, no matter how hard the cynics around him tried to burn them out. It is hardly surprising it inspired the young man who watched it. It was a blueprint for action, and the parallels between the Holy Land and the Soviet Union were there for all to see. The Pharisees were the communists, claiming to be motivated by higher values but really stuffing their pockets. They even had the ridiculous hats.

Watching the film, Ogorodnikov decided that he too could be a man who overturned the tables of the moneylenders, who held up to them a mirror showing what a true believer looked like. He came out of the cinema a committed Christian, and his life began.

‘But I was in a vacuum. I was outside the Church, I did not know what the Church was, I had no knowledge. What does it mean to be a Christian? How do I live in this totalitarian society, which is pressing on our freedoms, on our spirits?’

He smiled at the memory.

‘We were the first swallows of a new spring. Before us the Church was all old people, old people, and we were the first swallows. One time, I went into a church in one of the provinces, and the old women tried to force me out of the church. “We won’t let you close the church, we won’t allow you, we won’t let you,” they said. In the understanding of these old women, a young man could go into a church with only one aim, to smash things up, to close the church. It was only when I went up at the end of the liturgy to receive communion that the old women understood. All the church was crying, they were crying. I was a new generation, you understand?’

The trouble was that he did not know how. Books on Christianity were hard to find. Khrushchev, in one of his spasmodic attempts to keep communism alive and fresh after he had denounced Stalin, closed more than half the churches in the country. Those that operated were largely a formality, where old women attended sterile services rushed through by ignorant priests.

The Orthodox hierarchy was completely subordinate to the state. Priests were answerable to local committees controlled by atheists. Bishops made no efforts to rein in the government’s anti-religious campaign. In fact, they defended it if ever challenged by foreigners.

One such bishop, Metropolitan Yuvenali, during a visit to Britain in 1975, used an interview with the BBC to attack ‘some circles in England’ who present ‘a biased and one-sided picture of Russian Orthodox Church life’. There was a ‘spiritual revival’, he insisted.

If there was such a revival, it was no thanks to Yuvenali and his fellows. The Church printed almost no official literature on the faith. Believers received no support from the Church hierarchy, were forced to discuss religion in their own homes, and were on their own when it came to finding texts and puzzling out their meanings.

This is alien to Orthodox tradition, which stresses hierarchy and the importance of priests in administering the sacraments. If these new young believers were to be truly Orthodox, they needed churches to attend, but where could they find one that sated their energy, their intelligence and their questing spiritual hunger?

That was when Ogorodnikov heard about a church on the edge of Moscow, in an old cemetery, where an unusual priest was actually preaching to parishioners. Russia’s Orthodox Church never had much of a tradition of preaching, even in pre-revolutionary times, but there were always itinerant preachers, holy fools who rejected the world and travelled from town to town, enlightening crowds at markets and crossroads. The priest was cast from that same rebellious, truth-telling mould.

He was Father Dmitry.

‘In his services, in these talks, it was like being alive,’ Ogorodnikov said, the wonder still audible in his voice. ‘The Church had lost so much, there were so many martyrs, but it was quiet about it. Sermons were censored and had to be as abstract as possible. Priests had to talk in an incomprehensible language in the sermons. It was like they were not addressing the people, but something they could not see. If the words entered into your soul, so you heard the meaning, so you felt Christ in your heart, then the priest would be banned, he would be sacked, and you know he would not be able to find work, feed his wife. It was a dangerous situation.’

Although Father Dmitry had been in the camps, he was rehabilitated in 1956 and his criminal record erased. That meant he was free to finish his religious training and get a job as a priest. His original church at Transfiguration Square was blown up, but he got a job in another one less than a kilometre away and there he administered to his parishioners as best he could. People of all ages, he said later, kept coming to him with questions about depression, about alcoholism, about abortion and violence.

One night, he had the radical idea of treating the questions he kept being asked not individually but collectively. Many of them were on the same themes, after all. If he could gather the afflicted people together, not only would they hear his words of comfort, but also they would feel support from each other.

On 8 December 1973, he encouraged the attendees of his regular Saturday service to write down questions – ‘about what you’d most like us to talk about, about the questions you have, about your doubts, about the things that puzzle you’ – that they would like him to answer. The questions covered every topic he had hoped for: from the practical (‘Where can I find a Bible?’) to the theological (‘They’ve flown in spaceships but didn’t see God. Where is God?’), and, increasingly, to the personal too (‘Father, I’m a drunk. My family is gone, my life is shot, and yet I can’t stop drinking… What should I do?’).

Ogorodnikov was astonished.

‘This was completely unexpected, and when Father Dmitry answered our questions publicly, it was like a mouthful of water, it was so unusual, you had a sense that it was not true, it was hard to believe that in Moscow there was suddenly a place you could freely speak out. And the most important thing is that the public came to these talks, and these were people you never saw in church, serious intellectuals, and not just intellectuals. There were a lot of Western correspondents – you could tell them by their clothing. Everyone else wore black and grey, so you could tell them immediately.’

The day after our conversation I went out to see the church he had been talking about. From the sun-blasted tarmac of Transfiguration Square, site of Father Dmitry’s first church (the one that was blown up during Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign), I walked past the Mossovet cinema, along the tram tracks, and there it was, through a fine gateway. Before entering, I wandered into the attached cemetery, mainly to enjoy the shade under the trees. Although still early, the heat was building again.

From the graveyard, I walked to the church, a fine pink building, with a green roof. A plaque told visitors it had been built in 1790 and was protected by the state. Inside was cool relief from the dry furnace of the street. Old women wore headscarves tightly knotted under their jowls. Young women’s heads were covered more artfully, their scarves showing the contours of their hair.

The sanctuary, and the icon-covered screen that protected it, was off in the left-hand corner of a wide, shallow room. It was an awkward arrangement, reflecting the fact that the church had been cut in half to allow Old Believers – members of an ancient Orthodox sect – to share it with the official Orthodox. I had in fact initially entered the Old Believer side of the building, and been faced with a young man in peasant garb crossing himself and bowing to the altar repeatedly. I waited for him to stop so I could ask him if I was in the right place, but he kept going for two or three minutes, so I left and found someone else.

From Father Dmitry’s first days as a priest, he kept notebooks, little accounts of meetings. He mentioned no names, just described a woman, or an old woman, or a child, or a man, in encounters that provide unique flashes of insight into private life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Official literature was still full of Soviet advances in healthcare and the extensive provision of leisure facilities. Father Dmitry’s notebooks tell a different story: despair. Stalin’s re-engineering had failed to make the Russian soul happier. Instead it was sick. Father Dmitry’s notebooks record the squalid crimes they committed and the procession of horrors that filled horrible lives.

‘An old woman came to confession. She did not give her child the breast. He died. She had two abortions,’ said one entry.

In another he told a drunkard not to drink.

‘When you drink, you forget a little,’ the drunkard replied. ‘I don’t see the point of not drinking.’

Father Dmitry had been preaching for more than a decade when, in the early 1970s, his sermons began to gain more attention and the likes of Ogorodnikov began to attend. He was part of a small group of believers – Gleb Yakunin, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov and Alexander Men were the others – who wanted to revitalize the faith, to make it relevant to modern people and to reach out to the casualties of the Soviet experiment. They had a lot of work to do.

Before the 1917 revolution, the Orthodox faith was so conservative and ignorant that it was largely confined to the illiterate. Most educated Russians had abandoned the Church for Marxism and materialism. Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, the trend was reversed. It was Marxism that was sterile and corrupt. One atheist wrote, after attending Father Dmitry’s church, ‘the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ’s teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast. It stresses the value of the individual, of humaneness, forgiveness, gentleness, love.’

Marxism was now the official ideology and it became the target of the same kind of revulsion that had once been aimed at the Church. Father Dmitry compared the death and horror he saw and heard about every day to a war, but a war with no clear enemy.

‘There are other difficulties, perhaps as great as times of war,’ he said in one sermon recorded in 1972, ‘pervasive sin, when vice, like rust or vermin, is corrupting our values and morally crippling the rising generation, when moral standards are disintegrating, when drunkenness, hooliganism and murder are increasing.’

Khrushchev had briefly spoken out about Stalin’s crimes. His was only a partial account – he did not mention his own role, for example – but even that vanished when he fell from power. Under Brezhnev, the victims of the KGB were expected to keep their mouths shut. For Father Dmitry, that meant their wounds would fester. He believed in openness, and in talking about what no one else mentioned: his own eight and a half years in the camps, the KGB agents standing among the parishioners while he addressed them, or the police trying to block access to his services.

‘What a mob of them there was, in and out of uniform, and all gathered just to prevent people from entering the church,’ he said in his third question-and-answer session. This was heady stuff. No one else acknowledged publicly the way police officers abused their powers to harass ordinary Russians. ‘As a priest, I must defend the faithful when they undergo persecutions of any sort. I, the shepherd, must defend my sheep from the wolves. As long as the atheists act like wolves, I’ll come out against them.’

He stressed hope, and the impossibility of living without it. Why stay sober if tomorrow will be no better than today? Why have children if the future they live in will be as miserable as the present we have now? The important thing was to believe that tomorrow could be better. As he answered one alcoholic who wrote him a question: ‘I ask all of you in church right now to pray for such unfortunate people. Surround them with your attention and warmth. Remember that saving such a person is the greatest of deeds.’

He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing, to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings. This was unspoken of course. No official came out and said the communist state survived only because of suspicion, distrust and slander, but it was true. The greatest enemy of the state was its own people. If they began to trust each other, it could not command their fear and obedience.

The misery that Father Dmitry heard in confession was the symptom of the state’s policy. No one trusted anyone, and that is a parlous way to live. People were living in solitary confinement in the middle of crowds, and it was killing them. Father Dmitry set out to break down the walls and tear the bars from the windows.

He launched his mass discussions in December 1973, and by the beginning of January all of Moscow seemed to know about them. Thanks to their fame, we have several different accounts. One dissident wrote, ‘People spoke about them who were very far from the Church: professors and writers, believers in the transmigration of souls, and the same number of people who believed in nothing; followers of yogic philosophy and the same number of people who followed nothing. And most importantly, young people: kind Russian boys, wonderful Russian girls, fervent Jewish youths with fire in their eyes, excellent, determined and tough Jewish girls, Baptists and Zen Buddhists, Anthroposophists and Marxists.’

Ogorodnikov had told me how old women had feared him when he first entered their church, and that generation clash was the first topic tabled for discussion in that first discussion. Perhaps it was Ogorodnikov himself who asked about it. Perhaps it was an experience shared by many of the swallows of this new religious spring. The discussions were written down, typed up and passed around from hand to hand. They were hugely popular, and they confirmed Father Dmitry as the star of the religious dissidents. In one account, he is hailed as ‘the bravest and one of the best men I have ever seen’. The worshippers marvelled that he should have the courage to speak up fortnight after fortnight, apparently with no fear of the consequences that surely awaited him.

‘Why does he do it? I can’t understand how he continues,’ a friend of one chronicler remarked. ‘He is quite difference from Solzhenitsyn. I have spoken to them both, Solzhenitsyn simply was afraid of nothing and nobody, but this man is afraid, all the time. Yet he carries on.’

Soon enough the records of Father Dmitry’s sermons slipped under the Iron Curtain and into the West. Emigré publishers printed them, bound them and sent them back by their secret couriers. That helped cement Father Dmitry’s position, especially when his name began to feature on the BBC and the Voice of America, the radio stations that dissidents listened to in private and called simply ‘the Voices’.

The format Father Dmitry created was simple and brave. Again and again, he was asked to help a parishioner trapped in a pit of despair: ‘I get drunk till I pass out – so I can forget. But once I sober up, the depression will be back, only stronger.’ These people had been suffering alone, unable to understand why they were so miserable, unable to talk about it, and suddenly they learned that everyone else felt the same way. ‘I was a wasted individual. Alcohol had destroyed me. There was no light, no joy, no rest. My soul was destroyed.’

In his answers Father Dmitry repeatedly appealed for his hearers to trust each other. The authorities, he said, were splitting the molecules and compounds of society, trying to create moral, domestic and social atoms. Many of his listeners were clearly alarmed by what sounded like a political campaign.

‘What are you doing? These interviews are propaganda and agitation, and they’re forbidden. They can get you for that,’ said one question he read out. It gave him the opportunity to express his belief that their faith in God and each other could defeat alcoholism and despair, and to voice his defiance of anyone who tried to stop him.

‘Atheism has corrupted people. Drunkenness, debauchery and the breakdown of the family have all appeared. There are many traitors betraying each other and our country. Atheism can’t hold this back. Faith is what’s needed… If this is so, then I must preach. If they forbid me to preach from the pulpit, I’ll speak from outside the pulpit. If they throw me in jail, I’ll preach even there. Preaching’s my main job.’

Although he thought the Christian God was the answer to the crisis they were living through, he also argued that his lessons applied equally to non-Orthodox believers and he appealed to them too.

