The Last Man in Russia

8 It’s like a plague

A Russian train in winter is a far better place than the same train in summer. With snow and the long dark night outside, inside was snug and warm. In summer, a top bunk is torment, but now I was happy to wrap myself in my blanket and, if I felt a little too hot, to hold my fingers against the ice on the windowpane. I could melt through it and leave little clear circles, then watch the crystals crawl over them once more.

The platform of the Yaroslavl station in Moscow had been hard-pressed snow and dirt. A man stood selling power tools. He had a heap of drills around his feet, and a cattle prod in his hand that he crackled at me as I walked past. On the opposite platform stood a train with destination boards proclaiming Ulan Bator and Beijing in three languages. It pulled out five minutes before us. In a few days’ time, we would be thousands of miles apart.

Just before our departure, a man came swinging down the train flogging knock-off phones. A woman, one of my neighbours, asked what he had.

‘Are you going to buy,’ he asked aggressively. She hesitated. ‘Then what’s the sense in showing them to you?’

The woman looked around at us in surprise at his sales technique, and we shrugged and grunted and introduced ourselves. On the top bunk opposite me was Andrei, a snub-nosed woodsman in a vest – ‘I am a driver, a sawyer and a boss. See, that’s four jobs’ – with strong opinions, particularly about people from Chechnya – ‘They should all be killed, they don’t work and see how much money we give them.’ Just a couple of weeks before, a suicide bomber had attacked one of Moscow’s main international airports, killing thirty-seven people. His sister had passed through the airport ten minutes previously, he said, so that may have been the source of his strong feelings, although the suicide bomber had not in fact been from Chechnya.

Beneath Andrei was a sulky-looking girl who spoke on the phone for most of the first evening, and slept for most of the next day. Opposite her, and directly beneath me, was Yekaterina, a pretty girl from Vorkuta who listened to everyone’s conversations and smiled without saying much.

Most of the conversation over the next day was driven by our neighbours on the other side of the aisle. They were a mother and daughter from Ukhta. The mother – her name was Angelina – had learned English a long time ago and was delighted to show off to the carriage by holding exclusive conversations with me about Prince Charles. I spoke to her in Welsh for a while when she asked me what this place Wales was that he was prince of. She then happily explained to our neighbours that she had not understood a word. They had not understood a word of the exchange that led up to it, so probably did not realize I had been speaking in a different language at all, but she did not let this undermine her triumph.

Angelina’s grandfather was in the gulag in the early days. He was a Ukrainian convicted in the 1930s, during the wave of collectivization that submerged Father Dmitry’s family along with millions of others. He was released after the war but not given permission to return home. His daughter – Angelina’s mother – came to join him, aged just sixteen, in 1946 and ended up marrying a Latvian and staying in the north.

‘They always wanted to leave but stayed. It’s hard to leave when your house is here, your children. They say that it was fun at first because there were so many young people, so many intellectuals. It’s not like that now of course,’ she said.

Angelina switched back to Russian to include her daughter, Olya, and the others and for a long time they all discussed life in the north. They were relatively well off, but Olya and her husband had stopped at just one child.

‘A two-room flat costs 2.5 million roubles,’ she said. I did a quick calculation in my head. That is around £50,000. ‘And a new-build is even more. How can you afford to have a second child? This is the problem. We would need more living space before thinking about another child.’

Angelina moved on to an account of a holiday she had taken in Jerusalem, with side pilgrimages to the Holy Places in Bethlehem and Nazareth. Olya was not listening, however. She was still mulling over living standards for young families.

‘You are lucky to have been born in Britain,’ she whispered while her mother was talking, so only I could hear.

Up in my bunk I lay on my side, with my hand under my head, and watched the forest rattle by. As the trees receded into the distance, the partition one and a half metres away, against which Andrei was sleeping, seemed to rush towards me at astonishing speed. It made me feel a bit sick so I rolled on to my front to look out directly into the trees. The snow closed off any view beyond the first or second trunk. Every branch was laden with snow. Every twig was laden with snow. Every crosspiece on every telegraph pole was laden with snow. The tops of the poles wore a little white wig. The houses in the abandoned villages were huddled under the weight on their roofs, their windows dark and their paths uncleared. Their fences were just a few inches of black spike sticking out of the drifts, and the mammals that had left loping tracks on the snow’s crust passed over them as if they were not there. The branches of birch trees sloped up, and the branches of fir trees sloped down.

I put in the earphones of my iPod and listened to the memoirs of Keith Richards, guitarist of the Rolling Stones, which I had brought for just such a long journey as this one. With my blanket tucked around my ears, and the snow glistening outside, I drifted off to sleep while he was driving through Morocco and getting stoned with Anita Pallenberg in the sunshine.

The whole of the next day I was on the train. Without the little kilometre markers of concrete and metal to look at – they were covered in snow – the main objects of interest were the occasional station buildings which we hurtled past without stopping. The station managers – women in their late teens, mostly, swaddled in furs like fresh-faced beavers – stood outside the buildings holding up little white lollipops of plastic. Otherwise, there was forest. When night fell it looked like a negative photograph. The sky was black, and the trees were white.

The next morning a sudden worry I had missed my stop jerked me awake. I had a crick in my right shoulder and winced as I craned around to look out the window. The sun was a pure yellow, like a lemon pip, rising above the bleakest landscape and sending delicate fingers towards us, reaching between the blue shadows and under the sky. Beyond the sun were the pale lumps of the Ural Mountains. Nearer, the snow was sculpted into smooth shapes by the wind. We passed through the village of Ugolny – Coal Town – without stopping. It was all ruins, with no people and no tracks except those of a mammal of some kind, perhaps a fox.

Ahead of us, a haze in the clear sky traced back to a tall chimney spewing a dark stain of smoke for miles and miles. We pulled into Inta through blocks full of shattered buildings and empty windows. I pulled on my jumper and my down-filled jacket – of a brand recommended by a mountaineer friend because it kept him warm on top of the Andes – then my gloves, which were in two parts. The inner stayed behind if I wanted to take the outer layer off to use my camera. Last came my hat.

I was ready for the cold, I thought, but I was wrong. Minus 34 degrees centigrade caught at my throat like sandpaper and at my thighs like a bucket of iced water. Nikolai Andreyevich had come to meet me. He was smiling under a peaked cap, but I was coughing in the cold and had to wait to return his greeting.

He had a taxi waiting. The road was sheet ice where it was not beaten snow, and we roared towards town at 120 kilometres an hour. For some reason, Nikolai Andreyevich had decided we should deny I was British. Perhaps he liked the pretence, or perhaps he was concerned that my presence here would attract unwelcome questions. I was, he told the taxi driver with studied nonchalance, ‘from Moscow’. I was not to speak more than I had to in case my accent betrayed the lie, but in any case the headlong journey was so terrifying I did not much want to say anything.

I had friends here now, so had no need to stay in the Northern Girl hotel and argue over how much they would overcharge me for a sagging single bed. Nikolai Andreyevich had persuaded a woman called Galya, whose hair was carefully dyed but resembled a squashed magpie, to rent me her flat. I was delighted to get into the warmth and to drink a cup of tea.

Her flat was decorated with icons and with calendars celebrating the various branches of the Russian armed forces. In the living room was a flashing picture of Jesus that I unplugged as soon as I was alone. After a shower, I approached getting dressed strategically: two pairs of socks, underpants, long underpants, trousers, T-shirt, jumper. My coat, gloves, hat and scarf would come after another cup of Galya’s revolting purple tea.

As we sat in the kitchen, Nikolai Andreyevich lectured Galya about Schopenhauer, then moved on to lecturing her about coal, engineers and other topics. She initially mistook the lectures for a conversation and tried to make comments, but soon learned not to. I ate biscuits, then left to find some lunch, while Nikolai Andreyevich went off on business.

Lunch was not a success. My first attempt, in a café round the corner called Ugolyok, failed when a waitress told me it was full. I could see that only one of the dozen tables was occupied but she insisted, with the certainty of a true believer, against all available evidence, that there was not a single empty chair.

My second attempt, at the Barakuda, Inta’s other café, started little better. The only dishes on offer were various wizened bits of meat. I asked the blank-eyed waitress if they could fry me some eggs. She said no. I asked about an omelette. No again. I asked about boiled eggs, suggesting I would be happy to pay 250 roubles – £5 – for two, which is a pretty reasonable price by anyone’s standards. No. How about scrambled eggs?

The waitress, who had the wattled neck and initiative of a tortoise, but none of the charm, refused, pointing out that she had no way to enter 250 roubles into the cash register if it did not refer to a specific dish. None of the dishes featured eggs. In fact, she was not sure they even had any eggs. Or, she added, maliciously, any potatoes. The stand-off was beginning to look unresolvable when the cook emerged from the kitchen and told me I could have the eggs and some mushrooms too if I wanted them. Since I was the only customer, she cannot have been very busy. Perhaps she agreed simply to shut me up.

I thought, as I ate my tinned mushrooms and mopped up the egg yolks with the one triangle of bread I had been allowed, that this was probably the worst café in the world.

After lunch, I walked through the cold to the museum where Yevgeniya Ivanovna greeted me with the friendly condescension that Queen Victoria would have used on a loyal native. I would, she said, have to register my presence with the local authorities. She would, she said, accompany me. She donned her fur coat, and a thick fur hat with a dangly thing on the side, and we set off.

We took a car through town. The scrubby trees looked sparse without their leaves, and the sun was just peeking through a gap between two apartment blocks. Footprints scarred the snowfields, and thickly dressed adults – men distinguishable from women because they were thinner and taller – hurried past, keen to get out of the cold. I saw no children.

The registration office was opposite a three-storey log cabin housing a Sekond Khend – one of the shops that have sprung up in provincial towns to sell old clothes imported from Europe – and overshadowed by the two chimneys of the town’s heating plant. They were pouring steam into the sky in two thick white columns.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna swept in magnificently, her fur coat brushing both sides of the door frame, enquiring who we needed to talk to, and demanding to know why the organization was no longer called the Passport Table as of old, but instead the Federal Migration Service. She had, she told everyone, spent an age looking for it in the phone book. We would, we were told, have to wait. Vladimir was not currently available and only he was permitted to deal with foreigners. Yevgeniya Ivanovna was having none of that, and pushed into his office. He was dapper in jeans and a white linen jacket and working on some papers. He ordered her out into the corridor, back among the common people. She did not take kindly to it at all.

As head of the museum, she was a significant authority in town and not accustomed to waiting in line. While I sat patiently on the folding seats alongside two other supplicants, she swept up and down the corridor, muttering insults to Vladimir and the world in general. She opened the door to his office, then slammed it behind her on seeing he was still engaged in paperwork, smouldering while she did so like a volcano in a fur coat.

After two or three more slams, Vladimir’s colleague – a curvaceous woman with a lot of flesh poorly concealed by a tight dress – emerged to remonstrate. ‘You have changed your name but kept your old ways,’ replied Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and the curvaceous woman vanished back behind the door.

We waited another ten minutes before being ushered into Vladimir’s presence. He had taken off the linen jacket. This costume change was presumably for my benefit since he now wore a brick-red nylon waistcoat bearing the English words Migration Control. I wondered what possible cause there could be for English-speaking migration control in Inta. What English-speaker would move here? Still, I handed over my passport and we went through the absurd bureaucratic rigmarole of registration.

This involved a series of pointless questions about my employment, my parents and my marital status, all apparently predicated on the assumption that I was moving to Inta for ever rather than staying here for less than a week. Vladimir copied down my details wrongly, however, putting my middle name before Oliver on his form. He therefore called me James throughout, much to the amusement of Yevgeniya Ivanovna, who giggled. The giggle was infectious, all the more so when we understood the gist of a conversation between the curvaceous woman and a mumbling old man on the other side of the desk.

The old man had apparently lost his passport, and she wanted to know why.

‘It was stolen, on the train,’ he replied, and she forced him to complete a long and tedious form before getting a replacement. He laboriously wrote out his name, then put a dash in the box intended for his place of birth.

‘Why have you done that?’

Shrug.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Sosnogorsk.’

‘Where’s Sosnogorsk?’

Shrug.

‘It’s in the Komi Republic, write that. No, not like that. Komi. How do you spell Komi? Four letters. Komi. You need to do it again. If you waste another form I’ll make you pay for it.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he protested.

‘Nothing? You think that wasting the resources of the Federal Migration Service is nothing?’

The curvaceous woman handed the old man a form, and turned back to her computer. He picked up the pen and immediately put a dash in the box for his place of birth. Yevgeniya Ivanovna, who had turned pink with the struggle of not laughing, had to leave the room at this point, while I took a few deep breaths and faced Vladimir once more. Eventually, he gave me back my passport, along with a slip of paper showing I was legally allowed to be in Inta.

‘James,’ he said solemnly. ‘One last thing, if you want to eat out tonight it is better to eat at home because some of our less cultured citizens may take exception to your presence on the territory of the Komi Republic.’

I could hear Yevgeniya Ivanovna snort with laughter on the far side of the door and, not trusting myself to speak, I nodded my thanks and walked out of the door. The curvaceous woman was about to notice that the old man had spoiled another form, and I would not have survived that.

I was not, as it happened, planning to risk an encounter with Inta’s less cultured citizens since Nikolai Andreyevich had arranged for me to meet another old gulag survivor. The long night had fallen on the town as I walked back to the Ukrainian cultural centre where we had arranged to meet. By the time I got there, I was shaking with cold. My thighs felt like they belonged to someone else. One pair of long underpants was not enough.

Semyon Boretsky lived a short walk away with his wife Yulia. Considering the misery that fate had heaped on them both, they looked astonishingly jovial, and teased each other in the way only an old couple can.

Boretsky was born in capitalist Poland in 1922. Poland won independence from Russia after World War One and managed to gain large tracts of territory that Moscow coveted. Stalin never forgot them and, in 1939, under a pact he reached with Germany, Moscow took them back. Stalin and Hitler extinguished Poland between them, and Boretsky’s country of residence abruptly changed from Poland to the Soviet Union, without him having moved house.

It was only after World War Two was over that the Soviet security services really got to sort out the new territories they had inherited. The former bits of Poland had a population with none of the habits of obedience learned in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Anti-Soviet guerrillas operated in western Ukraine for years after the war ended, and the civilian population suffered as a result. Thousands of young men were arrested, and sentenced to entirely arbitrary terms in the camps, and among them was Boretsky. He described standing in the prison while their terms in the gulag were announced.

‘They just walked along saying twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five. That was twenty-five years, you understand, but I only got ten,’ he said. I asked him why he got less.

‘I don’t know,’ he said with a broad smile, as if a decade in the camps was a small thing. ‘They needed young people in the north back then, and they didn’t want us to be in Ukraine, so they sent everyone. There were not enough convicted people to fill six wagons so they filled them up with people who were still just under investigation as well.’

On arrival in Inta, ‘buyers’ came to pick the labourers they needed from among the new arrivals. There was no pretence that they had come as anything other than slaves. He was named V-195 and sent off to make bricks.

‘This number was on my breast, and then in larger type on my back. It was on my hat and my knee as well so I could find my clothes after washing,’ he said.

If you worked well, he said, you got 600 grams of bread. There were fifteen of them in his shift and they had to make 20,000 bricks. That was the minimum required from their eight-hour day, which normally lasted ten or twelve hours. If they failed to make that target, they got less food: at first 400 grams, and then 200 grams. Workers weakened on the reduced diet, and could not work harder, and lost ground fast. Then they died. It was an efficient way to make sure only worthwhile prisoners survived. Fortunately for Boretsky, he was young and tough.

They got soup made of grain, or turnips, or potatoes, with a smear of oil on the surface. Sometimes there was a scrap of reindeer, or a bit of salted fish. In summer, it was good, he said, but in winter it would be frozen before they received it from the kitchen.

And it was so cold. ‘You wore two pairs of quilted trousers and the wind went through like you were wearing a tracksuit. If you worked well,’ he said, with the pride of someone who clearly did, ‘then every day counted as double until you were freed.’

This was a system instituted in the early 1950s to try to encourage more work from the prisoners. If they worked hard they not only got fed, but their days could count double, thus bringing the end of their sentence nearer. He had a few months chopped off as a result, but he still was in the camp even longer than Father Dmitry was.

‘I left the camp in 1957, and found work. I could not go home for another five years. I had lost my rights, they called it. I had to report to the police twice a month, on the 5th and the 20th.’

He did finally go home in 1962, but did not get on with it. He had been away in the Arctic for a decade and a half, and he found his old friends’ jokes about polar bears annoying. He did not have the right to live there anyway, so he came back to the north and worked until getting his pension: 30,000 roubles a month now between the two of them, and they were grateful for it.

‘People leave here to go to Usinsk or Vorkuta,’ said Yulia, his wife. ‘It is hard to live if you are not working. A lot of people with a good education do not work. I am glad we are on our pensions now, but even so medicine is expensive. We have three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.’

Boretsky was rehabilitated, and had his conviction quashed in the 1980s. He won compensation, but did not remember how much, 8,000 or 9,000 roubles, he said. That was when you could get a car for 6,000 roubles so it was not as bad as it sounds, though then again it still does not sound like much.

The brick factory is closed now. There is no demand for bricks, since no houses are being built, and the clay for the bricks came from the mine, which is closed too, so even if there was demand, the factory could not operate.

‘People say they will find gold round here,’ Boretsky said, with a hopeful shrug. ‘Then there would be work.’

Nikolai Andreyevich and I walked back through the bitter cold of the evening, our feet squeaking on the snow. He had designed this whole part of the town, he said, in the 1970s when he was working as an architect. It was one of his best ever jobs.

