Issue #13/94, July 6 - 20, 2000   

The Slave Crew, left to right: Starshy, Lanky, Slava, Guest

Slaves for God

By Matt Taibbi

ANAKSARSKY MONASTERY, NEAR TEMNIKOV, MORDOVIA— The monks at this 300 year-old Orthodox monastery unsmilingly claim to be completely indifferent to wordly politics, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely without manners. In anticipation of the arrival of Vladimir Putin on August 4th, they’ve asked their stable of unpaid migrant workers—which this week includes me—to work overtime. Instead of the usual 8 to 5, my crew now works from 8 to 8, laying bricks and building the foundation for a new warehouse next to the monastery sawmill. The warehouse, my crew has been told, is to be finished in time for Putin—or else.

Actually the work day begins earlier than eight. At 5:30 in the morning, a bell rings in the temple and everybody in the monastery is roused for early services. That includes monks and novices, of which there about a hundred here, as well as the polomniki, pilgrims who travel from all over the country for three days of prayer, free bunkbed accommodations and near-prison-quality free food. It also includes the trudniki—migrant workers like us. Whether you believe in God or not—and you better not admit that you don’t—if you’re a worker at Sanaksarsky, you have to go to morning services. It’s the law around here.

There are other laws, of course. That there is no drinking, smoking, or sex on the territory of the monastery is a given. More surprising is the ban on all reading material. No one in the monastery is allowed to read anything “wordly”—that is, anything that is not a bible, a prayer book, or an authorized Orthodox Christian periodical. Newspapers are forbidden. Novels are forbidden. Shakespeare, Pushkin and Ovid, even Phillip K. Dick, if they were given any thought, would be forbidden.

The monks keep on a squad of security people (among the few paid workers in the place) to enforce these rules; they toss beds during work hours and peer into windows at night. The likelihood of their finding Shakespeare in this environment is not high. But if they catch you with a dirty magazine, as happened to one worker here recently, it can be grounds for dismissal.

Neither I nor my friend Aleksei Dindikin, the clown, knew the rules when we first arrived at Sanaksarsky last Monday night. After a brief negotiation with Father Nikolai, the monk in charge of the visiting pilgrims’ quarters, we were shoved into a tiny, mosquito-infested room (a “cell”, as they called it) and told to get ready for work early the next morning. I tossed my things on my bed and immediately dashed down the hall to take a dump, bringing the 2,900-page “Penguin History of the World” with me to smooth the process. When I came back, Aleksei was asleep in his bed with a copy of “UFO” magazine draped across his chest.

At 5:30 the next morning Father Nikolai entered the room to wake us up. He’s a short, barrel-chested man with the dark complexion, severe eyes and martial bearing to match popular representations of Genghis Khan. When I later learned that he had, in fact, been an army drill sergent before taking the vows, I became an instant believer in phrenology. “Get out of bed,” he commanded, with only his face visible in the doorway. “Time for mass.”

By the time we looked up again, he was gone. Little did we know that this was more or less the last time we would have any contact with the monks. We were about to enter into the lives of monastery slaves, who are not really part of the machinery of worship here.

Denied wordly pleasures like books and wine, the workers nonetheless are here solely to serve the monks’ worldly needs—to raise the crops the monks eat, to restore the buildings the monks work and live in, to wash the monks’ dishes. The monks spend up to ten self-flagellating hours a day on their feet proclaiming to God their hatred for all things terrestrial, and this is reflected in their treatment of their employees, whose presence does nothing but remind them of their vulgar physical needs.

In this, however, the monks have something in common with the rest of the world, which also hates these people who came here to work long hours for free. As we were to find out, if the world didn’t hate them, they wouldn’t be here.

ON THE FIRST DAY Aleksei and I dutifully got up to go to mass at 6 a.m. I’d told Father Nikolai the night before that I was a godless journalist and didn’t want to insult his faith by pretending to be a believer. He therefore exempted me from the obligation to make the sign of the cross upon entering the temple. That didn’t stop him from trying to convert me, however. Father Nikolai did not converse in the normal sense of the word. There were no jokes, no questions about work or about our personal lives, nothing like that. Instead, every conversation, no matter how hard we tried, came back to God within about eight seconds.