‘A kind of unwritten brotherhood is forming. Believers and non-believers are coming, Orthodox and non-Orthodox – Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians,’ he said. And he reached out across that great divide within Russian society that had provoked so much violence for so long. He talked to the Jews. It was an ambitious attempt to heal all of society, regardless of who was in it.

By the 1970s, Jewish activists were campaigning for emigration to Israel. The Soviet government, however, did not wish for many of Russia’s best-trained specialists to work in a capitalist country and denied them permission, instead sacking them from their jobs and turning them into pariahs. Many of these passionate young people found a home in Father Dmitry’s parish, feeling no contradiction between their own religion and his inclusive doctrine.

‘I have many times heard what Russians say about Jews, that they have a conspiracy, that they are perfidious and only do evil, that these are not people, but demons,’ Father Dmitry wrote. ‘And I have many times heard what Jews say about Russians, that they are brutal Black Hundred nationalists, that they are ready to kill all Jews, and are scared of them, and assign some kind of power to them… Where is this misunderstanding from? Relations between Russians and Jews have become particularly strained. O Lord, open their minds and hearts, show them that they are brothers and must love each other.’

It was intoxicating. By his fifth or sixth session, the church was packed to capacity and his followers rigged up loudspeakers in the yard outside. Hundreds of people came hours early to be sure of a place.

‘There is a choir, which sings a little flat and, at the back of the church, an open coffin containing the body of an old woman, from which comes a strong smell of spices. It is very hot, and the hat of the woman standing in front of me is made of some angora-like substance, which is constantly going up my nose. Somewhere in the church a mad woman is barking like a dog and pawing the ground. I wonder if I will be able to last out the service without fainting,’ wrote a visitor.

It sounds like a medieval church, like a sermon in England during the Civil War. The ferment and the excitement gripped the hearers as they heard spiritual ideas discussed openly for the first time in their lives. Father Dmitry criticized the police, begged people not to drink, feud or lie, and all the time called on his parishioners to unite among themselves and trust each other.

‘As the communists use the slogan “Workers of the world, unite”, we must say “Believers of the world, unite”. We must create the Kingdom of God here on earth,’ he said. ‘If you do not defend others, then you are not defending yourself, and you are leaving the field open for attack.’

It could not last. There was no way the authorities would allow this defiance to continue in their capital city. Dissidents could just about meet in flats around Moscow to whisper their heresy, but this was too much. To gather every fortnight and hear instructions to reject communist authority was close to sedition.

The authorities were in a tricky position, however. They feared criticism from the West, and could not arrest a priest for preaching the gospel, because that was his job and he was doing it in a church. Father Dmitry’s appeals were rousing: ‘I’m looking at all of you here. If we were all armed to do God’s work, nothing would be impossible for us. So let’s all help each other. Communicate Christian knowledge to each other, support each other in misfortune and temptations, and in general manifest an active love for each other.’ But they were not treasonous.

In late April, he gave the authorities the opening they needed by reading out a question that accused the patriarch of ‘grovelling before the authorities’. Even though Father Dmitry’s answer defended the patriarch as a man surrounded by enemies, this was too much.

A fortnight later, on 4 May 1974, when the faithful crammed into the church to hear his tenth fortnightly discussion, they were disappointed. The patriarch had banned him from talking to them until he had explained himself. Two weeks later he stood before them again, with his beard and his blue eyes, but without his priest’s robes, which the churchwarden refused to hand over.

He would not be silenced, however. ‘The condemned man’, he said, ‘is allowed a last word.’ He told his parishioners that the Church authorities had sent him away to a new parish in a distant village. He could keep preaching as much as he liked, but all of Moscow would not be his parish any more.

‘The atheists are using the bishops’ power to smother the Church, to dispose of those who don’t please them,’ he said, in his last words to the church of St Nicholas as its priest.

His congregation complained bitterly, sending letters to the patriarch and the bishops. They said they had found spiritual freedom in his church, that he had comforted them in a comfortless place, but to no avail.

‘I am a Jewish woman,’ wrote one worshipper. ‘Previously I thought that Orthodoxy was Jewish pogroms and chauvinism. Having heard Father Dmitry’s sermons, I understood that true Christianity and Orthodoxy preach fraternal love to all people. I understood that God is love. Father Dmitry’s words opened this path to me.’

It is clear that Father Dmitry’s message had got through to his parishioners if not to his superiors. The patriarch and the security services felt threatened by him, and had taken prompt action to ensure that his influence was contained. Ogorodnikov and his fellow worshippers would need to go to considerable inconvenience if they were to keep hearing his sermons out in the villages.

‘A whole lifetime has gone by. It was 1973, so almost forty years have passed, but it was an important, strong thing. People gathered whom you never saw in church. Not just intellectuals, but others,’ Ogorodnikov said at the end of our conversation. ‘There were discussions, and conversations, and meals. There we created an independent Christian society. It is not just that we had lunch or something, we lived the life, you understand.’

5 Reds admit ban of rebel priest

I missed my train to Kabanovo, the village where Father Dmitry was exiled when he lost his church in central Moscow. The next train would not leave for another hour, but it was already waiting at the platform so I sat in my seat and felt the carriage heat up as the sun grilled the roof. I was careful to select a place on the shady side.

Other passengers were filing in. Most of the men – like me – had bought bottles of beer, to keep them going on their journeys out to their dachas. It was too early in the day for vodka, which was a relief. Vodka needs company, but beer can be drunk alone. Beer-drinking neighbours would allow me to read Father Dmitry’s sermons in peace.

Russia has, of course, always been famous for drinking. One of the first mentions of the nation in all history – in the tenth century – features King Vladimir in Kiev rejecting Islam because ‘drinking is the joy of the Russians. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’ Books about pre-revolutionary villages describe how drinking was the major form of entertainment. If peasants had savings, they spent them on vodka. Their drinking was largely restricted by their spending power, however, so alcohol consumption became self-limiting. If peasants got rich, they got drunk, which meant they got poor, which meant they got sober.

Before 1917, duties on alcohol provided up to 40 per cent of government revenue and Lenin pledged to ban the trade, since it was blocking the nation’s path to communism. That proved hard to do, however. Like the tsarist autocracy before it, the Soviet Union struggled to provide consumer goods and found alcohol a useful way to make money from its population. By 1925, alcohol was a state monopoly, and by 1940 there were more shops selling alcohol than fruit, meat and vegetables put together.

It did not stop there. Production of spirits trebled between 1940 and 1980, and the consumption of all alcoholic drinks – including wine and beer as well as vodka and brandy – increased eightfold. Most of this growth was in the Russian heartland, rather than on the traditionally Muslim fringes of the empire where drinking was less popular. Wages were rising and living standards too, as the damage caused by the war was repaired and stability allowed economic advances. Thanks to the more humane style adopted by the government after Stalin’s death, it became almost impossible to get sacked, and Russians got paid whether they turned up to work drunk or sober. There was no longer a limit on how much people could drink, and alcoholism became epidemic.

The novelist Venedikt Yerofeyev, in his underground masterpiece of the late 1960s Moscow–Petushki, satirized the standard working week of his cable-laying gang as follows: ‘We would play brag one day, drink vermouth the next, play brag again the third day, and on the fourth back to vermouth again… Needless to say, we didn’t lay a finger on the cable drum – in fact if I’d so much as mentioned touching the drum, they’d have pissed themselves laughing.’

Conspiracy theorists speculate that the state liked a drunken population, since that made the Russians easier to control. That may be true, and it is certainly the case that the government was hooked on the revenue from drinking as much as the population was hooked on the oblivion it gave. Taxes earned from alcohol were greater than the defence budget by the early 1970s.

The trouble was, of course, that the same drinking that was financing the government was destroying the population. Alcohol was blamed for a third of car accidents, and four-fifths of deaths on the roads. Almost all sexually transmitted infections were linked to alcohol consumption.

If you look at the figures for how long Russians have been expected to live, the high point to date – just under seventy years – came in the early to mid-1960s. Life expectancy spiked upwards again in the 1980s, briefly surpassing its 1960s level, through only by a couple of months, when Mikhail Gorbachev severely restricted access to alcohol, but fell back once more when the campaign was unwound. By 1994, the average Russian was predicted to live for sixty-four years, and the average Russian man for less than fifty-eight.

In 1965, the first year for which the Russian government presents statistics, 119,170 Russians died from ‘external causes’ (car crashes, murder, suicide, poisoning, drowning), the majority of which are connected to alcohol. By 1995, that number had almost tripled. In 1965, a total of 419,752 Russians died from problems with their cardiovascular system, which are often caused by drinking and smoking. By 1995, that number had more than doubled.

National security was at risk too: ground crews apparently would siphon off the pure alcohol in fighter jets’ de-icing fluid and replace it with water, causing the planes to crash.

And look at the army, saviour of Russia on the many occasions when foreign invaders have coveted its wealth. Russia’s most sacred holiday is Victory Day. Every year, soldiers goose-step over Red Square on 9 May to mark the 1945 triumph over Adolf Hitler. Wave after wave of Red Army troops threw themselves at the German positions defending Berlin that year, clambering over the bodies of their comrades. Finally, the Germans broke and fell, allowing the Russians to wave their red flag from the Reichstag and establish the Soviet Union as a superpower.

That could not happen now. In 1990, some 1.021 million potential Russian soldiers were born. In 1999, that number had dropped to 626,000 – a fall of almost two-fifths in less than a decade. For comparison, since we were on the subject of World War Two, almost 150,000 more babies were born in Germany in 1999 than in Russia, even though there are far fewer Germans than Russians and even though Germany is itself afflicted by a shrinking population.

It is as if Russia’s army had already suffered a series of major defeats before even picking up a gun. You cannot fight a war without soldiers and, to breed more troops, you need mothers to have babies. In mid-2009, Russia had 11.7 million women in their twenties. By 2015, that number will have fallen to 6.9 million – that’s another two-fifths decline.

In the last sixteen years of communism, 36 million Russians were born and 24.6 million died. In the first sixteen years of capitalism, those figures were more or less reversed: 22.3 million Russians were born and 34.7 million died. If you plot a graph, in which the number of people alive is laid out according to their date of birth, with the youngest at the bottom and the oldest at the top, Russia looks like one of those rocky stacks in the North Atlantic, undermined by the waves until its huge overhang threatens to collapse altogether. The base of Russia’s diagram – children – is washed away, and the consequences are almost impossible to predict.

And then there is alcohol’s effect on the economy. Some estimates from the late Soviet period had a third of the workforce absent at any one time thanks to over-drinking. ‘Drunks are to be found on the shop floor more and more frequently. At some enterprises, special brigades have been formed to “grab” those who have drunk too much and stop them getting to their machines, to prevent accidents. They drink during working hours, they drink after work,’ one Soviet economist said in 1981. ‘This is the ultimate lack of respect for work, the ultimate negative attitude to it.’

Visitors to Russia remarked on the drinking, but foreigners’ travels were restricted, and few people guessed how deep rooted the problem had become. The cost to the state from drinking was estimated, by 1985, at 160 billion roubles, which was four times the revenue from alcohol, and only then did the government wake up to the problem. In Brezhnev’s time, the official response was embarrassment. State statisticians stopped listing vodka as a separate item on the yearly sales digest when its sales climbed too high. They instead lumped vodka into ‘other’ with ice cream, coffee, cocoa and spices, which instantly made ‘other’ the largest item on the list. Their inaction allowed alcoholism to become epidemic, and sufferers turned elsewhere for help, including to Father Dmitry, as evidenced by the questions he read out in his sermons.

‘I know that abortion is a sin… but I’m afraid with my drunk of a husband – what kind of child will I have? Do we allow abortions in such cases?’

The train was filling up, and vendors pushed past trying to interest us in their wares: an eggwhisk-shaped back massager, magazines, ice cream. A man sat down opposite me, then his wife. He was large and our knees touched. He had a two-litre bottle of homemade wine, opened it and downed a couple of inches. He offered it to me, but I gestured to the beer bottle tucked between me and the side of the carriage. He nodded, and left me alone.

Three more people joined us on our benches. There was no room for my bottle, and I put it on the floor. A sharp-angled metal ashtray jutted out in front of me and I could either wedge my knee against it or lay my thigh alongside it. Either way, it cut into my leg. I was uncomfortable before we had even set off, and my buttocks were numb by the time we reached the city limits.

The train rattled through parched fields. My plan to avoid the sun had failed. The train had swung round and I was in the full glare. The beer was beginning to make me nod, and the sun was battering the right-hand side of my scalp. Despite the discomfort and the crush, I fell asleep.

Every weekend Father Dmitry’s disciples took this two-hour train journey. It was a long way to come to hear a sermon, but his was the only one on offer. I awoke before Kabanovo, and alighted with a dozen or so others on to a long platform lined with a picket fence.

I walked through the village, along the dusty shoulder of a busy road. On either side were the kinds of solid brick buildings owned as weekend houses by wealthy Muscovites. Bare-chested men were watering their gardens, visible through chinks in high metal fences. A teenager at a bus stop pointed me to the right towards the church. The dust had coated my shoes light brown by the time I got there.

