Moscow Diary Read online

  This was the last day of the Sakharov Conference. I bumped into Yelena Bonner’s daughter and asked how the fact-finding trip to Armenia was going. She said, “Mother’s written to Gorbachev again”, as though this was the most normal thing in the world, which for her it is. By the end of the day they had the official permission to do the trip.

  I was very impressed by the conference. It was businesslike, as far as great discussions like that can be, and it came up with some half-sensible suggestions, particularly on legal procedural reform. When Baroness Cox was intoning the recommendations of our working group, some people from the audience silently went on stage and began holding up posters about their misfortunes. Yelena Bonner’s gentle son went to speak to them, but they didn’t move until Yelena Bonner marched onto the stage in a fury and shoved them off.

  She later told the auditorium that they’d fought to get free access for all to the plenaries, but it wasn’t a demonstration and anyone who tried to disrupt the meeting would get thrown out. Very few people would have dared to say that, or if they dared, very few would have got away with it – but she has indeed earned the authority.

  The day ended with a press conference in which successive Soviet journalists, official and unofficial, tried to imply Bonner had sold out or that the conference would not be following up seriously on prison reform etc. Most people on the platform were put on the defensive, until Bonner took the microphone and said, no, the conference would not be doing follow-up work. She had worked round the clock for eighteen months to put it on: “Now you do the follow-up work yourselves! You’re not three-year-old children. You’re all adults. There are 150 MPs here. Organise it yourselves!” My liking and admiration for her rose throughout the week. She’s not only honest, she’s smart. But I was struck again how harsh the Soviet press and public are.

  Irina and her mother were there and I sat with them in the morning. Irina was talking about literature again and said when she was at university they were all taught that capitalism was going through a crisis and as they waited for the crash they watched it reflected in the literature. She gave a merry laugh. She said Mandelstam wrote so well as to be almost incomprehensible: “… and in our country if we don’t understand something, we kill it”.

  I had an early night and watched the RSFSR Supreme Soviet discussing its draft law on a constitutional court. As there is not yet a multi-party system I don’t really understand the procedure they use, but the presidium seemed businesslike and the Congress was packed with people.

  Sunday 26 May

  It was a glorious day and I walked down to the riverside. It could have been Holland or provincial France on my stroll: cafés, people strolling clutching bunches of lilac. I sat with a fisherman, watching a festival on Red Square for Whitsuntide. Pleasure boats went by playing rock music. The fisherman told me you could catch huge fish at the riverbank and held out his hands. Here too. Someone had written “My heart beelongs you” in the dust on a lorry parked near us.

  My courtyard was lovely too. The trees give a nice shade and a group of men were out slapping chequers on the table near the rubbish containers, while I ate my ice cream. It was almost too hot to be out.

  Tamara took me to the jazz festival at the Palace of Culture attached to the Moscow Physics Institute. We watched them warming up and as usual some incredibly bad-tempered administrator came and shouted at the sound engineers. Tamara said Soviet people were bad tempered from morning to evening and she was sick of it. Me too. It was a mixed blessing going to the concert with a jazz expert, because she was intensely critical and intellectual about it. At the first interval we went backstage and she and her friend Bella demolished the acts. “It wasn’t jazz”, “It was not jazz”, they said. Apparently the singer with the headband and indifferent voice is married to the compère.

  Bella took us to a backroom and played us some improvisations. She graduated from the Composers’ Faculty at the Conservatoire and now plays at the Peking Restaurant and the Russky Traktir. Her classical training was stamped all over her, but her foot was stomping like there was a jazz musician trying to get out.

  Bill Skeat was on in the second half with a Soviet trio, including an excellent bassist, Viktor Dvorskin, and good young pianist, Lev Kushnir. They seemed to meet with Tamara’s approval too, because she kept saying to me in English, “A fine culture of sound” and “They have think” (?). We travelled home in the van with the performance artists from Minsk. There seem to be a number of interesting things developing in Belorussia.

  And now it is thundering.

