SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

Vladimir Bukovsky

interviewed by Irena Maryniak.

 

Index of Censorship. Issue 4, 2001. 

 

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You were twice subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment in the 1960s, first in Leningrad's Special Psychiatric Hospital and then in "ordinary" psychiatric clinics. What were the conditions of your internment and how did it affect you?

 

I was young and curious so I wasn't seriously intimidated, even though the chances of never getting out of hospital were high. But I didn't know that then. The special hospital was an overtly penal institution. The orderlies were criminals who had been designated to do time there. As far as they were concerned there were no rules, anything went. They could steal, beat or kill. The authorities never punished them, they put everything down to the patient's condition. If an orderly killed a patient, it was the patient who was to blame.

 

Unofficial forms of punishment included injections and "roll-ups". I never had a "roll-up", but it was an ugly thing to watch. They'd wrap wet canvas strips around the patient which shrank when they dried so that the victim lost consciousness. Then a nurse would come and loosen them. This could go on for any length of time. They called it "restraint"; in fact it was torture. Some people suffocated and died. A young political I knew, Tolik Belyaev, was given this treatment because he had been reading after lights out.

 

The punishment drug aminazine was widely used — in the early 1960s they had little else. They also gave sulfazine which was a solution of sulphur in peach oil, injected into muscle. It caused an abscess, high temperature and intense pain. In one section they gave insulin shocks, but we were spared those. Electric shocks were introduced later. They didn't have the technology then. Subsequently, the range of available equipment grew much wider.

 

They also administered the drug haloperidol. The idea was that it lowered the severity of the psychotic state by affecting neurotransmitters. An excess of dopamine induces a severe psychotic state and a low level of dopamine causes Parkinson's disease. They gave high doses of haloperidol to lower the dopamine level, and people got symptoms of Parkinson's.

 

All this made everything that came after seem much easier. When I was imprisoned, I found it quite simple to tolerate punishments like solitary confinement, cold or hunger. They didn't touch me. In prison you had colleagues, cell mates and limited rights. We used what we had. We went on hunger strike... In psychiatric hospitals there was nothing.

 

What about friendship?

 

We had that, but in those conditions there wasn't much we could do for one another. It was like a mischievous trick. You'd been diagnosed mentally ill. You were no longer responsible for yourself. You had no rights, even theoretically. I was fortunate in that our doctor was well over 70 and very experienced. If an orderly said that a patient had woken up and attacked him, he'd say: "I've been working here 40 years and I've never seen a patient get aggressive. What did you do to him? You must have done something..." So in his section they never touched anyone. There was also a woman doctor who secretly helped us. She still lives in St Petersburg. She was an 'ascetic' in the Russian Orthodox sense of the word. She worked in mental hospitals to help people. She wouldn'tlet them punish usand helped to get us discharged. I kept in touch with her quietly after my release. She went o n giving help, and was eventually caught and sacked. I lost sight of her after that. In 1991, I found her again, destitute, penniless, with no teeth. She was in a horrifying state. Her former patients now send her money from abroad.

 

What was the relationship between real patients and political prisoners?

 

We made a joke of them. Over half of the patients in our section were healthy — it was considered a "soft" section. In "hard" sections the number of sane patients was very small. About 10% ofall patients in Soviet psychiatric hospitals were politicals. A hospital might have 1,000 patients, of whom 100 would be mentally sound. Many o f the others were multiple murderers; they might have killed in desperate circumstances.

 

How did ordinary and special hospitals differ?

 

People were sent to special hospitals following a court decision. There'd be a trial and if the investigation found you mentally irresponsible you'd be sent for compulsory treatment. But you could end up in an ordinary hospital o n the basis o f complaints from neighbours o r relatives. People turned up fortuitously. Some had tried to commit suicide, others were merely thought to have attempted suicide. This was categorised as "dangerous". A potential suicide was dangerous to himself. Anyone who attempted suicide and survived had to submit to psychiatric treatment. You weren't supposed to commit suicide — it was seen as deviancy.

 

In ordinary hospitals the percentage ofpeople who were genuinely ill was high and most came o f their own accord, through a doctor. The different sections were graded. There was a ward for the chronically ill who had been there for decades. There were also wards for alcoholics and drug addicts.

 

In To Build a Castle you describe how it felt to leave hospital and go back into what we think of as "normal" life...

