Eight Pieces of Empire (30 page)

Yet what if this new devotion on the part of the security services to somehow atone is sincere, and what if some of the post-Soviet spooks have truly turned toward God?

A GOOD PLACE
to start was to attend services at Sophia the Divine. The problem of finding it was solved by a quick stop at the once notorious
FSB/KGB headquarters known as Lubyanka. My National Public Radio producer, Irina, doesn’t like this at all. Anything dealing with the security services or the church gives her the creeps, she says. It’s a freezing early Sunday morning and no one is out front, so we go around to the back of the Lubyanka and find a couple of sleepy guards. I bang on a heavy glass door.

“Hey!” Irina says, turning pale. “People just don’t bang on the door of the KGB!”

But our sheer audacity seems to do the trick. One of the sentries even picks up an internal phone and gets us directions to the Church of Sophia the Divine Wisdom.

Tucked behind a Metro station and a gaggle of other buildings, the seventeenth-century edifice is smallish, almost miniature in size, requiring taller Congregationalists (like me) to duck slightly upon entering. Unlike a typical Orthodox church, with its odor of decades of melted candle wax and censer smoke wafting around the icons, the Divine Wisdom smells like the interior of a new car. The walls are a bright yellow; the iconostasis is glitteringly new, tarnish-free, polished to a high gloss.

The gathering on this morning is tiny—perhaps twenty, ourselves included. The priest enters, smoke lingering as he slowly waves the mysterious box filled with burning embers to and fro. Most of the worshippers are older—there are a roughly equal number of women and men. Are there KGB officers in attendance? I cannot tell.

The next stop on my quest is the Russian parliament, or Duma, where I run down the ex-head of the now-renamed KGB, Nikolai Kovalyov, in between sessions. A twenty-seven-year veteran of the “organs,” Kovalyov rose all the way to the top of the security service in 1996, until being replaced by none other than Vladimir Putin two years later.

If I expect to catch him off guard with my question about the idea of the former KGB—which persecuted religion, or persecuted the religious, for so many years as the Marxist-defined “opiate of the people”—and now promoting the Orthodox Church as being somehow disingenuous, I am mistaken. Kovalyov’s eyes light up with delight at my question, and
the ex-head of the former KGB beamingly tells me that he was always a secret believer.

Kovalyov says that when he was growing up in then Soviet Russia, he kept a small icon in his room. The ex-FSB chief delcares to me that he had always felt Christ in his heart.

Mikhail Grishankov is another Duma member with a KGB connection who now claims a unique bond to the Orthodox Church. “I came to be a believer because I realized I couldn’t live any other way. God gives my life meaning,” he tells me. Over the years I interviewed Grishankov frequently, and the fact that he had essentially converted to being observant, and did not pretend to always have been a fervent “secret believer,” convinces me that he is probably being honest.

Another KGB man, Lieutenant Valery Ovchinnikov, wears a gold cross, four years after being baptized. Ovchinnikov tells me that he thinks many KGB men turned to Christianity because of their brutal experiences in Chechnya. I find this plausible. If Chechens can be driven to more religiosity—or even radical Islam—because of their horrific war experiences, why can’t Russian intelligence agents?

It is time to contact the current FSB leadership to find out about current operatives embracing Jesus. I make the requisite calls to the FSB headquarters to secure an interview but am told that all questions must be in writing and submitted by fax. A secretary tells us the FSB’s fax machine is broken, and it takes several days before the almighty FSB replaces it. Finally I submit my questions. I wait weeks for the answers, until I get a call from the once-dreaded Lubyanka to answer my questions about religion and the heart of the intelligence man.

“It is impossible to deny that certain mistakes were made in the past involving the relationship between the church and the state …,” laconically reads the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone, answering one of my questions. “A moral backbone [
sterzhen
’] is desirable to instill an ethical set of values indispensable for the work of individuals involved in issues of national and international security” is the response to another.

• • •

AND HOW DOES
the church take the new alliance with its former persecutors? I decided to ask Father Divakov of the Moscow Patriarchate. A bespectacled, intense clergyman, he reacted sharply to my query about KGB sincerity.

