Books - The last man in Russia by Oliver Bullough

“The Last Man in Russia”

by Francis Phillips 

Russia is dying. Its population is shrinking. 

Its people are drinking themselves to death.

 Why?

Oliver Bullough has chosen an original way to describe a whole country. By charting the life of a charismatic Orthodox priest, Father Dmitry Dudko, he paints a picture of the travails and tragedies of Soviet Russia. “In tracing the life and death of Father Dudko, I am tracing the life and death of his nation”, writes the author. Dudko, who was the Western media’s favourite dissident cleric in the 1970s, was born in 1922 to a peasant family in Berezino and died in 2004. He witnessed and suffered through all the social upheavals and the failed experiments of a brutal planned economy.

Through the lens of his life, Bullough seeks to understand why Russia is drinking itself to death. Between 1940 and 1980 alcohol consumption increased eight-fold. One devastating consequence of this national binge is depopulation. In 1989 Russia had 153,000 villages. Today, 20,000 of these have been abandoned and another 35,000 have fewer than ten inhabitants. In 2010, deaths outnumbered births by 240,000.

Bullough explains the problems of the Orthodox Church, which Dudko joined as young man: its destruction after the Revolution, its rehabilitation by Stalin during World War II, its infiltration by Communist agents. Today, “despite its long repression and then its close association with a brutal regime, [it] has returned to its role as the comforter of the lowest in society.”
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