 

It was a reaction many people experience after release from imprisonment of any kind. The process o f reintegration is intensely difficult. Getting used to prison is far easier. In extreme conditions you discover a greater capacity to adapt and react quickly. When you're freed you expect normality and there's no such thing. In prison you idealise life and freedom, it's like nostalgia for an imagined world. The mind embellishes what it wants. When you're released you perceive that things are quite different. It's a passage from one universe into another. You need time — and when you're set free you don't get that. There's a life to live, there's work, and people don't realise what's happening to you. It's as if you'd changed your skin. You walk around bare-skinned, highly sensitised. As a prisoner you're subjected to sensory deprivation. I remember the first thing that struck me when I came out of prison was colour. You're out of the habit of seeing colour — nothing coloured is permitted in prison. Even the strength of colour is painful and demands reintegration.

 

It's also a time of rejection. You want solitude but you're in work, there's family, friends keep dropping in. You don't want that. If you're just out of psychiatric hospital it's twice as bad because of the psychological tension there. You're constantly wondering if you're normal. Even though you know you were diagnosed for political reasons you still watch yourself. Perhaps I am mad? Those big nobs in white coats with diplomas and professorial status decided I was. There must be something wrong. You keep analysing yourself, comparing yourself with others. It's an additional burden.

 

You must have thought a lot about mental illness and what it is.

 

I saw too much of it. I had the feeling it was like a technical fault, an engine running after something's seized up, or one of those old gramophone records that goes into permanent replay. No one has really understood schizophrenia yet.

 

It's ironic that Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky of Moscow's Serbsky Institute apparently thought he did. The story of the struggle between the two Soviet schools of psychiatry, "Moscow" and "Leningrad", is well known. How different were they?

 

Snezhnevsky dreamed up a new form of schizophrenia: "sluggish" or "creeping" schizophrenia. The idea was that schizophrenia can begin in early childhood as a result of psychological shock that evolves into clear symptoms only years later. The problem with this was that there were no objective criteria. Living in the Soviet system it was virtually impossible not to be traumatised. Snezhnevsky saw potential schizophrenia from early childhood in everyone. You could show him anybody and he'd say 'schizophrenic'. I knew him quite well and I think part o f him really believed it. But it was very convenient for the KGB. In any other country his views would have raised a laugh o r prompted debate; h e would never have dominated his field. Here h e was useful without realising it. I don't think h e understood it for a very long time, only towards the end. If they wanted someone diagnosed as mentally ill he'd do it. It was as simple as that.

 

The Leningrad school was more traditional. They weren't intellectual giants, they were professional psychiatrists and didn't hold with all this nonsense. So if you were diagnosed with schizophrenia in Moscow and taken to Leningrad, they'd often say you were fine. "And as to the future — who knows? We don't have a crystal ball." Sluchevsky — the leading Leningrad psychiatrist — was an old, highly intelligent and educated man. He regarded Snezhnevsky's theory as absurd. In the 1960s, he was very influential in Leningrad, so if they brought him a patient from Snezhnevsky he'd delete him from the list without a second look. This discrepancy explains a whole series of cases. The dissident Marxist- Leninist Pyotr Grigorenko was diagnosed twice as healthy and then taken to Moscow and diagnosed as mentally ill. It was a time of covert attack and counter-attack between these two schools ofthought. Butit ended soon enough because, with the support of the authorities, the Moscow school prevailed and became obligatory.

 

In the 1970s you collaborated with Semyon Gulman on A Manual on Psychiatry for Political Dissidents, which gave advice on how to deal with internment in psychiatric hospitals. Did you follow your own recommendations?

 

Not always. Some of it came from experience, some was put in because Slava (Semyon) felt, as a psychiatrist, that it was necessary. Some of it was intentionally malicious. A sort of joke to demonstrate the paradoxes of the situation. But it was useful; the advice is sound. People like us were quite unprepared.

 

You suggested that people should, if they had to, retract their beliefs.

 

We had to explain that there would be a dilemma. I can't advise anyone to deny their own views. I didn't do it myself. But people needed to know that there might be a moment when they would have to choose. They needed to be ready. After that, it was up to them.

 

I was lucky. The doctor said to me: "I expect you're pretending. I can't see any symptoms. How did you get in here?" "You'd better ask them," I said. He kept demonstrating that I was mentally sound, which wasn't what the authorities wanted to hear. So, in the end, they compromised: they said my condition had "improved" and retired the doctor.

 

I thought about what I might do, of course. You didn't usually get discharged from psychiatric hospitals unless you admitted your "mistakes". In the event, it proved simpler for them to let me out. But many others had to do it. If you had a family you were very vulnerable. But I had comparatively few Achilles heels and never had to make the choice.

