Moscow Diary Read online

  moscow

  Diary

  Marjorie Farquharson

  Copyright © 2018 Marjorie Farquharson

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 9781789010381

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  “A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

  Laozi

  Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE FIRST EIGHT WEEKS: January–March 1991

  BACK IN THE USSR: APRIL–JUNE 1991

  JULY–OCTOBER 1991

  THE LAST LAP: NOVEMBER 1991–MARCH 1992

  1992

  POSTSCRIPT

  Notes

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marjorie Farquharson worked in the field of human rights and the USSR and post-Soviet States for over 30 years. She was the Amnesty researcher on the USSR at the International Secretariat from 1978 – 1992 and Amnesty International’s first representative in the Soviet bloc, worked as the Director of the EU TACIS project, worked in 44 of Russia’s federal regions as a Council of Europe Officer, and helped establish a regional ombudsman institution there. She has been a freelance researcher, writer and translator since 2001 and worked in all 5 Central Asian States.

  THE FIRST EIGHT WEEKS: January–March 1991

  Thursday 24 January

  While our wheels are being changed at Brest-Litovsk I’ll take advantage of the pause to write this diary.

  My visa came through after four days’ delay. The Moscow Foreign Ministry said, “Strange things are happening, particularly in the London Consulate. This is not the first time…” The official at the USSR Embassy asked me to come and collect it at the “KGB centre, 18 Kensington Palace Gardens”. This was either a slip of the tongue or refreshing candour on his part.

  It has been a very interesting ride so far. The Belgian ticket collector said, “Moscow? Give my greetings to Gorbachev”, and the carriage laughed. Later, while I was killing six hours at Köln station, next to a fruit machine that played ‘Ode to Joy’, a Pole sitting with me said, “Gorbachev?” and made a fifty-fifty motion with his hand. The last person to comment was a West African in my sleeper, who said, “Give Gorbachev my best wishes”, before pulling the blanket over his head.

  I woke up in Poland, where I have spent the last twelve hours. It looked sodden. In 1975 I remember it looked the poorest country we travelled through. I still saw some old steam engines, and a man with his horse at a well, but the station buildings were newly painted and the fields looked neat. There were also some new cars on the road. The Poles I travelled with were remarkably quiet: not eating, not speaking, just reading and saying “goodbye” nicely when they got off. Vivid contrast to three immensely physical Russians who got on after Poznan and had us all shifting our things etc.

  Changed trains at Warsaw to catch the train I should have got at Oostende. It was an immense battle for me and every other passenger to be allowed on, even though we had our tickets and reservations etc. I somehow wasn’t prepared for Soviet bureaucracy to start on Platform 4, Warsaw station. Once I was on the steward became very pleasant and amusing. He was reading Moscow News.

  Friday 25 January

  When I woke up we were travelling through rural Belorussia. There were trees pressing at the window, blue sky, snow on the ground, and every so often we’d pass a village. This is a fantastic way to travel and a fantastic way to arrive.

  It was -7 degrees in Moscow and I was met by my landlord and his wife, she in an expensive black fur coat. In the cab home they were discussing how the 50- and 100-rouble notes had been withdrawn from circulation almost overnight. Apparently it was meant somehow to hit black marketeers, but it also wiped out pensioners’ savings at a stroke. The landlord’s wife was anxious to divest me of all the things I’d brought them as rent. When I told her I’d sent them ahead of me she wanted me to ring the shipping company there and then. As she was going through the list of things, she saw my jacket and said, “I wanted one like that”, looked again, then said, “Oh, no, it’s cheap”.

  The landlord seemed to have a change of heart later on – brought me some bedding, food and an iron. He told me there are rumours that the 10- and 25-rouble notes will also disappear. I put on the radio and heard Galina Starovoytova’s familiar voice. She said it was hard to imagine anyone further to the right than the President, or who could hold a gun to his head and say, “OK, it’s your life, or tanks in Lithuania.”

  Saturday 26 January

  Today they announced there would be joint army and police patrols in major cities at night, public holidays and possibly weekends. The KGB also got new powers to investigate economic crimes.

  There were snowstorms all day. I caught up on my Izvestiya subscription. They have called this year, “The Year of the Market”, and are carrying a rags-to-riches story on the front page. I came to like their foreign news coverage – particularly of the Gulf, which they see as a political issue rather than a military one. Radio Moscow announced major price rises in Georgia and said it was price rises like these that had “led to the disturbances in the Baltic”. I wonder if Georgia’s the next to get it in the neck.

  Bloody hours of football on the World Service as I cleaned the bathroom.

  Sunday 27 January

  I thought I was being woken by someone’s ornamental clock in the morning, but realised it was church bells, presumably ringing from the church down the road. It was returned to believers a couple of years ago and has since been restored. Church bells were illegal until 1988.