“You were Christened a Catholic, and that is why you suffer,” he said to me. “Catholicism is a false faith. You don’t have the true belief. You still believe in life on earth.”

“Well, that’s where I’m registered to vote,” I joked.

No response; bad move. “You’ll see soon,” he said. “Today you’re going to an Orthodox mass. This is your first step to the real faith. Soon you’ll be like me. For me, this world is finished. I am already living for the next world and the next world only.”

The man needs to work on his salesmanship, I thought. Meanwhile, he was taking poor Aleksei, who did not get off so easily, and leading him by the arm into the temple. Aleksei was here undercover; he’d been advised by friends not to reveal his true profession. “A clown, it turns out, is considered a godless creature,” he’d told me on the way here, frowning as he drove. He hadn’t wanted to come—there’s not much humor potential in a Russian Orthodox Monastery— but I dangled a couple hundred bucks in front of him, and he grudgingly agreed to come along with me as my “assistant”. With theater season out, he needed the money.

What was worse from his point of view was that, once we’d arrived, he’d determined that presenting himself as a non-religious Russian would invite too many questions— so he announced at the start that he was a believer. This was partially true, as he’d been baptized in secret shortly after his birth in 1960. But it wasn’t so true that he didn’t freeze in panic the instant he set foot in the temple. He couldn’t make out the prayers the monks were saying, and, like me, he didn’t know when to bow, when to cross himself, and so on. Not only that, but after 40 minutes on our feet in the temple—you’re not allowed to sit at Orthodox services—Aleksei started to fall asleep. Twice I had to whack him on the shoulder to wake him up.

“Look alive,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he answered.

After an hour and twenty minutes of morning service, all on our feet, we were led into the trapeznya, the dining hall. Normally the workers are third-class citizens in the monastery, behind the monks and the pilgrims, but when it comes to food, the caste system changes a bit. Workers go second, after the monks. Unsweetened, unsalted kasha, served in tin prison plates, was scooped out for us by novices and pushed in our direction down the long wooden tables. We washed it down with tea in ten minutes of hurried breakfast and headed off to work.

Father Nikolai, making the best of his severely limited sense of humor, had promised us the night before that we would be assigned the very nastiest, most unpleasant work detail the monastery could offer—and that we would be worked until we collapsed. As a result we had spent the whole of the previous evening wasting valuable sleep time sitting up in our beds in the dark, our two cartoon sets of dread-filled white eyes snapped open and plainly visible against the blackness. My bet had been on the pig farm, on a shit-shoveling unit; Aleksei leaned toward the apiary. “Without gloves,” he said.

As it turned out, we were sent on an ordinary construction assignment, only one with unusually long hours. Father Nikolai, who swore to us that worldly politics didn’t interest him, didn’t tell us why the hours would be so long. We had to find that out ourselves.

NONE OF THE FOUR other workers on the sawmill construction detail cared a damn why they were being asked to work overtime. As far as they were concerned, if they were told to work to eight, they would work until eight. Who for and why was not their concern. They were lifetimes away from even thinking such questions. Each of them had their own, more serious problems to worry about.

Our group was fairly representative of the monastery’s worker population, which numbers about seventy. One, a tall young man named Sergei, was a dropout from the army. Another, older type, also Sergei, had drunk himself out of a job and been chased out of his house by his wife and her family. A third, a still older, bearded man named Slava, had run away from his wife, who had become a drunk, and was hiding from her and from the world in general here.

The fourth was a woman named Aleftina. In general, women are not allowed to live at monasteries. But the monks made an exception for this matronly woman of about fifty who had left “the world” to come work after her son was taken into the army. The reason the monks made an exception for this woman was this: she was pious, and she knew how to lay bricks. She’d been a professional mason for most of her life, and the monks definitely needed a mason.