 

What is happening in Russian psychiatry now?

 

Systematic abuse is over. The authorities have no interest in it, there's no demand. But occasional abuses occur, even in St Petersburg, and religious groups are sometimes still exposed. I recently received reports about regional authorities persecuting religious communes. The Moscow Patriarchate is often involved because it doesn't want competition, or needs a new church building, whatever. Sectarians are diagnosed as psychiatrically ill. It's convenient. They're taken away and there's more room for manoeuvre. These are localised cases. It doesn't happen in Moscow. There it's simpler and cheaper to kill people than to imprison o r hospitalise them. Moscow is indifferent. This isn't the age of Andropov. Psychiatric diagnosis implies a complicated process once controlled by the Party and the system. Today there are voluntary groups of psychiatrists who monitor what's happening. So incidents are publicised and a system can't be built up. You get isolated cases, but not a system. I suppose that can be considered a success.

 

What do you make of the Russian Psychiatric Society's estimate in April that, today, a third of Russians suffer psychological disorders?

 

Russia was traumatised by 73 years of communism followed by a sudden transition to capitalism. It's hard to find anyone who hasn't been personally traumatised. The new generation may be normal — time will tell. Many older people are psychologically broken. The experience of totalitarianism was immensely hard: total dependence and uncertainty, the arbitrary abuse of power. You had no idea what the authorities would do with you tomorrow. Even the existence oftwo conflicting channels of information was a trauma. I say that as a neurophysiologist. Radio, television, the press said one thing; life showed you something very different. It's a classic way o f inducing trauma o r neurosis. The way Russians escaped this discrepancy was to get drunk or tell jokes. 

 

There was a well-known anecdote in which a man goes into a hospital and demands to see an ear-eye specialist. They say to him: "There's no such thing. There are ear, nose and throat specialists and eye specialists. What do you need an ear-eye specialist for?" "I've got this problem, I don't see what I hear and I can't hear what I see." Thousands o f anecdotes were told in response to the lies people were fed, and to the internal, psychological conflicts this provoked. And then there was the hopelessness, the impossibility of getting out. It was deeply damaging for all those who lived through it.

 

Today people are still highly suspicious of one another. No one believes what they hear. There's always something behind it, and something beyond that — layer after layer like a matrioshka doll. That's how life was arranged. No one will ever do anything simply. You have to find a way round, take a detour. They talk about creating "market relations". You won't get 'market relations' in Russia so long as people don't have a direct relationship with things, let alone with each other.

 

Shortly before your arrest, Nikita Khrushchev declared that everyone was happy with the communist system and that those who expressed dissatisfaction had to be mentally ill. Do you think the view that if you're in conflict with society you must be mad still carries weight in Russia?

 

Today's generation, the people we call "Generation X", believe in total conformism. It's all they have: a reaction against the excessive idealism of their fathers and grandfathers. We were too idealistic and our children are conformists. There are similarities in Britain, especially now. It's even worse in the US. American society has a mob psychology. Ask for salt and you're an enemy of the people. In the West people don't know what historical experience has taught us in Russia: that conformism is dangerous. It's the foundation of totalitarianism. It was the same in Nazi Germany. Brecht writes a lot about conformism. There are always small groups of fanatics, but if a society is healthy enough it won't let them impose their madness on the rest. But a society predisposed to conformism will succumb.

 

How do you explain Russia's recent restoration of some aspects of Soviet rule?

 

They didn't carry things through and break the system. In 1991, we suggested putting communism on trial to draw a line under it once and for all. It didn't need to be a trial of personalities as in the Czech Republic — individuals could be left alone. We should have tried the system so that people understood to what extent they had participated in it. It was essential, and they didn't do it. The nomenklatura hung on to power and subsequently took the offensive. The former KGB has taken control of the mafias, the administration, the legislative apparatus, everything. This is as dangerous for the country as it is for its neighbours. But it can't last. People didn't understand why the Soviet Union fell. They didn't see that it was inevitable. They thought the CIA or a criminal conspiracy had undermined the state. They blamed Yakovlev or Gorbachev even though these were the people who wanted to maintain the regime, not destroy it. The people in power today are revanchists. They are trying t o create a partial image o f the Soviet Union without understanding that it can't be done. They could cripple the lives of yet another generation. Russia has minimal chances ofrecovery asit is. The chance that it will simply die is very high. If you break another generation the country will disintegrate.

 

You haven't been given a visa to travelto Russia since 1996. Why?

