The Last Man In Russia; and the struggle to save a dying nation
Oliver Bullough
Really quite stunned by how good this book is. It is many things at once: an inquiry into Russia’s catastrophic alcohol problem, a travelogue about dying towns in the Russian wilderness, a history of the late Soviet era. But it’s all tied together by the story of one man, dissident priest Father Dmitri Dudko, who was born around the same time as the USSR and died during the Yeltsin presidency.
The book is broken in two sections, “Summer” and “Winter”. Summer covers the early life of Father Dmitri, who found himself in the Nazi-controlled part of Russia during the war. Stalin’s restrictions on faith were temporarily lifted under Hitler, with the caveat that Orthodoxy needed to stand as a bulwark against the Jews. After Stalin, Orthodoxy was tolerated to a certain degree as long as it supported the state. Father Dmitri didn’t get this memo, however, and spent 20 years passionately speaking out against the tyranny of the state as it affected the lives of the people, especially in terms of alcoholism, the destruction of the family and antisemitism. His stance saw him feted abroad, but shuffled off to the gulag for a few years, and treated as an enemy of the state up until 1980.
In 1980, the start of “Winter”, he was arrested again, but this time subjected to the KGB’s sophisticated psy-ops techniques, and the unthinkable happened. They broke him. Like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, he emerged from prison full of love for Big Brother, and repentant for his former sins. “Winter” is a tough look at how that happened, why he broke when other dissidents stood strong, and what it meant for him afterwards. Alone, abandoned, humiliated and cut off from all others, he descended into bitterness and antisemitism. It’s a crashing fall from grace for someone who genuinely moved and inspired people. Father Dmitri’s stock falls so low that one of his contemporaries, when interviewed by Bullough, laughingly tells a story about accidentally pissing on his grave.
Does his story tell us something about what happened to the soul of the Russian people under communism? As Bullough rides trains through filthy dying towns, filled with mosquitoes and devoid of children, it certainly seems that way.
The coda of the book is tentatively titled “Spring?” It offers a little more detail into the final years of Father Dmitri’s life and suggests that maybe he wasn’t totally broken towards the end, but found smaller, humbler ways of helping others. There’s a note of hope for Russia too. Though it still struggles under the oppression of a pretty ruthless dictator, the green shoots of social rebirth seem to be appearing.
It’s beautifully written and quite unlike anything I've read in ages. One of my favourite reads of the year so far.