I had no one to meet, and no particular plan worked out for what I would do here, so I sat down on a rock in the shade and pulled out Father Dmitry’s sermons once more. This one was in the question-and-answer form that he preferred, and repeated his core message.

‘How do you relate to Jews?’ someone asked.

‘As sacred friends,’ he replied.

‘And how do you relate to Russians?’

‘As sacred friends,’ he continued.

‘And how to other ethnicities?’

‘Also as sacred friends,’ he concluded. But that did not satisfy his interrogator.

‘You have all sorts of friends. But let’s be specific. Russians say that Jews destroyed Russia, planted atheism here. Do you agree?’

‘We all destroyed Russia and implanted atheism: one person did in theory, and another in practice. We are all people before God, and you should not divide us up or blame someone for it.’

Father Dmitry would not be drawn into prejudice, into the language of blame used by the state. He preached tolerance and trust. It was his weapon against the misery and distress he saw around him. The Soviet government’s strategy for controlling its population – and one it inherited from its imperial predecessor and all other empires since the beginning of time – was divide and rule. The fact that he was asked such questions shows how divided Soviet citizens had become. Russians distrusted Jews, and vice versa. Armenians distrusted Azeris, and vice versa. Uzbeks distrusted Tajiks, and so on. Father Dmitry’s response was the opposite: unite and resist.

When I looked up from the sermon, two puppies were observing me. They barked and scurried behind a bush. When I read on, they emerged. When I stopped again, they vanished. We played the game for a while, until I became distracted by a particularly itchy mosquito bite on my index finger which had swelled my whole left hand like a rubber glove filled with water.

A light beige Lada car pulled up outside the church. It was old but well cared for. The driver gathered his belongings. He was aged around sixty, wore thick spectacles with cheap frames and a pocketed waistcoat full of screwdrivers and tools. He was carrying a bag with a pair of aluminium valves that appeared to be part of a heating unit. I asked if he was local, and he nodded.

We chatted about the village, and life there, about jobs (none), the collective farm (closed), children (few) and old people who might remember Father Dmitry.

He shook his head: ‘The people who knew him are all dead now. I was a student then so I did not know him but people still remember him, and talk about how he was investigated.’

He was going into the priest’s quarters to drop off the valves, he said, and offered to show me around. Father Dmitry’s room had been subdivided into two smaller rooms since he lived here, with the partition between them decorated with teddy-bear wallpaper. I tried to imagine Ogorodnikov and his friends eating their communal meals here and discussing their faith.

Father Dmitry might still have been under suspicion in Moscow, but he received a warm welcome from the locals. ‘When the upper hierarchy threw me and my children to the mercy of fate and attempted to make me admit my supposed slanders, when all these rumours spread around, the people helped me. They fed me and did not let me despair, and did not condemn me. When people close to the hierarchy tried to accuse me, saying I had not obeyed them, that I had broken some law, the people sympathized. Sympathy and love, that is what you need.’

I followed the handyman out of the room, and he unlocked the door into the church itself – a simple structure of brick and tin that had been rebuilt since Father Dmitry’s day – then we crossed the road to the church’s schoolroom, with its garden full of potatoes.

‘You should not leave land empty,’ the handyman said, squinting at me for approval through his lenses.

‘They appear to be doing well,’ I ventured, although in truth the plants looked spindly.

‘Ah, how are they doing well? Our soil is just sand.’

He offered me a lift to the station and I accepted with pleasure. It was not as hot as Moscow out here, but it would still be uncomfortable to walk far. He had, he said, previously lived in one of the more remote villages, but the bus service was cancelled and he had been forced to move into Kabanovo. He could not afford to run his car all the time, but liked to drive on occasion.

Back on the platform we stood for a while in silence, watching a crow, its hands behind its back, balancing along one of the rails, then jumping nimbly round and stepping back.

‘Do you think’, he asked me at last, ‘someone like me, with the experience I have, could find a job in Britain?’

I said I did not know, but before he left I asked him his name. He told me: Father Nikolai. I looked after him. He was the village priest, and I had had no idea.

Father Dmitry did not last long at Kabanovo. The local authorities had no appetite for groups of bearded Muscovites turning up and perverting the locals’ minds with dangerous talk of trust and community and the deficiencies of the state. All the same, he continued his single-minded campaign against alcohol, abortion, despair and degradation, noting down the talks as he had before.

A woman came to Father Dmitry to confess.

‘Do you have any particular sins?’

‘Yes, abortions.’

‘How many?’

‘Many.’

‘Well, how many?’

‘Thirty,’ she said, and cried.

By 1991, the average Russian woman had had 3.4 abortions over the course of her life. Stalin banned abortions but, after they were legalized in 1955, they became the dominant form of birth control. There were 8.3 million in the Soviet Union in 1965. In 1992, Russian women terminated 3.3 million pregnancies. The number has fallen since then, perhaps because the contraceptive pill is now widely available, but there are still more abortions than live births in many Russian regions, including Komi (where Father Dmitry was imprisoned) and Bryansk (where he was born), and the overall rate is four times the European average.

Other dissidents did not have Father Dmitry’s insight into the health concerns of ordinary Russians, since they did not really encounter them. Sakharov, although a brave and humane man, was still calling for Russians to have fewer children in the late 1960s to combat global over-population.

‘Mankind can develop smoothly only if it looks upon itself in a demographic sense as a unit, a single family without divisions into nations other than in matters of history and traditions. Therefore, government policy, legislation on the family and marriage, and propaganda should not encourage an increase in the birth rates of advanced countries while demanding that it be curtailed in underdeveloped countries,’ the great dissident wrote, in his typically lofty style. His calls for intellectual freedom and peaceful coexistence were very powerful, but they were also very irrelevant to the kind of people Father Dmitry was dealing with.

In 1970, Russia’s homicide rate was eight times the European average, but such numbers – with their implicit rebuke to the government – were increasingly hard to find. In 1972, Brezhnev’s government stopped publishing life-expectancy statistics. That same decade, infant mortality figures dropped out of the data too, having risen sharply from 22.9 per thousand in 1970 to 31.4 in 1976. The government instead boasted of having one of the highest proportions of doctors in the world, but hid how little effect they were having.

Healthcare spending dropped from 6 per cent of national wealth when Brezhnev took power to half of that by the mid-1980s. Over the same period, the number of cigarettes imported doubled to more than 73 billion a year: that means the Soviet Union imported a packet of cigarettes a month for every man, woman and child in the country. It made its own cigarettes too.

In December 1975, Father Dmitry was sacked once more. A letter from his bishop accused him of the ‘systematic inclusion in his discussions and sermons of political material of an anti-social character, including tendentious criticism of the life of our state’. The bishop went on to criticize him for having used the church buildings for preaching to groups of people who had gathered to hear him preach, although it might be supposed that such was a priest’s job, before attacking the Western media that had spoken out in his defence.

‘I consider it unacceptable that on some internal question in Church life, including in relation to Church discipline, which is regulated by the canons, laws and traditions of our Church, anyone at all from abroad should put pressure on us, in this case in defence of Father Dmitry, in the aim of furthering their own interests,’ he concluded.

That was a nod to the kind of conspiracy theorizing that was already consuming the KGB, who established a special Fifth Directorate in 1968 to crack down on intellectuals, students, nationalists, religious believers, Jews and anyone else suspected of serving foreign powers. Even before Father Dmitry came to Kabanovo, the KGB were trying to break dissidents through long interrogation and the planting of sympathetic agents in their cells as fake detainees. If they succeeded, the dissidents were paraded before Western journalists. Foreign reporters were showing increasing interest in the dissident story, and were beginning to write about Father Dmitry. His sacking from Kabanovo in December 1975 made the news in papers across the world.

‘Reds admit ban of rebel priest,’ said the headline in the Baltimore Sun. ‘Soviet priest draws anger of government’, read the headline on an Associated Press report picked up by other US newspapers. And he was not the only famous religious dissident. His friends Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson gained a splash of their own with a report to the World Christian Council on the persecution of believers.

In response, the Soviet authorities unleashed the heavy weapons of their propaganda arsenal. Izvestia, one of their two largest newspapers, went on the attack. In January 1976, Vladimir Kuroyedov, the government’s most senior religious official, took over almost a whole page to detail how in fact Soviet religious laws were the most ‘humane and democratic in the world’, and that anyone saying otherwise was lying to harm the country’s international prestige.

There were, he continued with sadness, a few malcontents, but religious believers themselves could be trusted to drive them out. Although, in fact, a hundred of Father Dmitry’s parishioners – at considerable risk to themselves – had signed a petition protesting against his sacking, Kuroyedov insisted they had expelled him because of his ‘sermons of an anti-social content’.

‘For this same reason his parishioners have thrown him out of two other churches,’ Kuroyedov added. That was a lie. Father Dmitry lost his first position because the church was dynamited and his second because he was sacked by the bishop – neither of them things Kuroyedov could admit without fatally undermining his own argument that believers were free and unhindered. Instead he linked Father Dmitry to the state’s enemies.

‘This “shepherd”, previously convicted of a crime, has been declared by reactionary propaganda in the West to be a “genuine fighter for the faith, suffering for Christ”,’ Kuroyedov’s article concluded with heavy Russian irony, naturally without mentioning the nature of Father Dmitry’s criminal offence – writing a poem – or his subsequent rehabilitation.

It was a warning to his parishioners and friends to shun him, to leave him alone, but they did not heed it. Father Dmitry had taught them to trust each other, and that meant defending each other too.

‘To tear a priest away from his flock is like a doctor leaving his patients, or a teacher his pupils. But these comparisons are weak. It would be nearer the truth to say it is like tearing a mother away from her children,’ said Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and prominent dissident, in a statement on Father Dmitry’s dismissal.

‘Father Dmitry’s living, free, Christian word went into the hearts of listeners and fanned their faith; it also gripped those who were seeking, those who doubted, unbelievers. Father Dmitry attracted young people – this was his main crime,’ said an appeal by Father Dmitry’s friends Yakunin and Regelson to the BBC.

Not everyone agreed with them, of course. Father Dmitry’s notebooks include a conversation with a fellow priest who told him he liked the sermon, but would have taken out ‘the sharpness’.

‘And if a sword isn’t sharp, if a sabre isn’t sharp, how do you fight? With a blunt blade? The sharpness is the point,’ replied Father Dmitry.

The priest was not so sure: ‘If we are tough, they will shut the churches. As it is we are preserving something.’

But Father Dmitry was an old campaigner, and refused to change. He said the fight to save his nation was urgent, and could not be put off for tactical reasons.

‘In the camps we used to say “You should eat today what you could eat tomorrow.” And I am doing today what I could do tomorrow, since otherwise tomorrow might not come,’ he said. ‘How many people were shot, how many were killed in the camps, how many died at the front with a meaningless scream? They died, and for what? So their children could suffer?’

6 They behaved like free men

I met Father Vladimir Sedov between the platforms of a metro station in western Moscow. Cheerful and lean in his black robes, he looked like a wolf with a sense of humour. His flat was chaotic, full of books and icons and bunk beds and living things. His cats regularly interrupted our conversation. One was bald and as friendly as a dog, one more cautious, despite its spangly collar. There was also a parrot, and several sons.

Father Vladimir is straight-backed and dignified with the bearing of a man in early middle age, but he shared his memories of Father Dmitry with the eagerness of a schoolboy rushing for lunch. He was born in Baku, but grew up in the Moscow region where his father was an engineer. He studied in the mathematics department of his university, and a distinguished career beckoned when this happened: ‘There were these rumours about an unusual priest who held question-and-answer sessions. My friends had been, and I heard about him, and I wanted to go too.’

This was in 1976, just a few months after Izvestia’s assault on Father Dmitry and his dismissal from the church in Kabanovo. It is clear from Father Dmitry’s sacking, and from the criticism of him in the national press, that the authorities considered him a significant threat by this stage. Nonetheless, in April 1976, he got a new parish. Perhaps the Church authorities calculated that he would, after having been sacked twice, not behave so unorthodoxly another time. Perhaps some individuals in the Church hierarchy secretly admired his stance. They were all believers after all, and a few bishops may deep down have been proud that one of their fellows was doing his job as they were all supposed to. Perhaps top officials were sensitive to foreign opinion, and did not want to give Westerners an opening to criticize the Soviet Union by depriving Father Dmitry of a post, no matter how irritating he was for the old men in the Kremlin.

Besides, the security organs were no doubt hoping that, after the very public warning of the Izvestia article, ordinary churchgoers would shun Father Dmitry’s services. It was well known that association with dissidents could lead to a summons, to questioning, to unemployment and, potentially, to prison. And prison was a place to be dreaded. Dissidents like Anatoly Marchenko had written prison diaries and circulated them in typewritten and carbon-copied manuscripts, so everyone knew that the Soviet jails were brutal, diseased and cruel. At one point, Marchenko, who was jailed for illegally attempting to leave the country, described seeing a fellow inmate chop off his penis and throw it out the window at a female guard. The other prisoners barely flinched, so accustomed were they to human degradation.

But, in many ways the authorities’ approach proved counterproductive. The young people coming to Father Dmitry’s church knew the risk they were running. But, for many of them, that was the point.

