The Last Man in Russia

Sources and Bibliography

For my demographic data I have relied on the website of Russia’s Federal Service of State Statistics (www.gks.ru), which publishes figures at fascinating levels of detail. I have used the monthly figures (which tend to show a lower total), rather than the census data, mainly because they allowed me to follow changes over small periods of time in very specific places, which is crucial to how I came up with my ideas. I have used www.mortality.org, for reliable life-expectancy and other statistics.

I have used and appreciated Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis by Nicholas Eberstadt (Washington, DC, 2010). He seems to make a good case, but I have also followed the online discussion about whether he has gone too far in his gloomy prognostications.

I have used newspaper archives in London and Moscow, as well as periodicals from elsewhere, for contemporary views on Dmitry Dudko. Among the most useful have been Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought, 8 March 1979; 12 April 1979; 29 February 1980), the Keston News Service (26 June 1980), Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (the Chronicle of Current Events, multiple issues, available on www.memo.ru), The Times (of London, multiple issues), the New York Times (multiple issues) and those papers included in Google’s mercifully digitized news archive.

I have scoured the libraries of Moscow and London, and corresponded with libraries further afield, in an attempt to find everything ever written by Dmitry Dudko. He was a prolific writer, so this has not been easy. I never found a copy of Vrag Vnutri (Frankfurt, 1979) but, otherwise, I am confident I have read the vast majority of his work. Here is a list of the books and articles that most informed this book.

Our Hope (New York, 1977) is the English translation of O Nashem Upovanii (Paris, 1975).

Podarok ot Boga (A Present from God, Moscow, 1997) is the closest thing he wrote to an autobiography.

The Collected Works published by the Moscow Patriarchate (Moscow, 2004) include in Volume 1: ‘Vernost v Malom’ (‘Faithful over a Few Things’); ‘Poteryannaya Drakhma’ (‘The Lost Coin’); ‘Vyyavlenie Iskusnykh’ (‘Exposure of the Skilled’). Volume 2 contains: ‘Na Skreshchenii Dorog’ (‘At the Meeting of the Roads’); ‘Kak Istolkovat Pritchi’ (‘How to Interpret Parables’); ‘Propoved Cherez Pozor’ (‘Preaching through Shame’). Volume 3 contains: ‘Khristos v nashei Zhizni’ (‘Christ in our Life’); ‘Liturgiya na Russkoi Zemle’ (‘Liturgy on Russian Land’); ‘V Ternie i pri Doroge’ (‘Among the Thorns and along the Wayside’).

I pieced together his self-published newspaper V Svete Preobrazheniya (In the Light of the Transfiguration) from an unpublished collection in the Russian State Library; from the Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya (Bulletin of the Russian Christian Movement, no. 127, 1978 and no. 129, 1979); from Volnoe Slovo (Free Word, no. 33); and from ‘Propoved Cherez Pozor’ in the Collected Works.

Religion in Communist Lands (Volume 1, nos. 4–5; Volume 4, no. 2) contains accounts of his sermons.

Other writings are in:

Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya (no. 118, 1976; no. 120, 1977)

Russkoe Vozrozhedenie (Russian Renaissance, no. 2, 1978; nos. 7–8, 1979)

Izvestia (21 June 1980)

Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (no. 7, 1980)

Den (Day, including 21–7 June 1992; 15–21 November 1992; 1–9 January 1993; 7–13 February 1993; 23–29 May 1993; 1–7 October 1993)

Zavtra (Tomorrow, March 1994; March 1995; September 1994; November 1995; April 1996)

Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary, November 2002)

The 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of the dissidents’ hand-printed samizdat (‘self-published’) literature. Some of these were smuggled into the West, printed in book form and then smuggled back (tamizdat: ‘published there’). Many were also translated and published in English. They include:

Elena Bonner, Alone Together (London, 1986)

Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle (London, 1978)

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Red Square at Noon (London, 1972)

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Selected Poems with a Transcript of her Trial and Papers Relating to her Detention in a Prison Psychiatric Hospital (Oxford, 1972)

Karel van Het Reye (ed.), Letters and Telegrams to P. M. Litvinov (Dordrecht, 1969)

Dina Kaminskaya, Final Judgement: My Life as a Soviet Defence Lawyer (London, 1983)

Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward (eds.), On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (London, 1967)

Pavel Litvinov, The Demonstration on Pushkin Square (London, 1969)

Pavel Litvinov, The Trial of the Four (London, 1972)

Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony (London, 1969)

Anatoly Marchenko, From Tarusa to Siberia (Strathcona, 1980)

Anatoly Marchenko, To Live Like Everyone (London, 1989)

Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (London, 1969)

Zhores and Roy Medvedev, A Question of Madness (New York, 1972)

Viktor Nekipelov, Institute of Fools: Notes from the Serbsky (New York, 1980)

Alexander Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry (Keston, 1986)

Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond (New York, 1991)

Harrison E. Salisbury (ed.), Sakharov Speaks (London, 1974)

Igor Shafarevich, Russophobia (samizdat, from 1981)

Gennady Shimanov, Notes from the Red House (Bromley, 1974)

Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson, Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR (Keston, 1978)

I have also relied on secondary literature for information on Russia, the Soviet Union, demographics, religion, totalitarianism and other themes covered in this book. These are the ones I have found most useful.

Olga Afremova, Otets Dmitry Dudko (Father Dmitry Dudko, Moscow, 1992)

Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent (Middletown, Conn., 1985)

Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem, 1998)

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB and the World (London, 2005)

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London, 2003)

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–56 (London, 2012)

Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, Nebr., 2009)

Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke, 2002)

Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union, Novocherkassk 1962 (Stanford, 2001)

Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston, 2010)

Anatoly Belov and Andrei Shilkin, Diversiya bez dinamita (Sabotage without Dynamite, Moscow, 1973)

Philip Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London, 2005)

Michael Bourdeaux, Risen Indeed: Lessons in Faith from the USSR (London, 1983)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London, 2011)

Alex Butterworth, The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London, 2011)

William C. Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe (London, 1999)

Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (London, 1986)

Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–45: A Study in Occupation Politics (London, 1981)

R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933 (New York, 2004)

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison, Wis., 2004)

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Survive (London, 2011)

Sidney D. Drell and Sergei P. Kapitza, Sakharov Remembered: A Tribute by Friends and Colleagues (New York, 1991).

Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London, 2000)

Nicholas Eberstadt, Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis (Washington, DC, 2010)

Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London, 1986)

Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (Basingstoke, 1996)

John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (London, 1995)

Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York, 1995)

Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (London, 1992)

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London, 1996)

Orlando Figes, The Whisperers (London, 2007)

Orlando Figes, Just Send Me Word (London, 2012)

Harvey Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons (New York, 1979)

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994)

Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century (London, 2005)

Masha Gessen, The Man without a Face (London, 2012)

Graeme Gill and Roger D. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2000)

Yves Hamant, Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (Torrance, Calif., 1995)

Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (New Haven, 1995)

Albert Heard, The Russian Church and Russian Dissent (London, 1887)

Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (London, 1986)

David Hoffman, The Oligarchs (London, 2011)

Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London, 2005)

Grigory Ioffe and Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia: A Geographical Perspective (Boulder, Col., 1997)

Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova and Ilya Zaslavsky, The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia (Pittsburgh, 2006)

David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago, 1986)

Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (London, 1994)

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (London, 2007)

Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (London, 2012)

Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley, 1991)

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)

Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2008)

Richard Lourie, Sakharov: A Biography (London, 2002)

Wolfgang Lutz, Sergei Scherbov and Andrei Volkov (eds.), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991 (London, 1994)

A. Malenky, Magnitogorsk: The Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine of the Future (Moscow, 1932)

Nick Manning and Nataliya Tikhonova (eds.), Health and Health Care in the New Russia (Aldershot, 2009)

David Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–91 (Harlow, 2004)

Mervyn Matthews, Patterns of Deprivation in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Stanford, 1989)

Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000)

Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss (Oxford, 2011)

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1949)

Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London, 2010)

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago (London, 1959)

Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen (London, 2004)

Keith Richards, Life (London, 2011)

T. H. Rigby (ed.), The Stalin Dictatorship: Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and Other Documents (Sydney, 1968)

Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman (eds.), Christianity for the Twentieth Century: The Life and Work of Alexander Men (London, 1996)

Abraham Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime 1953–1970 (Ithaca, NY, 1972)

Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman (London, 2012)

Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov (eds.), The KGB File on Andrei Sakharov (London, 2005)

Theo J. Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford, 1989)

John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (Bloomington, Ind., 1973)

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London, 2007)

Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004)

L. Sitko, Intalia: Stikhi i vospominaniya byshikh zaklyuchennihk Minlaga (Intalia: Poems and Remembrances of Prisoners of the Mineral Camp, Inta, 1995)