Her head wrapped in a white shawl and her body covered with a billowing navy blue canvas cloak that must have been a nightmare to wear in the heat, Aleftina stayed on the other side of the site, far away from us sinners, for almost the entire time we were there. She laid her bricks in perfect, spotless rows; her side of the site looked like a little corner of Buckingham palace. Occasionally she would whisper instructions to us when we brought her tubs of cement, bricks, and other supplies, but her chief contributions to the male side of the structure were the disgusted looks she shot at us from time to time as we struggled to keep the rows of bricks neat.

Slava we hardly ever saw. Older and wiser than the rest, and with strong leprechaun component to his character, he’d clearly found some innovative way to avoid work that escaped everyone else. Occasionally we saw him carrying a jar of mayonnaise to the site, or stirring a cup of tea somewhere, but that was it. As a result, Aleksei and I were left for the most part in the care of the Sergeis.

To get these people to tell their stories, incidentally, we had to agree to not use their real names. But they did allow us to use their real nicknames, which around the monastery is all that matters anyway. You check your passport at the door here, and from the day you enter, you don’t fill out a form or hear your surname called.

Of the two Sergeis, the tall one is called Sergei Lanky (Dlinny), the other Sergei Starshy. Sergei Starshy isn’t that old at all, just 31, but compared to Lanky, who at 23 looks and acts like a young adult version of Beavis, he’s ancient. Smallish, narrow-shouldered, and sporting a training-wheel goatee he hopes will someday turn into a monk’s beard, Starshy has been at Sanaksarsky just two months, although he’s been out of the world for longer than that. Prior to coming to Mordovia, he was in a Kaluga monastery for nearly a year.

Starshy’s story is a typical tale of a trudniki’s progress. People who come to the monastery, either as workers or as monks, tend to do so for one of two reasons; booze, or family problems. There are a few other fairly common scenarios: heroin, release from prison, homelessness. But for the most part, you either drink your way into a monastery, or your wife drives you there. In Sergei’s case, it was both. He drank himself out of a construction job in Kaluga, and in the process, his wife drove him crazy.

“I’d come home after work, drunk, and I’d take something out of the cabinet, then forget to close the cabinet door, leaving it open this much,” he said, showing the distance between his thumb and forefinger. “And I’d hear about that for hours. It never ended. And so I tried to stay away from home more, and then I drank more, and lost my job.”

Starshy didn’t want to leave home, but it wasn’t his decision. He and his family were living with his wife’s parents, and when he finally went over the edge, they kicked him out. “By the time they kicked me out I was in pretty bad shape. They figured I would end up living under a bridge somewhere. But I wanted to show them that I could still work, and that’s how I ended up here.”

What “ending up here” entails is more or less synonymous with indenture, and it is an option open to anybody. The monks take all comers. Even you, the eXile reader, can come to Mordovia and make a deal with the monks to work on the site—doing whatever they want, whenever they want. They’ll take you. In return, you’ll get no money, but free room and board.

It’s better than jail in some ways, the same in others, and in others actually worse. It’s better in the sense that the monks feed you better—variously and four times a day, although workers with experience say that other monasteries serve food just twice a day, and only kasha. It’s the same in that the living quarters are zone-like; the two Sergeis live with 12 other men in a common barracks about half the size of a squash court. But in prison you can at least read the snippets of “Megapolis Express” the guards give you before you use it as toilet paper. The monks also frown on staying up all night laughing, or laughing at all at any time, within the monastery walls.

For work at the monastery Sergei also receives 5 packs of Prima cigarrettes a week—which sets the monastery back a good 15 rubles— as well as a tube of mosquito repellent. He’s allowed to smoke the cigarettes on work sites outside the monastery grounds, which is where ours happened to be. When we met him, it was twenty minutes after eight, just after the start of the work day, and he was already smoking behind a pile of bricks, taking a break.