  It was a beautiful day: blue sky, deep frost and -16 degrees. It was so cold my face hurt by the time I turned out of the courtyard into the street. Went to visit Yelena’s mother and give her photos of their wedding party in October. She took such pleasure in looking at them it gave me pleasure just to watch her. She said the first frost always comes around the Feast of the Baptism, which has just passed. Apparently believers take a container to church to receive water that has been blessed. Yelena was arrested at the beginning of the Feast of the Baptism in 1984 and so her mother never got her container to church that year.

  There is something very clean and peaceful about their flat. I stayed about three hours and she told me some interesting things about old Moscow. She insisted on giving me sheets, a blanket, pans, plates and cutlery, her own grapefruit jam and some mayonnaise someone had given her from Tomsk. A lovely person.

  The cold was exhausting so I didn’t go out again in the evening. Alksnis of the “Soyuz” faction in Parliament was threatening there will be civil war in the Baltics which will spread through the USSR. He blamed Gorbachev for not going the whole way an
d imposing presidential rule. The radio is now denying rumours that 25-rouble notes will be withdrawn. However, a number of shops are not taking them.

  Monday 28 January

  I’ve spent the whole day tied to the house, waiting for my advance luggage to arrive. I phoned them at 9.00am. A nice guy came to pick up papers at 2.00pm and it’s now 6.00pm. I’ve been reading Dennis Healey’s autobiography; he said when he addressed the City at the Mansion House, his wife had to sit upstairs in the gallery “like a medieval leper, listening to a sermon from his squint”.

  Tuesday 29 January

  Because it was snowing I could see a path people take, off the beaten track. It turned out to be a shortcut to the metro and takes you through a lovely glade in front of the church. There’s also a fruit and veg shop hidden away there.

  This morning I went to the local sorting office to open a PO box for Amnesty mail. Two women who were sifting mail in a dilatory sort of way ignored me for 4–5 minutes, then I eventually got to speak to the chief postmistress. She said she would contact me when a box came free and asked me to jot down my details. I deliberately said that I was on a visit sponsored by the Foreign Ministry, and suddenly she brought me all the forms and a key, and even got a towel to dust the box (!). To give her her due, she had been very civil before I mentioned the Foreign Ministry. The box cost 48 roubles (£4.80) for the year.

  Had a very interesting lunch with Valentina, who also sent me away with sheets and pillowcases. She said she had been non-political all her life until the first real elections in 1989, when she went to a ward meeting to nominate twenty-three candidates and noticed the list was rigged. She stood up and pointed it out, and got nominated herself. In her nomination speech she had said she was for Sakharov, Yeltsin, Afanasyev – and added in English because she couldn’t think of the Russian, “for human rights too”. That and the demonstration on 25 February last year were two of the biggest events of her life. The third was when Sakharov was howled down in Parliament for his comments on Afghanistan. Valentina doesn’t like foreign radio stations because they sound condescending and she got tired of people foisting their views on her in Britain. Cautionary advice to me.

  Unexpected visit from the landlord when I got back. He’s preparing forms to register me with the police and thinks it will take two weeks. Ye gods! He talked non-stop for 1.5 hours and I watched his face working away, then suddenly breaking into a smile. Then he abruptly left with no goodbye – very tall, in a fur hat and big boots. It was exhausting – a sort of whizz through the Financial World Tonight. He goes on so much about how poor he is that I find I start doing it myself.

  Entertaining dinner with a visiting Quaker, who has lost a stone since she came here in November and has only seen two pints of milk. Sent me away with frozen pineapples.

  Felt immensely happy today.

  Wednesday 30 January

  My luggage arrived before breakfast and I spent the day assembling it, unable to fit the last screw into the arm of my IKEA easychair. The landlord and his wife came, to start the process of registering me with the block superintendent, the district finance department and the local police. After two hours Sasha had made some progress, but before the police can register me they need documents from the Visa and Registration Department, so I’ll have to go there tomorrow.

  Sasha was looking like a boyar, in long coat with fur lapels and high fur hat. Yuliya stayed with me for the two hours and we had mutual difficulty understanding each other. She pointed to the black sisal plant-pot holder she had macraméd, and said, “That’s horrible isn’t it?” Apparently the Ambassador’s wife in Tanzania had got all the Soviet wives making things out of macramé – even tables and chairs.

  I do so little here, so slowly, that I began to feel overwhelmed by what faces me. In the evening I sketched out an advert for AI, which I hope we can place in the press, along with the new PO box number.

  Thursday 31 January

  When people here say it is 30 degrees, they mean -30 degrees, which is what it was today.

  I have discovered that a Soviet courier service will take mail for £10, instead of the $60 which DHL asks. I took the tube and a bus to the main Warsaw highway and tottered with my mail to the International Post Office. Prices have gone up: the courier apparently cost £9 last week.