‘There was supposed to be another school there and an enclosed stadium where that park is.’ The park that he gestured at was just a blank expanse of snow, with bare saplings sticking through the crust, and beaten paths crossing it in a huge X. ‘The bosses here are idiots. They only think about their own pockets. I built a model of how this region would look and everything.’

He clearly mourned the vision he had had for Inta’s future, back in the 1970s when coal was rumbling out of the ground and the whole monstrous inertia of the Soviet Union was keeping the town alive. That was Inta’s high point, when people like him flocked here to earn the hardship wages that would set them up as aristocrats in the workers’ state. In 1970, fewer than one in a hundred of Komi’s population died every year. Now, the figure is twice that. For villagers, the figure now is triple what it was forty years ago. Over the same time period, the birth rate has fallen by more than 50 per cent.

Before catching the train north, I needed to buy a ticket to Moscow, since one would not be for sale in Abez itself. That meant a half-hour queue in the ticket office on the ground floor of one of the rotting concrete-slab apartment blocks that dominate Inta’s second-largest square. The office had a map of the old Soviet railway network on the wall behind the cashiers, and while I stood in line I traced the route I had taken to get here. North-east out of Moscow, the rails threaded the old gulag towns, until they sank under the weight of their own illogicality somewhere to the east of Vorkuta, just shy of the Arctic Ocean.

Stalin’s government had dreamed of building a spur parallel to Russia’s north coast, through the Urals, over the River Ob and on to a port on the River Yenisei. That would have connected the coal fields both to the Arctic Ocean and, via the rivers, to Siberia’s biggest cities. Thousands of prisoners died on the project, but the tundra was too unstable and the supply routes were too stretched. It was too much even for the 1940s. If it could not be done in the last years of Stalin’s life, it probably cannot be done at all.

Turning away from the map, I realized that the man directly behind me was a priest, and I struck up a conversation. Father Mikhail was twenty-nine – it seemed strange to call a man younger than me ‘father’, but that is what he called himself – and from Pechora, one of those gulag towns threaded by the railway. He had a narrow, suspicious face but was happy to talk when he learned I was researching the life of a fellow priest, even though he had never heard of Father Dmitry.

His chapel, which we visited when I had my ticket to Moscow and he had his to Syktyvkar, was in the Southern District, the only part of Inta with a still-functioning coal mine, and thus the only district that might have a medium-term economic future. Named in honour of St Nikolai the miracle-worker, his chapel shares a saint with one of the churches where Father Dmitry preached his sermons in Moscow. That struck me as a happy coincidence, and we wandered around inside.

Father Mikhail described the difficulties of building this chapel, Inta’s first, in minute detail, recounting every tiny triumph as a victory of the faith. A mine had closed and given him its garage, he said with a smile, as if the closure of the mine and the hundreds of subsequent job losses had been unalloyed good news. A demolished garage provided the bricks for the chapel’s walls. A well-wisher had provided the red corrugated roofing slabs. Another had given cement.

‘It is good that God did not give it all to us at once because we would not have noticed such a gift. It came hard and we all prayed and at every step we were joyful. When we finished the roof, we all shouted hooray. When we put in the door, we all shouted hooray,’ he said, as we stood in the roughly finished interior.

‘People think they have difficulties, but remember that when God went into the desert for forty days and was offered bread he refused it. It is like that. People think they want money and they bow down before it, but God said that man cannot live by bread alone. Now people say there is an economic crisis, but it is actually a call from God, telling us to throw away external things. The future of this town is in a return to faith, to trust in miracles.’

To demonstrate his point, Father Mikhail reached into the little booth where the faithful could buy candles and religious trinkets and, after a few seconds of studied concentration, selected a small icon of St Nikolai. Printed on 5mm board inside a gold rim, the icon showed Nikolai flanked on either side by tiny floating figures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It was a gift, he said, for me to remember our conversation by. Perhaps it would help me come to the faith, he added. He held it out to me, waited for me to take it and, when I did, folded his hands together in front of his groin.

He kept my gaze with a slight smile of sweet forgiveness without speaking for a few seconds. He held my eyes in fact, until I understood what he wanted. Of course: I should make a donation in exchange for the gift. It had taken me a little while to realize, and I was embarrassed by my own obtuseness. I reached into my pocket in a fret, dug out my wallet from under the layers of jumper and coat and pulled out a banknote. I noticed too late it was for 5,000 roubles, Russia’s largest denomination and almost half the cash I had with me. That is about £100. Indeed, it is more than a week’s wages for the miners who live round here. I could hardly put it back in my pocket though and fish out a smaller one, so I handed it over. He maintained his sweet look.

A taxi driver called Sasha drove me to pick up my bag and to catch my train. I had an hour to kill so, with grisly relish, he gave me a guided tour of the ruins of his town.

‘See there,’ he said, gesturing to some snow-covered humps. ‘There were houses there, but they’re gone. And there, on that flat patch, there was a school. That’s gone too. This town is dying.’

He said he wanted to move away, to give his six-year-old daughter the chance of a better future, but was struggling to find work anywhere else. A large thermometer on the main square announced that the temperature was minus 37. With delight, Sasha told me that Abez would be even colder.

At the train station, a single wagon waited for passengers, unattached to any engine. A man was smashing at repugnant icicles hanging from the hole that channels toilet waste out on to the rails, while boiling water gushed past him. A woman stuck her head out of the door, holding an empty kettle, and asked if it was defrosted yet.

‘Fuck no,’ the man said without emotion.

The carriage windows were filthy, and I could see only the vaguest outlines of the station buildings from inside. After twenty minutes or so, a few jolts suggested an engine had coupled on to our carriage. Another ten minutes, and the carriage moved off, complaining. My fellow passengers were mostly railway workers, even more heavily clothed than me in their thick, stiff, dark-blue jackets. I huddled over. With my gloved hands in my pockets, and my chin sunk into my chest, I could cherish a core of warmth that felt delicious and drowsy.

The fuzzy silhouette through the windows was now the jagged fringe of fir trees, and then the approximation of a weak sunset far off to the south. I persuaded the guard to open the door so I could photograph it, and the cold draught of the evening ripped through my coat and attacked the core of warmth I had so carefully built up. The sun finally slipped beneath the tundra to the south-west. It was 2.36 in the afternoon, and the long night was ahead.

A perfect crescent moon shone over Abez, close enough to touch but a million miles away. It was paired like in a Muslim flag with a single bright star, which swam in a pure black sky. A herd of snowmobiles had gathered at the station to welcome the two dozen passengers that alighted into the moonlight. Among them, his beard dusted with ice, and his eyes smiling behind his thick glasses, was Alexander Merzlikin, my guide of the summer.

He had a trailer behind his snowmobile, which he ushered me on to, sitting me on a reindeer skin and insisting that I wrap a fur-lined blanket around my legs. He asked if I was warm in my red down-filled jacket. I told him about my mountaineer friend and the Andes. This coat, I said, was the best Britain had to offer. He looked sceptical and muttered something about me needing to borrow a real coat. And we set off.

The single headlight cut into the dark, illuminating the cloud of powder snow thrown up by the two or three snowmobiles that had roared off before us. Alexander twisted the throttle and the wind cut into my face and tore at my arms. I began to wonder if he might be right about the jacket. The cold was intense – down to minus 40 and due to fall still further in the clear conditions – and physically painful.

The wooden houses of the village flicked past as I tried to shield my cheeks from the wind. By the time we arrived at Alexander’s single-storey home, I was rubbing my face to get a bit of warmth back into it. Alexander looked at me in confusion.

‘Why didn’t you just face backwards?’ he asked. I felt like an idiot, since that had not even occurred to me, and tried to create a convincing lie for my stupidity.

‘I wanted to see where we were going,’ I tried, hesitatingly. That did not even convince me, and Alexander laughed. He pointed me at the door and went to put away the snowmobile.

I entered a porch filled with firewood. The doors were lined with blankets, both for insulation and to ensure a good fit in their frames. I pulled off my boots, which were tight against my three pairs of socks. I wondered, when I realized how cold my toes were, if my boots might not be inadequate for these conditions as well. When I passed into the warmth of the house, a smiling handsome woman was waiting for me, Alexander’s wife.

‘I’m Natasha, but call me Auntie, everyone else does,’ she said, and we walked into the kitchen and she put the kettle on. The main feature of the room was a huge brick oven, as large as Alexander’s snowmobile, which gave off a pleasant heat. Three cats and a kitten were perched on top of it, among assorted pots and pans. They watched me with unblinking eyes as I sat at the corner of the table and drank my tea.

Alexander finally bustled in, his glasses iced over. He sat on a stool by the stove and lit one of his rough cigarettes. He scooped up a couple of shovels full of dusty coal and threw them into the fire. Then he sat back and looked at me. Why, he asked, had I come?

I explained that I wanted to experience the conditions that Father Dmitry had lived in. I wanted to feel, if only for a short time, the kind of conditions that he had endured and the kind of torments suffered by prisoners who refused to offer due homage to the Soviet state. We talked about that for a while, our conversation then wandering on to the conditions Alexander and his family lived in. His youngest daughter Dasha had now joined us. He told me about hunting and fishing, and the two women chipped in with comments and suggestions.

‘I used to hunt bears, but what do you kill them for? I don’t see the need to do this any more, it’s for young men,’ he said.

The next morning dawned pale. Lying in the warmth of the blankets, I could hear the wind moaning around the house, and I pulled on my two pairs of long underpants, three pairs of socks, vest, two T-shirts and trousers before getting out of bed. A pale orange stain on the sky was the sun poking its head over the horizon to see if the Arctic was warm enough for it. Before my window was a rolling unbroken, unscarred sweep of snow. To the right was a small stand of birch trees. Beyond was a tractor, its contours smoothed by a drift that made it almost unrecognizable as a man-made object. A little outhouse was off to the left, with snow pushed up its walls in an elegant sweep. When the sun finally persuaded itself to get out of bed, it was so weak I could watch it with the naked eye, and the bright patches it left on the snow seemed to emphasize the cold rather than alleviate it.

Alexander, when I walked into the kitchen, welcomed me with a cup of tea. He was sitting on his stool by the stove, smoking.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this but it’s warm, it’s only minus 27. But the wind is 15 metres a second and it bites,’ he said. The little black kitten was scratching in the coal by his feet, and I saw that the coal doubled as their litter tray. It seemed an elegant solution to burn the cats’ toilet waste, since they could hardly go outside.

Before we ventured out, Alexander examined the mountaineering jacket, and pronounced it inadequate. I would have bridled at the slur but, to be honest, after the cold of the previous evening, I had my doubts about it. He handed me a stiff blue coat as used by the railway workers, then, on seeing my boots, silently handed me a fur-lined pair. Before I put them on, he made me wear padded dungarees too. Fully dressed – with a jumper, scarf and hat as well as the collection of undergarments I’d donned in bed – I could barely bend in the middle. I felt like a knight in squishy armour.

Outside in the bright morning, the cold was still startling. My cheeks tingled, and I tucked my fingers into the palms of my gloves.

Boretsky, the old man in Inta, had said that the prisoners in the gulag wore two pairs of quilted trousers to work outside, with a daily ration of just 600 grams of bread. Here I was, full of a substantial breakfast, in two pairs of long underpants, trousers and padded dungarees, and I was already cold. It suddenly seemed a miracle any of them survived at all.

In a memoir published in 2011, Fyodor Mochulsky, a Soviet diplomat, recorded the early part of his career when he oversaw a convict-labour railway-building camp near Abez. This was before the railway was finished, so they had to take a steamer from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to Naryan-Mar, then a smaller ship up the River Pechora, then a smaller ship still up the Usa. The boat, with its cargo of building materials and food and prisoners, froze into the ice before they reached Abez, and they had to walk the rest of the way, sixteen days, over the icy crust that had formed upon the freezing mud. Mochulsky’s horse plunged through the crust.

‘The horse was thrashing around, and sinking even deeper into the marsh,’ he wrote. ‘We all shared a very worrisome thought: how will we explain that our horse disappeared when we arrive at the Gulag Camp Administration?… This crime, we all knew, had a corresponding legal statute: ten years’ imprisonment in the camps. By now, we had worked so hard to get that horse out of the quagmire that we were losing our strength. We were in total despair.’

That thought seems to encapsulate the bureaucratic insanity of the gulag. The horse was not pitied as a terrified living thing, but protected only to avoid punishment. Perhaps more terrible is that he, a free man, should accept a ten-year prison term as an appropriate punishment for losing a horse through no fault of his own. The guards were hardly more at liberty than the prisoners. The habit of giving and receiving orders was so engrained in both that it formed an internal prison they struggled to escape from.

When Mochulsky reached his final destination, a logging camp far in the wilds, the convicts had no houses or shelter of any kind. ‘They had scraped the snow off of several metres of frozen ground in the shape of squares, and had placed crudely cut branches down as makeshift beds. On top of these branches lay the prisoners, dressed in their greatcoats and army boots, “resting” after their twelve-hour workday.’

Mochulsky, who appears to have written the memoir to excuse his own role as a cog in the world’s largest-ever killing machine, recounted how he had mobilized the prisoners to build barracks for themselves and made them warm over the winter, and that they were grateful to him. That was the winter of 1940–1, when hundreds of thousands of prisoners died.

Perhaps more telling is an encounter he had later in Abez, with a teenage girl. A cashier, she had received a three-year sentence for an accounting irregularity, and had been raped for the first time before she even reached prison. In her first night in prison she was gang-raped, and was repeatedly assaulted by fellow inmates in transit camps and the camp barracks.

‘How could I help her? In the context of the camp, other than feeling bad for her, I could do nothing.’

The prisoners here were units to be worked to death. They died in their thousands, and were not remembered. That morning, as Alexander folded the fur blanket over me on the snowmobile’s trailer, he told me we would go to see the remains of such unfortunates: graves we had not seen in the summer, which had not won even the slight recognition of those in what is called the ‘memorial cemetery’, where Karsavin and the others were remembered as individuals, rather than ignored as random lumps in the tundra.

We set off along the bluff above the river, stopping to admire a recently finished church, which was built in memory of a young man who had died on a fishing trip. A little further on, towards the railway and the great bridge that had tamed the River Usa, we stopped and Alexander pointed to our right. He said something, but I could not hear, my ears being tightly swaddled in my woolly hat and my coat’s great hood.

I looked in the direction of his outstretched index finger and could see an obelisk against a clump of birches. It looked like a grave, so I stepped off the trailer to get a better look. I instantly vanished into the snow up to the tops of my thighs. I pushed back with my left foot, but just sank deeper. My heavy clothing blocked me from turning round, and I was forced to lie full length on the snow’s crust, heave myself round, then pull myself back on to the trailer with my gloved hands.

‘What did I tell you?’ Alexander shouted, and I realized that the unheard words had been a warning to stay on the trailer.

The obelisk, he told me, marked the grave of a boss’s daughter. I asked why it was all on its own, away from the main graveyard. He laughed, and coughed on the smoke of his cigarette.

‘It’s not all on its own, there are dozens of graves over there but the rest are for prisoners so they’re unmarked. They’re disappearing back into the ground. In a few years, you’d never know they were there.’

We swooped down the bluff, past the site where the North Stream gas pipeline will ford the river, and out on to the ice. In my attempt to reach the obelisk, snow had pushed down into my boots and was beginning to melt. We zoomed under the bridge, and Alexander pointed out the sticks that mark where fishermen have set their nets under the ice. He himself preferred a site 15 kilometres upstream, he said. It might be further away but the fish were better, and there was less competition. Fortunately, the cold winter water preserved any fish he caught, he said, and he only had to check the nets every three or four days.

I wiggled my toes. My feet were cold and stiff, and my camera was beginning to misbehave as well. The little screen that tells me the aperture and shutter speed, as well as all the various focus points and ISO information, was fading out. I turned it on and off again, but it did not return to life. I tucked it inside my coat in the hope that the warmth would revive it, but to no effect.

While we watched, a passenger train of nine carriages passed over the bridge. It was the first train I had heard since being here.

‘They used to pass every fifteen minutes, but that was before,’ said Alexander. ‘Now, you’re lucky if you get one an hour.’

We turned back for home and into the wind. The air hit me in the face like sandpaper. I had not realized that previously my back had been against the wind, and my face had been protected. I tugged my hat down as far as possible, and pulled my scarf up over my face. Just my eyes were exposed now, but the cold cut at my eyebrow ridge. It was sharp and inescapable. We were driving into both sun and wind, and it was weird to feel such cold and no heat at all from the sunlight.

By the time we were back inside, my face was extremely sore. I checked the thermometer on the way in; it was indeed just minus 27. Father Dmitry had experienced temperatures colder by 20 degrees or more, for longer, with a fraction of the clothing and far less food. Still, I was not prepared to stay out any longer no matter how much I wanted to know what he had lived through.

In the days of Mochulsky, the gulag boss, Abez was the centre of this part of the camp system. From here, the security chiefs co-ordinated construction at dozens of small camps up and down the railway, communicating by a primitive telephone and setting nearly impossible targets.

Mochulsky was told to build an embankment for a bridge over the River Pechora. ‘If you pull this off, you will get an award; if you don’t, we will shoot you,’ his supervisor told him bluntly. With such management techniques, it is hardly surprising that the bosses worked their labourers to death.

Alexander, however, came here much later. He was born in 1953 in the town of Uzlovaya, in the Tula region, which is just south of Moscow and is now close to being ground zero in Russia’s demographic catastrophe.