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (London, 2011)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (London, 1968)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago, Moscow, 1990)

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (London, 2011)

William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003)

Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)

William Tompson, The Soviet Union under Brezhnev (Harlow, 2003)

Mark Trofimchuk, Akademia u Troitsy (Academy of the Trinity, Sergiev Posad, 2005)

Judyth L. Twigg (ed.), HIV/AIDS in Russia and Eurasia (Basingstoke, 2006)

Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2008)

Anatoly Vaneyev, Dva Goda v Abezi (Two Years in Abez, Moscow, 1992)

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, 1993)

Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul (London, 2010)

Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge, 1996)

Michael Wieck, A Childhood under Stalin and Hitler: Memoirs of a ‘Certified’ Jew (London, 2003)

Venedikt Yerofeyev, Moskva–Petushki (Moscow, 1989)

Venedikt Yerofeyev, Moscow Stations (London, 1998)

These are specific references, listed by chapter, to works mentioned in the text.

The reference to the king rejecting Islam comes from Heard’s Russian Church and Russian Dissent. The statistics on relative alcohol consumption come from Eberstadt, Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis. The figures for the increase in Russia’s consumption of alcoholic drinks from 1940 to 1984 come from White, Russia Goes Dry.

The ‘we will bury you’ comment and the background to Khrushchev saying it are from Taubman’s biography of the Soviet leader.

The information on Sinyavsky and Daniel comes from On Trial, edited by Labedz and Hayward. The Alexeyeva book quoted is her excellent Soviet Dissent.

Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index is available on the organization’s website cpi.transparency.org, and the Levada Centre’s survey is on www.levada.ru along with a fascinating array of other investigations.

The quotes from Father Dmitry are mainly taken from his Podarok ot Boga.

The eyewitness account of pre-revolutionary village life comes from Tian-Shanskaia’s Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia. Other useful books on peasant life include the early parts of Figes’s A People’s Tragedy, plus the early chapters of the following books on the famine.

These are Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, Davies and Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger and Stalin’s Peasants by Fitzpatrick. Snyder’s Bloodlands is magnificent for collectivization, famine and the violence of the war, while Ioffe and Nefedova’s Continuity and Change in Rural Russia was also a major source.

The fate of the Jews is described in Altshuler’s Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust and Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The general origins and effects of anti-Semitism are touched on in Butterworth’s The World that Never Was. Accounts of the mass rape inflicted by Soviet soldiers when they captured towns in World War Two are legion. Among them are those in Applebaum’s Iron Curtain.

For details on Stalin’s deal with the Orthodox Church, see Service’s biography of the dictator, as well as the books by Jane Ellis. The quote asking where all the priests have gone is from Trofimchuk, Akademia u Troitsy, the Sergiev Posad seminary’s official history.

The details of production of food on private plots come from Ioffe and Nefedova’s Continuity and Change in Rural Russia. The quote expressing amazement about Hagia Sophia is from Heard’s The Russian Church and Russian Dissent. The details about Pavlik Morozov are from Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers. The narrative of the gulag is largely taken from Applebaum’s Gulag.

The Lenin comment is from Volume 35 of his collected works, as quoted in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, which is also the source for the details on KGB penetration of the Church.

Details on the gulag are from Applebaum’s Gulag and from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

For information on the protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, see Gorbanevskaya’s Red Square at Noon. The Khrushchev secret speech can be found in Rigby’s The Stalin Dictatorship. The Leonid Plyushch quotes come from Fireside’s Soviet Psychoprisons. Information on writers’ roles under Stalin can be found in Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul.

The Father Dmitry quotes here are taken from Our Hope, a collection of his sermons published in the West in English (and in Russian as O Nashem Upovanii). A description of the debris of Father Dmitry’s first church, following its demolition, is in the introduction to Bourdeaux’s Risen Indeed.

The 1972 sermon is from Religion in Communist Lands, Volume 1, nos. 4–5. The other descriptions are from ‘An Eyewitness Account’ in Religion in Communist Lands, Volume 4, no. 2; and from an article by Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov found in the Memorial archives and originally published in Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya in 1974.

The lonely struggle of Soviet Jews for emigration is described in Beckerman’s When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone. The letter by the ‘Jewish woman’ is by L. A. Gold and is dated 5 May 1974. It comes from the Memorial archives.