Father Vladimir was at that time a gangly young man, barely out of his teens, and felt stultified by the official culture dished up to Soviet citizens like prison slop on a tray. He had looked at yoga, at progressive rock, at Buddhism and at all the other bits and pieces of other people’s cultures that drifted through Moscow in those days. They did not appeal. He wanted something he could feel part of, something Russian.

He was intrigued therefore by the thought of a Russian priest who refused to walk the official path, so he took the train to Grebnevo, Father Dmitry’s new parish. As he told me about it, he turned to his computer and called up a satellite image from the internet. He zoomed us in, click after click. First we saw the whole of Russia, then Moscow appeared, before it vanished to the left of the screen as he magnified a spot to its east. The word ‘Grebnevo’ appeared and the village itself filled more of the screen until we could see the church too, in a wood on the shores of a reservoir.

‘He asked everyone who went to the church whether they were christened, and there were a lot of people who weren’t christened. But I told him I was christened, even though I wasn’t, and he blessed me. My friends knew I was lying, and told me they knew, but I insisted that I had been christened secretly,’ Father Vladimir said, smiling at the knots his younger self had tied himself into.

‘I felt ashamed of having lied to them, and to him, so when I got back to university, I went to the church near Moscow State University and I got christened. I did not know the creed or anything, so the priest was cross with me, but I insisted and my happiness was so great afterwards that I ran back to the university like I was running on air.’

At that time, getting christened was a risky step. Many priests took lists of these new-believers and shared them with the authorities. That meant being christened could hurt your employment prospects, or lead to attention from the security services. Father Dmitry, to avoid this, often christened people in his own home and deliberately did not write down their names. He later said he christened thousands of adults, sometimes a dozen a day. His rebel attitude captivated Father Vladimir.

‘It is hard to fight a totalitarian system. People who were scared, who needed support, they went to him. There were poets, artists. They had heard of this priest that you could talk freely to. A lot of people sensed what I sensed, that Father Dmitry was the most life-loving and optimistic man we ever met, and he was a man who had lived the hardest life.’

His friends were surprised by Father Vladimir’s passion. After all, they had been the believers, not him. His sudden conversion took them by surprise. He caught the train to Grebnevo the next time Father Dmitry was speaking, then the next time also. He devoured every word the priest spoke, as well as those of the older believers – Ogorodnikov was there, of course, so were his friends Yakunin and Regelson – and decided to follow the priest as a disciple: a spiritual child in the language of Russian Orthodoxy.

‘I was a student, and I had a room in the halls, but after that I mainly stayed in Grebnevo. I wanted to stop university, but Father Dmitry thought people had to try not just to swim with the current, but to make something of themselves. He thought believers should not be marginalized, but should be part of society, so I stayed at university.’

Father Dmitry already had a son and daughter, but he took his spiritual children into his home as if they were new additions to the family.

‘I helped him in his services. Before me there was another young man, but he had married so there was a free place. Father Dmitry was so open that I lived with him there and in his flat in Moscow. He slept on the bed, and I slept on a quilt on the floor,’ Father Vladimir remembered.

He glanced back at the satellite image on the screen, fiddling around with the mouse to zoom in a little bit more on the church itself. At maximum magnification, the quality of the picture was not very good. You could see a dome, with a long shadow stretching north, and woods around the church, but very few details.

‘I can remember it so clearly. It’s a shame you can’t see much in that picture.’

I asked when he last went back.

‘Oh, I haven’t been since those days,’ he said.

Well then, I asked, would he be prepared to show me the church? We could go together. He paused, looking at the screen again, thought for a while, then nodded. On Thursday, he said. He would drive me out there to save us the train journey in the heat. We would visit the scene of his conversion. It was also the scene of Father Dmitry’s final confrontation with the security services, and Father Vladimir would talk me through how it had happened.

That Thursday, therefore, I was sat in the front seat of Father Vladimir’s little white Toyota. It had right-hand drive, like a British car, because it had been imported from Japan. Such second-hand cars have taken over most of the far east of Russia and are increasingly available in Moscow too. Since they are cheaper and more reliable than many of the other cars in Russia, it is not surprising that drivers like them. For passengers, however, they are disconcerting. I was sitting in what should have been the driver’s seat. Oncoming traffic whizzed by inches from my left knee, and I felt vulnerable without a wheel to hold on to.

The Moscow ring road was, as usual, heavily congested. We crawled forward, and Father Vladimir and I discussed the Olympics, and whether the Summer Games – next hosted by Britain – or the Winter Games – next to be hosted by Russia – was more prestigious. Retail mansions and supermarkets passed by on both sides. When we finally turned off to the right, they gave way to botched-together markets for building products. When we turned off to the left, even those vanished, giving way to the glories of the Russian countryside. With the air-conditioning on, I could appreciate its beauty without having to gasp in the heat.

‘There were fewer cars back then. We used the suburban trains, or the bus,’ said Father Vladimir after a while of silence. He had clearly been reminiscing to himself about his first journeys to see Father Dmitry in Grebnevo. ‘There were fewer stray dogs too,’ he added, as we drove past two puppies and their mother, her teats swinging in time with her legs as they walked along the verge. ‘I haven’t come back here, because he was not here. Without him, there was no reason. I followed him here.’

The broad horizons of Russia opened around us: birch trees, scrubby fields, little houses with lace carvings around their windows, all painted in fine blues or greens. I left him to talk as I looked at the view.

‘The Soviet government was like a great wall, you know. It did not let good or bad develop. But since those days the weeds have grown fast, the wild capitalism has spread.’

We entered the town of Shchelkovo – five-storey apartment blocks, trade centres, generic restaurants, scattered trash – and Father Vladimir decided we should stop and see the church. Most Russian churches have onion-shaped domes made of silver metal or wooden shingles. In the grandest churches, the domes are golden or painted in bright colours, and cluster in clumps like tulips.

This church was, however, built of red brick and spired like a Protestant chapel. Father Vladimir told me that he had once known the priest here. There was some connection to Father Dmitry too that I did not catch as we passed inside. More than a hundred women were following the service, which was an impressive turnout for a Thursday, and the sweet harmonies of the choir were unusually well sung.

A young priest held out a gold cross for the worshippers to kiss. A grand screen was half obscured by scaffolding, but its ranks of gold icons – all the bearded faces looking to the middle, where two icons of Jesus and Mary gazed out at us – were arresting nonetheless. Several of the women noticed Father Vladimir and pushed over to him for a blessing, cupping their hands at waist height, casting their eyes down.

While they gathered, I watched the heat haze from the candles dance before the icons. It was mesmerizing to see the ancient faces of the saints come alive in the shimmering air. An elderly woman standing next to me asked me who I was. Raisa Ivanovna, she was called, and it turned out she had worshipped at Father Dmitry’s church in the 1970s.

‘It was amazing how young people came to his church. Normally it was just us old women. I was already old then, like I am now.’ She laughed. ‘I had always believed, but I believed more after I heard him, if you know what I mean. He was so kind. The security services questioned me. They asked me who, what, when, where, but I just told them I went to him as a kind shepherd, and that he was like a father to me. He was a man under surveillance, you know, and we were amazed by how many people came to him anyway. They did not care. What did they have to be scared of, what did we have to be scared of? We were not spies. We knew we were not spies.’

Father Vladimir had returned, and was preceded by a middle-aged woman: plump and handsome, with laughter around her eyes. She shook my hand. She was Zoya Semyonova, she told me, and had been another of Father Dmitry’s spiritual children. We would, she said, go for lunch.

We turned our backs on the service. Another few women begged a blessing from Father Vladimir on our way out of the door. We walked over the road, around the back of a nine-storey block and into the lift. She rang the bell next to a door – steel with padding over it – and we waited. She rang the bell again, until we finally heard movement. It swung open, to reveal another Zoya – Zoya’s daughter – who had clearly been asleep.

‘We have come for lunch,’ Zoya senior announced, with the authority of a mother, so Zoya junior stood aside and we all trooped into the kitchen. Zoya senior then summoned her husband, who was also a priest who had known Father Dmitry, and we sat down to drink tea.

Zoya’s husband, Father Alexander, arrived before Zoya junior had finished her preparations. He was dressed in black shirt and trousers, but not in a robe like Father Vladimir. He had the priest’s full beard, however, and a wide-nostrilled nose that made him look almost ridiculously Russian.

While Zoya junior attempted to improvise a meal for this unexpected kitchenful of guests, he launched into the story of Father Dmitry.

Father Alexander, it transpired, had been the young man who preceded Father Vladimir as the altar boy. In fact, it was his marriage to Zoya senior that opened up the spot that Father Vladimir then filled. He had, like Ogorodnikov, experienced those first sermons in the cemetery church in Moscow, when it seemed the whole city was packed into the courtyard to be intoxicated by free speech. He was just twenty-three then and worked as a conductor on the railways, a job that gave him a lot of spare time to dedicate to the faith.

‘He christened people at home in those days because the KGB were following him. He had a domestic chapel where he held little services. My brother had been christened as a child, but I had not. My parents were scared of the KGB; my mother had been in a German concentration camp and was scared of everything. We were believers, though of course we did not shout about it. We lit candles, painted eggs, all of that,’ he said. His eyes were dark and direct, and did not flinch while he told his story. I would look up from my notebook and he would be sitting in exactly the same way as he had been two minutes earlier, his eyes focused on me whether I was looking at him or not.

When Father Dmitry was sacked, his congregation gathered in his flat. ‘It was like the earliest Christian times. People sat anywhere they could: on windowsills, on the floor. They drank tea. It was unique. They asked questions. It was a festival of faith. For a year the KGB were thinking, wondering, how they could stop this. They gave him a church to keep him under control; that was at Kabanovo. But of course they didn’t control him. Oh, it was so beautiful there.’

Zoya junior had by now, from somewhere, produced soup, fish, salad and bread. She too was listening to her father as he evoked the different world they had lived in just forty years before.

‘People came from Moscow to him, you could not stop this. The villagers, these collective farmers, saw how these beautiful ladies from Moscow came. It was like a place of pilgrimage. People would pray, eat, sleep, then stop for the night. And in the morning, they would clean, talk, have these discussions. Then they would put up the antenna and listen to the BBC and the radio would broadcast these same words he had just spoken in Kabanovo.’

It was like a different country, the way he described it, as if they were living outside the Soviet Union.

‘The local people were kind. They brought mushrooms, eggs, even chickens that would run around everywhere.’ He laughed. Everyone else chuckled too. ‘And there was a china factory, I remember, so we only ever drank tea from new cups. We had a big kettle, and I was the main operator of the kettle.’

The KGB were circling outside the windows, the nation was sinking into a depression, but in their little room in Kabanovo – the one I had seen that is now subdivided by teddy-bear wallpaper – they had been free. One evening the stove was burning, and it was howling winter outside.

‘It is so good,’ said Father Dmitry. ‘And it is so scary. It cannot last long being so good in such circumstances.’

‘We knew the KGB were all around,’ said Father Alexander, after a mouthful of soup, ‘and of course it was scary, but we were together.’

Father Dmitry wrote later of the kind of tactics the KGB used against him. Marina, one of the congregation, was repeatedly summoned and questioned about him; then her mother was summoned; then her younger brother; then the family’s friends and neighbours. It was designed to drive people away from Father Dmitry, who wrote to his spiritual children to reassure them, and to raise their spirits.

‘The godless have used everything: libel, forgery, traitors among the priesthood, but everything has been without result, and now they have moved to their favourite method: violence, physical force. But as was said long ago: physical force is powerlessness. In their powerless fury, they don’t know what to do.’

Father Dmitry had learned about violence himself in 1975 on a trip he made with Alexander and a couple of others. They all wanted to drive to Bryansk, to Berezina, to Father Dmitry’s home village, to see his brother and his relatives. The four of them squeezed into a Zaporozhets, a small, rickety, noisy Soviet car. Alexander and a doctor friend were in the back. Father Dmitry and the driver were up in front.

When they set off down the main road to Bryansk, a barrier was across the road. It looked new, as if it had just been installed, and they had to make a 400-kilometre diversion. It was a daunting prospect, but they were determined. Perhaps the driver got tired on this extended journey, or perhaps it was too dark. He did not see that a truck had been parked across the road until it was too late.

‘We crashed into the back tyre. They were right in front of us. They wanted to kill us. Both of Father Dmitry’s legs were broken below the knee,’ said Alexander. It is impossible to know now if the crash was really an assassination attempt or just a strange accident, but they could be forgiven for thinking the worst. A black car had been following them, and a bus arrived soon after the accident, full of people who laughed at them, at how the God-botherers had got in an accident.

They were taken to a hospital intended only for workers at a nearby nuclear power station, and left untreated all night.

After lunch and back in Father Vladimir’s white Toyota, we drove through Shchelkovo, the drab apartment blocks sliding past. It merged almost without a break into Fryazino, with more apartment blocks, then into Grebnevo, where at least the houses were smaller.