‘I left my homeland thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘I went back five years ago and it was like nothing had changed, nothing had improved: the same holes in the road, the same destruction; no one does anything to make it better. Our rulers say the correct words about democracy, about the market, about creating the right conditions but nothing gets done. We are the richest country in the world by natural resources, but look at us. This snowmobile we went out on this morning costs the same as a car – 160,000 roubles – but people were using machines just like this fifty years ago, there is nothing new here. All the technology you see is Western now, nothing gets made in Russia any more.’

For a hunter, of course, a badly made snowmobile or a poor-quality outboard motor can be lethal. Get stranded in the tundra without transport and you die, summer or winter. He had a brochure for snowmobiles from Germany and Japan, which he had picked up on a recent visit to town. We pored over it together, gazing at the shiny smooth bellies of these gorgeous machines. He lamented the shoddy quality of what he could afford.

‘This is the problem of Russia itself,’ Natasha said.

She was an Abez girl, born and brought up here. Her mother had worked as a teacher in a village on the far side of the river and, during the thaw, would walk across the river on the moving ice. It was that kind of self-reliance and edge that Alexander had fallen in love with when he first came north.

‘This was like a zoo, mushrooms, berries, everything,’ he said. ‘You could see the Urals on a clear day and I went out in the boat, sometimes for fish, but normally just for an adventure.’ His trips had made him an expert in the geography of the gulag. ‘It is not like what is said in the books. They say there was a camp here or a camp there, but it is not like that. There were camps everywhere. Last year I went up the River Lemva for 200 kilometres. There is a swamp there where the prisoners cut the trees and sent them down the river. There was prisoner labour everywhere and it was used for everything.’

After he has set his nets, he said, there is not much to do, so he explores the tundra a little, looks at what is around him.

‘In this place on the Lemva there’s only marsh, but we looked about and found the camp. Time hides everything but the first years I lived here I often saw barbed wire in the tundra, which must have been guarding something.’

Now we – or rather I – were warmed up, we saddled up the snowmobile again. I wanted to see again the memorial cemetery that we had visited in the summer, and to photograph the village. My camera had revived in the warmth, and this time I took the spare battery too. With a battery keeping warm in my pocket, to replace the one in the camera as soon as it died of cold, I hoped I could keep it on life support long enough to get the shots I wanted.

As we set off down the hill once more, Alexander’s two dogs tentatively followed us. They were thick-furred mongrels, shaggy as wolves, and were clearly not sure if they could accompany us on our trip. When Alexander did not stop them, however, they gained confidence and trotted up alongside the trailer. When we roared out on to the ice, they gambolled and danced like dolphins round a ship. They leaped and bounded with joy, sometimes running their noses along in the snow to cool down. They were mother and son, and the male – still puppyish though full grown – shoulder-barged his mother again and again, urging her to play. Sometimes, he would crash through the crust on the snow and come bouncing up again, grinning foolishly. Their tongues lolled, and they were the image of joy.

In reading books on the gulag, I always imagined the guard dogs as grim, oppressive beasts, but perhaps they were like these two, and their play would have been a comfort in the surroundings. It is hard to imagine how grins like these, or a nudge on the hand like the one I felt as we slowed to drive back up into the village, would not have cheered even the most downhearted of men. We headed off to the right, through the ruined farm buildings, to the cemetery. The path was impassable, however. No snowmobile had gone up there this winter, and without a compacted track to follow we ran the risk of crashing through the crust ourselves, and facing a struggle to extricate the heavy machine.

Frustrated in that plan, therefore, I turned to look at the village graves, hoping to see headstones with the names of gulag bosses and their families. The cemetery was too recent for that, however, so I idly scanned the names that were there. These graves were far more recent than I had imagined, most if not all of them post-Soviet. But there seemed an impossible number for such a small village. It was then that it dawned on me, as I looked from name to name, that here was the death of Russia, in hard dates, in front of my eyes. These graves were not of pensioners, but of young men and young women, dying before their prime. What chance did a village have to support itself, or to reproduce itself, if its new adults die before they can achieve anything? And if the villages are dying, then the country is too.

This was the alcoholic apocalypse that Father Dmitry saw starting in the 1960s, and fought against with his sermons. I wrote down the birth and death dates in a column in my notebook: 1988–93, 1990–2007, 1983–2007, 1962–1994, 1972–1992, 1986–2008, 1985–2005, 1975–2001. I saw a man born in 1949 who had lived to 1997, and smiled briefly. At least here was someone who had lived a full life, I thought, until I worked out that he had died aged forty-eight. His life was cut short by any standards I was used to, but it looked age-long compared to his young neighbours: 1971–2006, 1986–2006, 1970–2004, 1980–2005. That is not all the graves. Some I could not reach through the snow, and on others the drifts obscured the dates and names of the people buried beneath, but it was enough to show why Abez has shrunk like a slug sprinkled with salt.

Right by the path was the grave of Veniamin Arteyev, born May 1980, died October 2007. His little sister Zoya was next to him. She had been born three years after him, but died six months earlier, on 20 April 2007. And between them was their mother. Her birth date was obscured by snow, but she died on 7 September 2003. I looked at Alexander for an explanation of this family tragedy.

‘Their father sold moonshine. He wanted to be rich, and look what happened. The two kids died in the same year,’ he said with a grimace.

And a little further along was Andrei Kulikov, born March 1983; died, two months after his twentieth birthday, in May 2003.

‘He was my pupil, he died of this too,’ said Alexander, flicking his jaw-line in the Russian sign for getting drunk. ‘He shot himself in the end. They are all kids of twenty, twenty-four, twenty-five, they all died of this,’ he said, with another flick.

‘It’s like a plague,’ I said, at last.

‘Ah no, it’s worse,’ he replied.

A grey stone grave for a young man, 29 August 1981 to 28 October 2006, dredged up another memory for Alexander: ‘That one died on his snowmobile falling through the ice. They didn’t find his body for a year.’

There is apparently a disco sometimes in Old Abez, the little village the other side of the river where Natasha’s mother used to teach. Drunk and exuberant, the lads race each other back over the frozen Usa, heedless of the streams of ice-cold water that run on top of the ice, concealed by a thin crust of snow. One time there were six snowmobiles stuck in mid-river where they had crashed into water flowing under the snow and been abandoned.

Even the two dogs seemed subdued by the graves, and they sat in the snow by the snowmobile, waiting for us to move away.

The mood hung with us back to the house, and the conversation continued with Natasha in the kitchen.

‘If someone comes back from working on the railway, he’s cold, he’ll sit and watch television and drink vodka,’ she said. ‘People are lazier than they used to be. Or else now they are wiser, because they do not do what we used to do.’

She reminisced about the colder winters of her youth, and the heroic amounts of work people did to stay alive.

‘When I was small this was big, the biggest village of the north, 2,000 people at least in the village itself, and more in the hamlets around. Now there’s no one there,’ she said, leaving their fate hanging in the air, to be filled in by Alexander.

‘Last year eleven people drowned, falling out of their boats,’ he said.

Natasha took over again: ‘They weren’t all found. There was a lot of water this year and strong winds, and then there is this as well.’ She tapped her jaw-line.

Do the women – I tapped my jaw-line – as well, I asked?

‘They also. Everyone in Russia drinks now.’

The mood was bleak, as the conversation rolled on towards the fate of the country.

‘I was like you once,’ said Alexander. ‘I believed in improvement and the future. I condemned this and that and everything, but I started to change. Look at your son. He is small now like a toy but he will become big and you will care more about how he will do at school, what he thinks and so on, and this will become your main concern. Your own successes will be less important.’

Young people, he said, had no concern for the victims of the gulag, and no interest in the work he does to try to keep the graveyard respectable.

‘The younger generation collects berries on the graves, they light fires. Yes it happened, they say, these people died, but it has nothing to do with us. In March there will be a new mayor in Inta and he will come to the memorial cemetery. They always do. But he will only come once and never again. That’s what they do,’ he said.

Did that mean that officials, the state, had no interest in the graves?

‘The state has no relation to any of this. They cannot afford to provide us with gas, but they can build themselves offices. Everything is done through the arse, to screw things up,’ he said, with an unexpected profanity, the only one I heard him use. ‘The state makes you pay. If you don’t have to pay for the railway, they will make you pay for the mosquitoes that bite you. They find a way to make you pay.’ And that was why the collective farm had closed, and with it had gone all work but on the railway. ‘There was no point in keeping the animals, you have to make money. You have to be able to pay for processing and transport.’

There had been a geological survey base in Soviet times but it was found to be unprofitable, so it was closed and all the equipment sold off. Now it has been reopened.

‘We realized that in Russia all we can do is drink vodka and sell oil, so we need to find more oil. If we run out we won’t even be able to buy vodka, so these geologists are back,’ he said.

I asked him whether he was depressed about being a Russian.

‘I haven’t called myself that for thirty years. I don’t think about that. As soon as you think about being a Russian, you think about not being a Jew,’ he said. ‘I remember Zinoviev, the leader of the revolution, had a Jewish name because people began to talk about it after 1991, and to wash all this dirty washing and to talk about how the Jews were to blame for everything, how all the Jews were bad and all the Russians were good and so on.’

He shrugged. He had escaped to the pure clean north. He wanted nothing to do with all that dirtiness.

At four the next morning, I was a dumpy figure in the cold waiting for the train south, towards the sun. The thick clothes and darkness made all of us on the platform look the same, men or women, misshapen like clay dolls.

Alexander told me as we waited on the platform that ‘before’ 300 children had studied at the village school. Now there were just ninety. I thought about that word ‘before’. Before, there was order. Before, there were children. Before, there was work. Before, people drank less. Before, people lived beyond their twenties.

In Two Years in Abez, Nikolai Punin looked out at the grim view of Abez. ‘If you asked me what hell looked like, I would describe it just like that: the total rule of the straight line and the right angle. No free spirit was left alive by their obsession with tidiness, fences and orderly footpaths, all neatly maintained and swept constantly. Who said that hell is packed with good intentions? Quite the opposite, there were no good intentions, only meaningless ones and that made inmates lose all hope.’

A crowd of railway workers boarded the train and, although I had a ticket, it seemed I had to sit in the cheapest compartment until I got to Inta, where I could be assigned bed linen. Hunched in my coat, hat and scarf almost touching across my face, I dozed.

The train’s approach to Inta was heralded by the phone of a teenage girl on the bench opposite me. There had been no reception for the two-hour journey through the forest, but we were now within range of a mobile tower in the town. Her ring tone was a repeated English-language chorus: ‘I am a sexy girl. I like you fuck me well. I am a sexy girl. I like you fuck me well. I am a sexy girl.’ She grappled under her coat to find it, pressed the green button and began a muttered conversation with her mother. I wondered if she knew what the words of her ringtone meant.

The prevalence of such trashy English-language culture is, I supposed, another sign of the collapse of Russian confidence. The dregs of Anglo-America had been dumped on places like Inta, and been taken up for want of anything else vaguely vibrant. As I waited for us to pull into the platform, I remembered other examples I had seen up here. One taxi driver had affixed a semi-transparent sunshade across the top of his windscreen with the English words: ‘Guns don’t kill people, I kill people’ (I have corrected his spelling).

Most startling of all, however, had been a T-shirt – it must have come from a Sekond Khend – I had seen worn by a middle-aged man. Below a picture of a grinning male face, it bore the boast that ‘Five billion potential grandchildren died on your daughter’s face last night.’ What path did that take to get to its final owner?

When, after Inta, I finally got my bunk and snuggled down in the warm, I mused over how it was that English-language trash culture had penetrated so far into Russia. After World War Two, Western writers feared that Russia’s totalitarian state would conquer them all, but in fact the reverse happened. Russia today is like the opposite of A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess. At that time the Soviet Union seemed so powerful that he imagined a future when Western teenagers spoke a slang peppered with Russian words: moloko for milk; droog for friend; horrorshow for good. But that is not how it turned out. It is not Western hooligans using pidgin Russian as slang, but out-of-control young Russians speaking pidgin English. You see it in the graffiti along the railway lines: White Pride, Skinheads, Hooligans.

This penetration began in the 1960s, when the West pioneered mass fashion and the Beatles. Russians old enough to remember talk about listening to foreign pop music on home-made LPs fashioned from X-ray film, which was solid enough to keep the groove, although it did not hold it for long. But Western culture still had to sneak through the chinks in the Iron Curtain. That meant a random selection of Western bands and writers, protected by the communist state from more vigorous competitors, flourished in the Soviet Union when they withered and died at home. Like flightless birds on an inaccessible island, bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Judas Priest became hugely popular, expanding to fill evolutionary niches they had no access to in the West. Minor band members still play solo concerts in major Moscow venues when they might struggle to fill the back room of a pub in London.

Meanwhile, bands like the Rolling Stones are all but unknown. Their records for some reason failed to penetrate the Soviet counterculture at the right time. As the train rattled along, I plugged in the spoken version of Stones guitarist Keith Richards’s autobiography, and his words helped the thought process along.

‘We were not destroying the virtue of the nation but they think we are so eventually we’re drawn into a war,’ said Keith at one point as he described his arrest and conviction on drugs charges.

If Keith thought that his one night in Wormwood Scrubs was a declaration of war by the authorities, he should have looked at what was happening in the Soviet Union. His same post-war generation, his Soviet contemporaries, full of fiery optimism, attempted to do what he and his friends did and revitalize culture, inject it with a bit of dynamism. The first post-Stalin dissidents were young people who gathered at a statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow to read their poems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were the equivalent of the bohemians meeting in coffee shops in Chelsea or in Greenwich Village.

The Soviet state at first was not quite sure how to respond. Boris Pasternak was criticized for his Western-style novel Dr Zhivago, but he was not arrested, nor did he lose his country home in Peredelkino, a village where houses were reserved for artists and writers.

Two of his disciples – Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel – however, were to be made examples of. And it was their arrest and prosecution for the publication of work abroad that diverted the Soviet youth movement on to a new track.

‘The lack of opportunity to struggle for the Cause discouraged the most ardent Communists among the young,’ wrote one friend of Sinyavsky’s. ‘Can a thirty-year-old writer be expected to wait like a good boy for the censor to show a little magnanimity in ten or twenty years’ time, if then? Sinyavsky had not that degree of patience.’

It is noteworthy how many of the Soviet dissidents did not begin as rebels. Sakharov was a physicist. Zhores Medvedev was a biologist. Father Dmitry was a priest. In an ordinary society, they would have continued their activities unhindered. However, the state’s ideology kept intruding into their lives in ways they could not tolerate.

Sinyavsky and Daniel’s trial was publicized by four of their friends, who were then themselves arrested and prosecuted. Alexander Ginzburg only wrote up a transcript of a legal hearing and passed it to journalists, but that was enough to earn him five years in a labour camp. When he came out, he was of course a committed opponent of the regime.

Whereas young Germans and Frenchmen waved the red flag and demanded a general improvement of the world, starting now, young Russians fought for the most basic of human rights. The state’s oppression distorted the cultural movement. It started with poetry and writing, but it could not develop into the mass-market rebellion of the Western baby-boomers, because it never got out of the basements.

It was as if the police in Britain and America had arrested Buddy Holly and Cliff Richard, given them six years of hard labour and then kept arresting any of their friends who spoke out in their defence. It is hard to imagine how Bob Dylan’s protest songs or the Rolling Stones’ poseur rebelliousness would have then made it to number one.

In 1968, when Jean-Luc Godard filmed Keith and the rest of the Rolling Stones and intercut them with staged footage of actors pretending to be Black Panthers, eight real rebels showed astonishing bravery by gathering on Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Assaulted by the crowd, who shouted ‘scum’, ‘dirty Yids’ and – to Natalya Gorbanevskaya who had come with her baby – ‘The tart’s got herself a child, now she comes to Red Square’ – they were arrested.

Gorbanevskaya, because of the baby, was released, and she told Western journalists about the protest. The Western papers and radio stations splashed with it. It was rare to see any kind of crack in the monolith of the Soviet Union. But their protest simply heightened the division between dissidents and mainstream society, which mostly approved of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and thought the Czechs should be more grateful for the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.

‘It was very strange,’ Gorbanevskaya told me. ‘My name became famous and there was this big noise about me, and it was like they could send troops into Czechoslovakia but they could not arrest me.’

At that time, the Kremlin was still embarrassed by unfavourable media coverage. That kept Gorbanevskaya safe, although she was eventually thrown out of the country. Dissidents like Sakharov became skilled at using the Western radio stations and newspapers to their own advantage, and a group of brave activists kept the protest movement alive for a decade. It was under cover of that embarrassment that Father Dmitry’s free community developed. The Soviet government no longer had the heart to kill thousands, tens of thousands, of people to squash an idea, and any other technique was less effective.

It took the KGB more than a decade to penetrate and demoralize and finally crush the dissidents, culminating of course with the arrests of Sakharov and Father Dmitry.

As I sat and listened to Keith describing Swinging London, a long line of snow along a telephone wire slipped and fell. At first, it dropped as one long cylinder, but it broke up as it accelerated, so, by the time it hit the snow beneath, it was just a cloud of powder. Mammal footprints trotted through the forest beneath the wire. A little later we mounted a bluff, and I could see for kilometres over the snow and trees. No one lived there.

Father Dmitry was not sent to the camps in 1980. Instead, they kept him in the relative comfort of a cell in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. Within its high walls, he was free to contemplate his future during the days of inactivity, interrupted only by occasional interrogation. He knew, as he lay there, that his fate was in his own hands. He must have dwelled on the potential misery of a fresh term in the camps, back in the cold, stripped of the church where he served and the love of his children. In 1980, he would turn fifty-eight. Imprisonment would be a heavy burden for him to bear. He had no idea when he would see his friends again.