We introduced ourselves. Stunned and somewhat frightened by the sight of a professional clown and an American dressed in work clothes appearing on his slave labor site, Starshy quickly ran and summoned Lanky to size us up. We answered all of their questions curtly and asked to be directed to work as soon as possible. Uneasily, they sent us to load a trailer with bricks by hand, from a nearby supply pile.

Sergei Lanky trailed behind us. I turned and asked him how the work was here.

“Oh, it’s fine,” he said, before adding, ominously: “Only, the mosquitoes are a problem.”

He pointed to the brick pile. Aleksei and I flicked a pair of mosquitoes off our arms desceded upon it without enthusiasm. The work day had begun.

It is difficult to communicate now, in retrospect, exactly how awful the labor was at this place. Heavy clothes were necessary to deal with the bricks and the mud, but it was too hot for anything but a t-shirt. Mud and red brick-dust crept under our shirts, up our pantlegs, into our underwear, and mixed with sweat, creating a hellish sandpaper effect that was felt with every step. The mosquitoes located us quickly and within minutes multiplied to the point where I had to keep my mouth closed to keep from breathing them in. My arms I lathered with repellent until they were white, but it didn’t help; they bit through the shirt on my back, through the rag on my head, even through my jeans. There was no way to keep them off—you just had to deal with it. Within an hour I could see bumps covering my hands, while my neck was covered with red dust where I’d scratched spastically with my bricklaying gloves.

And throughout all of this we had to work with the knowledge that at the end of the day, there will be no bath and no shower. The only relief, the guys explained to us, was a swim in the nearby Moksha river after work.

Aleksei and I had visited the Moksha the night before. By sunset, there were so many mosquitoes on the riverbank that we could barely see each other. Like the lack of newspapers, meat and female company, this was just one more negative you had to put up with to earn your daily kasha—the nightly charity blood donation to the local mosquito population.

Carrying bricks and mixing cement is ugly work. Even if you’re in good shape, you start feeling tired after about ten minutes. It took about that long for the question to pop into my mind: who the hell would do this for any length of time at all, for free? In exchange for one’s freedom? What’s wrong with these guys, that they volunteer to do this?

About an hour into the work day I got my first hint. I was kneeling on the ground laying bricks, spitting mosquitoes out my nose, when I heard the two Sergeis start up a conversation:

Lanky: “Who do you think is tougher, Jackie Chan, or Sylvester Stallone?”

Starshiy: “Stallone. Look at those muscles. And the guys he fights, they’re all heavyweight champions, not some bodyguards in Hong Kong.”

Lanky: “I don’t know. I think Chan is tougher. You figure, he’s that small, and he still beats everyone up. He must be really bad.”

Starshiy: “I don’t know.” Then: “Matt, what do you think? Who would win in a fight between Jackie Chan and Sylvester Stallone?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think the only way those two guys fight is through lawyers. But I like Jackie Chan better, I guess.”

Lanky approved of the answer. By about 10:30 he was spending a lot of time at my end of the site. He had the usual questions about America—how much do things cost there, how many bottles of vodka can you buy for fifty bucks, etc. I asked him how he’d ended up here. He told me an amazing story: after leaving the army a few years ago, he’d joined up with a satanist cult in his hometown of Voronezh. He was vague about what happened in the cult, but it was clear things hadn’t ended well; they’d carved a cross in his chest (which he displayed for me) stole all of his things, and threatened to kill his family. Soon afterward he joined up with a local monastery in the Voronezh region to hide from the cult; according to his version, they found him there and chased him away, sending him on a nationwide tour of Russian Orthodox monasteries. He’s been a worker for monks in any number of regions—Moscow, Kurskaya, Nizhni, Saratov, and Samara, among others.

