15 Apr 2013 03:28:49
If Russia is dying, Bullough suggests one doesn't have to look far to find the cause. Russians are literally drinking themselves to death. If Bullough is right, then the staggering figure of Boris Yeltsin is a more accurate symbol for the nation that Putin's gung-ho, karate black-belt.
The statistics are sobering: Russia's population has been falling for decades, the average life expectancy of a Russian man having now dropped to below the age of retirement. Russian economists know what Lenin discovered after the communists came to power. Although he announced that the state would ban the sale of alcohol, no government could afford to lose almost half of its revenue. Instead, the communists monopolised the trade. They did very well at it: by 1940, more shops in Russia sold alcohol than sold fruit, meat and vegetables.
But more than a thesis on the economics of grain distillation, The Last Man in Russia is a contemporary history refracted through the story of one extraordinary man. Father Dmitry Dudko's life more or less mirrored the rise and fall of the Communist party. Born in the Russian heartland in 1922, he died in Moscow in 2004. In his 40s, during the 1960s, as the superpower's star rose ever higher (literally so with the astronaut Yuri Gagarin), Russia's drink problem became acute. This was when Dudko came to public attention. As the Russian Orthodox church championed freedom of speech and of action, Dudko became a mouthpiece for dissidents. The novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's wife called him "a man of surprising integrity".
"Vice, like rust or vermin, is corrupting our values and morally crippling the rising generation." These words could have been uttered in today's Russia, but they come from one of Dudko's 1972 sermons. Knowing the extent of despair among Russians – from the confession box as much as from alcohol consumption – the priest realised that people needed a forum to air and discuss their grievances.
At the end of 1973, he began a series of mass discussions. These attracted the attention of key dissidents, drawn by Father Dmitry's courage, his message and also by his considerable oratorical skills. One regular described it as the creation of an independent Christian society, something the regime could not tolerate.
That he was silenced, first by the church authorities and then by the communist regime, comes as no surprise. What was surprising, and remains so, is the fact that Dudko did not go quietly to the gulags, but managed to stay in Moscow, spreading the word until 1980, when the KGB pulled him in. His arrest made world news, but not as much as his appearance on state TV in June 1980, when, in Bullough's words, he "calmly and methodically destroyed himself" by denying all that he had stood for and calling for an end to opposition against the regime.
Life continued for Father Dmitry and for the dissident movement, but no one forgot the priest's betrayal of himself and of the movement. Not that he gave up. He was still preaching in the 1980s. And although the audience was thin – many could not forgive his weakness at not standing up to the KGB – the message was just as relevant and urgent. In the words of a mourner at a recent memorial service, "Father Dmitry wanted to save the whole Russian people, one at a time." With his public betrayal, he had lost the opportunity to save them en masse.
Bullough crosses Russia in search of people and places connected to the dissident priest. Weaving together the narrative strands – the priest's story, the politics of the cold war, activities of the KGB and many others – and bolstering them with solid research, he charts the decline of the Russian nation. He is particularly good at conjuring key moments, vivid characters and credible dialogue, and at flipping between the small incident and the big picture. When one of the priest's supporters mentions group sex, Bullough notes how "Gossip and mistrust had replaced solidarity and friendship. And if the KGB could do that to these staunch fighters and firm friends, just imagine what it did to the whole country." Imagining is a whole lot easier with such a lively, well-written and commanding narrative to guide us.