9 The unworthy priest

Every one of Father Dmitry’s friends remembered the next time they saw him, however. Father Vladimir’s shoulders fell slightly when he told the story. He looked down at his hands on his lap.

‘Yes, I saw him on television,’ he said. ‘Someone rang to say they were showing him on television, so I turned it on. There were a few of us and we watched. It was a shock.’

It was an experience he shared with citizens of the whole Soviet Union. Moscow at that time only had three television channels. Other regions had fewer. That meant tens of millions of people would have seen Time, the most popular daily television programme in the country, on 20 June 1980. Most of them probably heard of Father Dmitry for the first time that evening. Although he was famous among dissidents, and among religious believers, this was his first appearance on a national media channel. The vast majority of Soviet citizens would have had no idea who he was.

They would have seen a plump man with a beard, a stereotypical Russian priest, happily reading out a prepared statement, then answering questions from a man off-camera called Sergei Dmitryievich. What Father Dmitry said would have satisfied the most hawkish Soviet Cold War warrior, because he rejected everything he had ever stood for. He admitted the ‘systematic fabrication and dissemination abroad of anti-Soviet materials’. He admitted being a tool of the West working to destroy the Soviet state. This was not like the show trials of the 1930s. He did not look traumatized, thin, pale or disoriented. On the contrary, the most shocking thing was that he looked himself.

Throughout the conversation, he smiled and appeared entirely content with what he had done. He looked well fed. Dissidents watching said it would have been better if he had been bloodied and bruised. At least it would have made sense. He was admitting to crimes that could bear a prison sentence of seven years, yet he seemed happy. His appearance was so at variance with what he was saying that observers wondered if he had been given a euphoria-producing drug.

The Washington Post’s reporter, trying to explain what he had seen, called this ‘one of the heaviest blows to be struck in recent years against the struggling Soviet human rights movement’. ‘Dudko occupied a unique and important place in the spectrum of influential dissidents who have risked jail to speak out for individual freedoms within this authoritarian system,’ the article said. ‘Unlike the wooden and forced performances given by other dissidents who have recanted in recent years, Dudko looked and sounded both eager and intent upon recanting his crimes.’

Keston College, a UK-based organization researching the oppression of Soviet believers, refused to draw any conclusions from the appearance, apparently reluctant to confront the possibility that he might have been speaking voluntarily. Keston had been at the forefront of keeping Father Dmitry’s fate in the world’s eye, and its publicity had helped have him praised in Britain’s House of Commons by a Foreign Office minister, as well as in the United States and elsewhere.

‘Father Dmitry’s “confession” is, perhaps, the greatest body-blow suffered by the Orthodox Church since… 1971,’ Keston said.

And that night, while Time was showing him rejecting his life’s work, printing presses all over the Soviet Union were churning out copies of Izvestia, the country’s second newspaper after Pravda. The article he wrote for that only took up a quarter of a page, but it resonated around the world. It was proof of Father Dmitry’s surrender.

Under the banner headline ‘The West Wants Sensations’, Father Dmitry calmly and methodically destroyed himself. ‘In January 1980 I was arrested by the organs of state security for anti-Soviet activity. At first I denied my guilt, and announced that I had not spoken against the Soviet government, and that as a priest I am fighting against Godlessness. But then I understood, I was arrested not for my faith in God, but for a crime.’ He acknowledged that he had done harm to his country, and thanked the government for the patience it had shown towards him over the years. He should, he now realized, have been working with the state and not against it.

He wrote that he had told himself, ‘You are fighting against all criminality: drunkenness, hooliganism, moral decay, for the strengthening of the family… but you are not being blamed for this, the Soviet government is fighting this too.’ He had always said the reason he did not work with the state was because it was spreading distrust, profiting from the sales of alcohol, encouraging abortion. Now, he had changed his mind.

And he apologized to the bishops too. He said he had been wrong to lecture them when he should have been listening and obeying. By publishing books abroad, he had given ammunition to the state’s enemies. ‘Do you really think that in the West they understand us better than we understand ourselves? Even the ethnic Russians who live there, they long ago lost touch with their homeland and what is happening here.’

He rejected his self-published newspaper. He rejected the books he had written. He named specific foreigners – a journalist from the New York Times, an American professor, a Belgian bishop – who had helped him, at significant risk to themselves, by smuggling his writings out the country. He named foreigners who had tried to bring foreign-published works into the country and who campaigned for believers’ rights. And he rejected them all. ‘I now understand that foreigners who interfere in our internal affairs will bring us nothing but harm.’ He banned the further publication of his books. He wanted to make a clean break with the past, and to start again with a new message. There would be no more talk of boycotts, of resistance.

‘We live on Soviet land,’ he wrote in conclusion.

On my return from the Arctic, I visited Tanya Podrabinek, the Muscovite I had befriended in the north the previous summer, at her home in the Moscow suburb of Elektrostal. There her husband Kirill told me how Father Dmitry’s Izvestia article sped through the camps system, and was used by prison guards to assault dissidents’ morale. By summer 1980, Kirill was close to the end of a three-year sentence he had received after he and his brother Alexander refused to abandon their investigations into military hazing and punitive psychiatry.

‘It was three weeks before the end of my term, and the prosecutor came to talk to me. This was in 1980, in June, and he brought me that copy of Izvestia, the newspaper,’ Kirill said.

I had a spare photocopy of the article and handed one to Kirill, and we sat and read it through together. It was the first time Kirill had seen it since that June day in 1980 when he was anticipating his imminent release. He finished and handed it back. He seemed keen to get rid of it as quickly as he could.

‘The prosecutor gave it to me, and he said: “Look, what your friends are saying,”’ Kirill said. ‘I told this prosecutor that Dudko was a priest and not a fighter. Perhaps I was not fair because among those priests there were tough ones too, but I think the prosecutor understood.’

It is obvious why the prosecutor showed the article to Kirill. This was a propaganda coup for the government of almost unparalleled magnitude. A senior dissident was calling on anyone who opposed the government to give up the struggle and obey its orders. All over the country, political prisoners were being shown the article and offered a deal: surrender and be released. Kirill refused to surrender, however, and retribution was swift. A new court case was quickly arranged, and he received three more years under the law that criminalized any comments deemed to be anti-Soviet. He had been careless in whom he spoke to.

Although Father Dmitry’s betrayal of his ideals did not work on Kirill, the Soviet government expected it to have a major effect on society at large. It was better even than a show trial, with the staged humiliation and then execution of an opponent. By breaking a dissident, parading them and releasing them, you showed that the reward for submission was a new life, rather than death. Previously, in the 1930s, the state had just wielded its power to crush opponents. Now, it had learned finesse.

Father Dmitry also addressed a letter to the patriarch, dated the same day as the Izvestia article, which was published with presumably deliberate understatement on page 40 of the Patriarchate’s official journal. ‘My first words are: forgive me,’ Father Dmitry wrote. He signed off with the words: ‘the humble novice of Your Holiness, who is not worthy of calling himself a priest but, if you will allow it, I will dare to sign myself, the unworthy priest D. Dudko’.

Patriarch Pimen, the man before whom he abased himself and whom he was asking for forgiveness, was someone who had praised the ‘lofty spiritual qualities’ of Andropov, the KGB chairman who locked Christians in mental hospitals. Patriarch Pimen had singled out the ‘titanic work in the cause of international peace’ done by Brezhnev, under whom the Soviet Union invaded both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He had won the Order of the Red Banner for his ‘great patriotic activities’, at a time when his priests were being arrested. If anyone needed forgiveness it was the patriarch, but it was Father Dmitry who was asking for it.

On 21 June, the day after his television appearance, he was released from prison. He had been inside just over six months. His wife Nina told foreign journalists that he was tired and turned them away when they tried to talk to him. A couple of days later he released a statement for them: ‘Leave me in peace, stop trying to pull me into some kind of politics, I am just an Orthodox priest, and one on Russian soil.’

Tanya’s husband Kirill refused to judge Father Dmitry for what he had done, but was ruthless in his assessment.

‘I just think he was weak. There are several different elements here. If you are weak, do not invite attack. That is the first thing. Secondly, it is one thing if you just answer for yourself, it is another if you answer for others. Around Dudko was a group of young people that he had gathered around himself, and his recantation was a heavy blow to them.

‘He showed weakness, and that was far from harmless to those around him. The prosecutor came with this statement to me, for example. And the third element, which is the most important, is that if you show weakness, you should retire from public life afterwards. You should not shout out again, but he did live a public life afterwards and that is not good.’

Father Vladimir’s assessment at the time was far harsher. When Father Dmitry, his spiritual father, had been in detention, he had battled to keep his plight noticed in the world’s media at considerable risk to himself. It had, it seemed, all been for nothing.

‘I would not say they fooled him, rather they broke him. I stopped going to see him then. A lot of people left and did not come back, they all said he had been broken. And if he was broken, then he was not from God because a martyr should not be broken,’ he said, still with his head lowered.

10 The KGB did their business

Inside Father Dmitry’s flat, behind the door closed against the journalists, he faced his family. His wife, ever understanding, was just pleased to have him back. But his son – who would grow up to be a priest himself, but at the time was a student who had faced harassment of his own for his Christian beliefs – was angry, red in the face. Even his eyes were red, Father Dmitry wrote later.

‘What is wrong with you? Have you gone mad?’ his son demanded.

‘What? Well, you’re still young. And how would you survive without me? I haven’t rejected God and the Church,’ Father Dmitry replied.

‘I don’t know what I will do now at college. I would like to vanish off the face of the earth.’

One of Father Dmitry’s spiritual children expressed the shock and concern of them all in an open letter: ‘I, Marina Lepeshinskaya, accuse the organs of the KGB of the murder of my spiritual father.’ The Western journalists kept coming to the door, asking to see him, just to see what he looked like, just to talk to him, to ask him to explain himself, but Father Dmitry stayed in his room.

On the second day, he wrote, he hid away and cried, as he began to see quite how enormous a step he had taken. His wife’s sister, walking home, was grabbed by a terrified woman who said that his former disciples wanted to kill him because he had sold them out. His sister-in-law rushed home. He told her that there was nothing to worry about, but they still went outside to check, and he decided never to sleep alone in case the threat was real.

Perhaps, while he stayed inside, he re-read the statement he had written for Izvestia, and saw the names of the people, people who had previously considered themselves to be his friends, whom he had accused of wanting to undermine the state and wanting to harm the Russian people.

Desperate in his guilt, he wrote to one of them, Archbishop Vasily of Brussels. ‘If you had told me that I would behave like this, then I would have considered it as slander. But it appears that I overestimated my powers, I have fallen so low, like no one before me,’ he wrote. ‘I have never suffered such torments as now. I now know from my own experience what hell is. I am ready to do anything to correct the situation, but I don’t know how.’

He did not want to see journalists, and he did not want to see accusing faces around him, so he fled to the countryside, where he issued a statement for his spiritual children. He tried to summon up the old fire, the old arguments, as if nothing had happened. ‘The first thing I beg of you is don’t separate, have love for each other. Forget your personal grievances, forget your ethnicity. Now we need to unite like never before in the face of this danger,’ he wrote, in words that he could have written a year earlier.

But how could they trust him, let alone unite around him, when he had named their closest foreign allies in print? The obvious question they would all be asking would be: who else did he betray? He had had months of interrogations and plenty of time to list every single one of his friends for the KGB files. Then, the second thought would have been even more worrying still. If the group’s leader could crumble, then so could anyone. And if anyone could collapse and give their secrets away, then how could anyone trust anyone at all? The group of friends had held together in his absence by campaigning for his release, and by keeping his plight in the headlines. Now, they did not even have that to unite them.

They were stunned by one still more enormous question: why did he do it? How had a man who had been so brave for so long surrender so willingly? It is a question that still divides his old friends.

Alexander, Zoya junior’s father, was possibly the only one of his spiritual children who did not desert him and he refused to admit that Father Dmitry had done anything wrong: ‘I was not sad, I was pleased. He showed he was a true son of his homeland and his Church. It was not a fall, it was a confirmation. By shaming himself before pagans and non-believers he told the whole world he was a believer.’

But he was speaking three decades after the event. In Lefortovo itself, Father Dmitry had been subject to the whole range of KGB tricks to make him change his mind. He had a cellmate accused of currency speculation. This was one of the KGB’s favourite ploys. Currency speculation was a crime, but one that no one had moral qualms about. That meant anyone would happily chat to a black-market moneychanger. The man played on Father Dmitry’s fears of imprisonment, and urged him to co-operate. What harm could co-operation do?

He also had an extremely convincing interrogator called Vladimir Sorokin. Once the cellmate had persuaded Father Dmitry to at least talk to his interrogator, which took six weeks or so, then Sorokin enlarged the chink to gain access to his soul.

Sorokin produced writings by a theologian called Yevgeny Divnich, who had been imprisoned first by the Gestapo and then by the KGB. He had been a friend of Father Dmitry’s in the camps, but had not been released after Stalin died. Divnich held out against the KGB for more than two decades. He once told Father Dmitry that if a day went by without him somehow harming the Soviet state, then he considered the day wasted.

But he too surrendered in the end, ground down by the system and by decades in the camps. ‘My Christ supports the Soviet government,’ Divnich wrote in words that Father Dmitry later quoted approvingly. ‘It is impossible to defeat the Soviet government with one’s own primitive powers. Opposition is a primitive power, and obliges you to unite with foreigners and that is treachery, you must betray your homeland.’

That was the choice that Father Dmitry was given. As a Russian, he wanted to support Russia. As a Christian, he wanted to oppose the Soviet Union. But, if he opposed the Soviet Union, he was allying with foreigners and thus fighting against Russia. He had to choose, therefore, between his religion and his country and he chose his country. That was how he himself justified his choice.

‘I am all the same a patriot’ was one of the things that the television showed him as saying. But his resolve collapsed on the outside, when he understood what he had done.

On fleeing Moscow, he was stuck miserable in the village of Baydino in the Tula region, where he had a house. I went to find it.

The Tula bus station was bitterly cold. Minibuses stood in ranks in a yard of compacted snow, more grey than white. Bus information was hard to get hold of. I could get to Arsenevo, which was most of the way to Baydino. From there, the woman at the enquiries window told me, there might be a bus or I might have to make my own way. It was minus 32 when I left the hotel. I had donned two sets of long underpants, as well as my usual vest/T-shirt/jumper/jacket combination on top. As I waited for the Arsenevo bus to edge out of line and come forward for passengers, I mused on the strange disconnect between my face, which was pinched and sharp with cold, and my legs, which were slightly too warm.

I had reading material in my bag. Father Dmitry, when he hid away in Baydino, wanted to reach out to his disciples. So he started publishing his newspaper once more. He would have to send it out by the mail, which meant it could be intercepted and would have little effect, but it was important to his self-respect that he did something. So, on 9 November 1980, after almost a year’s gap in publication, his In the Light of the Transfiguration came hammering off his typewriter again. And I had it with me.

The minibus finally admitted the handful of us heading for Arsenevo. I arranged myself carefully, wedged up against the wall of the cabin, coat zipped up to the top, hat pulled down, scarf tightened. Both gloves – the thin inner and the padded outer – were on my left hand, but only the thin inner one was on my right, so I could hold the pen and take notes.

But no one was listening.

‘Those who were around me, they are all gone,’ he wrote in the first edition of his newspaper. ‘Now, when I am summoned, only my wife goes with me. And one other, who they say doesn’t understand anything anyway.’

The language of crucifixion that he used before to describe the fate of his country, that was now used for himself. He was on the cross, as Jesus was. This was his personal Golgotha, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion.

I huddled tighter into my coat. As we drove south-west out of the city, the sun rose off to our left, casting orange tendrils over the snowfields. A woman stopped the bus to get off, letting a gust of cold into our warmer cabin, and the four other passengers pulled their scarves tighter around their faces. My clumsy fingers, made thicker by cold and gloves, struggled to turn the pages. As we drove towards Arsenevo, Father Dmitry’s torment deepened.

‘Spiritual children, my friends, where are you? Answer me. Let us unite to do God’s work around Christ. If you think I fell then, when we unite, you can raise me. Surely you will not trample on me with your feet when I lie at the foot of Golgotha?’

It is clear from his words in the next week’s edition that no one replied. He keeps admitting his guilt, saying that everyone is guilty, admitting his own guilt again. ‘I begin to understand how people, unable to withstand disgrace, end their own lives. This was how Judas, presumably, could not withstand his disgrace. And people feel sorry for Judas. How unhappy he was, who could be unhappier than him?’

We pulled into a little village and stopped to fill up with diesel. As the fumes crept into the cabin, I began to feel sick. I do not normally get travel sick, but this seemed to be an exception, so, as we drove out, I looked at the road. We crept up a hill, and rounded a roundabout adorned with a large globe. The sun was a glowing orange hub in the sky, but so low I could still look at it without my eyes hurting.

The sickness faded, but returned as soon as I plunged back into Father Dmitry’s world. I realized then that this was not travel sickness at all, but intense shame. His guilt was so huge that it seeped off the page. It was the feeling you had as a child when you had done something wrong and felt dreadful. You want your mother to hug you and make everything better, but you know that is impossible because it is you that is to blame. It was the torment described by Father Dmitry, and his knowledge that he had betrayed everyone and everything he loved, that was making me feel sick in sympathy.

‘I have stopped getting letters. It’s true, at the beginning I received a few letters, but they have stopped. Have I been forgotten or are my letters being intercepted?’

The fingers of my right hand, the hand with only the thin inner glove on it, were stiff with cold and would barely unbend. I tried to massage them and dropped my pen, which evaded my clumsy attempt to catch it. It fell on to the floor of the cabin and into the slight gap left by the sliding door. I felt still sicker as I tried and failed to coax it out. Without a pen to take notes, I sat and watched the road. The sunlight was less orange now, more buttery, as we drove on a bleak empty road through a forest, the colours stripped out of the landscape.