He would probably have stayed in one place, he explained, but he keeps getting thrown out. In fact, he said, this was his third time around at the Sanaksarsky monastery; twice he’s been thrown out of this place for various offenses—a porno mag once, drinking another time. He has what the monks would certainly call vices; he drinks every now and then, and sometimes after dark he sneaks off the monastery grounds to the nearby village of Alekseyevka, some two kilometers away, and visits one of his two girlfriends there. “They’re both total dogs, with faces like this,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “You have to drink an awful lot to be able to fuck them. But it’s worth it.”

Sergei knows he’ll be caught eventually, but he doesn’t care. Generally, he says, he borrows some money every time he’s thrown out of a place, runs around town somewhere having a good time for a week or so, then looks for a new place to live. Sometimes this gets tricky. Before his last trip here to Sanaksarsky, he got caught on the side of the road in the snow while hitchhiking with nothing but a bottle of vodka in his pocket. When night fell, he had to build himself a little cocoon out of sticks and snow off the side of the road and drink himself to sleep inside it. He nearly froze to death.

Now he’s back at Sanaksarsky and he’s happy. “This place is paradise compared to the army,” he said. “Nobody beats you here. And they’re better than the nuns in Diveyevo. Women are brutal, never work for women. They’ll work you round the clock, and give you thin soup for it.” The chief thing, he explained, is the food. “Four times a day here, and you can get extras whenever you want it. Right now, if I really needed to, I could go to one of the brothers and ask for a packet of tea or some mayonnaise. They’re pretty cool about it.”

When the subject turned to food, Starshy and Slava appeared on the scene immediately. As it turned out, the crew generally starts speculating about what might be for lunch sometime around eleven in the morning every day. It is The Topic of Discussion around here. At least four times during our tenure there Aleksei and I heard reminiscences about the time the monks served caviar after Easter. On a day-to-day basis the guys more realistically hope for things like pastries or cake, an unusual soup.

A little while ago, the monks sent Slava on a mosquito-feeding trip into the woods, and he brought back so many mushrooms thatthe workers have seen nothing but mushrooms ever since. As a result, the mere mention of mushroom soup makes violence a real possibility on the site. But on this day, old bearded Slava made amends. At around 11:00 he came running up to the site from somewhere in the direction of the trapeziya.

“It’s okroshka!” he announced. “We’re having okroshka!”

Cold soup, with egg. A novelty. Sergei Lanky pumped his fist. “Class!” he shouted. “Finally! Are there fried potatoes?”

“No,” Slava said. “No fried potatoes, but there is okroshka!”

“You hear that?” Lanky said to Starshy. “There’s okroshka.”

“Just kidding,” Slava said. “It’s mushroom soup.”

Both Sergeis pounced on him at once, punching his arms mercilessly. But it was a friendly elementary school beating, nothing serious. Aleksei and I looked at each other in surprise. It was odd to see a man near fifty as Slava is laughing and enjoying this kind of thing like a kid.

Before lunch the men asked us to come visit their barracks. It was about what you’d expect—stinking, a mess of bunkbeds draped in clothes and bags, with a single sink full of unwashed dishes and nests of flies. When we came in, two older men with smashed faces, obvious drunks, were glumly packing up their things. Lanky explained that they’d been kicked out the day before for drinking. When they left, Lanky peered out the door to see if anyone was coming, then pulled out an old newspaper clipping from inside his pillow and started to read it. I swear to God that’s what he did—it was a scene straight out of Stalinist Russia. Then he leaned over to Aleksei.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Do you have any worldly newspapers?”

We did. Just the day before, we’d met with a group of journalists from a Sarov-based newspaper, and they’d given us a stack of back issues. Aleksei shrugged and said that he did. Consipratorially, Lanky then leaned over and gave instructions for bringing the newspapers outside later that night when we took a walk—if we could spare some, he’d like to have one or two. We agreed.

Lunch was Lanky’s finest hour. There was kasha and fresh bread, along with mushroom soup and, as a surprise, eggplant caviar. There was also fresh kvas—the monks make great kvas. Lanky ate four portions, inhaling them in a way I haven’t seen a person eat since high school. He ate with the insistent bodily hunger of a growing person, despite the fact that at 23 he can hardly still be growing. The soup he lapped up to the last drop, licking the bowl.