 

Since the mid 1990s, the ex-KGB has been taking over key positions i n the administration and preparing to get their man to the top. They're still "myth-making" in a way. They imagine that people like me cando something. They're terrified, they always were. I've seen documents showing that they always thought there were more ofus, that we were stronger, that there was something behind all this when there wasn't.In their eyes we became giants. In fact there's nothing I can do. I don't even try. They recently denied Alexander Ginsburg a visa. He isn't well, he's only got one lung. What have they got to fear? H e goes over to buy books. But they didn't let him in just in case. We're trapped in myths.

 

And paranoia?

 

There's never been any shortage of that. They spent decades hunting enemies of the people. They invented them. How could you avoid going mad? It was the way the system worked. Look at the resolutions passed by the Politburo, the minutes of the meetings they held. It was a nuthouse. I discuss them in my latest book, Judgement in Moscow. In 1992, I was invited to testify at the trial the Russian Supreme Court conducted against the Party. I was given access to the Central Committee archives and to some of the Politburo archives. I scanned many o f the documents and published a book.

 

The Politbiuro would be discussing a problem and they'd say world imperialism was behind the Solidarity movement, for example. It's impossible to tell whether they believed what they're saying. On the one hand they had to talk as ideology decreed, on the other they needed to be effective. They understood that it was an ideology, they weren't naive. But the power of inertia, the habit of believing the doctrine had done its work. They were fighting shadows. It was a cast of mind in which they had grown up. And even if you were cynical enough to understand how relative it all was, it didn't mean that you were free in relation to it.

 

I examined records of meetings on the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance. The Politburo spent six months persuading themselves not to send troops: everyone understood that it was a mistake. Then they went anyway. It was Moscow's decision to destabilise the country by removing the Shah. They put the former prime minister, Mohammad Daud, in charge. Five years later, the 1978 April Revolution took place. But in Moscow they seemed to be incapable of understanding the level of instability they were provoking. I found a remarkable dialogue between Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and the PDPA Khalqi faction leader Nur Mohammad Taraki. When the 1979 crisis began, Kosygin telephoned Taraki and they had a conversation reminiscent of something out of Tom Stoppard. A division had rebelled and it looked like the end. "Why aren't you arming the workers?" Kosygin said in time-honoured Marxist style. "We don't have workers, we have artisans." "What about the students?" "We don't have them, we have schoolchildren." "Where are the officers we trained for you?" (Afghan officers were trained in Russian academies.) "Oh, they've all gone over to the enemy." The Soviet Union had provoked revolution in a pre-industrial country which was, by any Marxist criteria, totally unsuitable. And then it wondered why it couldn't stay in power. Marxist ideology was spectacularly unrelated to reality.

 

And today's paranoia is a vestige of this... But isn't it understandable that Russians might be genuinely concerned about how richer and more powerful countries could treat them?

They're more cynical than that. People are filling their pockets and the KGB has degenerated into a Bond-style crime cartel, a "Spectre". Its concerns are more banal than ever: control and money. In that sense the paranoia has subsided but the mindset is still there: suspicion, mistrust. In the end it can only turn against itself.

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Index on Censorship, Issue 4, 2005

 

The late-1980s, the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s "restructuring" (perestroika), saw the Russian media exposing the Soviet past. There were revelations about repressions, the labour camps and the activities of the KGB. Was this the start of any kind of serious attempt to work through a totalitarian past and "de-Sovietise" Russia?

 

Vladimir Bukovsky: The waves of exposure were very artificial. They were released by decisions taken from above. The authorities called it glasnost. They disclosed only what they considered necessary and it was done very gradually. There was no cathartic moment and the revelations were by no means complete. The Communist Party did not disclose its basic secrets. Glasnost was a way of lifting the lid off the pot to prevent an explosion. They gently released the pressure, and it fell. It was neither "de-Sovietisation" nor "de-Communisation", it was a way of stabilising the situation. The Soviet leadership understood this, and did it quite consciously. What was said and written then was mostly familiar. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the camps and the KGB. It wasn’t news — though the fact that the authorities permitted the discussion continued to astonish people. Stalinism had been examined to some extent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Not fully or in detail, but these things had been talked about before. I saw nothing new under glasnost.

 

At the time, from the outside, there seemed to be a genuine moral imperative, a sense of moral protest behind the revelations. Where did this go?