We crept to the top of a hill and met a huge view: white and khaki, forest and fields stretching far away.

Father Dmitry was desperate to confess, and to rid himself of his feeling of guilt, but there was no one to confess to. He tried issuing a few statements, reaffirming his pre-arrest convictions, but that just tied him in knots with the KGB, who then threatened him with rearrest. Each twist in his position rendered him less believable anyway.

Without friends to talk to, or the debates he loved so much, he was thrown back on to his newspaper, into which he poured his anguish. His family – his son Mikhail, his daughter Natalya, his wife Nina – was still around him, but they did not provide the debate he wanted. That had come from his spiritual children.

Left alone, his guilt chewed away at him.

‘The telephone is quiet. No calls and no one comes. They just judge me. They judge. They judge.’

In his newspaper, he tried to explain the choice he had made, how he had tried to reconcile the biblical instruction to ‘render unto Caesar’ while also remaining true to God. This is a difficult issue to square for any theologian, but particularly so in the Orthodox tradition, which developed in the Byzantine Empire where the emperor was the protector of the Church. There was no theological defence against an atheist government, since the government was assumed to be the shield of the Church. Priests had no tradition of rebellion, of asserting the Church’s authority against the government, as the Catholic and Protestant clerics in the West did.

He was faced with two different instructions – obey the government, and obey God’s law – but could not obey both of them. He was, as a law-abiding man and an Orthodox Christian, torn between them. In the 1970s, he had raised God’s laws above human laws. Now, however, the KGB had reminded him forcefully of the power of human laws, and he was pulled in two directions.

‘You are violating the rules of the fight. Instead of ideological methods, you are using administrative, legal, punitive measures,’ he wrote in an imaginary dialogue with the KGB that he composed around this time.

Before his arrest, his newspaper had described the collapse of a community in real time. Now, it was describing the collapse of an individual. I could not – despite the lack of pen to take notes, despite feeling sick – stop reading. The sun flickered in my eyes through the trees and the cabin window, and the words were brutal, like a long, sliding car crash lasting hours.

We stopped in a small village, where a red-brick church with a cross was the centrepiece of a row of houses. I took the opportunity to retrieve my pen, and read on.

‘We all need confession. But who will confess first? Everyone is called to confession, but let someone else confess. And no one even wants to understand my confession. Everyone is leaving, I am left almost alone, just with my family, and even Mikhail wants to go to Moscow.’

Mikhail, his son, was angry and told him what everyone was saying.

‘What they are saying is that your books should be burned, that no one should come to you, that you cannot be a spiritual father,’ Mikhail said. Father Dmitry replied that he did not believe it, but his son insisted: ‘They are sparing you, a lot tougher things were said as well.’

And Father Dmitry began to get angry. His friends would not forgive him. No one was coming to see him, and he could not believe this was out of choice. Someone must be stopping his old friends from coming.

‘I don’t understand, what is this? Revenge? And for what? Are they fulfilling someone’s orders, or just inspired by the spirit of evil? Are they stripping their father bare to laugh at their father?’

It was a beautiful day now. The roads were almost empty, and nothing moved in the wide flat landscape ahead of us, just the puff of exhaust from a car a couple of hundred metres in front. It was hard to reconcile the beauty around me with the pain on the page.

‘Christians are leaving another Christian in sorrow. I understand that my sorrow is a bit different, that it’s not the kind to inspire sympathy. And anyway I’m not talking about sympathy, but do you really not understand that they are dividing us, to drive in a wedge, to play on our mistakes?’ he wrote. But he himself was as much to blame as any of them, accusing his old friends of abandoning him, of obeying orders, of anything he could think of.

His community was truly shattered. The lesson was clear: totalitarianism does not allow independence. It cannot. Even the smallest attempt to assert autonomy is a threat to the whole. Father Dmitry had understood this in the 1970s, which is why he encouraged hope and trust. Those are the only weapons that can be used against a state determined to destroy society.

Father Dmitry had thought he had been serving his nation by spreading trust, and fighting abortion and despair, but, in doing so, he was defying the state. And that was not allowed. That was why he had to be crushed. His fate parallels the fate of his whole nation. Through the twentieth century, the government in Moscow taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical and treacherous. That is the root of the social breakdown that has caused the epidemic of alcoholism, the collapsing birth rate, the crime and the misery.

Father Dmitry understood quickly, on emerging from detention, what had happened to him. He understood that he had been a danger to the state, and why the state had to isolate him or destroy him. The concepts of trust, hope and faith were too dangerous to be allowed to flourish. Most Russians caught in the national decline did not have his awareness. They drank or fought without knowing why life was so miserable. Father Dmitry tried to rebuild the old community, to get working again. He appealed in what was left of his newspaper for unity, for his spiritual children to come back, and for them to try again. But who would come back to him now? It was too late.

On 22 February 1981, he typed his last issue. He said he had to stop publication so as to keep his secrets to himself from now on, but I think he was just depressed that no one read his paper. He had certainly shown no desire to hide secrets in the past. I finished the page. It was incredibly cold.

In Arsenevo, it turned out that buses to Baydino did exist, but that they would not do me much good. There was one in the morning, which I had missed by more than an hour, and one back in the evening, for which I would have to wait six hours. If I were to wait for the evening one, I would still have no way of getting back again unless I was prepared to spend the night there. The temperature was if anything even lower out here in the countryside, and my breath was a thick cloud in the waiting room, so sitting around was not an attractive option. I walked out into the cold and looked for a taxi. There was no shortage. Half a dozen men were waiting in their cars for non-existent customers, and I hired the first: a stocky driver with a moustache in a white Zhiguli.

It was eerie outside the little town. The cold was so intense that the upper branches of the birch trees were covered in hoar frost, as delicate as the first leaves of spring but white and sparkling. Sometimes the low sun caught a tree just so, and then every crystal would light up and the whole glowing tree was transformed into something more magical than any neon display. Sometimes the birches were a dark screen along the road, and then I could see between them to the vast featureless fields, their snowy crust unscarred. At other times the road ran through a dense wood, threatening in black and white.

There were no other cars on the road, which stretched ahead of us in a straight, desolate line. A black figure appeared on the horizon after a while and trudged onwards without stopping as we drove past. He was the only sign of life we saw for the whole half-hour it took to reach the village.

We turned right, following the sign for Baydino, then crossed a small iced-over river and stopped on the far side. The driver gestured to a line of houses that paralleled the road. That was it, Father Dmitry’s refuge when the storm broke over him.

‘Quiet, monotony, fresh air, the absence of a mass of people, two or three women walk by, a boy runs past, sometimes a drunkard passes, totally inoffensive, just swaying slightly: after the city’s din and fuss, it was unusual,’ he wrote later, before going on to describe their first evening. ‘Some young voices unexpectedly began to sing, and they played on the balalaika. They sang for a long time, and then were quiet. Calm, quiet, and nothing else. For my children it was boring, my wife was also dissatisfied, but I felt like I was in heaven.’

I had specific instructions to help me find the house he had lived in. I knew which way its door pointed, how many fir trees were in its garden and what colour it was painted.

I did not anticipate the search would take me long, so I asked the driver to wait and stepped into the cold. The field was knee deep in snow, but villagers had beaten a path across the field towards the nearest house. I could tell from the footprints that the path was regularly used by a woman (or by a man with small feet), but I could not see her anywhere in the yard of the house, where the only sign of life was a dog who barked frantically from a locked shed. The yard also contained a huge log pile, next to a shed that had until recently contained rabbits. Their hutch was empty. Perhaps the woman had taken them to market on the morning bus.

My instructions said Father Dmitry’s house was the one with conifers in the garden, but there appeared to be pines all along the track that formed the backbone of the village. Finding his place was going to be slightly harder than I had anticipated. The shovelled path ended after the rabbit woman’s yard, and I followed the tracks of an animal, which turned out to be a cat, since four of the creatures were looking at me from the locked yard of a house. A car in the yard was piled with so much snow you could hardly tell it was a car. Apart from the cats, there were no other signs of life. By the time I reached the top of the village, mine were the only human footprints.

The village contained about thirty houses, of which three were habitable. The rabbit house was the only one permanently lived in though, and the other two were clearly only used at the weekend, probably as country retreats for Muscovites. Of the rest, some were rotting, their walls buckling and window frames stolen for fuel. Others were still weather-proof, but forlorn, with trackless snow piled to the window sills. There would be no balalaika music here now, not even any drunkards such as the one Father Dmitry had described. Baydino was another one of the villages in the statistics, and was all but dead.

In fact, the Tula region is the core of the cancer that is eating away at the Russian population. It has just 2.2 people of working age for every one pensioner, which is the worst figure in all of Russia, but one that the country as a whole will exceed in just a few years. The number of pensioners compared to working adults is increasing all over the industrialized world, but nothing like to this extent. As a comparison, in 2010, Great Britain had 3.6 people of working age for each pensioner, while the United States had 4.5 – more than twice as many as the Tula region. Only the Pskov region has a population that is contracting faster than Tula’s. It has the highest ratio of deaths to births in the country, and the second lowest fertility level. It is, in a word, dying.

Tracing my own footprints back through the village, I tried to decipher the directions I had been given. Father Dmitry’s house was clearly one of three adjacent buildings that formed a line on the side of the village nearest the road, so I waded into the snow in one of the gardens, to look more closely. By this stage, I had lost all feeling in my toes, and I had my padded hood cinched tight over my face to hold my scarf over my mouth. Just my eyes were exposed to the cold. I ploughed forward. The snow was waist deep here, and I realized the best way to make progress was almost to lie on it, walking on my knees rather than my feet and supporting my weight on my stomach. I did not even to try to lift my legs clear at every step. If I walked on my feet, sometimes the crust would support me, but I would invariably crash through halfway into the next step, which made extricating myself far more difficult than if I just ploughed forwards like a cow.

The first house fitted all the requirements except that the porch pointed the wrong way. Just a few small panes of glass were missing from a decorative window, but that had been enough to let the weather in. The floorboards of the porch were rotten, and trash had blown through. This house was still together, but would not be for long.

I pushed on to the next house. Really, I should have gone round back by the road, but it was taking a long time – five minutes to go 20 metres – to get anywhere, so I just dived through the hedge that separated their gardens, and floundered round to its front door. It was hard work, and I began to sweat under my coat. I released the hood a little, and suffered as my feet warmed and the blood flowed back into my toes. Some snow had pushed down into my boots and was melting, which made me feel all the colder.

This second house was definitely not the one, being the wrong shape, so I repeated my hedge dive to get to the third. They all three looked more or less the same: cream-painted walls, single storey, porch, two rooms. But this last house was the most damaged of the three. A whole window was missing, so I heaved myself over the sill and inside, where there was only a light dusting of snow. It was a relief to be able to walk without wading. In the bedroom, two old wire bedsteads lacked mattresses. A wardrobe still held some cheap summer dresses, and a row of their matching belts hung from a rail. A Formica-laminated cupboard stood up against a wall, its doors open. Here were toothpaste tubes, and bottles of iodine, and a glass full of toothbrushes. A magazine from 1981 – the same year as the last edition of Father Dmitry’s newspaper – was piled on top of some school-books. A girl called Galina had done her Russian homework here.

On the wall behind the cupboard was a swallow’s nest.

As I prepared to hoist myself back into the snow, I noticed, among the wreckage of dozens of dead butterflies on the windowsill, an empty bottle of vodka and a half-used bubble packet of hypodermic needles.

I retraced my way back through my trench to the house of the cats, and started again. At the end furthest from the river the houses were even more damaged, without roofs, full inside and out with snow, and with no chance of any traces remaining of their previous owners. I gave up, walked back out to the road and down to the car. In a brief panic, I worried that the driver might have got bored and left me in the cold, but he was still sitting there patiently with a cigarette. Just as I was about to get in, I noticed that smoke was now blooming from the chimney of the first house I had passed: the one with the rabbits and the barking dog. There had been no smoke before, so this could only mean someone was home. The driver said no one had passed him, and I had seen no one, but smoke was smoke. Excited to find a human at last I strode back down the beaten path, and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I tried another door. There was still no answer.

Puzzled, I walked back to the car, unable to understand how the fire had lit itself without a person being at home. It was only that evening that I guessed the owner had probably been in all the time, but had not wanted to open their door to someone mad enough to spend two hours wading through waist-deep snow and breaking into derelict houses.

On our drive back to Arsenevo, my driver told me that he had worked for seventeen years as a coal miner near Tula, and now had a monthly pension of 8,000 roubles. That is around £160 and, as a comparison of how far out of whack the local economy is, my grim hotel room in Tula cost me 6,200 roubles for my two nights’ stay. When he dropped me off back at the bus station, I gave him two 500-rouble notes, and realized as I did so that that was half a week’s pension. My driver told me there was no other work, all the farms were closed, and the sausage factory that used to exist had gone with them. Food is imported now, he said.

While waited for the bus back, a three-year-old girl in a pink jacket so puffed up that she could barely move her arms commanded the little bus station. She talked incessantly to her father, delighting in the sound of the Russian words ‘to Tula, to Tula’. Her father, keen for a break, phoned his wife and handed his daughter the phone. She then became silent and refused to say a word until he took the phone away. He finally did so, and ended the call, at which point she nattered away again as before. Her father’s eyes met mine in a mute shrug, and then the bus came.

She was the only child I had seen all day. I made a point of looking out for more, but did not see any.

The bus back to Tula was not the modern sleek model of the morning, but an old doddery Soviet-era Icarus. The temperature inside was the same as that outside – minus 32 – and, if it warmed up during the journey, it did not warm up by much. It was far too cold to read or to take notes, so I sat with my double-gloved hands pushed up into my sleeves and nurtured the ember of warmth into a steady glow.

I could not help but muse on Father Dmitry as our bus retraced our morning route back from the bleak fields. The evening light had none of the mellow warmth of the morning. The fields were flat and greyish. The trees were gloomy, and there was no colour or warmth anywhere in the world.

My mind kept piecing together little snippets from the newspaper I had been reading that morning. I had been so mesmerized by the misery that Father Dmitry was pouring on to the page that I had allowed the actual events of his life to wash over me: the summonses to the prosecutors, the insults from his friends, the abusive letters.

Now, though, I had time, and I began to see a picture emerge of a second narrative contained in the newspaper besides the misery. The story gradually formed itself on the long bumpy journey, but was still an amorphous shape when the Icarus made a heroic effort to crest the slight rise into Tula’s bus station.

Back in Tula, I walked the road from the bus station to the centre of town, partly because I had not realized how long it was, and partly because I wanted to think some more. At the end, I turned right and found a bar in a shopping centre. I occupied a table in the corner, as far as possible from a group of rowdy Armenians playing billiards. I spread out my papers, ordered a beer and began to read.

I went back to that moment just after his release from detention, when a woman came screaming that his former disciples wanted to kill him. The next day he had a meeting with a senior figure in the KGB, at his own request. Worried about his safety, and about a threat to his life from people who had been his friends, he turned for help to the authorities.

‘I said to them, that I am being threatened, they want to kill me,’ he wrote later.

The KGB man did not appear to believe the threat, but did offer to take him back into detention for his own protection, and that was a crucial moment. Before his arrest, Father Dmitry was urging a boycott of the state. Now he was turning to it for help against his own friends.

It is clear from Father Dmitry’s own account that the KGB used a disorienting good cop/good cop approach, which worked better than they could have imagined on a priest who was alone and friendless and desperate and guilty. They spoke to him kindly and politely as if he was their old chum. They discussed the disagreements he had had with the state, and how he disliked its atheistic policies.

‘Yes, we are guilty before you,’ a senior KGB official told Father Dmitry. ‘And not only that, the state is guilty before the Church.’

How could he resist these entreaties, when he had no other friends? He wrote that he had asked for forgiveness but that his friends would not even talk to him. And here were KGB agents admitting all of the crimes that he had been accusing the state of committing for so long. Perhaps he had been wrong about them? And, if he was wrong about them, who else was he wrong about?

Distrusted by his friends, after his release from detention he began to sympathize with his persecutors. It was a coup for Sorokin – the investigator – who shared the first name and patronymic of Father Dmitry’s brother. Father Dmitry later wrote that he came to regard Sorokin as his second brother.

The KGB could control who came to see him at Baydino. They knew the community he had lived in, and they recognized its fault-line between Jews and Russians, that there had always been mutual distrust no matter how Father Dmitry tried to contain it and, without him realizing it, they exploited that.

‘At last the Jews came to me. At first a young man from Kiev. He said that people are still reading my books, and he asked nothing, he just looked at me. I came to life a bit. The Russians just pester me all the time, but the Jews sympathize,’ Father Dmitry wrote.

Who was this mysterious Jew from Kiev? And who were the others who came later and showed him documents printed in his defence? He was glad that they had come and grateful for their sympathy. When they brought statements for him to sign, he signed them ‘mechanically’, he wrote later, hardly reading them.

Father Dmitry was turning back and forth, grateful first to his KGB friends, then to his anti-Soviet Jewish friends, and he wanted to please them all. His attempt to excuse himself to the foreign bishop he had incriminated in his Izvestia article, and then the statements he gave to the Jews – which were inevitably found in a raid on a flat in Moscow, although he had not intended them to be published – angered the security services, who called him in once more. Although they had released him, they had not closed his case. He was still at risk of prosecution.

‘We have made a mistake, we thought about closing the case, but now these new statements,’ his investigator Sorokin said. ‘But well, how can you write this? Who will believe you anyway? One day he’s like that, another day, he’s different. And anyway we don’t mean you any harm, why did you write this?’

