Inside the soul
of a drunk and bitter country
By Peter Pomerantsev
Dmitry Dudko wanted to be a priest in a
violently atheistic Soviet Union. When the KGB came to arrest him in 1948, they
demanded he recant poems denouncing Stalin. “I won’t sign anything,” he told
them. “I spoke the truth.” He got 10 years’ hard labor in the freezing mines of
the far north. In the gulag he continued to pray, continued to write, continued
to insist that Christ’s law was higher than the Kremlin’s. He was given another
10 years. When he was finally released, he began to preach in a cemetery on the
outskirts of Moscow. He spoke against the state’s attack on the family,
chastised the Orthodox establishment for toadying to the Kremlin, denounced the
KGB for destroying communities by making men report on one another, taught Jews
and Russians and Tatars to huddle together in faith and hope and overcome their
ethnic bitterness.
In the
1970s, in a late Soviet period defined by endless cynicism and conformism, when
no one believed in anything (least of all communism) and submission to the
Kremlin for the sake of submission became the essence of the system, Dudko
became legendary. Thousands would come to his sermons. Foreign correspondents
were so inspired by him, they smuggled Dudko’s works out of the U.S.S.R., and
his fame spread throughout the world. He became a beacon of anti-Soviet
dissidence, a religious Solzhenitsyn, a free man in a totalitarian system. In
1980 he was arrested again. This time the KGB’s approach was more subtle: “we
are guilty before you, and the state is guilty before the church,” they told
him; they agreed that Russia needed to find faith; they hinted that they were
believers just like him; they blamed all the bad bits of communism on the Jews.
Wasn’t it time for us Russians to stick together? They said they would give him
a chance to preach to a much greater audience if only he would do one tiny,
little thing for them.
After six months of nonstop interrogations
Dudko appeared on state television. He seemed happy, healthy. He looked into
the camera and, smiling, rejected everything he had ever stood for. He
confessed that he had been a Western tool undermining the fatherland. He turned
in the foreign correspondents who had smuggled his works to the West. He begged
forgiveness from the Kremlin, from the church’s hierarchy. Men who had gone to
prison defending Dudko were now shown his confession and told there was nothing
for them to believe in: if Dudko could be broken, so could anyone. The movement
shattered. When he was released, Dudko was finally given his own church. His
message changed. Where he had preached harmony and hope, he now preached rabid
nationalism and anti-Semitism. He died lonely and bitter and mad. In Oliver
Bullough’s bleak, beautiful The Last Man in Russia, a mix of biography and reportage,
Dudko’s journey from defiance to submission to self-destruction becomes the
archetypal Russian story: a broken man representing a broken nation.
The
1970s and 1980s, the period when the current Russian elite matured and which is
the focus of Bullough’s book, are largely ignored inside Russia. Few novels and
fewer films focus on the era. The most notable movie about the period is
German, the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, which focuses on the
battle between dissidents and the Stasi in 1980s East Berlin and captures the
sense of slow-baked fear, granite depression, and moral corruption. When The
Lives of Others was released in Russia in 2007, local media acted as
if the film had nothing to do with them. Whereas in the countries of Eastern
Europe unbroken Soviet-era dissidents have become heroes, Russian dissidents
are often ignored or censured as traitors: while Václav Havel became president
of the Czech Republic, Russia chose a KGB man, Vladimir Putin, as its leader.
The mechanics of Putin’s rule are a 21st-century spin on how Dudko was broken
in 1980: oligarchs are allowed to keep their money as long as they publicly go
down on one knee to the Kremlin; journalists can have all the fun they want as
long as they compose Putin hagiographies. The aim is not to simply oppress (how
banal!), but to make you part of the system.
When the Kremlin pushed through the recent
Dima Yakovlev bill, which banned Russian orphans from being adopted by U.S.
parents, many Duma deputies and senators were privately appalled, but were so
terrified, they signed anyway: “It’s a way to make us all guilty,” a Duma
deputy (one of the very few who didn’t sign) told me afterward, “the old KGB
trick.” Seen from this perspective, the loud Russian debates between choosing a
“European” or “Oriental” path, between “patriotism” and “modernity,” are all
distractions from the great drama between brokenness and self-respect that no
one wants to talk about. The new generation of dissidents, such as Pussy Riot,
who have taken to Moscow’s streets over the past two years invoke their 1970s
predecessors: the protest movement is not just about standing up to Putin, but
a way to finally deal with the unresolved conformism of the 1970s. The new
dissidents have resurrected the vocabulary of their predecessors: dostojnstvo(dignity),
which in the language of the dissidents means not betraying your beliefs; poryadochnost (decency),
which means you don’t snitch on your friends; ne pachkatsa (not
to get dirty by cooperating with the state). But the new dissidents remain a
disliked minority, accused by state media of being Western stooges who are
“doing it for money”: in a culture of conformism everyone has to be seen to be
a cynic.
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