I could see Father Vladimir’s eyes flitting around, as he looked for things he recognized. At last we mounted a small rise, and he sighed. We stopped on the edge of a beaten stretch of earth that faded into a garden. Ahead of us was a gate, and beyond was the dome of the church. He sat for a while without getting out of the car, smiling.

Zoya senior was there before us, looking up at the church. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. And it was. The green dome on its white and ochre columns was proud against the blue sky. Bright summer vegetation filled in the scene. ‘When Father Dmitry first came here, he was with his wife Nina and she gaped at this. She thought they had been mistaken – she told Father Dmitry to check they had come to the right place.’

Father Dmitry took up his new post here in April 1976, a time when the Cold War was getting distinctly colder. The early 1970s had been marked by détente, when the two sides wished to trade with each other and resolve their differences. Washington was losing the Vietnam War and facing massive anti-war protests at home. It did not want diplomatic trouble abroad as well. Henry Kissinger, national security advisor and later secretary of state, was not interested in ideology or in lecturing the Soviets on how to behave. He wanted good relations, and both sides wanted to spend less money on weapons.

The culmination of détente was a summit in Helsinki in August 1975, where almost all European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, signed a series of accords recognizing each other’s borders, and establishing a multilateral framework for negotiations (it later became the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

This was a triumph for Moscow, which had long wanted the West to recognize the existence of a separate East Germany and its own dominance of the eastern half of the continent. Almost as an afterthought, the signatory countries tacked on an agreement to respect basic human rights. These obligations were nothing new for the Soviet Union. Its own constitution contained most of the freedoms guaranteed in a democracy, and it had signed up to the founding documents of the United Nations, with their guarantees for all human rights. Officials had never kept these old promises, however, and Brezhnev himself told journalists he had no intention of enforcing the new ones.

‘No one should try to dictate to other people… the manner in which they ought to manage their internal affairs,’ he said after signing the treaty. He seemed to think it would have no significance beyond the paper it was written on.

Some senior KGB officials, including KGB head Yuri Andropov, thought differently. They warned Brezhnev about the risks of signing up. They said these obligations might give the dissidents and critics in the West new tools to use against Moscow, but Brezhnev’s government – intoxicated by its success in winning recognition of the borders the Soviet Union had imposed on Eastern Europe after World War Two – ignored them.

The dissidents, ever imaginative, soon proved Andropov right. In October 1975, Sakharov won a Nobel Peace Prize, giving the dissidents a morale boost. Over the next two years, they formed Helsinki Groups to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with its obligations under the Helsinki Accords – the first in Moscow under Yuri Orlov, the others in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic States. They knew these groups were illegal, but they presented them as civil initiatives to assist the government, and they could claim to be doing so under a treaty Brezhnev had himself signed up to.

Every report they wrote was written dispassionately, singling out the particular clauses of the agreement that had been violated. It was a severe embarrassment for the KGB, and Father Dmitry was in no mood to make the agents’ job any easier.

If officials had hoped that, by giving him a place in this elegant church, built in the late eighteenth century, they could persuade him to shut up, they were disappointed. This was closer to Moscow than Kabanovo, just 30 kilometres away from the city, and even larger crowds of worshippers came to hear him speak, and to enjoy the freedom of true discussion.

‘We discussed everything freely, not needing to look around us, expressing ourselves in our own language. It was like we lived outside the state. It was as if our country wasn’t militantly atheist. This freedom amazed one schoolboy from Leningrad. He at first announced that he was an atheist, that he could not believe, but after spending three days with us, he asked to be christened, and became a militant believer,’ Father Dmitry wrote later.

The state’s pressure did not of course let up, no matter what Father Dmitry thought about it. The dissidents’ underground newspaper – the Chronicle of Current Events – repeatedly detailed the police raids on his home and those of his friends, just like it recounted the arrests of Jewish activists and Ukrainian nationalists and the exiling of scientists and writers. Police officers marched through the church during services, taking photos and making recordings. Police volunteers in red armbands jostled the worshippers as they filed into the church.

But Father Dmitry and his friends were together, and they were not afraid. In the words of Andrei Amalrik, one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a prolific writer, ‘The dissidents accomplished something that was simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country they behaved like free men, thereby changing the moral atmosphere and the nation’s governing traditions.’

The police might be outside, but inside the dissidents had each other, and they had their radios. They could hear about themselves on the BBC, and sometimes they could even read about themselves in the Soviet press.

In April 1977, the Literary Gazette, one of the Soviet Union’s top publications and – KGB defectors later revealed – one that could always be relied upon to print whatever the security services wanted, launched a fresh assault on Father Dmitry, Ogorodnikov and other friends of theirs. Considering that he was supposedly just a village priest, and the others were ordinary citizens, it was a vastly disproportionate response. But the government had to do something. The repeated reports on foreign radio were in danger of turning Father Dmitry into the country’s most authoritative religious figure.

The Literary Gazette’s story used the standard Soviet technique of heavy irony to undermine its targets, and combined it with excessive use of quotation marks to cast entirely unfair doubt on them. Father Dmitry was always called ‘Father Dmitry’, for example, and his friends were not described as very respectable, they were ‘very respectable’.

The effect is certainly comic, and as I sat in the library reading the old yellowed pages I laughed at the memory of a story my wife once told me. She is a doctor and had a colleague who would, when bored, use the same technique employed by the Soviet propagandists and highlight random words in a patient’s medical notes to amuse later medical teams (patient came in with a ‘friend’, complaining about a sore ‘knee’ and other ‘symptoms’). It is not a sophisticated form of humour, more suited to an exhausted doctor on a night shift than supposedly the best propagandists in the world.

The paper quoted some of Father Dmitry’s poetry, and then levelled the allegation that he had, while living under German occupation, collaborated with the Nazis by having his verses printed in an occupation newspaper. This, the article implied, was the reason he had been arrested and sentenced to the gulag.

‘“Father Dmitry” does not so much preach the Ten Commandments as transgress them, and at the same time the laws of his country,’ the paper said. That was a major accusation. In what was clearly a warning sanctioned from on high, Father Dmitry was being told he was breaking the law.

The article ended, however, with an admission of how the Soviet government was losing the propaganda war. It said the article was written so as to warn innocent people away from talking to these dangerous criminals – or, as it quoted an unnamed citizen as saying, to ‘protect those close to us from the pernicious influence of these swindlers… let everyone know what is hidden behind their masks’ – but admitted that the potential victims would not hear the warning since it would not be rebroadcast on foreign radio, which was the only source of news they followed.

Father Dmitry understood his growing celebrity and his own news value for foreign correspondents. He called a press conference in response, so as to deny the charges. He had not, he said, had poems printed in fascist newspapers, nor was he a traitor. He was just worried about the fate of the nation.

‘My heart was wounded by the suffering of the people, and so I forgot my own well-being and the well-being of my family and made a decision: no matter what may happen, I will bring my mite, however small, to the treasure-house of human salvation, and with this mite I will appear before God saying, look, Lord, that is all that I could do,’ he told the assembled journalists. ‘They can imprison me again, they can contrive catastrophes, they can execute me, I shall know what I am suffering for.’

It was almost like he was taunting the authorities, laughing at their inability to halt his growing fame and influence. In August 1977, he gave an interview to a journalist from the New York Times. He denied that he was involved in politics, but still delved into the politics of his country, and into its unfolding demographic catastrophe.

‘Our nation has become corrupted, the family has fallen apart, the nation has got drunk, traitors have betrayed each other, or, as we call them now, stool-pigeons – in huge numbers. We say: a third person could be a traitor, so we try to speak one on one. People say the walls are listening, and we are starting to lie to each other, we do not trust each other,’ he said. ‘The poor Russian people. What a diabolic storm has broken upon it.’

In Grebnevo, we walked through the gate into the churchyard, a shady wooded area, where the church’s cross rose up to catch the afternoon sun. Zoya senior and Father Vladimir were looking around in delight, while Zoya junior and I were smiling at every comment they made and every memory that burst out of them. To the left of the gate had been Father Dmitry’s living quarters, and the hall where the believers had gathered for their Sunday discussions.

Zoya senior walked around the side of the building and was trying to get her bearings. ‘This was where the room was, it’s gone now,’ she said, standing on a patch of lawn. ‘This is where the ambassadors came. All the great people sat here, French people, English people, Americans, they all sat here.’

Father Vladimir was closely examining the door. ‘This was where they arrested me,’ he said at last, with a broad smile. ‘They broke the second door.’ Father Vladimir was arrested in Grebnevo in November 1978. ‘It is so strange to be here,’ he said. ‘It is like it is all living in front of my eyes. I brought some people here after work on Friday, then on Saturday some police cars came from over there. This was in November. Father Dmitry came and told us to stay in bed, that he had a plan to confuse the police, but I was worried they would kill him. So I barricaded the door. All of us were holding the door shut and the police started to smash it down with a log.’

Zoya senior had joined us now: ‘I had come up by then, so I was outside with the police, and someone said there were terrorists or bandits inside the building.’

Father Vladimir: ‘They finally came in and I tried to hang on to the table, but they took me away.’

Zoya senior, laughing: ‘They were saying he’s a terrorist, he’s a bandit, and I was saying it’s just Vladimir, he’s a student.’

Father Vladimir was dragged away barefoot, in his underwear, and held for ten days of detention. His arrest was the culmination of three months of police harassment. Uniformed officers regularly pushed into the rooms where Father Dmitry lived and insisted on checking the number of beds, the number of chairs, the number of people. In December, Father Vladimir was detained again and his friend Georgy Fedotov was taken off for psychiatric assessment, in what could have been the prelude to the forced treatment that so many dissidents had to undergo.

Soviet officials began having dissidents diagnosed as insane back in the 1960s, and came to appreciate the value of psychiatric drugs in social control. These chemicals could sedate or torture anyone who refused to obey orders, or who acted differently.

Pyotr Grigorenko, a general who disagreed with the policies followed by Nikita Khrushchev’s government, was among the first to be treated this way. The Serbsky Institute in Moscow, supposedly the country’s leading centre of psychiatric medicine, proved more than willing to co-operate with the KGB in restraining people such as him. In April 1964, it diagnosed him as suffering from ‘paranoid development of the personality, with reformist ideas arising in the personality, with psychopathic features of the character and the presence of symptoms of arteriosclerosis of the brain’.

The report went on:

When his wife Zinaida, genuinely concerned, asked when he had gone mad, a KGB official responded: ‘The illness is a subtle one, not everyone would notice it… but his ideas are socially dangerous.’

Soviet psychiatrists came up with new diagnoses, such as ‘creeping schizophrenia’, that only they were able to diagnose. Criminal investigators were allowed to request a psychological evaluation, in which doctors could almost always be guaranteed to give the diagnosis the KGB required.

Gennady Shimanov, a Christian, wrote of his own experiences attempting to persuade a doctor that he was just like everyone else.

‘No, Gennady Mikhailovich,’ the doctor had replied. ‘If you were like everyone else, we wouldn’t keep you here. How many days have you been here now? Have you seen a single normal person here? There you are. Well, all right. Now tell me please about your “conversion to God” as you call it.’

When Shimanov tried to find out what his symptoms were, the doctor was clear.

‘Your symptoms are a one-sided fascination with religion. You have cut yourself off from life. After all, how do healthy believers behave? An old dear drops into church, crosses herself, goes out and carries on with her affairs, having forgotten God already. We still have such people, but in time there will be fewer and fewer. But it is quite different with you. That is what worries us.’

And it was not just the religious who were targeted. Zhores Medvedev, a respected scientist, had become obsessed with disproving the theories of Trofim Lysenko – a charlatan biologist whose ideas had convinced Stalin and thus replaced orthodox genetics as official scientific doctrine. This was not just a subject of academic interest. Scientists who backed the Mendelian and Darwinian views of genetics and natural selection had been sacked and jailed. After Stalin’s death, the ideas of Lysenko had been gradually allowed to fall into disrepute, but Medvedev wanted acknowledgement that they were wrong. He wrote up a history of the affair and published it abroad.

‘I read it recently – it’s a polemical work,’ said the doctor who arrived to examine him. ‘By now people have forgotten about Lysenko – the struggle in genetics is over. And instead of forgetting about it like everybody else and getting on with your work, you recently published this book abroad. Why?’

The book is a passionate attack on Lysenko, well sourced and intelligently argued. For the doctors, however, the fact that Medvedev was combining scientific work with historical research was a sign of mental illness.

‘As a matter of fact I have observed that your brother suffers from a split personality,’ a doctor told Medvedev’s twin, Roy, a historian. ‘He is a biologist, but is also involved with many things that bear little relation to his immediate responsibilities. Besides, he is always dissatisfied about something, always fighting against something.’

The Soviet state in some ways existed like a country in the Middle Ages, when people were punished for any deviation from the pure religious line. Officials saw Marxism as the revealed truth, while the Soviet Union was the perfect society, and only insanity or dishonesty could explain any deviation from that way of thinking.