The details of shops selling meat, fruit and vegetables versus shops selling alcohol come from White’s Russia Goes Dry, as do most references to alcohol statistics in this chapter. The quotes from Moskva–Petushki are taken from the English-language version published in 1998 by Faber & Faber under the title Moscow Stations.

The quotes from the sermon preached in Kabanovo are from the Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya, no. 118 from 1976. The quotes from Father Dmitry’s confessions, here and elsewhere, are from his notebooks published as ‘Na Skreshchenii Dorog’ in the Collected Works.

Details on the number of abortions and government policy towards them come from Lutz, Scherbov and Volkov (eds.), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991, from Eberstadt’s Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis, from Feshbach and Friendly’s Ecocide in the USSR, and from Feshbach’s Ecological Disaster.

The Sakharov quote is from his essay ‘Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’, which I found in Salisbury (ed.), Sakharov Speaks. The protests by Shafarevich and by Yakunin and Regelson were published in Religion in Communist Lands in 1976 and are available online at www.biblicalstudies.org.uk.

The Father Dmitry quotes here are from his self-published newspaper V Svete Preobrazheniya. A little more on his car crash in 1975 can be found in Religion in Communist Lands, but it remains a mysterious incident.

Details on the Helsinki Accords and the formation of the Helsinki Groups are from Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, Beckerman’s When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone (which is also my source for the quotes from Shcharansky), Tompson’s The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Horvath’s The Legacy of Soviet Dissent and Lourie’s biography of Sakharov.

The Amalrik quote is from Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia.

The text of the interview with the New York Times was published in Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, no. 2, 1978. The press-conference transcript is in Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR by Yakunin and Regelson.

Details on the abuse of psychiatry come from Fireside’s Soviet Psychoprisons, from Rothberg’s The Heirs of Stalin, from the Medvedevs’ A Question of Madness, from Alexeyeva’s Soviet Dissent, from Shimanov’s Notes from the Red House, from Nekipelov’s Institute of Fools and from Gorbanevskaya’s Selected Poems.

The story of the Soviet Union’s support of Lysenko’s quack biology can be read in Joravsky’s The Lysenko Affair and Medvedev’s The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko.

Andropov’s war against the dissidents is dealt with well in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive.

Keith Richards’s autobiography Life is well read on the audiobook, mainly by Johnny Depp. Of many audiobooks I have listened to on long train journeys, it may be my favourite.

For Poland’s experience during and after the Soviet invasion, I relied on Kochanski’s The Eagle Unbowed and on Applebaum’s Iron Curtain. Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss is not entirely reliable, since it was written much later as a justification of his own role in the camps, but is the best we have.

Details on the Podrabineks’ trials can be found in the Chronicle of Current Events, and other reactions to Father Dmitry’s recantation of his views can be seen in Google’s news archive. I have not been able to find a video recording of Father Dmitry’s television appearance, so I have relied on contemporary observers’ descriptions of his appearance.

The quotes from Father Dmitry are from his Podarok ot Boga, ‘Vernost v Malom’ and V Svete Preobrazheniya.

The quote accusing the KGB of killing the ‘spiritual father’ is from the Chronicle of Current Events. Father Dmitry wrote about Divnich in Nash Sovremennik.

The Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign is described in White’s Russia Goes Dry, and its spectacular demographic effects are dealt with at length by Eberstadt in Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis. The corrupt privatization deals and crooked 1996 presidential elections are well described in Freeland’s Sale of the Century and Hoffman’s The Oligarchs.

The three Russian sociologists are Ioffe, Nefedova and Zaslavsky, and their book describing degradation in the countryside is The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia.

Details of Ogorodnikov’s torments in the 1980s can be found in his A Desperate Cry. That covers more ground than my account of his life, which more or less ends in the mid-1970s. The life story of Alexander Men is described in Roberts and Shukman (eds.), Christianity for the Twentieth Century. He was a fascinating and humane man, who deserves to be better known. The details of KGB infiltration of the Orthodox Church are from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s The Mitrokhin Archive, and from Ellis’s The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness.

Some of the finest writing on the winter protests in Moscow was by Julia Ioffe in the New Yorker. The British journalist mentioned in the account of the Pussy Riot trial is Tom Parfitt, whose coverage of the winter of protests for the Daily Telegraph was also superb. Other journalists whose work I appreciated include Miriam Elder of the Guardian and Shaun Walker of the Independent.

‘Krasivo Sleva’ is found on the Markscheider Kunst album of the same name. I would recommend St Petersburg ska as something purely joyful to anyone who needs cheering up.