Lacking the mechanical process of serving in church to fill his time, or the discussions with the faithful that he had enjoyed so much, his hours were empty. There were only so many statements he could write, and his newspaper only came round once a week. He wanted to work, to chant the holy mysteries of Russian Orthodoxy, to light the incense, to process behind the icon screen and to dispense the ritual bread and wine.

This was the KGB’s trump card, and they did not wait long to play it. Sorokin and another senior agent drove out to Baydino to see him.

‘I’m going to take a holiday and come here to relax, it’s so good here,’ said the other agent, Anatoly Trofimov.

‘You’re welcome, we’ll holiday together,’ said Father Dmitry. They took chairs and went to sit under an apple tree. That was in late summer, a time unimaginable as I sat in frozen Tula, and the trees I had seen as skeletons that morning would have been heavy with fruit.

‘We have already seen the church in which you will serve, we have photos,’ Trofimov said. The conversation moved on, but the dart went straight to Father Dmitry’s heart. The KGB were the gatekeepers to a future for him, a chance to escape the unchanging misery he was in.

The misery worsened because, while he was sitting under apple trees in Baydino, his old friend and fellow priest Gleb Yakunin was on trial in Moscow. He expected to be called as a witness, and worried and worried about how he would speak. Would he admit to meeting foreigners? Or would he defend his comrade? Then the trial ended. Yakunin got five years. Father Dmitry had not been summoned, and the worrying had been for nothing. And he did not come out of the contrast well. Yakunin had not appeared on television to recant his views, but had endured his ordeal and stayed true to his ideals. That was almost worse for Father Dmitry than having to speak against him in court.

Rumours churned in Moscow. People said that he had refused to go to the court to defend Yakunin, and he could hardly bear it. He and his wife decided to go to see Ira, Yakunin’s wife, to sympathize and to explain. But on the way he changed his mind.

‘Go on your own,’ he told his wife.

‘What, are you scared?’ she asked.

‘No, but go alone anyway.’

He was summoned to the KGB once more to talk to Sorokin. He had asked for books at Baydino, and they had sent him a pile of atheist brochures, books about Rasputin, the mad monk who advised the last tsar and his family, books by priests who had given up the faith and turned atheist. He was angry, accusing them of promising him a church and not giving it to him.

‘How long have I been at liberty? And you don’t let me serve for a single day, and you said you would give me a church straight away,’ he said. ‘I am ready to do anything. Prison is as scary to me now as my situation. Being shot would be better.’

It was the KGB’s moment. Sorokin took him aside and they went to Trofimov, the big boss. Trofimov shook his head over all these statement he had signed and given to the Jews who came to see him. Those had complicated the case. Without them, everything would be fine. Nonetheless, Trofimov was prepared to take him into his confidence.

‘Do you really not understand that the Jews want to put you in prison, but with our hands? And we don’t want to imprison you. God grant that you reconsider,’ he said.

‘It’s interesting that an atheist KGB man should say “God grant”,’ said Father Dmitry.

‘God grant,’ repeated Trofimov, the clever man. ‘Go and reconsider.’

Sorokin left him to stew on that for a while. Father Dmitry was still trying to make up with his spiritual children. Eight of the ethnic Russians among them came to tell him their complaints. Their complaints were about Jews, and the weakened Father Dmitry was less able to rein in their prejudice.

‘You cannot even stand next to a Jew,’ one of his disciples spat out.

‘I don’t know much about theology,’ said another, ‘but what upset me the most is that you tried to make us embrace the Jews.’

The next morning he felt so weak that he could not get up, and he had to say his morning prayers in bed.

A while later, the KGB summoned him back. He was to speak to Trofimov again. This was a conversation so secret even Sorokin was not allowed in on it. The KGB were finally taking Father Dmitry completely into their hearts, and here was an even higher boss, Sergei Sokolov, to do it. A young woman brought tea and cake, and the two agents appeared to sit patiently while Father Dmitry said grace, then to business.

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell created Room 101, which contains the ‘worst thing in the world’. The room’s contents were different for every individual and, when they were unleashed, that individual’s resistance finally crumbled away and they became a pliable servant of the state. Father Dmitry’s Room 101 contained anti-Semitism. He had tried for decades to banish hatred of the Jews from his mind, but the KGB summoned it back and, in conversation after conversation, they destroyed him with it.

‘You are surrounded by Jews, and they have no love for Russia. And, you know, we would never have interfered with you if you had not had around you people who then go abroad and raise anti-Soviet hysteria,’ said Sokolov. He was talking about Jews who were emigrating to Israel, Europe and America and buttressing the increasingly hardline political stance being taken by Ronald Reagan in Washington and the likes of Margaret Thatcher in Europe. He was telling Father Dmitry that it was the Jews, not the KGB, who were to blame for his suffering.

Father Dmitry tried to oppose this logic, saying that among those who left the country were patriots. He mentioned Vladimir Maximov, a dissident writer who was forced to emigrate after spending time in a psychiatric hospital, saying that he had written good poems full of love for Russia. Vladimir Maximov, it should be noted, could hardly have had a more ethnically Russian name.

‘Did you know Maximov was a Jew?’ Sokolov shot back.

Father Dmitry said that, no, Maximov was a Russian, that he was one of his spiritual children.

‘He’s a Jew,’ said Sokolov. ‘I knew his mother well.’

Father Dmitry was near the end of his resistance now. He had resisted the anti-Semitism and hate he had been brought up with, the hate under Stalin, the hate under Hitler, and the prejudice from his spiritual children. But this was too much. He had already been lured into humiliating himself on television by an appeal to his patriotism. Once he had given in to that, it was a short step to join the KGB’s paranoia and start seeing the plots they saw.

Father Dmitry mused. ‘Yes, we all need to unite now to defend the honour of Russia. We have many enemies.’ One of the KGB men asked him what united them, what they had in common. He thought about it and replied: ‘We are all Russian.’

In the Russian language there are two words that we translate as ‘Russian’. One is rossiyanin or, its adjective, rossiisskiy, which means ‘someone from Russia’ or ‘of the Russian state’. The other is russkiy, which is used as both a noun and an adjective, meaning ‘ethnic Russian’, or ‘of the Russian language’. He used russkiy. A Russian Jew is a rossiyanin, while Father Dmitry was russkiy. This was what Father Dmitry decided he had in common with the KGB men.

They brought up the possibility of him finally getting a new church again, and what he would do if he got one. He said he would fight alcoholism, he would uphold the spirit of the people. In short, he was saying he would act just as he had done before his arrest. But then he tailed off. He realized that was not the answer they were looking for.

‘Well, you will see yourselves. Facts will show. If it’s not to your liking, I’ll be there,’ he said, defeated at last. He wrote about this conversation many times in later years, as if unable to forget about it. The fight to save the Russian people was off. He would go along with the KGB, do their bidding, anything to get out of the hole he had dug for himself. The state could encourage abortion, spread alcoholism, sow distrust at the heart of family life, and he would not object.

‘That is correct,’ said Sokolov. ‘But look out, don’t even think about fooling us.’

The next day came the telegram from the bishop. He had a church, just outside Moscow, at Vinogradovo. It was, he wrote, a miracle. But he must have known it was not. And he knew whom to thank for it. He owed his new life to the KGB. He overlooked the fact that it was the KGB who had destroyed his old life. That had been a thousand years before. He was their creature now. It had taken them a while, but they had dug out the vein of defiance that had crossed his character, and created yet another compliant servant for the state.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith, the central character, is subjected to Room 101 and has his defiance broken, just as Father Dmitry was subjected and broken. After countless sessions of torture, his interrogator tells him: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.’

That could have been written about Father Dmitry, and so perhaps could a later passage, when Winston Smith finally breaks: ‘two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed’. If two and two cease to add up to four, then everything stops having to make sense. All you have to do is stop thinking and you are free.

‘How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it,’ was how Orwell imagined it.

He wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the future could be imagined as a boot stamping on a human face for ever, and that was what the KGB promised. They had endless power and could torment people for as long as they wanted. They could torment people until they realized for themselves that resistance was not just futile but wrong. It is a terrifying image, and Orwell’s description of the destruction of Winston Smith’s character is remarkably similar to what happened to Father Dmitry, but here he went too far. Humans are not machines. You cannot stamp on their faces for ever. If you deny people hope and trust and friendship, then they sicken and despair. People will not breed in captivity.

After his destruction, Winston Smith went to a bar and drank – ‘It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into a stupor every night, and gin that revived him in the morning’ – alone and avoided. In the Russian case: for gin, read vodka.

Father Dmitry now had none of the young intellectuals around him with whom he had so loved to debate. They had abandoned him, or been imprisoned, or emigrated to Israel. He still wrote, but there was no one to read what he produced or to argue with his conclusions, so he held debates with himself. He wrote the questions and then provided the answers: ‘There is only God. My hope in my friends has fallen to a minimum.’

‘The KGB agents did their business. I was left alone, solitary. I still continue my discussions, I look for new techniques, but people don’t come and the level of the discussions has fallen,’ he wrote.

His writing became ever more bitter, as he lamented his abandonment. He wrote long statements to his old friends. His justification for his actions changed as the years passed. At first, he admitted his guilt and begged forgiveness. He said he was scared of imprisonment, and that he had been weak. Later, he tried to explain it away. He stopped admitting his faults. He had had no choice. He was a priest. To break with the Church would have meant damnation.

Reading those words I felt sorry for him, but I no longer liked him. It was hard to like him. Yakunin was in prison. Ogorodnikov was in prison. Sakharov was in internal exile. Solzhenitsyn was in exile abroad. But it was Father Dmitry demanding sympathy because he had teamed up with the KGB to stay out of prison, done their work for them and undermined his friends. It did not look good, and his spiritual children did not come back because of it. And that made him angry.

‘Despite everything,’ he wrote, as if he had been wronged somehow, ‘I love all people, I worry about them, especially about my own Russian people, about my own Russia.’

He invented a counterpart, Father Peter he called him, with whom he could hold long imaginary debates that confirmed his own viewpoint. But the debates were not like the old ones. Father Peter did not challenge his views. Before, Father Dmitry had insisted on tolerance and trust, but now he ventured further up the path of prejudice and racism the KGB had opened for him. This fictional counterpart asked him what he thought about the world, and about the faith, and about everything. Father Dmitry conflated himself and his country – ‘What happened to me taught me a lot, just as what has happened to our country should teach us a lot’ – and he was looking for someone to blame for the fate of both.

Before the KGB warped him, he had looked for solutions. He was not interested in finding those to blame for the demographic catastrophe, the alcoholism, the abortion. He just wanted to unite everyone, to end hatred and to build a community. Now, with his community scattered in all directions, and himself left alone, he concentrated on finding culprits.

And he had been well taught by the KGB. He blamed the Jews.

‘Do you really not see that they are to blame for everything? It is not an accident that Marx was a Jew, and the creator of communism and atheism. If you try just to say that, everyone considers you an anti-Semite,’ Father Dmitry said. It is hard to believe that this bigot is the same man who had so fought against prejudice and racism just a year or two before.

11 I look at the future with pessimism

The KGB gave Father Dmitry a church in Vinogradovo, a village outside Moscow that has now been absorbed into the capital’s northern suburbs. I arranged to go there with Zoya junior, the daughter of Father Alexander. She was the young woman who had been dragged from her bed by her mother, Zoya senior, and forced to cook us lunch. She is also, as it happens, Father Dmitry’s goddaughter and has a letter from him in her flat.

‘I congratulate you, Zoya, on the birth of your namesake Zoya. Let it be so, her name is Zoya. You will always remember yourself in her. God preserve you. I wish you strong and flourishing health. Your spiritual father Dmitry Dudko,’ the letter says in his chaotic handwriting, above the date 27 February 1982. It sits on a fashionable Japanese-style sideboard.

By 1982, Father Dmitry was installed in the new church, with Alexander and Zoya senior as two of his few remaining spiritual children. When I asked Alexander why they had remained with Father Dmitry, he seemed confused by the question. Father Dmitry’s televised confession, he said, had merely been proof of his spiritual worth. Father Dmitry made no mention of Alexander in his writings from the early 1980s, although he did describe that single disciple who had stayed with him because ‘he doesn’t understand anything anyway’, and I have wondered if this was a reference to Zoya’s father.

Be that as it may, it seemed appropriate to be visiting Vinogradovo with her. She looks like her father, in so far as a beautiful woman in her twenties can look like a middle-aged bushy-bearded Orthodox priest. She wears a gold cross around her neck and is an educated and sharp representative of Russia’s new middle class. She works as an interior designer, drives a smart German car, and picked me up outside a metro station at the end of the line.

She had never visited Vinogradovo before, or if she had she had no memory of it. She programmed it into her satellite navigator, which squawked directions at us as we drove out of Moscow towards the great ring road that sweeps traffic around the capital. Out here on the city perimeter are vast new developments of tower blocks and shopping complexes. The architecture, despite occasional whimsies of towers and turrets, is joyless. You know that, while the walls may look clean and unspotted now, in a couple of years they will be as flaky and damp-stained as their Soviet-made predecessors.

When approaching the city, these towers meld into a solid wall, rearing out of the virgin forest. While Russia is shrinking and its villages are dying, Moscow is booming. Here is, according to some estimates, 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth. The oil and gas money is a fountain showering Italian clothes, French wine and German cars on the elite, and offering work to everyone else as long as they are prepared to get their hands dirty.

The total number of people living in Russia’s cities shrank by 3.7 million in the decade after 2000. That is a decline of more than 3 per cent, and in some places the collapse has been far worse. In Komi and the Bryansk region, the urban population fell by almost a tenth, while in the Tula region it slumped further still – by more than 13 per cent. Moscow had none of that trouble. In the same period its population rose from 9.9 to 10.6 million, making it by far the biggest city in Eastern Europe. And that is just the official figure. Millions of illegal immigrants from the former Soviet republics work here on building sites and in the markets. They are unregistered and uncounted, but they keep the capital moving and earn crucial roubles to send back to their families in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan or Armenia.

It was some time before Zoya junior and I realized that her satnav was malfunctioning. At every junction on the ring road, it directed us to turn off, then threaded us randomly through the nearby streets before depositing us back on the ring road again. It did this three times before we switched it off and relied on the map.

The map was almost equally unhelpful. We drove past our destination three times without seeing it, and went down what appeared to be every backstreet there was before finding the one we wanted. When we reached the church, I wondered what I had come for. It was just a church: yellow ochre and white, surrounded by gardens and trees that probably looked nice when not covered by a foot of snow. Inside, the church was fussy, adorned with modern icons that have for me no spiritual power, and guarded by an old woman who knew nothing of Father Dmitry and wanted nothing to do with me.

Nonetheless, looked at from outside, it was a smart and grand building. More importantly, it was near Moscow, pretty much as near as it was possible for Father Dmitry to get while remaining in the diocese that surrounds but does not include the city. It would have been a far more convenient location for his discussion group and community than Grebnevo. But the discussion group was no more by the time he was here, the community was scattered. There was nothing to see in this church, and we turned around and drove back towards the city.

Zoya junior was meeting some friends in the Sretenka monastery, a lovely building just a few hundred metres away from the Lubyanka. It was a Saturday evening and the regular prayers to welcome in the Lord’s Day would be read with incense and chanting, so I happily accepted her suggestion that I should come too.

In the 1980s, just a few people would have attended services at churches anywhere, and probably fewer still so close to the KGB’s headquarters. Now, however, the church was packed. President Vladimir Putin, his ministers and the country’s top businessmen are all regular churchgoers, as are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians.

It was dark and cold that night, but the church was warm and fuggy. It was packed with worshippers, mostly women, who crossed themselves and bowed as the progress of the service demanded. Priests in hats appropriate to their clerical rank – black, with and without veils, and purple for the most senior – performed the mysteries. Back and forth the men went in the complex ballet of their faith. Two young men had the task of tending to the hundreds of candles, which were thin. They calmly and patiently straightened any candle that looked like falling over, while the heat from the flames shimmered, and the gold on the vast wall of icons flickered the light back into the room.

The gorgeous bass swell of the choir, which included several of Zoya junior’s friends, tugged at my spirit and I stood and lost myself in the sound for more than an hour. Russian churchgoers do not sit down unless they absolutely have to, and that is only if they are very elderly or very sick. Services, therefore, become an exercise in endurance and eventually, despite the thrill of the ancient music, my legs were no longer prepared to tolerate it. I said goodbye to Zoya junior, and walked back into the cold.

During the 1980s, Father Dmitry worked patiently to reassemble a group of spiritual children. He never regained his position as a rebel and a media star, but he retained his passion for preaching, and a small group of young men and women eventually assembled around him once more.

Among them was Vladimir Petrovsky. He had none of the baggage of the heroic days before the televised confession, and knew a different spiritual father: quieter, more private, subdued, depressed, angry.

We met at the Botanical Garden metro station, which I know well, since it was the setting-off point for one of my favourite weekend walks when I lived in Moscow. In summer, the nearby park is a riot of wild growth, with hidden formal gardens in a vast expanse of woodland that reveals new secrets on every visit. In winter, however, it is like everywhere else: a spread of beaten dirty snow dotted with trash. The temperature was a little warmer that day, but it still bit when I stepped out of the glass and concrete metro station.

