“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” So said Brutus of Julius Caesar. With Fr. Dmitry Dudko, the opposite is true, yet he tried, under threat of further imprisonment at the hands of the KGB, to undo all the good he had done. Fr. Dmitry was one of a handful of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church who had stood heroically against state atheism. His outspoken sermons, especially his question-and-answer sessions at the end of the liturgy, drew thousands and influenced a generation of young people in the 1970s. Yet he betrayed his followers and renounced his conduct in an infamous TV interview on 20 June 1980. In a subsequent article in Izvestia he confessed to being a criminal, to betraying the Soviet state and his own hierarchy. He rejected what he had preached, what he had written, and the friends, both foreign and Russian, who had supported him while he was being persecuted. In the 24 years up to his death in 2004 he never regained his former influence.
Fr. Dmitry immediately realized the enormity of his betrayal. In a letter to Archbishop Vasily of Brussels he wrote: “I have never suffered such torments as now. I now know from my own experience what hell is. I am ready to do anything to correct the situation, but I don’t know how.”
Oliver Bullough’s magnificent biography restores the good. Some mystery remains as to how the KGB broke him. Someone said he looked as though he had descended from heaven to the TV studio, rather than having come straight from the hell-hole which was the Lefortovo gaol. Another who saw the interview said he “looked like a condemned man.” Bullough could not trace any copy of the interview. One certainty, though, is this. As I wrote in my obituary for The Guardian when Fr. Dmitry died in 2004, “The greatest shame in this episode belongs not to Fr Dmitry, but to the duplicity and brutality of the KGB itself.” The triumph is that, over the next ten years, it would be the Christian faith which grew, while the power of the KGB to break it waned.
At the age of 26 Fr. Dmitry had been imprisoned for eight and a half years for allegedly writing an anti-Stalinist poem; subsequently, following ordination to the priesthood, he claimed that no week of his life passed without harassment by the KGB. In 1975 both his legs were broken in a horrific car accident, almost certainly engineered by the authorities. Worse, he was constantly criticized, even betrayed, by his own church leaders. A letter from his bishop accused him of “systematic inclusion in his discussions and sermons of political material of an anti-social character, including tendentious criticism of the life of our state.” These are the same bishops, Bullough tells us later, who now justify their conduct of church affairs during the Communist period. Faced with further imprisonment, Fr. Dmitry simply caved in.
Oliver Bullough has written two books in one, seamlessly interwoven. He tells Fr. Dmitry Dudko’s story fully and in detail, but at the same time his field researches lead him to the places where his subject lived, worked, and was imprisoned. Simultaneously he records his impressions of Putin’s dying rural communities, drowning in alcohol and a world removed from that of Moscow’s oligarchs. His characters leap from the page: he is a fine writer. In an interview last year, published in the Church Times of London, Bullough claims not to be a believer. Be that as it may, few Christians have written about the Russian community of faith with more sympathy and insight.t
Canon Dr. Michael Bourdeaux, president of Keston Institute, Oxford, England, and a contributing editor to the East-West Church and Ministry Report