 

Since everything was manipulated, and happened from above, it didn’t lead to anything. The only consequence was something the leadership wanted least: in 1990–91, the country slipped out of its control. The same had happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe. It was something the Soviet leadership neither wanted nor expected. As they saw it, everything was measured, controllable and neat. They thought they knew what they were doing. But the population wanted to go further, and further still. To do so the authorities would have had to admit that the entire system was a mistake, that it had never worked and that Soviet ideology itself was deeply flawed. They wouldn’t go down that route. But the people did. That was where the dichotomy arose, and it defeated the communists.

 

What role did the dissident movement play in the process?

 

We paved the way. Our part came earlier. We discredited the Party and communist ideology, and under our influence they were forced to opt for glasnost. In their efforts to gain credibility they had to confirm the very things we had once said. We delegitimised them and forced them to find other ways of establishing a working relationship with society. But our influence was perhaps even greater in the West. There was a very equable attitude to communism over here, especially among left-wing intellectuals. It was widely held that these were, in essence, people with good intentions who may have made a few mistakes. Ideologically, communists were seen as kindred spirits. That was why the West never demanded the dismantling of the Soviet system. It merely talked about reform. Compare this with attitudes to apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid had to be dismantled, but the Soviet Union was to be "reformed".

 

No human rights indictments were ever made in Russia and there was no equivalent to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Why didn’t the dissident movement take things to their logical conclusion?

 

We would have done, but we weren’t given the chance. I talked and wrote about this a great deal at the time. I made public statements and spoke to the Yeltsin leadership. I proposed that they should immediately organise a trial of the Emergency Committee that organised the 1991 putsch. The entire Committee, 14 men, had been placed under arrest. I suggested to the Yeltsin leadership that they should hold an open trial and turn this into a judicial examination of the Communist Party and its history. The defendants represented the very apex of the Soviet system. I proposed the release of archival documents and so on. Many members of the government wanted this, but Boris Yeltsin wouldn’t agree and the West put a lot of pressure on him not to pursue it. The disclosures might have been uncomfortable. Over the course of 73 years, the West had collaborated so much with the Soviet regime, and many prominent or influential figures — some in public life – were linked with Moscow. No one wanted to talk about it then any more than they do now. The West generally opposed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they did all they could to prevent it. Attitudes were completely different from ours. They certainly didn’t want to take things to their logical conclusion. We were up against Yeltsin and his team on the one hand, and the West on the other: between them they didn’t let us do it.

 

There was also no discussion about the question of individual and collective responsibility.

 

There was a discussion. It wasn’t widespread and it didn’t grip the country. In 1992, the Russian Constitutional Court began its work and the discussion process continued only within its framework. I participated as an expert and witness of the court. But the court would not permit any discussion on criminality. If the conversation turned to crimes, the judge would stop us and say that the Constitutional Court had no right to examine criminal acts. It could only look at the constitutionality of particular events and actions. The judge was right, of course. Criminal justice was outside his jurisdiction. But a trial that would have talked concretely about crimes and murders committed under the Soviet regime never took place, as it should have done. On the other hand, Yeltsin was right in his way. He had not been involved in anything himself, but he understood that if such a trial began, he would not be able to stay in politics. The fact that he had once been a member of the Politburo would have made him unacceptable in normal political life. He sensed this very acutely and he was not alone. The same is true of many others.

 

So there was a compromise between the opposition and the regime.

 

We never compromised with the regime.

 

People who were in power then are back in power now.

 

What could we have done? Nobody asked us. We didn’t have the influence and the population soon became indifferent. There was no great pressure from below — even though it had existed in 1990 and 1991. At that time people had a very strong political sense. Miners were demanding changes in the constitution. The country was demanding openly that the communists should go. In April 1991, when I was there, you could sense the tension and the energy in the country. But nobody picked up on this. No one took it further. The intelligentsia took fright. They feared a rebellion, bloodshed and tanks (I told them we’d be seeing tanks in any case), and by 1992 it had all gone to sleep. People lost interest. The economy collapsed. The most important priority was survival. People lost their savings, the cost of living rose almost 30 times over. Politically speaking, people are now completely apathetic.

 

So is there any sense in talking about de-Sovietisation and ‘surmounting’ the totalitarian experience?

 

It never happened in Russia. Nor do I think it ever happened in Eastern Europe. There was no process of de-communisation anywhere. There were limited "lustrations" in the Czech republic, but my Czech colleagues tell me that these collapsed very quickly because a great deal couldn’t be proved. After a while, communists returned to power everywhere in Eastern Europe and halted everything. It was a very brief moment, just a few years. The Czech Republic did well out of it at first, the country began to develop but all that soon turned round. The Poles attempted to carry out lustrations several times over and never did. Whenever a new government came to power it was discussed, then nothing would happen. The most troubling aspect of it all is that communist regimes were never dismantled, which is why things are taking the form they are. In Russia, they refer to "post-communism" or the "post-totalitarian period", they don’t talk about "democracy" or "freedom". The same people are still in power, but now they also have the lucre. That is all.