Then he started abusing the “waiters”—the monks who work in the trapezniya. If I had to guess I would say this was probably the one place in the entire monastery where the workers can get away with cracking wise at the brothers. Lanky found this place and claimed it as his own. When he finished his first bowl of kasha, he snapped his fingers at a monk in an apron who passed by:

“Hey! Brother! Some more kasha!”

A monk passed by with some kvas. Lanky held out his tin cup and with a mouth still full of kasha said:

“Kvas! Give it here!”

By the end of lunch he was openly hamming it up, calling the monks “Garcon!” and “Waiter!” to their faces. He was living for this moment, you could tell.

After lunch we went back to work, and ashamed as I am to admit it, I almost didn’t make it. With the heat and the bugs and the actual work itself—all of it together was almost too much. By five I was taking “Prima” smoke breaks once every twenty minutes. The two Sergeis, meanwhile, took their only break around then to polish off what they call a “LinKor”, or Big Boat. This is a whole baton of bread, sliced lengthwise in half, and covered in monastery-made mayonnaise. Those two clowns sat there and each ate a whole LinKor before my very eyes. What amazed both Aleksei and me about this is that they sat there outside in complete calm and ate their meal bugs and all. Neither Aleksei nor I could sit still for more than a few seconds without being devoured by mosquitoes (our smoke breaks we took pacing back and forth), but they didn’t even seem to notice the bugs.

At the end of the work day, Aleksei and I faced a dilemma. We were filthy and grimy to the point of physical misery, but we also did not want to risk going near the river. There was a rusty barrel full of water on the site that had been used for mixing cement, and I thought seriously about taking a bath in it. But in the end the two Sergeis, Slava, and three or four other workers from other sites convinced us to follow them to “Paradise”, a nearby lake.

We went. To get there we had to go through the woods, where the insect factor reached Vietnam levels. Finally we reached a tiny sandy-banked lake in the middle of a pine forest. The water rippled with landing bugs. Aleksei and I, frantically swatting at each other, watched as the other workers stripped to their underwear and dove in. We followed, but reluctantly.

Then an amazing thing happened. All of the workers, including the older ones, started doing piggyback rides and playing water games that looked like “Marco Polo”. Even Slava, bearded old Slava, was giggling and splashing water back and forth. It was such a clear case of regression that it was creepy. I couldn’t stand to be out there for more than a few minutes, and neither could Aleksei, but they wouldn’t leave with us. When we left in a hurry through the woods, they were still back there in the lake, playing little-kid games.

THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX FAITH is a faith of power and fear. The Orthodox God forbids his subjects to sit during prayer, and requires everyone, including the priests, to look forward toward the altar during services. There is no human-to-human eye contact in church. The actual doctrine is one of total self-annihilation. When you come to the church you are told that everything that was your life without God was sinful; only when all of that life is replaced by God does one become...well, if not holy, then at least not necessarily doomed. The Orthodox Church does not encourage its subjects to find a greater understanding of God. It merely encourages them to accept a master-slave relationship with God, with God as the infallible master.

On earth the master-slave dynamic is played out endlessly in an elaborate hierarchy within the church. Discussions within the monastery are therefore generally limited to humorless paeans to God and orgies of flattery directed towards one’s earthly higher-ups. One worker I talked to while I was there, an ex-con named Mikhail who’d been at the monastery for three months, called the monks “supermen. They’re really supermen, supermen on earth.” In a conversation on our first day with a pair of novices Aleksei and I mentioned a monk named Father Varlam, a big, fat prick of a monk who ran the nuts and bolts of the monastery’s giant industrial operation. Varlam, whose permission I needed to work on the construction site, had accused me, within the first minute of our acquaintance, of both serving the devil and of being in league with, of all people, Sergei Dorenko. “You’re all sellouts. You work for the Jews and the American corporations. You print lies for the devil.”

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said.

