Moscow Diary Read online

  I ran to the Leningrad train, clutching tulips, to wave off Robin, Helen and Sheila. Robin was looking happy and skinny and young, clutching my tulips as we took photos. Then I met Irina to take her to a Mikhail Pletnyov concert at the Conservatoire. She is fascinating. She’s tall. However, what strikes you is her great intelligence and wit. We were talking about the tarty look that is so prevalent here and she said appearances were deceptive: sometimes the most disciplined-looking people have towering passions. I think she has. All the friends she played music with have emigrated, and I felt very sympathetic and sorry for her, but realised that’s probably quite an inadequate reaction. She’s very much her own person. I got the impression she’d come to the concert rather to humour her mother, who feels sorry for me.

  At home I called Natalya Vysotskaya to apologise for my catatonic behaviour over the phone yesterday, and the nice woman had drafted a letter for me to send to the Krasnopresnensky Executive Committee about renovating our premises. She says she specialises in tear-jerking letters. It seemed that’s the first time anyone has spontaneously helped me – but as I keep thinking it, I realise I’m being helped all the time.

  Wednesday 15 May

  An early visit from the landlord to deliver his translation. Then came Rachael – my third volunteer – a Cambridge student who feels at a loose end. Looking at her pale face and listening to her, I feel we are all going through some kind of existential experience here, if I knew better what existential means. We’re all finding it immensely tough, we’re all alone, none of us is really happy, but we’re all committed in some way to experiencing what there is here. She sat at one end of the room and I at another, both of us revising translations, and it was nice to have the company. While she was there Tanya Ilina rang. The Journal of Humanitarian Sciences was putting in its office’s order for food and did I want to be included? Another spontaneous kindness. I explained about my food box from London and said no.

  Lunch with the new Portuguese Ambassador. The embassy is on an unprepossessing industrial street, but is a very open, low building with lilac trees in the garden. I could see the ambassador in the picture window, reading his paper, waiting for me. He’s been at the UN in New York and Geneva, and also spent three years in China. Only two of them work at the embassy and he covers Mongolia too. We were waited on by a Soviet maid who seemed to make him cringe. He doesn’t have Russian, and so isn’t into the fascinating minutiae like the man at the Norwegian Embassy, but also perhaps it is a generational thing. He looked at things in broad sweeps, which I wasn’t so able to do. He says Amnesty is a “giant” at the UN. Ninety per cent of the 1503 submissions come from us. I do feel a flush of pride when I hear things like that.

  From there to the Shevardnadze Foreign Policy Association, clutching my letter and the lists of all the documents we put out in 1990. It’s in a former embassy building on a side street and, rather refreshingly, has no furniture. So even they are experiencing premises problems. An electrician was sitting on the floor outside the office where the Executive Secretary, Sorokin, received me. He’s young and slim with short, brylcreemed hair, like a London advert. He was also informal and pretty clued up. He’d heard about our plans to set up an office all last year and in principle wants both our organisations to stay in contact. I hope somehow it will help us with our registration. He was explaining the Russian phrase “a wedding General” to me, and said, “Say you and I were getting married…”. Most people would die rather than use an example like that.

  I went out again at 6.00pm to meet Ruslan and his friend Andrey. After talking, Ruslan took us to a place he knows, where we drank a bottle of champagne. It was a bare room above a shop, with pools of rain on the floor, building rubble in the corner, a table at forty-five degrees, and stinking of toilets and mice. However, we could look out of a big window onto the ring road and Andrey said, “Cross your heart – what use do you think AI can be here?” So I told him, and some of my arguments seemed to make sense to him, though not others. It was good practice. They walked me to the Pushkin monument and Andrey, to my surprise, thanked me for the company.

  When I got home I waited till midnight to get a free line to Kiev to ring about these blasted train tickets.

  Thursday 16 May

  Another early morning visit from Nikolay. His mother, the good soul, has agreed to take the tickets to the Drohobych train. Nikolay was in a daft mood, constantly contradicting himself then agreeing with me. I said, “Are you a Yes Man?” and he said “yes”. Then I went to the Stolitsa journal to do an interview, which went fairly well. I managed to bring in one of our thirtieth anniversary appeal cases from Vietnam and also to counter Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of AI.

  I travelled to the other end of town to post the mail – that trip is a real drag – then came back to revise rather a poor translation of one of the speeches to the Eighth UN Crime Congress. Funny how hard and time-consuming it is to rework a poor translation. At about 8.00pm Nikolay’s friend Kostya came with his article on Amnesty, which will go to Moscow newspapers then get syndicated to Arkhangelsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Baku and elsewhere. I realise he and Nikolay have put in lots of work reading and translating Amnesty publications, and what they’ve come up with is very fresh and balanced and interesting. My bits in it are the worst. Somehow there seems to be a bit more hope in the work. I also got a phone call from Denjoe in Dubno, saying there’s a lot of interest there, and would I come and address a meeting.

  When I was scanning Izvestiya I found a piece by their Rio de Janeiro correspondent about the Brazilian Health Minister’s visit to Amnesty in London, which vindicates our report on abuses against children in Brazil. Curiouser and curiouser. You could hardly get more oblique than that.