  I then made for the Visa and Registration Department (UVIR) in the centre of town, everything looking absolutely lovely in deep snow and a pink light. Found UVIR had moved from Kolpachny Pereulok and left no sign saying where to. Eventually tracked them down at the end of Chernyshevsky Street, to find they were shut. Far from the metro I couldn’t face more walking, so caught a bus – foolishly as it turned out, because it crawled along the ring road for about fifty minutes and I got chilled to the bone. I really was feeling peculiar by the time I got home and immediately slept. Yelena’s mother rang to see how I was coping with the cold and to offer me another blanket.

  I put socks and a pair of leg warmers on top of my tights and went off to UVIR again. There was a big disorderly queue, which moved quite quickly. When it got to me, eight or nine people crowded in from all sides, saying they’d got permission to jump the queue, and a big argy-bargy broke out. “Well, I am the queue, and I’m next,” I said grimly. An African diplomat on my left was playing with a biro which turned into an aerial (?). It turned out UVIR can’t provide papers for me, it has to be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  There was great pushing and shoving to get onto the No. 25 bus home and I noticed nine of us, all women, didn’t make it. When we eventually caught the next one, we were picking up the female residue at all the stops.

  There’s a big mirror by my phone in the hall and, what with tiredness and -30 degrees, it looked like ET looming up at me. Out with the cream. I made the mistake of doing “simple” domestic things as an antidote to the day. Decided to replace the split and unsanitary toilet seat with the one I’d brought from home, but could not get the two screws at the back to budge. So now have no toilet seat at all.

  I can’t explain why I find my surroundings so absolutely beautiful. I came home in the dark through the glade behind the church. The mixture of snow, shadows, and shapes in their winter clothing was lovely.

  Friday 1 February

  Minus 18 degrees today and comparatively warm, although it was today I noticed the inside of my nose was freezing.

  I went to the independent weekly journal Stolitsa to talk with their editor-in-chief about placing an ad with them. They are also interested in our Prisoner of the Month column. The foreign editor, Vitaly Yerenkov, is a former Novosti journalist and very interested in, and interesting about, the international scene. Without any access to agency reports or foreign press, because they can’t afford them, he has to write pieces about the Persian Gulf. He had some scathing things to say about the Western press and their actual lack of freedom. At Novosti he had watched them eating out of Gennady Gerasimov’s – the press spokesman’s – hand, totally unwilling and unable to challenge the US/European consensus that Gorbachev is a “good thing”.

  I lunched at Pizza Hut and was almost embraced by a Finnish financial journalist, who was just back from the oppressive, secret and hothouse atmosphere of Nizhny Novgorod. She thrust her garlic bread at me and was anxious to talk. Today is the day Soviet troops start to accompany police on patrols. Troops withdrawn from Central Europe are now massed on the Finnish border and the Finnish armed forces are in a state of low alert. All these things gave her an apocalyptic vision, which I must say I don’t actually share at present. She kept looking at her watch as four o’clock approached, as though she expected the armoured cars to start rolling in.

  The dingy half-light in my flat in the evenings drives me mad, so I thought I’d finish setting up my lamps. Repeated last night’s mistake re domestic tasks and decided to transfer some Soviet two-pin plugs onto my things. But whereas UK plugs are fairly compact and smooth in
side, everything inside a Soviet plug is loose and wobbles, so that trying to attach the wires is like stepping from one moving boat to another in a high sea. Gave up and wrote this diary. Now my lamps don’t work, nor does the TV, because I removed the plug. As for the toilet seat…

  Saturday 2 February

  Extremely tired, but decided I would go and strut my stuff at the Moscow Aviation Institute where the Moscow Helsinki Group were holding a seminar. There was a ballroom dancing lesson going on in the hall outside, very much like our own class in Herne Hill – a lot of European hips trying to get their way round the Cha-cha-cha. Moscow Amnesty members had arranged a good stand on “Different Faces of Repression” around the world and I added our Death Penalty Report and UN Codes of Conduct. Extremely chuffed that I sold 20 roubles’ worth.

  A woman spoke about the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. It was intelligent, confident, in good Russian, and what people wanted to hear. But I felt very uncomfortable during it. She made it sound like what is laid down in the US constitution and in laws always actually happens. Surely in any study like that you’ve got to look at the people who nevertheless fall through the system and see how that happens too. She made it sound as though it’s all OK, as long as lobby groups are protesting – like they form one cosy whole with the government.

  It reminded me of the book Critical Psychiatry: in the US psychiatry is treated as a kind of “mental hygiene”, to accommodate the individual to their surroundings – a substitute for any radical political sentiment. I noticed the guy from the Soviet Foreign Ministry walked out.

  Tremendous sense of relief when I got home by 6.00pm with nothing pressing to do for 1.5 days. Actually managed to fix a lamp and wrote letters home. Soviet cosmonauts can see the fighting in the Gulf – fires and smoke.

  Sunday 3 February