He went on. “Do you want to know why Russia is in such a terrible state right now? Why people are starving?”

I shrugged.

“Bar codes,” he said. “They bear the number 666. 666 is the mark of the Beast. The Beast is sending us bar codes from America. Clinton is involved...it’s been proven...”

And so on and so on. Aleksei and I had to listen to this insane gibberish for a full twenty minutes. And like Father Nikolai, old Varlam ascribed to the Lenin school of debate; never stop talking, never concede anything, wear your opponent down. In this world all dialogue moves in one direction—top to bottom. There is no exchange of anything between rulers and subordinates in this world, excepting spittle from the mouth of the former to the face of the latter.

Anyway, when we mentioned this Varlam to two young novices we caught fishing on the Moksha, they quickly interrupted us.

“Father Varlam? A genius,” the first one said.

“A very holy man,” said the other. “And with such depth of mind and character. I feel lucky to be here with him.”

But above even Father Varlam in the monastery is the Starets Iranim. An old man who looks like a parody of a wise old elder, with a long gray beard, bright eyes, and a crooked back, Iranim is considered the holiest man in this part of the world. The busloads of polomniki who come to visit this place do so primarily to see him. They come close to him, shout questions at him, beg advice. He answers, generally, by saying things like “Trust in God”—but nonetheless he is considered a man of great wisdom. Everyone who talks about him here says the same thing about him, which is understandable because on virtually every subject here there is only one opinion that circulates and circulates. About Iranim it is said that he has a hypnotic power, that he says things that sound simple but which penetrate the soul, that he knows your problems without being told, and so on and so on. A good five people laid that whole line on me, including both of the Sergeis.

When we first arrived at the monastery, Father Nikolai rushed to introduce us to the Starets Iranim, thinking that he was doing us a big favor by exposing us to the old man’s holy flesh. This introduced us to one of the more repulsive traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. In this religion, laymen kiss the hands of monks and priests, as though they are royalty. Father Nikolai urged me to do it, but I would have no part of it, remembering the advice Denzel Washington gave to Will Smith before the filming of Six Degrees of Separation—”Don’t be kissing no man.”. Aleksei, trying to be polite, approached the old man and innocently held his hand out, as though for a handshake. The old man recoiled in shock, then offered his hand again for Aleksei to kiss. This, too, Aleksei fumbled, and the old man stumbled away.

“Did you feel that?” Father Nikolai said. “Do you understand now?”

On the way to work on the second day I asked Father Nikolai if he thought it was odd that the church should be working overtime on behalf of a former KGB agent, a man who in his youth would have snitched on anyone who was so much as baptized. He shrugged. “Politics don’t interest me,” he said. “I barely even know who the President is.”

Aleksei and I worked two full days on the job. By the end of the second day we were dead tired, but the guys in our crew were bubbly and headed for Paradise again. In a whisper they’d asked us to drive into the Mordovian town of Temnikov, across the river, and sneak them back a bottle of vodka. We agreed to this, too. The vodka was a much more serious proposition. We had to hide it in the woods, between two stumps of a tree, and give them directions to the tree. All of these precautions were their idea. They even asked us not to point to the tree, but instead to simply describe it. “There are eyes and ears all over this place,” Starshy said, looking in a panic back and forth in search of guards.

I tried at one point to ask both of the Sergeis what they thought about Putin coming, but gave it up pretty quickly. They didn’t even want to hear Putin’s name. All they wanted was to be done with their hellish shifts every day and have their few hours of freedom in a bug-infested lake, or on a patch of grass with a loaf of bread and some fresh mayonnaise. For this, and for the privilege of not being beaten by an army commander, or jailed by a cop for vagrancy, or forced to stay sober and feed one’s children, they were willing to put up with just about any humiliation, even (or especially) abstract ones like Putin.

I asked Sergei Starshy if he thought he’d ever see his children again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d like to. But I think I’m going to try to be a monk instead. I think it’s my calling.”

See RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL MONKS

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