Petrovsky was slight. His grey hair was scraped over his scalp, and his eyes peered at me from behind thick spectacles. Perhaps it was just me that day, but he did not seem as open as the people I had interviewed about the 1970s, and appeared to be very suspicious of my intentions. His questions as to why I was writing about Father Dmitry at all were searching. As we walked through the edges of the park to his flat, which was up a dark flight of stairs in a concrete apartment block identical to thousands of others in Moscow, I felt myself under examination. It was not a pleasant experience, so, by the time we were in his little kitchen, where he made tea, and I sat at his oilcloth table, I was on edge.

He looked at me and waited for my questions. Perhaps the reason he looked so unenthusiastic was because he knew what kind of questions were coming. When I asked Father Dmitry’s disciples about the 1970s, they could focus on arrests, and harassment, and comradeship and solidarity. The years after his humiliation had little of that, and Petrovsky probably knew I would ask about the extreme nationalism and prejudice that the KGB had kindled in Father Dmitry.

‘I found out about him through my godfather,’ said Petrovsky. ‘I came to him in 1987. The first time I went into his flat was in July, on 1 July, after his wife was buried.’

The loss of his wife Nina after a long illness devastated Father Dmitry. She had patiently supported him through his years of triumph, then through his humiliation, and had been one of the few people who never judged him. He needed new spiritual children desperately, and Petrovsky’s arrival was well timed. At first, their discussions were about literature, and Petrovsky began to go to his house regularly, or to his new church at Cherkizovo – a distant village he was assigned to after Vinogradovo.

‘As a priest, he led a person’s soul. He said that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy revealed the soul more than anyone else. In this time many young people came to the faith. It is hard at first to speak of the soul so he tried to speak to them in their own language through literature,’ Petrovsky told me, staring at me directly through his thick glasses. ‘I became his assistant from 1987 and stayed with him to the end. I worked nowhere at first, I just helped him. I was on my own. I was given a bit of food but the first years were hard. That was before I became a priest.’

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling apart, but did not realize it yet. After Leonid Brezhnev had died, and two more geriatric general secretaries followed him to their graves in quick succession, the country finally had a leader who was prepared to try to stop the epidemic of alcoholism. Russians now claim that Mikhail Gorbachev’s restrictions on alcohol, which involved grubbing up vineyards and restricting sales drastically – 90 per cent of alcohol shops in Moscow were closed, for example – were disastrous. The popular myth today is that people turned to shoe polish and anti-freeze in their desperation to get drunk, with catastrophic effects on the nation’s health. But that is not true. This was, in fact, Russia’s demographic zenith. In 1986–7, life expectancy bounced upwards to its highest ever level, while the birth rate zipped up too.

Had the country stuck to Gorbachev’s alcohol policies, then perhaps the catastrophic post-Soviet demographic collapse might not have been so bad. If the government wanted the nation to have a future, it had to curtail alcohol consumption severely. It had no choice. Sadly, however, it could not afford to do so. Revenues collapsed without alcohol being sold in the state shops. Some money went to illegal distillers instead and thus stayed out of government coffers, some was just not spent at all and languished in savings accounts. Public support for the leadership slumped too, often because of complaints swapped in queues at the wine shops. Even supporters of the measures got bored of them. There were no consumer goods to buy with the money people saved, and what was the fun in that?

‘I always hated drunkenness,’ one woman from Minsk wrote to a newspaper. ‘But suddenly it seems that nobody celebrates holidays any more. We used to make ourselves new dresses for the festivities. This year I didn’t feel like making a single new dress. Why bother?’

That complaint was itself a sign of how, under Gorbachev’s policy of openness, Russians began to be free to discuss subjects that had been taboo just a year or two before.

The huge campaign against the dissidents that culminated with Sakharov’s exile and Father Dmitry’s recantation was unwound. In late 1986, Sakharov had a phone installed so Gorbachev could call him and invite him back to Moscow. Yakunin and Ogorodnikov were released in 1987. Gorbachev, burnishing his image as a modernizer, told the United Nations in 1988 that there were no political prisoners left in his country, and he was close to telling the truth, although full rehabilitation did not come until the 1990s. Controversial themes were up for discussion in ways they had not been since the revolution.

Father Dmitry entered into that with enthusiasm. This was when he elaborated his theories about the Jews’ responsibility for all his nation’s ills.

‘It is not that he went into politics, but politics came to him,’ said Petrovsky. Among the people who attended his discussions at the end of the Soviet period was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a firebrand nationalist christened by Father Dmitry, and whose misnamed Liberal Democrat Party – it is neither liberal nor democratic, rather the opposite – became the first registered opposition party in the Soviet Union.

Although this was before Zhirinovsky’s more controversial remarks, such as that Russia and Germany should once again carve up Poland between them, and before his friendship with a former member of Hitler’s SS, the politician was still a noxious combination of Soviet nostalgia and racism. Petrovsky attempted to explain away Father Dmitry’s friendship with him – ‘People asked whether he would go into a beauty contest, and he said that to save a soul he’d go anywhere’ – but in truth, by the end of the Soviet Union, Dudko’s views now had more in common with the extreme right than with anyone else.

By April 1992, a few months after the Soviet empire’s collapse, he was appearing at demonstrations with chauvinist politicians, and was appointed spiritual adviser to a new newspaper called Day, which combined communism, Orthodoxy and anti-Semitism into a single package. In May 1992, Day reprinted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document detailing a plot (in fact invented by the tsar’s secret police) by Jews to take over the world, in what was surely the Protocols’ first publication in Russia since the Nazi-sponsored papers of wartime. A week or two later, it reprinted an interview with Hitler.

‘The newspaper Day is showing, like no other, what is being done to the country,’ Father Dmitry wrote in one of his columns. It seemed that, having lost his chance to rally people around a message of hope, he had launched a campaign of nihilism and hatred instead. Now he was even lamenting the collapse of the totalitarian state that he had once urged his followers to boycott.

I asked Petrovsky how it was that Father Dmitry could support the KGB when they had ruined not just his life, but the lives of so many of his friends. He had, after all, been imprisoned in the north for almost a decade just for writing a poem. Petrovsky shrugged, and his face set a little more. The conversation was clearly going along the path he had expected, but that did not mean he was enjoying it.

‘He said that in the camp he did not die of hunger. There was always a ration, but that under this new system people were dying of hunger. The communists were better than these times, and he said that under the communists there was less temptation.’

That was nonsense, and he knew it. Millions of people died in the camps from hunger, or from deliberate neglect, or from diseases caused by their weakened conditions. Father Dmitry himself worked in a camp hospital where prisoners did just that. Petrovsky grimaced when I confronted him with the weakness of the argument. His own grandfather had died in the camps in 1937, he said, but Father Dmitry felt he had earned the right to criticize or support the communists as and how he wished.

The early 1990s got worse for Father Dmitry and for millions of other Russians. With Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, ill-thought-through and corrupt privatization deals were launched in an attempt to break the back of the communist system. Inflation, all but unknown in Soviet times, wiped out savings and the purchasing power of fixed incomes. Pensioners who had been assured that they would be looked after were forced to sell their belongings to buy food. Bewilderingly, unemployment appeared where previously everyone had been guaranteed a job. Often those still in employment had to wait months to get paid, while their factories’ new owners used the money to fund lavish lifestyles detailed in the vibrant new press.

Where before the sardonic jokes that Russians swapped had been about their leaders, now they were about ‘New Russians’, the philistine, moneyed beneficiaries of the 1990s: ‘How much did that tie cost?’ ‘$500.’ ‘Ha, I got the same one for $700.’

An attempt by hardliners in 1993 to block this headlong progress ended with Yeltsin sending tanks to bombard parliament and imposing a new constitution in which he could rule largely unchallenged. Father Dmitry’s newspaper, which had supported the attempted coup, was banned and relaunched as Tomorrow, but continued the same campaigns against the changes that were dramatically altering the country.

Newly rich bankers and businessmen like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Potanin flaunted their wealth, while millions of ordinary workers were paid late or not at all. By the mid-1990s, Russian men were dying on average seven years earlier than during the anti-alcohol campaign, and the birth rate dropped from an average of 1.6 children per woman to 0.8. If such a birth rate is maintained, every generation will be less than half the size of the one preceding it.

By 1996, Yeltsin’s popularity rating was in single figures and he faced a strong challenge in presidential elections from Vladimir Zyuganov and his revitalized communist party. As it turned out, Yeltsin would win comfortably by brokering every deal he could, including effectively giving away Russia’s most valuable assets to the big businessmen.

But while it still looked like there might be a fair fight, Father Dmitry offered his own advice to the Russian electorate. It was not now a surprise that he advised his readers to vote for the communist Zyuganov, but the reasoning he used shows how much he had changed.

He started off by defining Russia as Orthodox. He admitted that people of other faiths lived in Russia, such as Catholics and Muslims, but he denied they were Russian. ‘For the Catholics,’ he wrote, in reasoning that might raise eyebrows in Ireland or France, ‘country makes no difference, they are citizens of the whole world. With Muslims it is a little harder, they love a particular country. But what country? That’s up to them. If they live in Russia, which has been Orthodox since time immemorial, then they should dance off out of here.’

He then summarized recent history. He said that Russians love their homeland and could not conceivably have done anything to harm it, so therefore someone else must have been to blame. And who might that have been?

‘Who stood in the government, in the propaganda, in the conducting of repression? Was it not people with Jewish names? There was only an insignificant percentage of Russians. There is of course nothing more to say. But the reply will come that it was people with Russian names who destroyed the churches. Yes, maybe they were destroyed with Russian hands, but not with a Russian head,’ he wrote. His reasoning was exactly the same as that used by his KGB tormentors in 1980. It was the Jews, his interrogator had said, who were giving the orders that were causing his misery. And his Russian captors had no choice but to obey. It had been the Jews, they had said, who had wanted to send him to prison. And now Father Dmitry was parroting it back. The Russians had just been obeying orders.

So, to recap, he was advocating the expulsion of Russia’s 20 million Muslims, almost all of whom live in their ancestral homelands, which were conquered by Russia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he was saying that the Soviet repression of the Russians was the fault of the Jews.

Any readers wondering what this had to do with the presidential race did not have long to wait. He was analysing which of the two candidates would do the most to support Orthodoxy and oppose everything else. That, it turned out, would be Zyuganov, despite the fact that Yeltsin was the one who went to church, and the one who had given the Church its freedom, while Zyuganov was a communist, and thus a member of the party that had destroyed the Church. Why? Because Yeltsin had had dealings with the West for too long. Zyuganov would not pollute the country with foreigners.

‘He is a patriot with an Orthodox style, who supports the thousand-year culture. And that is what our enemies are afraid of, that the Orthodox would make up with the communists, then it will be the only force, and then God-fearing Russia will be mighty and indivisible.’

Petrovsky was not the only new disciple attracted to Father Dmitry in the 1980s. I had heard of another one while visiting Father Dmitry’s home village in the summer. He was called Father Vadim, and it was he who had reopened the church in Berezina in the mid-1990s.

Where was he now though? That I did not know. Unecha, the little railway town, does not have many hotels. The relatively convenient ones were full of railway workers coming in or passing through and so I ended up in the Amber Hotel, which was not so much a hotel as a forest base. Cut off, surrounded by trees and falling snow, it was silent and as primeval as a 1970s concrete mock-Finnish construction could conceivably be.

The hotel had several floors of rooms, a restaurant, a receptionist, a table-tennis table, and me. It was eerie. I felt like I had strayed on to the set of a horror film. Despite the cold and the snow, therefore, I cinched my coat tight around my face and walked into the forest.

The tracks of the car that had brought me here were already covered, and I followed not so much a road through the forest as an absence of trees. There was really only one direction to walk in, and so I walked in it. After a quarter of an hour of silent progress, the forest opened up to a vast empty field and, just visible through the curtains of snow, was a church.

There was something perfectly Russian about the view before me. If a Hollywood producer wanted an opening for a film, a backdrop for a fur-swaddled Anna Karenina and her troika to tell viewers that they were in Russia, that they could only be in Russia, then this sawtooth line of conifers, the bulging domes of this church, this vast empty white field and this drifting snow would have been it. This is the Real Russia, to Russians and foreigners alike. No one thinks of the giant glass-roofed malls on the edge of Moscow as being primordially Russian. They do not even think of the endless ranks of grey apartment blocks as being properly Russian. When they think of Russia, they think of flatness, and forest, and wild places, and snow and always, somewhere, on the edge of the shot, a church like this one.

The Hollywood producer might be tempted to linger on the scene for a while, but it was minus 20 and snowing hard, so I was not. I hurried towards the church. It was a Saturday evening, so a service would be due at some point and that meant a priest would be in attendance. A priest might know where I could find Father Vadim.

Two old women stood on the rough wooden boards of the church’s floor. A few candles flickered before some of the icons. A pyramid screen shielded the holy core of the building, and a priest was bustling about. It was some time before I realized that a service was in progress and that I was a third of the congregation. The faithful of Unecha had clearly been deterred by the blizzard and I could not blame them. The church’s radiators did not even take the edge off the cold.

After the service had stuttered to an end the priest, a suspicious-looking man with a vicious face and ginger beard, was brusque with me. He had no love, it seemed, for people with foreign accents and bright-red coats who asked questions. Father Vadim’s parish was in Old Guta, he snapped, and was there anything else?

‘No, nothing else, thank you.’

He turned away without a word. By that stage it was dark, and it was a long cold worrying walk through the trees before I saw the lights of my hotel in its little clearing. I was the only customer in the restaurant and thus spoiled the evening of two waitresses and a barman. They got their revenge, however, by failing to tell me that I needed to order breakfast the night before if I wanted something to eat in the morning.

Supper had not been substantial, so I was hungry even before my taxi came to pick me up the next day. It was the same driver who had driven me here in the first place and, when I told him I wanted the church in Old Guta, he said: ‘Oh, you mean Father Vadim’s place?’ I was clearly losing my touch. Taxi drivers always know more than you expect.

He chattered away as we skirted Unecha and plunged into more forest, but I only listened enough to make polite noises. The trees here were thick and bleak, pines and birches. Some birches were dead and had fallen to make curved half-arches over the banked road. We were the only travellers that morning, and did not see another car until we arrived in Old Guta.

The village was spread out, with the church just one house among many. A cross above the door was the only sign that it was anything special. The pink-painted porch contained embroidered banners on poles like those carried by trade union marchers, except these bore the bearded faces of Jesus or Orthodox saints. I could hear the service, so I nervously pushed open the door into the interior, only to be met by the worried face of a man with rugged white hair and a jutting moustache.

‘Leave it open a little, Zhanna Mikhailovna is feeling bad,’ he said.

Here was a largish room, 6 metres by 3, with twenty-five or so worshippers packed in. I wormed my way to the back, and examined my surroundings. Prints of icons had been pasted on to 2mm fibreboard. A huge white peasant stove blasted out heat. The floor was plain knotty pine. It was hot: a fug of beeswax and incense and people and smoke. The screen protecting the holy place was more fibreboard and, as I looked, Father Vadim processed out, a battered face in his mid-forties above an immense tangled beard and a vast green and gold cloak.

Most of the congregation were older women, though half-a-dozen uncovered male heads stood out among the headscarves. The chants faded backwards through the room, starting loudly at the choir at the front, all the way to silent me. The hand gestures of the ritual passed out like ripples in a pond. The people looked and sounded like a unit, what a church should be, and surely what a church would have been like in these villages before the revolution.

It was a community, I realized – the kind of community that Father Dmitry had wanted to create. It was small and unpretentious, but it was itself and that was what mattered. When the worshippers lined up to take communion, a stocky man with swept-back hair gestured to me to join the queue in front of him. I declined, smiling.

‘Go on, don’t be scared,’ he said with a smile of his own.

‘No no,’ I said, searching for a reason not to go. ‘Um, I’m a Protestant.’

He shied away as if I had tried to kiss him, and spent the rest of the service on the other side of the room watching me in confusion. Candles were passed out from the front, and a kind-eyed woman pressed one on me.

‘With the love of God,’ she said, and I took it. I liked standing there with a candle, part of a little twinkling constellation of people joined together by friendship and trust in this church on a Sunday morning. It was simple and affecting, far more so than the grand processions and choreography of a cathedral, and I felt a little flicker of hope. Perhaps, far below the radar, such groups are operating all across Russia and will provide the trust and friendship Russians need to rebuild their society from the wreckage left by the KGB.

After the service, Father Vadim and I bundled into a minibus. He had no car, and a long way to get home, so a worshipper gave us a lift, through Unecha and down the long straight that heads east. The wind blew tendrils of snow across the tarmac ahead of us, and every passing car was trailed by a blizzard. Otherwise, it was a cold clear day.

Father Vadim’s house was more untidy than anything I have ever seen. Boxes and paper and general stuff were strewn on every surface, but he clearly did not mind. He swept a space on a chair clear for me, then sat down too. His mother put the kettle on, then joined us.

She had, it transpired, worked in a library in Moscow and had asked Father Dmitry if he would give a lecture there. This was 1990, still Soviet times, and asking a priest to address a crowd was a brave thing to do.

‘I had believed for about a year,’ said Father Vadim, ‘and that was when I met him. He was small and not as dramatic as I thought he would be. The first thing he made everyone do was pledge sobriety because our country is falling apart. He said that we had lost our sense of self and were drinking too much.’

Father Vadim’s grey cat had got over its suspicion of me, and now sat on the table taking darts at my pen.

‘This was his way to save the country. He was very worried for Russia, and he said spirits were the big danger. It was fine for me, I had not drunk for a few years anyway, and after this meeting I said I wanted to be christened, so he took me to his flat and christened me.’

Vadim went with him to church, and enjoyed it. He enjoyed the sense of community. At that time, Moscow was suffering from the severe economic policies at the end of communism. He said he did not really understand Father Dmitry’s desire to launch into politics. He just wanted a monk’s life, somewhere in a village, where things would be simpler.

