When they grabbed Dudko, who had already spent a decade as a slave in Arctic Komi, something in his head snapped. Like Orwell's torturers in Room 101, the experts of the Lubyanka prison found the weakest part of his mind and laid out a paranoid tunnel for him to crawl through out of his faith and into their hands. It was anti-Semitism. The Jews, the interrogators whispered, had always been the enemies of Russia, the plotters with Lenin and the devils that gave the orders for the camps. Perhaps terrified of the needles, or of another decade in the Gulag, he betrayed his friends, denouncing his movement on Soviet TV as Western spies, frauds and saboteurs. 

He was set free, but after his betrayal he found his church empty. Instead of asking for forgiveness for his weakness, he turned to the KGB's agents for solace, so effectively had they done their job. They comforted him, stroking his wounds: they were all Russian patriots after all. Bitter and demented, Dudko was by the 1990s lamenting the fall of the USSR and urging the expulsion of Russia's Muslim population. Like Orwell's Winston Smith, the broken priest even lamented that Big Brother was gone — he missed the KGB. 

By then, demographic rot had turned into collapse. But was the moral decline of the nation really bound up with the alcoholism that set in under Brezhnev, resulting in the population decline under Yeltsin and Putin? Here Bullough treads on weaker ground. Russia has a soul, but it also has an economy. Whether the collapse in births and life expectancy in the 1990s was more a consequence of a botched transition to capitalism is not fully addressed. 

The Last Man in Russia lays the stress on belief. Bullough argues that Russia's epidemic of alcoholism, violence, abortions and nihilism is a consequence of collectivisation, the Gulag and the KGB — that sickened by Stalinism, the population gave up on hope from the 1960s to the 1980s and turned to the bottle. "It was as if the country had gone on one giant zapoi," the Russian word for a days-long binge. This seems a bit of a generalisation — but seen from the perspective of Father Dudko, it was also true.