“The Apostle Paul persecuted the early Christians,” he seethed, his forehead burrowing as if to cast a spell.… “But that did not prevent Paul from becoming an apostle after he turned to Christ! The church does not cut itself off from anyone who is willing to repent.”

Father Divakov’s reaction made clear that the conversation was over. And in a way it would be hypocritical to judge him, or at least some of the FSB (former KGB) men. Among Americans, how many recovering something-aholics, scandal-plagued politicians, hedonists, violent convicts, or other wayward souls have tried to ease the acceptance of their transgressions by declaring a lightning embrace of the faith?

SO THE FORMER
KGB had its new church.

But many still needed a new
icon
. Not just of the painted variety, like the ones on the walls at Sophia the Divine. A flesh-and-blood symbol of good versus evil. And they would find him, or his remains, in a small town about an hour outside of Moscow.

THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR
asked me, ‘What are you carrying in that bag?’ ” said Lyubov Radionova.

It was a security measure, a typical passenger check. Perhaps the woman holding the bag held it so tightly that she evoked suspicion. Suicide bombers have blown up Russian trains, after all.

“I told the train conductor, my son’s head is in this bag. She looked at me as if I was crazy.”

She was not crazy.

The woman indeed carried the head of her son in that cotton-sewn bag. The route was Chechnya-Moscow and then a suburban train home to tiny Kurilovo, an hour from Moscow.

She held it and held it.

Her son’s name was Yevgeny (Zhenya) Radionov. He was one of thousands of Russian soldiers to die during the brutal Chechen wars; in a way his fate was seemingly little different from many others, his modest goal being to become a cook after army service. Nineteen years old, he was captured by the Chechen fighters and held for a hundred days, likely as prisoner exchange material or for ransom money. And then executed.

I am sitting with his mother, Lyubov, a woman whose eyes convey exhaustion and despair. In her tiny apartment there is a mini-shrine to her son, Zhenya. There are photos of him in uniform that are indeed iconlike, his bulky frame and boyish face recast in the mystical iconic fashion, a halo above his head.

The late Zhenya’s mother, Lyubov, then tells every detail: how a telegram came saying Zhenya had deserted his post. Lyubov did not believe it. “Zhenya wasn’t capable of it,” she tells me. Like the mothers of many missing Russian soldiers in Chechnya, she sets off for Chechnya, eventually finding the patrol post from where he supposedly “deserted.” Locals there confirm the military lied; there had been a battle, and Zhenya and two other conscripts were captured by Chechen fighters after a firefight. Lyubov goes on a crusade, traveling throughout the republic and even meeting top commanders, now dead, like Aslan Maskhadov and Shamyl Basayev. Over a dozen trips in all, until the right contact is made.

A Chechen field commander, Ruslan Haihoroev, confirms it to Lyubov: He even says he personally executed Zhenya Radionov on his nineteenth birthday. The commander tells Lyubov Radionova that her son was given a choice: He could convert to Islam and join the Chechen resistance. He refused, and, moreover, refused to remove the small silver cross he always wore.

“I begged him to tell me that it wasn’t true, that he had a chance to live and preferred to die,” Lyubov says. “But even the Chechen commander confessed to me that he considered Zhenya had died with great dignity, a real man.”

In exchange for four thousand dollars, the commander disclosed the exact site of Zhenya’s grave. Lyubov and several helpers, also Russian
conscripts, began digging with their hands. There was the body, decapitated, supposedly as added treatment for refusing to take off the cross, which through the clumps of dirt still hung there around what was left of Zhenya’s neck. The headless body was spirited back to Moscow. Lyubov returned yet again to the Chechen commander, who gave her the bag of skull fragments. Zhenya had not only been decapitated with a rusty saw; his head had been smashed, part of a Chechen belief that if a victim is decapitated, his spirit will not come back for revenge after death.