 

Wasn’t there also a kind of danger in the notion of de-Sovietisation or de-communisation in the sense that the idea of re-education, or creating a new kind of person, is a very Soviet one – the "New Man".

 

That was their concept. It wasn’t ours. We didn’t want re-education, we wanted a cathartic experience, a public expression of "repentance". The sort of thing the Germans went through in the period of de-Nazification when the country had to acknowledge that everybody was guilty because everyone had in some sense colluded. The degree doesn’t matter. This acknowledgement has never been made in Russia; in Germany it has. Germany is flourishing and Russia remains caught in the doldrums.

 

Will it ever happen?

 

There’s very little hope of that now. It’s all been relegated to history. People have other concerns and new crimes are taking place. So there will never be a full acknowledgement or any kind of contrition. The generation that lived then will soon no longer be with us, and the new generation knows nothing of the communist experience. The moment has been lost. I don’t think that it can ever be brought back.

 

And what of the future?

 

Because the regime was never dismantled, vestiges of the nomenklatura have returned and taken over leading positions in the country. Essentially, this means the KGB. But the KGB was also part of the Communist Party. Lenin called the KGB the armed detachment of the Party — which is exactly what it was. This group is back in power and they are openly trying to restore a semblance of the Soviet system. This is bound to fail; a full restoration is out of the question. We’re in a different age, different times, the people are different. The entire history of the Soviet Union would have to be played out anew. It cannot be done.

 

In what sense do you think the leadership would want this? In terms of empire? Of economics?

 

Certainly in terms of empire. Economics is less of an issue. The authorities merely want to control the economy in the final instance. But they would want it in terms of empire, internal control, the level of censorship and so on. They have restored elements of repressive politics. We have seen what they tried to do in Ukraine, in Georgia; what they are constantly attempting to do in the Baltic States. They cherish an urge to take over and crush. Though I think they understand that it’s impossible to return to the level of control that existed in the Soviet Union.

 

That control was largely ideological.

 

Indeed and there is no ideology today. Things are happening at the level of economic integration, though. It is constantly under discussion and there is an economic union once again. But the present leadership is stillborn. They might kill large numbers of people, which they will, but they are incapable of doing or changing anything. They have been at war in Chechnya for ten years; they’ve probably already killed about half a million people. There’s likely to be further friction with Ukraine and the Baltic States and Kazakhstan. This isn’t the end. But they are incapable of creating anything. And all this could last for as long as the price of oil remains high. As soon as the price of oil begins to drop the further fragmentation of the country will begin. Regions will begin to break away: the far east, eastern Siberia, the Urals, the South. These areas are already showing tendencies towards separatism. As soon as the centre is weakened and the price of oil and petrol falls, Russia will be over. I don’t suppose it will disappear altogether but there will be a time of division and the strengthening of regional structures, of regional self-government. Later, they may come together again into some kind of confederation — that is too far off to predict. But I’d anticipate about 30 years of separatist rule.

 

What kind of role does Orthodox Christianity have in Russia now?

 

Orthodox Christianity has no role at all. The Russian Orthodox Church has been wholly discredited. It is a Stalinist institution and everybody knows it. They also know that its hierarchs worked for the KGB. They even know their KGB sobriquets. It’s all in the public domain. What kind of credibility could a Church that spent decades in the pocket of the KGB ever have?

 

There is a national religious tradition and people maintain it by going to Church for the Easter and Christmas liturgies. But they have no trust in this Church, quite rightly, and the Church has no moral authority. That is why any spiritual revival on a religious basis would be out of the question. There are no parallels with Poland where the Catholic Church never yielded to pressure; continued to defend its rights — thanks largely to Cardinal Wyszynski’s determined stance; and acted as bastion for the opposition during the Solidarity years and under martial law [December 1981 to July 1983].

 

In Russia, the authorities were always attempting to use the Church as a supplementary tool of control. This was also true under the Tsars and everyone understands it. People aren’t fools. They can perfectly well recognise political control when it’s masquerading as religion. That is why there has been such a proliferation of sectarian religions in Russia – there are hundreds of them now. People who are looking for spirituality don’t go to the Russian Orthodox Church. They will go anywhere but there.