This is an important book: a chronological account of the life of a Soviet-era dissident set firmly in its political and social context. There are few such works. Alexander Ogorodnikov stands out as a man of integrity and courage; as a former KGB official told him in 1992: “You and Vladimir Bukovsky, you are the only dissidents who never made concessions.” Ogorodnikov has always been concerned with the practical needs of ordinary people. As a young man he was an idealistic communist but gradually became aware of corruption. At first he put this down to local problems, but then became disillusioned with the Soviet system itself. In 1971 he moved from the provinces to Moscow where he registered at the VGIK film institute. He studied Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St Matthew which “showed him the way from an abstract notion of God to the living Christ.”
The official Orthodox Church was allowed only to celebrate the liturgy, and its hierarchs collaborated with the authorities. Notwithstanding these limitations and compromises, Ogorodnikov founded the Christian Seminar in 1974 free of church and state controls. I was at Moscow University that year, and I went to meetings of the Seminar; young men and women would talk fervently about faith and how to act on it in the Brezhnev “years of stagnation.” Koenraad De Wolf notes how remarkable it was that Ogorodnikov succeeded in building up a network of a few thousand individuals in a wide range of towns and cities, in contrast to most dissident movements at the time, “which consisted of isolated groups of intellectuals who had almost no contact with the population for whom they wished to obtain more rights and freedoms.” Also remarkable was the Seminar’s inclusive ecumenism in action. Its members were mostly Orthodox, but they welcomed Catholics and Protestants, and they questioned me as an Anglican about the religious situation in England.
Ogorodnikov was arrested in 1978 and spent 99 months in the Gulag. About a third of the book describes the appalling physical, psychological, and spiritual torment he and his fellow-prisoners endured. He was released in 1987 as Gorbachev’s reforms began to take hold. De Wolf says that during the Gorbachev period there was “no role of significance” for former dissidents; Ogorodnikov nonetheless set to work. He was by now well known in the West among journalists, politicians, and human rights organizations. Keston College, where I was head of research, had been publicizing his activities and imprisonment since the 1970s. He built on these contacts. In July 1989, accredited to a Dutch newspaper, he was the only independent Soviet journalist to attend the Moscow meeting of the World Council of Churches, and first travelled abroad in the same year.
In 1989 he founded the Christian Democratic Union of Russia, not as a political party but as an umbrella organization for social activities. It ran soup kitchens and set up the first private school in the Soviet Union and a shelter for homeless girls. In 1995 it founded the Island of Hope Center in Moscow for street children, the only shelter in Moscow not run by the state. Island of Hope was constantly raided and its activities impeded by the police, now mainly for economic rather than ideological reasons.
In the book’s conclusion, British parliamentarian David Alton states, “We must tell this story to all generations,” and certainly it is very important that the truth should be told about the cruel oppression of the Soviet system; for this reason Koenraad De Wolf is to be congratulated. However, there are a few critical points to be made. The historical background from the nineteenth century is somewhat hit-and-miss: for example, the assertion that charity “simply had never been an inherent element in the Orthodox soul.” There are also numerous errors of fact: Vadim Bakatin, not Batakin, was minister of internal affairs, not foreign minister; and the scholar Jane Ellis was English, not American. Such errors, as well as inconsistent Cyrillicto-Roman alphabet transliterations, of which there are a good many, unfortunately somewhat compromise the scholarly reliability of the book.
Also, the tone of the narrative sometimes tends toward hagiography. This is a temptation when writing about Soviet times when atheism was militant and active believers brave and few, but it is best avoided in the interests of historical objectivity. Dissidents needed to be strong personalities to stand up against the Soviet system, but a corollary was that they frequently fell out with each other as well: they were only human. In the interests of narrative flow the author has also decided not to use footnotes, which makes it hard to identify sources. This is a pity because Ogorodnikov’s story deserves to be widely read and pondered by a new generation for whom the Soviet period is already history.
Philip Walters, Editor, Religion, State & Society