Leonid Plyushch, a Ukrainian dissident and one of the most famous victims of psychiatric abuse, said the doctors would explain to him that, since he had risked his own freedom and his family’s happiness by his actions, he must be mad. He would respond by saying that the early communists had done exactly the same thing. They had risked imprisonment for something they believed in. The doctors would then respond by saying he was having delusions of grandeur, since he had compared himself to Lenin. They always had an answer.

‘Since all dictatorships proclaim heaven on earth, all who refuse to live in that paradise must be crazy – or have been bought by agents of foreign intelligence,’ Plyushch wrote.

During that time, he was treated with haloperidol, a powerful anti-psychotic drug that also has strong sedative properties. It was one of the few such drugs produced in the Soviet Union, explaining its popularity with Soviet doctors. He was also given insulin shots, specifically to suck up the sugar in his blood and plunge him into artificial comas.

Medvedev was fortunate in having a twin who believed in his sanity. Roy mobilized support, including from Sakharov, and won release for his brother. Not all dissidents were so lucky in their friends and relations, however, and some spent months inside, enduring regular injections of sulphazin. That was a suspension of sulphur in peach oil, which had no medical use beyond causing pain and inducing fever. Plyushch saw a fellow inmate nearly killed by an injection of sulphazin.

For now, Father Dmitry’s friend Fedotov avoided all that. He was released after a few days, as was Father Vladimir, but it was the kind of harassment intended to make them rethink their behaviour.

It did not work, of course.

Father Vladimir: ‘When the police volunteers came in their red armbands and were supposed to keep order, we wore white armbands and said we would keep our own order.’

Zoya senior: ‘They asked us if we were expecting a high-up boss or someone, and Father Dmitry said we were expecting the highest boss of all. It was Easter, you see.’

Father Vladimir mused on Father Dmitry.

‘He was not scared to sacrifice himself, you know. In a totalitarian state, if someone gets in trouble, then they are avoided. This is how the state creates order. It was not just those who were under investigation who were avoided, but people who knew them as well. There was no severe repression, like there had been in the 1940s, but it was not necessary because the fear survived. That was how the state controlled the people, by making them fear each other. Father Dmitry did not have this fear.

‘When I ended up in Father Dmitry’s big family, I felt I was with people I could trust. He did not aim to create this separate society, it just happened. He created a free society. He was not God, but he was holy. What I experienced then, it was so bright and sharp for me. What I had with him I remember like it was yesterday, I remember that brightness more than’, he waved his hand around to indicate the modern world, ‘more than this even.’

As we walked out of the church and back into the trees, he described how they had lived in Grebnevo. They ate in shifts, since there were always at least sixty people there, and only seventeen could fit at the table.

‘While we ate, someone read out a religious book while Father Dmitry rested. Then he would come out and the discussions started. I used to collect the questions. That was one of my jobs. Some people were happy to ask the questions themselves, but others preferred to write them down, they were still scared of what might happen. This lasted all day, several hours anyway. If the service ended at twelve or one, then we would not leave until six or seven in the evening. If we came on Saturday, we would remove the table and take these screens down off the windows, put mattresses on them and sleep. One morning Father Dmitry came out and laughed, there were so many of us. You could not even turn over in bed.’

We walked along the uneven ground, and through a gap in the crumbling perimeter wall. Here apparently was a palace complex, which had been done up since Father Vladimir was last here. It had been ruinous in his day, and he was keen to see it in its proper glory.

The first herald of the complex was not promising. Someone had defecated in the middle of the path, and it lay stinking and covered in flies, next to a smeared wedge of toilet paper. We stepped over that towards a tent erected by a film crew in the courtyard. They would not be filming an aristocrats’ drama, however, because the palace complex that Father Vladimir was so keen to see was in ruins, the bricks exposed and the plaster peeling off in chunks.

Father Vladimir was shocked. It turned out that the complex had indeed been renovated, but had then burned down just before the opening ceremony. He looked around at the mess, the piles of filth and the collapsing glory of the complex.

‘You know, say what you like about the people who were in power then, at least they were not these criminals like we have now. Yes, they arrested me, but they did not beat me, whereas now so many people have been killed just for money.’

I said, surprised, that he sounded nostalgic. He seemed to long for the days when the police took him so seriously they would smash down a door and drag him away.

‘I am nostalgic. If you think of all the horrors people live through, from these criminals. All authority is from God, and in the 1990s there was no authority. Yes, they were against us in those days, in the 1970s, but at least there was authority of some kind. At least then the oppression was for ideological reasons, now it’s just for the money,’ he said, looking up at the buildings, and nodding at the gaping windows. ‘Lacking a master destroys more than any enemy,’ he said.

Trees were growing from the tops of the walls of the old palace now, and the rot looked irreversible. I was not sure whether to take it, like he did, as a metaphor for the whole country or not. I could see his point that the Soviet Union at least looked after its citizens, but I could not agree that that was justification for forcibly injecting them with anti-psychotic drugs if they held a different opinion.

The lake was ahead of us, and provided a more cheerful topic of conversation. Dozens of local kids swam and splashed in the shallows. Others were rowing out in an inflatable dinghy, their friends trying to drag them out. When they failed, they ducked under the water and heaved the whole boat over, shrieking. According to local legend, the lake was created in honour of Catherine the Great in the shape of the Russian letter ‘ye’, which is the first letter in Yekaterina, her first name, although it did not look much like one when I called up the satellite picture that evening.

That evening, I read some more of Father Dmitry’s writings from this period. He self-published a little newspaper, which he called In the Light of the Transfiguration. He stuck it up on the wall in Grebnevo so all his visitors could be instantly informed of the troubles and triumphs of his flock, and of their friends throughout the Soviet Union. A few issues of the paper were reprinted in a three-volume edition of his works published in 2004, and in them he detailed the attacks on him and his spiritual children, and taunted the authorities with his defiance.

‘O Godless ones! You have everything in your hands, I have nothing but faith in God,’ he wrote. ‘To send out an army with weapons against a weaponless priest is shameful and embarrassing.’

He then listed his demands: a printing press of his own; the right to speak out wherever he wanted; and the right to hold services in one of the churches in the Moscow Kremlin. That, he said, would even up the forces. He was beginning to talk as if he was at war with the government.

A couple of days later, I decided to investigate the Literary Gazette’s allegations against Father Dmitry. Perhaps he really had published poems in a Nazi-sponsored newspaper. It was not the most terrible of crimes if he had, but the article was very specific in its information. Admittedly it had said Father Dmitry was aged twelve when his work was printed, which would have meant the Nazi occupation started a decade earlier than it actually did, but it was curiously exact in naming the newspaper as the New Way and saying it had been published in Klintsy. It even gave a name for Father Dmitry’s poem: ‘Song from a Cellar’.

‘The Hitlerites didn’t give a damn about the literary form, but the content was to their liking, and was entirely consistent with Goebbels’s propaganda,’ it said.

I felt I had a sense of Father Dmitry’s character by now. His strength lay in his refusal to compromise. He held firm to his own beliefs in all circumstances, no matter what was demanded of him. If he had published a poem in a Nazi newspaper, it would reveal a flaw in his character, particularly if the poem did indeed chime with Goebbels’s propaganda, since it would mean he had collaborated with the occupiers.

I had already visited the Lenin Library’s store of papers printed under occupation when I looked for information on Father Dmitry’s childhood, so I returned to that high-ceilinged parquet-floored room up under the library’s flat roof, with its spider plants and striplights, and found the New Way, published in Klintsy, in the card index.

A few minutes later, the helpful librarian brought it over to me, safely enclosed in a stiff card folder. It was stamped ‘restricted’ – in Soviet times, only researchers approved by the KGB would have had access to this. Now, anyone could read it. After all, no one really cares any more.

The paper was bad quality, yellowed and full of holes. Its masthead said, above the words ‘under the Swastika flag to freedom’, that the New Way was published on Thursdays and Mondays. I sat and began to read. It was pretty crude.

‘The German army is bringing freedom to the whole Russian people, together we will defeat communism and secure the dawn of personal well-being,’ said one issue in huge letters. And there were collaborators among the Russians who helped set the tone.

‘Yid-Bolshevism has not killed the spirit of the Russian people,’ said an article by a Russian Orthodox priest published on 11 April 1943, which listed fifty-five churches restored and twenty-nine priests appointed. In June, an article announced a training course for wouldbe priests.

By 19 August, in the last copy in the archive, fifty-eight churches were open and thirty-five priests operating. However, if Father Dmitry was tempted to celebrate that fact with a poem, he did not do it here. There was no poem or article under his name that I could find, nor a poem called ‘Song from a Cellar’ published anonymously or otherwise.

The Nazis also issued another newspaper with the title the New Way. It was published in Riga, Latvia, but I thought I might as well scan through it anyway. Its first edition had a map of Europe, featuring an enormous Germany stretching from Romania to the North Sea. Photos showed happy Russians surrendering, and Russian youths cleaning German boots with smiles on their faces. There were no poems by Father Dmitry here either, nor in another paper called the New Times published in Vyazma, nor in New Life, or any of the other forgotten publications issued under the Nazis on the thin and fragile wartime paper.

‘It was probably just a libellous article,’ the helpful librarian told me. She had become quite involved in my search, and shuttled back and forth with piles of these strange old newspapers.

I returned to my Formica desk and sat with the long drawer from the card index in front of me. I was tempted to agree with her that the Literary Gazette’s accusation was a crude lie. It was a strange lie, since if you are going to libel someone and try to blacken their name, it would seem more sensible to make up a really dreadful crime for them to have committed.

According to people quoted in one of Father Dmitry’s books, for example, at one point in the 1970s the police alleged during private conversations that he had murdered children on the Nazis’ orders. That was proper defamation, which could really damage someone. I mused on why they had not made that allegation public. My imagination started to get tied in knots.

Maybe it was the irrelevance of the poetry offence that meant I should doubt its veracity. Perhaps the KGB were acting in the knowledge that since people know big lies are supposedly more believable than small lies, then small lies are actually more effective as libel. Could it be an advanced double bluff? Or a triple bluff? They had after all had decades of experience in deception. This, I imagined, is the kind of paranoia that must have swirled in everyone’s mind in the 1970s. In trying to keep one logical step ahead of the opposition, you began to see shapes in a fog of suspicion that gets thicker the further you go.

I willed myself to snap out of it, and wrote down a conclusion. From the evidence available, I wrote, the allegation that he wrote poems for the Nazis looks like a lie. There, I could leave and get on with other things. I breathed out, and gathered up my notebooks. But then I doubted myself again, pulled out the long drawer full of the dog-eared index cards and scanned through them one last time, checking off all the names of the Nazi papers to make sure I had missed nothing.

In doing so, I accidentally flicked past the cream-coloured divider marking off the next section of the index. Before I had time to rectify my error, my eyes automatically read the index card my clumsiness had revealed. There, staring back at me, were the words In the Light of the Transfiguration. That was Father Dmitry’s self-published newspaper. I forgot all about the Nazi poem and whether it existed or not. Surely they didn’t have Father Dmitry’s words here? In the Lenin Library? I bounded back to the issue desk, filled in a request form and handed it over to my friendly ally.

‘Have you found it?’ she asked.

‘No, but I’ve found something better. It’s his own newspaper, I think.’

She shook her head, chuckled at the strangeness of foreigners and walked back through the door to the restricted section. This could be truly extraordinary luck. The Lenin Library was the official reference library for academic researchers. It did not concern itself with the dissidents’ self-published documents. I had been informed that the Lenin Library possessed no such archive, and yet here one was. I mused over how it could have ended up here at all. Perhaps it had been deposited here after some long-ago KGB investigation ended. Maybe a secret Christian archivist in this bastion of scientific communism had stashed it among the more respectable papers.

When she finally brought me the brown envelope stuffed with documents, I pulled them out with trepidation. I need not have worried, however; it was the real thing. I had seen some issues of the newspaper in Father Dmitry’s collected works, but they were incomplete and they lacked the immediacy of seeing a genuine hand-typed, carbon-copied version.

This was an original. It was typed out – if not by Father Dmitry himself, then by someone who knew him well. It was clearly the work of an amateur. Misspellings were stamped over with rows of capital XXXs, and each edition had a hand-drawn cross in the masthead. It was like taking a time machine back to the heady days of freedom at Grebnevo. After the fog of the Nazi and Soviet lies, it was a clear, crisp morning.

The threat circling around him was clear on the very first sheet of the very first paper, dated Sunday, 3 June 1979. A priest called Vasily Fonchenkov, he wrote, had joined Yakunin’s Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights, whose statements Father Dmitry regularly republished. The Christian Committee had been founded in December 1976. It worked in partnership with the Helsinki Groups and tried to publicize the troubles that believers of all denominations faced in living their daily lives: arrests, sackings, harassment.

The KGB were acutely sensitive to information leaking into the West that revealed any persecution of believers, much of which came from the Christian Committee. Yakunin had kept the group small, with just three or four members, to prevent penetration, but that tactic had failed. Defectors later revealed that Fonchenkov, though a priest, had been recruited nine years earlier by the KGB’s Fifth Directorate and given the codename FRIEND. They did not know it at the time but, by admitting this false friend, Yakunin had given his enemies access to the very heart of their free community, and their every move would now be reported back to the KGB.