There are a lot of souls that need saving. A book by three Russian sociologists describes how, in 1974, one in eight children born in villages were officially registered as disabled because of exposure to alcohol in utero. That sounds terrible enough, but the situation has now got so much worse that all the categories used by such previous studies have become useless.

‘The situation is apparently past the point when diagnoses like “drinking”, “binge drinking” and perhaps even “alcoholism” reflect the true meaning of the problem. What is going on today is more aptly described as “pervasive human degradation”, “profound degeneration of a genetic pool”, and so on. While such qualifications may sound harsh, they are not off the mark at all,’ they wrote.

Father Vadim wanted to help and, when the chance came to serve in Father Dmitry’s home village, he grabbed it.

‘Our villages are dying. There is no help from the government. It is closing the schools, the medical centres. There are no farms, just a few people work and that’s all. This drunkenness keeps growing, and people have lost their sense of life. People either leave to find work, or they get drunk,’ he said. ‘It used to be men who drank but now women have started to as well. This degradation is serious. You do not notice it so much in towns, but in villages there is nothing. In the 1980s there were children, schools, but now it’s all gone. A house here would cost you 5,000 roubles. That’s with a garden. In fact, offer someone your mobile phone and they would happily exchange it for a house. Only old people are left, and they’re dying.’

I asked him what he thought of the government, which has, after two decades of doing nothing, finally launched policies to save the Russian population. Vladimir Putin, in his spell as prime minister, promised to stabilize the population at 143 million, but by the time he said it that number already looked unrealistic.

Putin has boasted of improvements to the birth rate – a 20 per cent increase in the number of children being born – and credited his government’s policies for it. But most of that increase was really just an echo of the anti-alcohol campaign of the 1980s. The birth rate increased under Gorbachev, and that baby boom meant a bulge in the number of parents two decades later and thus more children. But the effect will be temporary. Soon the parenting generation will be those born after 1991, when the number of Russians born halved. To stabilize the population, those women would have to start having heroic numbers of children, and there is no sign of that happening.

The government needs to restrict alcohol sales but, mindful of what happened to Gorbachev when he tried to do so with vastly greater state resources behind him, it is cautious in doing so.

‘We hope in God and for a miracle because nothing good now comes from our own brains. The government really does nothing, no one in the country believes in the government. I look at the future with pessimism.’

12 They don’t care any more

So, did Father Dmitry have a choice? Could he have refused to surrender to the KGB? The question is an important one because, as I have thought almost ever since I first heard of him, his personal experience closely mirrors that of his whole nation. When he betrayed his own conscience, he did irreparable damage to his soul. Before, he was a happy and confident man. Afterwards he was a miserable racist. The transformation was total and was a result of that moment when he decided to stop struggling, to seek compromise with people who wanted nothing but his destruction.

Everything that followed – the sadness and the hatred – was a result of that moment. It is important to understand that his misery was a result of his own choice, because it takes us back to the misery of his whole nation. If he could have acted differently, if he had a choice, it means every Russian had a choice. That means that the depression of individuals is not inevitable. If every Russian had a choice, there is hope that some people took another path, and will continue to do so.

The simple answer to the question of whether he had a choice is: yes, he did. And the proof for that is his old friend Gleb Yakunin, who was arrested a few months before Father Dmitry on similar charges, but who did not recant in 1980 and who won himself a five-year prison term and five years in exile as a result. The life stories of the two men could almost be a science-fiction story, in which someone faces an important binary choice and we get to see all the consequences that follow from both available decisions. Father Dmitry went one way; Father Gleb went the other.

Father Gleb and I arranged to meet in the office of For Human Rights, a pressure group, in central Moscow. I was early and sat in the lobby, surveying the chaos of a place where new-generation Russians scurried around while grizzled veterans of the Soviet-era struggle tapped away one-fingered at their keyboards.

Brown boxes were piled along the corridor, those on the bottom sagging under the weight of those above and slowly oozing their papers on to the floor. Wires ran along the walls and floor, linking extension cord to extension cord. Heaps of newspapers were covered in drifts of dust. One headline – ‘How much of an armed force does Russia need?’ – was all but illegible through the dirt. An alcove was full of a precarious heap of ring binders. If you had wanted to access the one labelled ‘Outgoing 2008’, you would have had to remove about a dozen others first or else risk them all collapsing on the floor. Some tinsel decorated a doorway. New Year’s Eve had been just a few weeks previously, but the tinsel looked like it had been there far longer than that.

Yakunin arrived fifteen minutes late, bustling in off the street and greeting everyone boisterously. He led me downstairs, where the basement office was if anything more chaotic than the one above. We found space on a Formica-topped desk piled with broken electronic equipment, and he unloaded bread, pork, garlic, tea bags, sugar and more from a paper bag.

‘There,’ he said, when the kettle had boiled and my notebook was on my knee, ‘let’s talk.’

When he said ‘let’s talk’, he meant that he would talk. He had a story to tell and did not intend to be interrupted. He and Father Dmitry met in the 1960s when, in the temporary liberal interlude that followed Stalin’s death, they opposed changes to the governance of the Orthodox Church that made priests into employees of their parishioners – that is, of the local government – and thus increased state control over them.

In the end, only Yakunin and one other agreed to put their names to the letter of protest, and Yakunin lost his parish as a result.

Despite Father Dmitry’s last-minute decision to keep his signature off the letter, the two men remained close. They were priests, they were neighbours, their wives got on; they had a lot in common. When Yakunin founded the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in 1976, Father Dmitry republished its statements in his self-typed newspaper.

‘He was a pure Church person and said what he wanted. I was banned and only Dudko could speak so openly. Naturally, that meant Western journalists went to him, and when the KGB decided to crush the human rights movement, they added him too,’ Yakunin said.

The KGB linked them together, and the KGB’s favourite newspaper, the Literary Gazette, lambasted them both, along with Ogorodnikov, in 1977. Yakunin’s arrest in November 1979 preceded Dudko’s by a couple of months, and they were held in the same detention centre. It was there that Yakunin got the first hint that Father Dmitry might not endure. While his own interrogator attempted to break him down, Yakunin could hear voices coming through the wall.

Yakunin’s interrogator noticed and said: ‘So? Do you hear how your friend Dudko is talking to his investigator?’

At the time, Yakunin thought Father Dmitry was holding out, since the voices were loud and angry, but he was wrong. He was deeply disappointed by Dudko’s recantation and television appearance, and by the subsequent changes to his character.

‘There were always people who gave up, because they were scared. But with Dmitry Dudko, it was like a rebirth. He could have asked for forgiveness for his cowardice, but he didn’t. Instead, he created a construction to explain it. It was like a psychological rebuilding of himself. He went on and on about how much he loved the KGB. It was almost as if he fell into a psychological hole.’

Yakunin was tried and convicted. He was under no illusions about the official Church’s attitude to him. At his trial, two priests who represented the Orthodox Patriarchate abroad testified that his ‘antipatriotic activity’ had turned the Christians of the world against the Soviet Union. Another witness said Yakunin could drink two bottles of vodka (Yakunin asked in return: ‘Over what period?’), while another said Yakunin was an agent of imperialism, an opponent of peace, and deserved to be on trial. On hearing his sentence, Yakunin said: ‘I thank God for the destiny I have been given.’

He was therefore in prison when Father Dmitry suffered the guilt and loneliness that allowed the KGB to remodel his character, and he was away in exile for the whole long process that changed his old friend from a believer in humanity to an anti-Semite. This is not to say that all was well in prison. Yakunin and others suffered torments. Ogorodnikov later wrote that he had attempted suicide three times, in full knowledge of the fact that it was a mortal sin.

And their tormentors knew how to keep them twisting. In 1986, Ogorodnikov was tried again and forced to confront the world’s indifference. ‘An empty courtroom during my trial, where besides the KGB there were only the two of you,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘is symptomatic evidence of the loss of interest in my cause and the weakening of Christian activity.’

It is a testament to the strength of both Yakunin’s and Ogorodnikov’s characters that they survived. At last they heard that things were changing. A colonel in the KGB flew all the way to Yakutia to see Yakunin in exile, and they got drunk together. Yakutia was about as remote as you could get in the Soviet Union, so Yakunin realized something was up.

‘He said they knew I was honest, and they did not need me to sign any papers. I could go back to Moscow and be a priest if only I stopped my political and human rights activities. I told them I had already been so long in prison I didn’t mind staying a little longer,’ he said, smiling. ‘Then a couple of months passed and all political prisoners were amnestied.’

He was given a parish, but it was a different world that he had come back to. The dissidents had always hoped that, given the chance, everyone in Russia would be just like them: idealistic, democratic, honest. It did not turn out that way. The new freedoms did not spark a reckoning of the betrayals of the past as the dissidents had hoped, or an examination of the Russians’ own sins, but rather an orgy of blaming minorities and foreigners. The change wrought in Father Dmitry had been visited on millions of other Russians, who shared his distrust of outsiders and his self-loathing.

Among the little group of believers who had discussed the reforms to the Church with Father Dmitry and Yakunin in the early 1960s was a priest called Alexander Men. Unlike them, however, he had stayed out of trouble. He had not felt the need to advertise himself, so the Soviet government had not bothered him, instead leaving him to inspire those around him with his gentle faith and unflinching honesty.

He was born a Jew, but had never felt any kind of discrimination from ethnic Russians in the 1970s, the time when Father Dmitry was preaching inclusiveness and urging everyone to stand together to oppose the collapse of Russian society. By September 1990, however, that had all gone.

‘In 1975, fifteen years ago, I gave an interview which was published in Paris. They asked me whether there was any anti-Semitism in the Church. I said that I hadn’t come across any, not on a mass scale. Fifteen years later and the picture has completely changed. I wouldn’t say the same thing now. Anti-Semitism has become, unfortunately, one of the distinguishing features of the Church,’ he told an interlocutor, who then asked if he himself had been a target.

‘Of course, that goes without saying. I feel it. I have been a priest for a long time, thirty or so years, but this has only started to happen now. I feel it in the way people behave towards me, in the way they talk to me, in everything… There has to be a category of people who are held responsible for the sins of society. They are the personification of society’s own sins.’

Men pointed out that, even if the anti-Semites were right and that it was Jews who had ordered that churches be dynamited and believers killed, nothing would have happened had Russians refused to obey. Obeying orders, he was saying, is not a defence.

‘That means people are to blame. But it’s a very difficult thing to admit and so you have to find someone else to blame. It’s easy to swear at the Jews. A coward will always pick on someone defenceless.’

That was an austere message to give to the Russians, a nation that had been obeying unpalatable orders for seven decades.

‘Make a comparative analysis of denazification in Germany and destalinization here and you’ll understand.’

That interview seems as relevant now as it did when he gave it, perhaps even more so considering the Kremlin’s current campaign against historians who publish works ‘to the detriment of Russia’s interests’. But he never got to see how prophetic he was. He was struck down from behind with an axe four days later while walking from his home to the train station. He was aged just fifty-five. His murder has never been solved, but it is easy to see a link between the racism he had suffered and his tragic end.

Yakunin rambled a lot during our conversation. It was hard to keep him on the topic of the 1980s. He preferred to skip through current events – Egypt, a new law in Russia, the unexpected cold, an album of chants he wanted to record – but he would come back to the 1980s in the end.

‘In our camp there were fifty political prisoners and 250 guards. And we only had three real dissidents. Of the others, some had tried to cross the border, or to blow something up. They were not actual dissidents. Us dissidents were necessary to the KGB though, you see, and when they imprisoned us all they had no one left to fight.

‘The thing that interests me is why they were so scared of us. When our information got to the West, they were scared. But look now, look at the things people write, and they don’t care. They spit on it. That is the single big difference between now and then. They don’t care any more.’

In 1990, after his release from the camps, Yakunin was elected to the Russian parliament. He was part of the liberal wing pushing for reforms and, when hardliners launched a coup to try to preserve the Soviet Union in 1991, it was natural that he should be part of the commission set up to investigate it. That gave him access to the KGB archives. It is hard to believe now, but in that brief window of reform, an uncompromising dissident priest was allowed free access to the deepest secrets of the state.

‘They asked me which bit I wanted to see. I said Fifth Directorate, fourth section, which was the section devoted to the Orthodox Church. I wrote out all the most important facts for three months. I should have kept my mouth shut and worked more, but I could not.’

In January 1992, Yakunin publicly revealed the extent to which top Church figures had helped the KGB. He published their codenames, giving them a chance to own up to their identities: ABBAT (that was Metropolitan Pitirim); ANTONOV (that was Metropolitan Filaret); and ADAMANT (that was Metropolitan Yuvenali, Father Dmitry’s bishop and the one who had moved him from parish to parish at the KGB’s request). They refused to identify themselves, and their outraged boss, the patriarch, went to top officials demanding that Yakunin’s access be ended.

Yakunin protested and wrote to the patriarch. ‘If the Church is not cleansed of the taint of the spy and informer, it cannot be reborn,’ he told him. He listed the codenames again, and singled out one unknown hierarch for particular attention.

‘The most prominent agents of the past include DROZDOV – the only one of the churchmen to be officially honoured with an award by the KGB,’ he wrote. The patriarch was right to panic about the damage Yakunin could do, since DROZDOV was in fact himself. The KGB’s penetration had gone to the very top, and it is hardly surprising that the Church did not want to rid itself of the spies. If it did, there would be hardly anyone left. It was not just the odd rogue priest who had informed on his flock, but almost everyone. The rogues were the ones who had refused to help the KGB.

In this way, the Church was a true reflection of the whole of Russian society. The KGB and the Russian people had penetrated each other to such an extent that they could not be separated. The culture of betrayal and suspicion and distrust that the KGB relied on had become part of the national culture, poisoning politics in the 1990s and beyond: decades of corruption, murder and sordid sex scandals. If it cannot purge itself, however, the Russian nation will never rid itself of the illness that has driven people to alcohol. Russians need to trust each other again.

Amid the furore of the emerging truth of how far the KGB had penetrated the Church, Patriarch Alexy attempted to explain why he had decided to work for the security services. Like informers everywhere, he clearly knew deep down that he had acted wrongly, but he could not bring himself to do the honourable thing and resign. Instead, he told an audience in America that he had no choice but to cooperate, since otherwise the churchgoers would have had no priests, which would have been a disaster.

‘I still now think with terror of what might have happened to my flock if by my “decisive” actions I had left it without the Eucharist, without being able to attend church, if I had left their children without Baptism and the dying without their final parting words. I would have committed a great, indelible sin, and out of concern for my own moral reputation I would have left the running of the diocese and betrayed my flock,’ he said. In short, he had had to betray the Church in order to save it.

Yakunin continued his campaign. Eventually, therefore, in October 1993, he was defrocked. Even the Soviet Union had not disqualified him as a priest. It had taken his parish, but not his title. It took the spite of an Orthodox hierarchy on the defensive to throw him out. He maintained his campaign for a full inquiry into the Church, however, and in February 1997 the Church took the last remaining step open to it. He was officially excommunicated, a step usually reserved for someone who has committed acts of serious and unrepentant heresy. ‘Let him be anathema before the whole people,’ the Church said in a statement issued after a full synod.

It is a sign of how far the Church’s values and those of the liberals had diverged that, while Yakunin was being thrown out, a priest called Ioann could remain metropolitan of St Petersburg despite anti-Semitism so virulent that he considered The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be ‘already in action’. A racist was a bishop. A KGB agent was patriarch. In a way, it is hardly surprising that Yakunin should be thrown out for being an honest man.

Western liberals who had praised Father Dmitry in the past were so disgusted by the change in him and the Church that they dropped any further interest. In a study of the modern Russian Orthodox Church published in Britain in 1986, Dudko had the second highest number of entries in the index: more than Stalin, or Solzhenitsyn, more even than Ukraine. In another study by the same author published ten years later, he was not mentioned once.

I asked Yakunin whether he regretted never having made up with Father Dmitry.

‘You know, my mother and father are buried at the Friday Cemetery,’ he began, and I worried he had headed off on another tangent. Then I remembered that Father Dmitry is buried in the Friday Cemetery, so I listened closely. ‘I regularly go there to pray. One time, when I had finished, I needed a pee, so I went over to the wall, and I was peeing, and I looked up, and there was Dmitry Dudko, and I was pissing on him.’

He laughed.

‘No, I never saw him again. It would have been like talking to a deaf mute. There would have been no point.’

As I walked away, I mused on what Yakunin had said, and I realized something I had not noticed before. I had spoken to almost all the people who had been closest to Father Dmitry, the core members of his old community, over the previous year or so. And almost none of them now had any contact with each other at all.

Yakunin never saw Father Dmitry after their arrest. Ogorodnikov never saw Yakunin, and asked me for his phone number. It was me who broke the news to Ogorodnikov that his old friend Sergei Fedotov had died the year before.

‘What? Sergei? Tell me you’re mistaken, tell me you’re mistaken,’ he said again and again, breaking off our talk to come back to it.

Father Vladimir never saw Father Alexander, and neither of them saw Yakunin. Father Dmitry’s son Mikhail, when he heard I had seen Yakunin, who is his godfather, said: ‘Well, I don’t expect you’ll hear much from him.’ And so it went on. The KGB’s destruction of the community had been so successful that now they just swapped gossip about how far the others had fallen.

‘You know, apparently, he’s involved in group sex,’ one former disciple said about another I had spoken to. And that pretty much summed it up. Gossip and distrust had replaced solidarity and friendship. And if the KGB could do that to these staunch fighters and firm friends, just imagine what they did to the whole country. And that is how the Russian nation was divided and ruled.