  Last night a fly seemed to spend most of the night on my face. I’ve now got cockroaches in the living room as well as in the kitchen and bathroom. It’s probably the weather.

  Stolitsa uses paratroopers to staff the reception desk. Two strapping men sat and watched as two old women carted out stacks of the journals to a distribution van. It’s funny, whenever I see workers in motion here they’re women, and when they’re stationary they’re more often men.

  Friday 17 May

  There are so many cracks in my Academy of Sciences cup that the tea seeped out almost as fast as I drank it at breakfast.

  Not a sparkling start to the day. Everyone was out, then the secretary at the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises put the phone down on me four times.

  I went to my Russian class, which was interesting and helpful as usual. Misha’s wife is studying in Yugoslavia and he said he was a bit frightened by her last letter, because she was having such a terrific time and going on holiday in Greece with a new friend she’d made. He, meanwhile, was trying to prepare all the food for their teenage son’s birthday party tomorrow. He was trying in every way to remind her of them: sending their photo to await her in Greece, buying her a bag and planning to send her chocolates, but afraid they wouldn’t be good enough for her new company. He was also planning to turn up in Greece unexpectedly – always rather a disaster I’d have thought. When his son, Andrey, came back, he seemed rather frightened by me, and came out into the hall to ask us what we had been translating and where we were going. It must be very tough for them both.

  I did an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, which has a circulation of 1.5 million. The journalist, Katerina Deyeva, invited me to speak to their anniversary meeting at the end of June, which has a huge audience. There must have been a more personal vibe between us, because I felt I was speaking gibberish.

  As I was nearby, I popped in on the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises and amazingly came away with the Executive Committee Resolution and the key to the premises. Olga Ivanovna Lavrova looks so immensely strained and made a battery of phone calls, just because she knew my “President” is coming out here. Fortunately the same hierarchical strain doesn’t exist in Amnesty. Mind you, we also wo
rk a lot harder without it. Meanwhile, her secretaries sat by idly watching.

  I decided not to go home before having dinner with two people from “Memorial”. I sat outside the Conservatoire listening to someone practising Brahms’ second Piano Concerto very well, until a thunderstorm broke and drenched me. Herzen Street turned into a river 9” deep, and so a whole chain of women pedestrians had to negotiate the 3’-high pipe that blocks the pavement. We all held each other’s bags and helped each other over, me in a short, tight skirt and high heels. I arrived at the dinner like a drowned rat. The “Memorial” people were two Americans who are helping to computerise the archive. They too have been finding it tough – they also arrived during the dreadful winter and the Gulf War.

  A bomb went off in the headquarters of the Democratic Russia Party tonight.

  Saturday 18 May

  The Museum of the Revolution has an interesting exhibition of posters which I went to see this morning. Not only Red propaganda but White too, and sometimes they had literally used the same pictures but supplied opposing captions. The fact it wasn’t totally Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik made it very good. Some of the posters in 1918 were like posters in 1991: “X – the only hope of Russia’s Salvation!” or “Bolshevism = hunger and violence!”

  At night I visited a neighbour, Tamara, who by the oddest coincidence is a close friend of Zaure in Kazakhstan. She’s head of a jazz faculty in Moscow, and blow me down, amidst everything else it seems jazz is going through a crisis too. It would be nice to hear about something that isn’t. Tamara and her daughter are planning to go to Israel, and her daughter treated me to a barrage of English that was intended to impress but felt like an aggressive assault. Her mother obviously thought so too and sent her to bed.

  Tamara was immensely kind to me and has a lovely face, but in the course of the conversation got onto the subject of “blacks”, whom she doesn’t like, though she’s “not a racist”, according to her. Soviet racism really is a deep thing and will bring lots of trouble in the future. For me it feels like a yawning gap in front of me when I’m trying to get closer to people I like here.

  In the afternoon I cleaned and tidied like mad for Ian’s visit – maybe some hierarchical strain after all. I also drafted a longer article for Moscow News. I am very tired and can’t remember when I last had a day off.

  Wednesday 22 May

  Ian has been and gone, and a lot has happened since I last wrote up this diary. We mainly pursued the premises and the vexed question of Amnesty’s legal status. On the Monday morning we met up with Natalya Vysotskaya and Valya Levina and went to look round the office space at Herzen Street 22/53. It was recently occupied by squatters and was full of rubbish and crap. It’s also in need of major repairs. But it has four rooms and a hall and is in a great place. Ian had the bright idea of talking to the neighbours, and Natalya used her charm to get us into what turned out to be a neat little computer firm next door. They said their place had been in even worse nick when they took it over (rent 12,000 roubles/year) and they gave us useful advice on firms to use for repairs. So, bucked up by that we decided to order a security door and set up shop.

