I waited for him to call back, but he never did. There was a pause at the other end, then he swore at something or someone in the room with him and hung up. He said the last two words in English, however, and clearly wanted me to translate them. He was speaking Russian, heavily slurred, but still intelligible. What is the meaning of the word zombie hedgehog?’ He had, I later discovered from his girlfriend, been drinking – with breaks only to pass out – solidly for two days already, and he went on to drink for two more. Misha, however, had something different in mind. It is normal to call or text friends if only to laugh with them. Presents are exchanged and toasts drunk for success in the year ahead. For Russians, New Year is a more important holiday than it is in the West. I assumed he was calling to wish me a happy new year. Misha, a journalist friend, rang me around noon on 1 January 2004. Leading readers from a churchyard in Moscow to the snow-blanketed ghost towns of rural Russia, and from the forgotten graves of Stalin’s victims to a rock festival in an old gulag camp, The Last Man in Russia is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nationone that, Bullough shows, might yet be saved. Although most Russians have forgotten the man himself, the embers of hope that survived the darkness are once more beginning to burn. But as Bullough reveals, this courageous group of believers was eventually shattered by a terrible act of betrayalone that exposes the full extent of the Communist tragedy. He maintained a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems. At a time when the Soviet government denied its subjects the prospect of advancement, and turned friend against friend and brother against brother, Dudko urged his followers to cling to hope. Undaunted, on his release in the mid-1950s he began to preach to congregations across Russia with little concern for his own safety. Father Dmitry Dudko, a dissident Orthodox Christian, was thrown into a Stalinist labor camp for writing poetry. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale of a lone priest to give life to this national crisis. Faced with staggering population declineand near-certain economic collapsedriven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy.
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