Flicking through the pages of Father Dmitry’s newspaper – each issue was three sheets of paper, stapled together, typed on just one side – was like fast-forwarding through 1979. On 17 June, there is an account of Father Vladimir being arrested again, although of course at that time he was just a student called Vladimir Sedov, not yet a priest. The police did not know how to deal with him. Officers still believed the old stereotype that only ignorant old women went to church, and had failed to learn that educated young Russians flocked to see Father Dmitry in their dozens.

‘How can you be a believer if you have higher education?’ he was asked by the police.

‘Today it is people with higher education who believe, only dunces don’t believe,’ he replied with commendable cockiness, and was held for three days without charge.

On 24 June, Father Dmitry conjured up an amusing contrast in generation gaps. In the 1920s, he described a grandmother being challenged by her grandson in the act of hiding an icon under her pillow. The grandson then ripped the cross from around her neck, leaving his grandmother in tears. In his imaginary scenario for the 1970s, the roles are reversed: a communist grandfather challenged his Christian granddaughter.

‘I have heard, I have been told, you have been christened,’ the grandfather says. ‘How could you? You don’t think about your grandfather at all, what will happen to me?’

Having provoked a few chuckles with that, Father Dmitry then warned his congregation to be careful of the unknown men who were attending his services, in case they were agents sent to undermine the congregation. Then he ended with the account of a religious man who was locked up in a mental hospital for five months, and given eight of the dreaded injections of sulphazin, the 4 per cent suspension of sulphur in peach oil, which was prescribed to induce a fever and torment the patient.

He wrote about anything that concerned him: about religious festivals, about persecution and about the decline of his nation into alcoholism. A train crash was caused by the driver being drunk. ‘History has not known such a number of railway catastrophes as are happening at the moment.’

And there were constant reminders of the danger that the wolves in uniform posed to his flock. In August, a spiritual daughter of his wrote about being summoned by the KGB and questioned for four hours about Father Dmitry and his sermons. The three agents told her not to tell anyone, but she wrote to her priest anyway.

‘It is interesting what their aim is in summoning her. We do everything openly, anyone can come and listen. It is clear they are searching for lying witnesses. Well, whatever, let them search,’ he wrote. He was confident in the loyalty of his friends.

A week later the same woman recounted a second summons, and the KGB’s threat to try her under Article 70 – anti-Soviet activity – of the criminal code, if she did not testify that Father Dmitry himself was engaged in anti-Soviet acts. The threat was clear, but he ignored it. He had more important subjects, like a woman who prayed in the church every day.

‘Everyone around her drinks: husband, father, even her fourteen-year-old son. She does not know what to do. Only the church gives her the strength to bear this unbearable cross.’

The impression grew upon me, as I turned the pages, of an embattled community strengthened by the pressure upon it, and of Father Dmitry as the cheerful, smiling centre, the rock on which they could all stand. He printed a letter from a prisoner being held in Vorkuta in the north, who wrote about his interrogations.

‘When they ask me who my spiritual father is, I reply with respect that it is the Holy Father Dmitry Dudko… In Dmitry Dudko I find the spiritual powers that help me serve Jesus Christ,’ the letter said.

If he ever doubted himself, letters like that must have kept Father Dmitry going, for he was under no illusion that they could soon all be arrested. He regularly hid the surnames of people who wrote to him, and now used the language of war: ‘I don’t name surnames on the principle that at the front it is dangerous to pronounce them, since the enemy may be listening.’ Together his friends and allies would be strong enough to resist anyone, however.

It was September 1979. The hot Moscow summer was over, and the leaves were turning gold and russet. The first cold nights were biting, and the geese were flying overhead, honking, heading south, reminding the people stuck on solid earth that the cold times were coming. Father Dmitry’s neighbours were piling their hay into stacks in the barns and the fields, and preparing to bring the dairy herds indoors for the winter.

Father Dmitry was still pounding away at his typewriter, however. ‘They ask us whether our militant mood is not recklessness. We answer that it is less reckless than compromises would be, since they would give up our positions without a fight.’

And a couple of weeks later, on 23 September, when night and day are the same length and summer is undoubtedly over, he returned to the language of war. ‘In struggling against our external enemies, against their attacks and persecution, we sometimes forget about or pay too little attention to our internal enemies. If the attacks of external enemies serve to mobilize our forces, to strengthen and unify us, then internal enemies weaken our forces, disorder our ranks, disturb our unity.’

He denied repeatedly that his language was political, or that he was opposed to the Soviet Union, but his words belied him. The film student-turned-believer Ogorodnikov was in prison by now, and Father Dmitry described his hunger strikes. He criticized the Church for being controlled by the Godless. He criticized the government for doing nothing to save the nation from its despair. He criticized the murder of the Russian tsar by the Bolsheviks, and prayed for the souls of the royal family.

Then on 11 November, he wrote that his friend Yakunin, leader of the Christian Committee, had been arrested. The net around him was tightening. The stress was getting to his spiritual children too. Under the constant harassment, the believers were clearly beginning to argue among themselves. He begged them not to divide along ‘ethnic’ lines – Sovietese for division into Russians and Jews.

‘Let the words of the apostle “in Christ there is no Greek nor Jew” be not just words, but a rule for life,’ he wrote, in a quotation (actually, a misquotation) of St Paul’s letter to the Galatians that he was particularly fond of. ‘Free yourselves from prejudice and received opinions.’

He sensed that a decisive battle was close, that this was the calm before a downpour. Ogorodnikov and Yakunin were in prison, so he was the last major Orthodox rebel still at liberty, and the authorities were saving him for last.

Outside his little world, the whole dissident movement was under assault. The security services had been obsessed with squashing the tiresome self-publicists for a decade now. Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled in 1974, brilliantly summed up the state’s increasing paranoia, with its insistence that everyone pull together because ‘the enemies are listening’.

‘Those eternal enemies are the basis of your existence. What would you do without your enemies? You would not be able to live without your enemies. Hate, hate no less an evil than racism, has become your sterile atmosphere,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote in an open letter to the Writers’ Union.

Dissident opposition to the authorities’ sterile atmosphere grew despite the harassment, however, and the arrests severely damaged the Soviet Union’s international image. The dissidents’ allies in the West were lobbying hard to damage it further, and proved very effective.

The policy of détente pursued by Washington in the first half of the 1970s changed under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976. Activists in the United States, particularly from Jewish groups, had learned well how to lobby US officials and to demand that they put pressure on the Soviet Union to protect basic human rights. Carter even wrote a personal letter to Sakharov saying he would ‘use our good offices to seek the release of prisoners of conscience… I am always glad to hear from you, and I wish you well.’

For Jewish groups, the main priority was the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. American Jewish groups bombarded their representatives with demands that they take action, and sent cards and letters to their kin the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The Soviet Union did allow a certain amount of emigration but resented allowing young Jews that it had educated and trained to go and work in a capitalist country. It often demanded they refund the cost of their education before they leave, which was all but impossible. The Jewish activists maintained close contacts with Western groups and in 1977 Natan Shcharansky, the most famous of them, was charged with treason. His conviction was a foregone conclusion, and he used the trial to shame the Soviet government, saying how investigators had threatened him with execution if he did not cooperate.

‘Five years ago, I submitted my application for exit to Israel. Now I’m further than ever from my dream. It would seem to be cause for regret. But it is absolutely otherwise. I am happy. I am happy that I lived honestly, in peace with my conscience. I never compromised my soul, even under the threat of death,’ he said. He thanked his supporters, among them the veteran dissident Alexander Ginzburg and the Moscow Helsinki Group founder Yuri Orlov, both of whom were also on trial.

‘I am proud that I knew and worked with such honest, brave and courageous people as Sakharov, Orlov, Ginzburg, who are carrying on the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia… Now I turn to you, the court, who were required to confirm a predetermined sentence: to you I have nothing to say.’

After his conviction in 1978, his face made the cover of Time magazine with the crumbling word ‘détente’ above him as a headline. He was in prison and his fate had become synonymous for many Westerners with the fate of the whole Soviet people. The government in Washington was finding it harder and harder to prevent public anger over the Soviet Union’s treatment of the dissidents from destroying bilateral ties.

Other minorities had champions too. Evangelical groups campaigned on behalf of their co-religionists in the Eastern Bloc, while broader human rights groups kept the fate of the political prisoners in the headlines.

Despite opposition from the White House, Congress had passed the Jackson–Vanik Amendment in 1974, which made normal trade with Moscow contingent on it allowing Jewish and evangelical emigration. That had hurt, and Moscow was in no mood to be preached to. Under Jimmy Carter, the preaching continued.

By 1979, even before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and the United States began to pour money into the saddlebags of the mujahedin, there were no relations left to salvage. The superpowers’ détente had failed.

This was bad news for Father Dmitry and the remaining dissidents. While there had existed some chance that the Soviet Union could win trade concessions, the Kremlin abided by some of its international obligations to protect human rights. Now that that chance was gone, the KGB had nothing to lose from rounding up the last of the troublemakers who polluted their socialist utopia. The Moscow Helsinki Group of young dissidents that attempted to hold the Soviet Union to its international human rights obligations was crushed. Yuri Orlov, the group’s founder, like Shcharansky refused to co-operate with his investigators. He got seven years in prison, plus five years in exile. The Ukrainian, Georgian and other nationalist groups were closed down. Jewish organizations were destroyed. The dissident Christians were arrested.

By late autumn 1979, who was left? The greatest of all the dissidents, the Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, was still at liberty, fighting his tireless and lonely battle, but he was all but alone now. His allies had been picked off one at a time. And Father Dmitry was almost alone too.

This, for him, was Russia’s crucifixion. After the crucifixion would come the resurrection, which he yearned for, so it was time for the final fight. He appealed to all believers in the country. They must pray for the persecuted, for those who, like their friends Yakunin and Ogorodnikov, were not with them in the last redoubt.

He had an ultimatum for those who would imprison them, and a demand of his followers: ‘All actions, that one way or another help the persecutors, must be stopped immediately.’ He was calling on his supporters to boycott the state.

This was more than a taunt. It was revolution. It was practically suicide.

‘Happily,’ he wrote of his congregation, ‘only a few people are scared. More new individuals are coming, praise God. A religious spring is beginning in Russia!’

Inside might be a religious spring, but outside Father Dmitry’s windows it was winter, by now 25 November. Snow had been on the ground for a week or two, and the temperature was below zero. He was not deterred. As long as they remained united, they had nothing to fear.

But they did not remain united. Just the next week, some of his spiritual children – his footsoldiers, the crucial support he needed in his fight for the soul of the Russian nation – had left him. They had not, he wrote, even said goodbye. And their departure was accompanied by arguments, and arguments meant even he began to question their good faith. He had tried to banish distrust beyond the church walls, but it was back, creeping under the door like a cold draught from the winter outside.

‘I start to wonder, is it not someone’s provocation: to break the unity of my spiritual children? First there were arguments, ethnic differences, and now they depart. This must be to someone’s benefit.’

He was getting suspicious and distrustful. He was beginning to think like the people he was fighting, and as soon as he did that he had lost. His whole battle was based on using his own methods, not theirs. The KGB were chipping away before their final assault.

He tried to shore up his position but a week later it was worse. Threats were exchanged between members of the congregation. The Sunday discussion had been full of alarm, and his distrust grew. ‘Who knows, maybe someone planned this so as to disunite us,’ he wrote. And the ‘ethnic question’ – the Jewish question, anti-Semitism, racism, everything Father Dmitry had tried to banish – reared up. The discussion ended with slammed doors, with shouting, despite his appeal that they needed to love each other, to keep everyone in their hearts.

He wrote later how it appeared.

Russians said: ‘You only have Jews with you.’

And Jews asked: ‘How can you keep all these anti-Semites?’

This internal division, he wrote, was not accidental. Someone had been sent to dig into the fault-line in his congregation, to use the old tactics of divide and rule. Distrust was all around him now. It was almost the end of the year, and on 16 December he prayed that 1980 and the new decade would bring his spiritual children back to him, and to each other. By now, fewer people were coming to his discussions, and he had plenty of time to think.

Eventually I began to read the last stapled-together document in the envelope. He could not sleep, he wrote, and he heard the bells strike the quarter-hours. The police were following ever more closely those who came to his church, and he recounted a conversation between an arrested man’s wife and a state investigator. When she told him she wanted a big family, he scorned her.

‘Only scoundrels have big families,’ the investigator said, allowing Father Dmitry to end his newspaper and the year on his favourite theme: the threat to the future of the Russian people.

‘That is why our families are shrinking. We will go far with these morals, until the last person eats the last person.’

That was the end. There were no more copies in the envelope. I would need to find an eyewitness to describe what happened next. For that, I would need Father Alexander.

We met, along with the two Zoyas, senior and junior, and Father Vladimir at a sushi restaurant just outside Moscow. The contrast was strange. Father Alexander’s bearded face and black robe were like something from the Middle Ages. The flashy decor and plates of highly priced fish were pure twenty-first-century Russia.