  We also had three meetings with Foreign Ministry Departments about our status. The Information Department told us they couldn’t register us as a press outfit. The Humanitarian Affairs Department was pretty clueless and said, “How would you like to be registered?” The best meeting was with Igor Yakovlev, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Legal Department. He made calls to the head of the Information Department, the head of the International Organisations Department and Deputy Minister Petrovsky, and undertook to devise some new status which would fit us and other international organisations. The meeting had its funny sides. We were escorted up by an apparition in chiffon and spangles, who seemed very friendly but a bit dippy. She left us outside the office door, which I couldn’t open. Ian gave it a shove and I fell into the room, creating the serious impression we strive for. Later Yakovlev went through his battery of five phones, trying to work out which one was ringing. It was a sort of Dick Van Dyke show brought to Moscow.

  In the two days we also attended the Sakharov Conference, amongst many other things. I never thought I would be pleased to see the international human rights crowd, but I was, quite. It was like stepping into another life. The staff at the Rossiya Hotel had loosened the regime for the conference, so it wasn’t like crossing the border getting in. All a totally false impression. As word got round more Muscovites and ex-prisoners began to attend the sessions. When they heard that tomorrow’s session is to be in the Sovincenter though, they said they wouldn’t come because security was seven-deep, and they’d never be allowed through.

  One of the US delegates invited me for a drink at the Rossiya bar and I apologised that I don’t have any hard currency. He said lightly that if he lived here he’d always carry some. It’s no reflection on the Sakharov Conference, which has been pretty good, but to me there increasingly seems to be a major problem about this blindness to wealth. If you were to have a conference about untouchables and exclude all Indians it would be more obvious, but this oblique discrimination is just as effective and few people seem to be bothered about it. I only have the smallest sense of what it’s like living here, but I feel most of these people have none. The pity of it is that so few Russians or Soviets seem to object. They’re not (yet) in a position to.

  Real life impinged more today when Viktor crept into the session, looking pale and starved as usual. His mother’s legs seem to be paralysed and she can’t get out of bed. When he got up to leave I touched his arms saying goodbye and he looked at me with real gratitude. At the end of the row he very embarrassedly blew me a kiss. At night Nikolay came round, on the eve of his first trip abroad – to an Amnesty meeting in Hungary. We sat drinking whisky and I deciphered the words of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s a Sin’ for him. I lent him my camera for his trip, but he was reluctant to take it because he wasn’t sure he would be able to use it, never having had one before. In the morning the landlord had been round, preparing to make the big experiment of putting money in a bank account for the first time. He didn’t want to put in too much, because he was afraid the government would not let him have it back on some pretext or other. Quite a realistic fear here, I think.

  The highlight of the last few days was definitely the memorial concert on Sakharov’s birthday, at the Conservatoire: Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and the Virtuosi of Moscow. It had me in tears at many points. They ended with the ‘Lacrymosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem. The audience sitting at the back of the stage turned out to be a choir. They began singing sitting down, then slowly rose to their feet as they reached the first crescendo. I’d never seen anything like it and it was immensely moving.

  Yelena Bonner said some unusual things for a maîtresse d’. In her opening speech she said, “Very few of you shared the thoughts and ideas of Sakharov; even fewer of you were his friends; the most you can say is that you were alive at the same time that he was in history.” Absolutely true. When the Dutch Academy of Sciences gave her a medal for Sakharov she said, “This is a lesson in doing things on time. You were late in inscribing it and now you have to give it to me and not him.” She is largely driven by “zlost” and anger it seems, but I think she has earned the right to say all these things. She must be sickened by human nature as displayed over the decades to Sakharov. When she and Rostropovich were together on stage it was like a family show, Gorbachev sitting unacknowledged throughout in the box nearest the stage. The whole evening was both solemn and informal, and matched the occasion perfectly. I wondered what a Hollywood version would have been like.

  It was very nice to have Ian here, both because he was someone to compare impressions with and take decisions, but also because he is so quick on the uptake on the Soviet scene. On the human level too he came carrying a big heavy bag of presents from him and the London office, and he also seemed to be prepared to spend a
lot of time with me, just talking.

  A few weeks ago I looked at the Old Testament to reread the story about Samuel, but I found the stories so good I’ve carried on reading, and am now up to Nehemiah, reading things I’ve never looked at before. The stories are all set in a political context, and people’s bad sides only seem to make them come a cropper when they pretend to be better than they are. People’s psychological motivation is very modern and very clear. What has kept me reading is that almost every day the story has fitted what I am doing. Just as I am contemplating the renovation work we need in the office, Ezra and Nehemiah are considering the repairs of Old Jerusalem and economic inequalities are giving Nehemiah pause for thought. A local human rights wallah has also just appeared on the scene as Sallambat, Tobiah and Geshem the Arab, disparaging the building efforts. No Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises to contend with yet.

  Friday 24 May

  Today I ground to a halt. Stayed in bed till 10.30am then had a blissful day at home. I prepared letters on the premises, and basically tidied up loose ends before the big leap forward into new waters/bogs in June.

  I took the laundry in – something I’ve been trying to do for four weeks – and on the way home found the local cake shop was selling chickens, so I bought one. The local church has erected a scaffold on its grounds and installed a beautiful big bell. I could hear it tolling tonight and it was deep and peaceful.

  Saturday 25 May