An elaborate grave was constructed, and the story spread from tiny Kurilovo across Russia like wildfire, becoming especially popular with nationalist groups. Russian military commanders took their troops on pilgrimages to the gravesite. Songs were written about the boy saint. “Zhenya never took the cross off …,” go the lyrics.

Then the icons (some swore they excreted a sacred perfume, a phenomenon they maintain occurs only with icons of extremely venerated saints) started appearing in dozens of churches, as the faithful demanded canonization for “Saint Zhenya,” as they referred to him. Zhenya had not been formally canonized, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church arguing that canonization is a very long process, as well as other ecclesiastical obscurities. This stopped no one. Prayers were composed and recited:

Thy martyr Yevgeny, O Lord, in his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God, for having Thy strength he has brought down his torturers, has defeated the powerless insolence of demons. Through his prayers, save our souls.

Indeed, some of the icons erected in Orthodox churches were life-size and placed next to the likes of icons of Jesus Christ. The number of times Zhenya’s followers used the word “martyr” made it clear to me they had elevated this unlikely young man to practically such a status. The issue practically led to a split in the church between its mainstream leadership and elements demanding Zhenya be made a saint; an enormous debate continues to this day, with part of the church hierarchy maintaining
there is yet not sufficient proof about Radionov’s case, that someone killed in battle had never been canonized, and citing an obscure precept that naming “new martyrs” had ended after the Bolshevik takeover. The church and the patriarch instead formally “honored” Radionov, the real reason for the refusal to canonize the result of very understandable worries among some in the church (and doubtless the government) that such a step could lead to anti-Muslim hysteria in a country with a large Muslim minority.

AS A COLD
wind blew, Radionov’s mother and I walked down the few hundred meters from her house to Zhenya’s grave, which she visited daily. She caressed the right side of his grave marker and whispered something to the tombstone above her son’s body. I asked her if the idea of his canonization was important to her.

Her response was surprising. “I suppose it is important to some people,” she said. “But for me it is not the most significant fact. I was not even a churchgoer. I was a Communist Party member for twenty-five years. All I know is that I lost my only son, and that means I have lost everything.”

It is not his mother who needs her son’s canonization. It is the elements within the Orthodox Church, which needs a new symbol to rouse the flock. It is elements in the state, which in turn needs the church for support, and vice versa. It is the army, which needs some sort of creed or ideology to replace Communism. It is the faithful themselves, being given back their “opiate of the masses” in exchange for the Marxist utopia that never materialized.

M
any of them were
on their way to becoming some of the most quirky countries on earth—some arguably more repressive than under the Soviets. Tajikistan, the poorest of the Central Asian countries, had torched itself in the early 1990s with a senseless civil war that killed tens of thousands. By the mid-2000s, it was little more than an opium crossing point for “exports” from Afghanistan.

Kazakhstan was building an oil powerhouse, but also a repressive dynasty dominated by the family of Communist-turned-capitalist-leader Nursultan Nazerbayev.

In Turkmenistan, one of the most flamboyant personality cults in the world was under construction. Saparmurat Niyazov—Turkmenbashi, or “Head of all Turkmen,” “President for Life” of a desert country sitting on some of the largest gas reserves in the world but most of whose citizens were dirt poor—was master of the absurd. Whimsical, and in the estimation of many, demented, he renamed the days of the week after himself and his mother, outlawed opera and ballet as un-Turkmen, and even banned TV presenters from wearing makeup because he declared that the cosmetics made it difficult for him to discern between male and female anchors. In his late fifties, he dyed his hair alternately bleached blond, then soon after jet black. Billboards of Turkmenbashi coiffed in both hues competed with one another on the streets of the capital, Ashgabat. I dreamed of making it to Turkmenistan—the most bizarre corner of the former empire, its most twisted fragment. I filed for a visa, haggling over the phone with various Turkmen Foreign Ministry folks whose telephone numbers seemed to change by the week as some sort of hiding tactic. The answer was always the same: Ring back tomorrow. Finally, one call put them over the edge: The voice on the other end told us to “draw our own conclusions.”