He sat next to me, and told his story with enormous enthusiasm. He kept making barely comprehensible jokes, patting me on the back to make sure I understood them. He edged ever closer to me as he did so, squashing me against the wall and grabbing my left arm. Zoya junior took advantage by occasionally swooping on his sushi, so every time he turned back to his plate he looked slightly puzzled by there being fewer than there should have been.

He talked intermittently about their life in Grebnevo. About how they ate together, chatted, drank tea and read God’s law. About how half of them were Jews, and half Russians, about their arguments, and about how Father Dmitry stood above them all, and took no sides.

Then on 14 January 1980, in the evening, Father Alexander was arrested. Zoya senior fled to Father Dmitry with their children. Father Dmitry went to find out what was going on. A policeman met him at the station: ‘We knew you would come,’ the policeman said. The police had no intention of releasing Alexander, but they knew that Father Dmitry looked out for his flock, and respected him for it.

Father Dmitry went home, and in the morning the police came for him too. They detained him directly after he had finished conducting the service, bundled him into their car and took him away. He was told he was just being taken to the city for his flat to be searched, and his wife Nina went with him. They did not take him to his flat, however, but to the Lubyanka – the KGB’s granite-edged headquarters that looms over Moscow from its hilltop.

A search team was, in their absence, ripping up his flat, as well as the houses of Father Alexander and Father Alexander’s mother, and the flats of their friends Ovchinnikova, Kuzmina, Glemyanov, Chapkovsky, Kapitanchuk and Nikolaev. Dozens of agents took part.

Father Dmitry’s wife Nina sat all day in the lobby of the Lubyanka, waiting for her husband’s release. It was only in the evening that she was told he had been arrested and taken to Lefortovo, the KGB’s prison. He had vanished from sight, and would have to fight on his own now.

‘They held me for fifteen days,’ said Father Alexander. ‘The KGB told me later they had no problem with me.’ The jokes and backpatting were over while he remembered it, and how Father Dmitry vanished from their lives.

With the arrest, and the searches and the harassment, the dissidents’ publicity machine barely survived. It was down to Father Vladimir and his friend Georgy Fedotov to tell the world what had happened. Fedotov told the foreign correspondents, and was then himself arrested and held in a mental hospital.

Father Dmitry’s other friends at liberty were tireless in their campaign for him, nonetheless. Already on the day of his arrest, they organized dozens of signatures under an appeal to Christians of the Whole World. ‘The appearance of Father Dmitry in our country and in our times cannot be understood but as a miracle to redeem Russia and the whole modern world. The mind cannot comprehend the colossal influence that Father Dmitry has had on the spiritual life of our nation,’ it said. The list of signatures showed his wide appeal. Most of the names were Russian of course, but there were Jewish names too, as well as Soviet Muslims and Ukrainians.

‘The worst plagues of our life: attacks on the Church, the collapse of the family, alcoholism, abortions, all of this appeared in Father Dmitry’s sermons as a reflection of the battle between good and evil.’

Their appeals reached the world. The London Times on 23 January quoted a letter written by Father Dmitry just before his arrest, which he had clearly been expecting.

‘Sound the alarm! Silence and compromise are not tactical steps, they are betrayal… If anything happens to me, let this letter be my message.’ The article went on to describe dozens of other dissidents from all over the Soviet Union who were swept up in this vast operation.

They included Tatyana Shchipkova, ‘a member of an unofficial seminar on religious philosophy, who was sentenced to three years’ hard labour’. There was Mikhail Solovov, ‘who took part in an attempt to put up independent candidates in the last Soviet elections’. There was Malva Landa of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Rolian Kadiyev, of the exiled Crimean Tatars, and other discontented people from Lithuania to Leningrad to the Arctic.

A week later, in an article headlined ‘Father Dudko: The Flower of Russia’s “Religious Spring”’, The Times praised the steadfastness of his fight to save his people. ‘In almost every sermon Father Dudko refers to the key problems of Soviet society: the high divorce rates, widespread alcoholism, hooliganism and criminality among the young. His solution is a stable family life,’ the paper wrote.

His arrest made headlines in newspapers across North America, from the New York Times to the Ottawa Citizen, and his name was repeatedly paired with that of Sakharov, the most famous of all the dissidents, who was now exiled to Gorky. His exile and Father Dmitry’s arrest were the clearest possible signs of the regime’s confidence. The KGB could now get rid of anyone they wanted, the papers said, even those previously deemed ‘untouchable’.

The Olympics was scheduled for Moscow that summer and, in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan, many Western countries were under pressure to boycott the Games. Campaigners added the fates of Sakharov and Father Dmitry to the charge sheet against Moscow and indeed a US-led boycott went ahead, ruining the Soviet Union’s party, in what was supposed to be its triumphant ascent to the pinnacle as host of the world’s biggest festival.

All of this, of course, was unknown to Father Dmitry. While his spiritual children fought and prayed for him, while KGB agents gathered evidence and while Western journalists kept his name in the headlines, he was in a cell in the KGB’s prison of Lefortovo waiting for interrogation.

7 Ideological sabotage

The Lubyanka building, to which Father Dmitry had been taken, then dominated and still dominates north-central Moscow. If the democratic Russian government that took power after 1991 had wanted to change the country and to commemorate the victims of the previous regime it might have opened this building to the public or turned it into a museum. I have often thought how wonderful it would be to see groups of children running in and out of the forbidding front gate, exorcizing the ghosts of the past with their laughter.

The post-1991 government did not turn it into a museum, of course, or throw open its doors. Instead, it left it as it was. It is still the headquarters of Russia’s security agency and is still off limits to ordinary citizens.

When I lived in Moscow, I walked past it every day on my way to and from the office. If I was talking on the phone when I did so, I would lose the signal as I approached the towering façade. It would only return when I was a good 50 metres beyond. The FSB, as the KGB’s main successor agency is now known, takes no chances.

The Lubyanka’s first two storeys are granite, made of sharp-edged blocks. Above them are six rows of windows poking out of an ochre façade, with a broad cornice along the top. A grand entrance pierces the front, while smaller doors give access to the sides. At the back is a towering entrance for trucks, blocked by high barred gates and guarded at all times by policemen. Presumably, this entrance was busy during the KGB’s heyday.

The front windows face towards the Kremlin. They previously overlooked a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet security service, but he was toppled in 1991. Officials occasionally mutter about putting him back.

To the right of the Lubyanka’s front elevation as you look at it, there is a large rock on a low plinth. This was brought from Solovki, the first island in the gulag’s archipelago, and erected as a memorial to the KGB’s victims. You reach it through the underground walkways that honeycomb the space underneath Lubyanka Square. They are full of kiosks selling cheap lingerie, pirate DVDs, baked goods and electrical components. The rock does not get as much passing trade as the kiosks. It is large and grey and smooth.

I have been inside the Lubyanka on two occasions, both times for off-the-record briefings with members of the FSB. The chats yielded nothing of interest from a news perspective, but were fascinating nonetheless. This had after all been the inner sanctum of the KGB, then, as the FSB is now, second only to the Kremlin as a source of power in Russia. On both occasions I entered through a small side entrance, was scrutinized by a security guard through thick glass and was left sitting on a chair for five or ten minutes until my escort arrived. Then my documents were checked and I was given leave to pass through a turnstile and climb a grand staircase to a first-floor corridor lined with doors. We turned towards the front of the building and entered a large office. It had a huge desk at the far end. That desk was, one guide told me, just how Andropov had left it. This was in fact Yuri Andropov’s office.

Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and thus ran almost the entire campaign against the dissident movement. Next to the phone was a switchboard, two metres wide and covered in different coloured buttons that could connect him to any of his subordinates anywhere in the country. From this desk he co-ordinated the exile of Sakharov to Gorky; the arrest of Jewish nationalists who wished to go to Israel; the harassment of Father Dmitry and his friends in their church community in Grebnevo.

Even before he headed the KGB, he had been ambassador to Hungary, and thus responsible for crushing the Hungarians’ attempt to loosen the Soviet embrace in 1956. He helped send the tanks and soldiers into Budapest and cowed the nation for a generation. As chairman of the KGB, he did the same to Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the Prague Spring attempted to create a more flexible kind of socialism. These two experiences of uppity satellites showing worrying degrees of independence convinced him that the Soviet Union was engaged in a death struggle with imperialism, in which the fight against dissidents was a key front.

Not everyone in the Politburo – the leading organ in the state – shared the full extent of Andropov’s paranoia. Many thought the government’s critics could be won over by generous treatment and benefits. Andropov disagreed, and his KGB were merciless. They kept up surveillance and harassment of anyone they suspected of ‘thinking otherwise’, as the dissidents themselves termed their activities.

His aim was to extract confessions from the KGB’s opponents, to make them admit that they were not honest strivers after truth and justice, but foreign spies bent on undermining their homeland. His agents were highly skilled. They were allowed to detain suspects without charge for months, and could use those long spells of inactivity to undermine the dissidents’ resolve. The dissidents in response drew up precise guidelines of their own for how to engage with interrogators, approaching the conversations in full knowledge of how dangerous they were. Natan Shcharansky, the Jewish activist, was a highly skilled chess player and plotted his approach in the same way he would plot a match.

Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, outlasted his interrogators, and was honourably defiant to the last. ‘I rely on my own inner conviction, on my experience and on my thoughts,’ he said. It did not save him from a seven-year sentence, but it meant he kept true to himself and inspired fellow dissidents to do the same.

Not all dissidents were as stern and unyielding as him. In 1973, KGB agents managed to extract confessions from Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, who had been compiling the underground human rights journal the Chronicle of Current Events. Although Krasin had written the handbook for arrested dissidents, telling them to admit nothing, he was finally broken over months of detention. They grilled him repeatedly, extracting tiny concessions from him, holding out the chance of meetings with his wife and family. They were ably assisted by an informer sent in as a cellmate. Eventually, tiny step by tiny step, they overcame both Krasin’s and Yakir’s resistance and sent them back to their old friends as changed men.

‘We forgot the basic truth that we are citizens of the USSR and are bound to respect and keep the laws of the state,’ said an appeal that Krasin wrote from inside prison.

According to KGB records, fifty-seven dissidents were summoned for interrogation as a result of evidence given by the two men. Confronted by Krasin and Yakir, forty-two of them also capitulated.

The amount of resources put into the case – thousands of hours of agents’ work, hundreds of books, rolls and rolls of tape for recordings – was enormous, but it was fully justified from Andropov’s point of view. When senior dissidents such as these recanted their views, the demoralization among their friends was deep. And Krasin’s recantation was so total that some of his former comrades wondered if he had been a KGB plant all along.

This did not always work. Solzhenitsyn never broke, despite near-constant surveillance – the results of which Andropov reported to the Politburo regularly. Neither did Sakharov, and nor did the religious dissidents like Ogorodnikov.

For Andropov, any act of freethinking was dangerous, as he himself laid out in a speech in 1979, less than a year before Father Dmitry’s arrest. He said that Westerners often asked why, if the Soviet Union had built socialism, and was strong and prosperous, it felt so threatened by people who did nothing more than hold prayer meetings, write letters or draw pictures. Did this not suggest the government was actually rather weak? Not at all, Andropov replied. The secret of the Soviet Union’s survival was constant vigilance.

‘We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system – to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions of the overthrow of socialism.’

That meant that, although Father Dmitry saw himself as a simple priest, the KGB saw him as an existential threat. Today’s religious believer was tomorrow’s terrorist. Was he aware of how seriously the KGB took him when he passed through the doors of the Lubyanka that day in January 1980?

This was not the first time he had been picked up by the KGB and brought here. Back in 1948, when he was a student and had written an unwise poem about Stalin, this was the scene of the interrogation that sent him to the gulag.

Sitting on a low wall and looking at the Lubyanka building, I contemplated Father Dmitry’s state of mind in those first hours. He had been picked up at his church. He had thought he was being taken to his flat. He was instead taken to the Lubyanka, and on to Lefortovo. Everything was being done to keep him off balance.

Did his own personal experience of the horrors he would face if he were sentenced to prison help his resolve or undermine it? I thought back to Abez, to the dying village in the Arctic where the mosquitoes whined around my head and bit through my socks.

And I thought about Alexander Merzlikin, our bearded guide to the graveyard where Karsavin and the others were buried, and a conversation we had had as we waited on the platform for the train back south. A dozen or so local people stood patiently, making no movement, while Tanya and I waved madly around our heads, trying to keep the mosquitoes off.

‘I don’t know how they can stand the mosquitoes,’ I had said to Merzlikin, gesturing at the others. ‘I don’t know how you can stand them.’

He smiled and shrugged. He was not a man of many words.

‘And I can’t imagine what it’s like in winter,’ I added, slightly lamely.

He nodded: ‘Unless you’ve been here, you can’t.’

That was the problem, I realized. Father Dmitry knew what he was up against. He knew what a Russian prison was like in winter. But I did not. I could not appreciate the horrors he had lived through, nor the events that had shaped his mind. I needed to go back to the north, to see what it had been like for him in the cold and dark.