  Monday 27 May

  Amazing how yesterday refreshed me. Another hot day. I met Natalya Vysotskaya at Krasnopresnensky District Soviet and we went to collect the next batch of documents in the paper trail leading to our premises. Apparently we have to make a written request, endorsed by the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises, for a ground plan of Herzen Street 22/53. This has to go to the Bureau of Technical Administration then come back to the Fund. The woman insisted we type our request on an Amnesty letterhead, which I didn’t have with me. Natalya very charmingly offered to create our own letterhead and to type the request herself there and then. The woman relented, we got our request stamped, and saved maybe three days or a week of faffing around. By a lucky fluke the Bureau of Technical Administration was open on a Monday, so I got our request in in the afternoon and persuaded them to have it ready by Friday.

  Natalya is being great. The day before she’d spoken at the Moscow City College of Advocates and encouraged them to give their time to her legal aid fund. They said now was not the time, because the financial situation was so difficult. She said now was exactly the time for poor clients.

  Ed Kline invited me to lunch at the Metropol hotel, the newly restored, super-duper Art Nouveau creation in Revolution Square. I went as I was, in T-shirt and jeans. Two women descended on me and asked if I was looking for the service entrance, then three security guards came up and tried to send me to the canteen. Finally made it to the restaurant. Ed’s wife later offered me a comb, so I guess today’s look was not a whing-ding success. It was fun to see them again and they were kind to me.

  Ed asked me if I’m meeting “plain people” and not just the intelligentsia. I’m having no trouble meeting “plain people”. It seems to me “intelligentsia” is something other people should call you, but which some people here call themselves. When I got off the bus I bumped into Father Nikon’s sister, Ira, at the bus stop. She was so surprised she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me. She’s off tomorrow for two months’ nursing at a pioneer camp. It’s one way she can give her son a holiday.

  Tuesday 28 May

  A crow gave an immense squawk on my window ledge. I flung on the radio and switched off the alarm, but found it was only 5.20am.

  At 2.00pm I went to meet an opposition deputy from the Georgian Supreme Soviet. He was with the representative they hope to base in Moscow. The Georgian mass media is so controlled by Zviad Gamsakhurdia that they are fairly desperately looking for outlets to the world. They came with information on seventy-two prisoners in Georgia and said four people had been picked off the street and “disappeared” for a week. They were held in some kind of garage. Gamsakhurdia has set up a National Guard parallel to the police force.

  I don’t know what their nationalist outlook would be if you scratched the surface, but they were both mild-mannered and said they oppose the death penalty, rather to my surprise.

  At 5.30pm I met Valya, to visit our premises. She brought Tolya, her daughter’s boyfriend, who will supervise the day-to-day building work. He seemed very serious about it and I liked him. He’s also old enough and just tough-looking enough to be quite handy in the job, I think. However, when we got to the office we found the padlock had been changed. Apparently last week there had been a fire or a flood there. The next-door neighbours said they were lucky they hadn’t been burned alive. “Must have been a fire,”
said Valya, to no one in particular.

  Tolya and I went round to the District Exploitation Administration to see if they have changed the lock. Usual scene of bedlam in their office and they shouted at us. Apparently they hadn’t; an international association of orphans is using it to store stuff. Michael Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave are its patrons.

  It makes a tremendous difference to have these helping hands at this stage. Perhaps I’m just doing more interesting things, or perhaps I’ve just been around long enough. I do feel more at home. Yesterday I knew exactly which underpass to drop into to pick up a copy of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. They had an interview with Ian for our thirtieth anniversary today. They said he was “a man of few words”, but I think that may have been because I was interpreting for him. The Russian TV news carried an excellent five minutes on our thirtieth anniversary tonight.

  At night another terrific thunderstorm burst and I got drenched. As I got nearer home this was joined by fireworks. The noise was spectacular and it looked like it was raining blood.

  Wednesday 29 May

  I slept very badly because the thunder and lightning continued till 2.00am and I don’t have curtains. Then there were mosquitoes. Was woken at 7.45am by agitated ringing on the doorbell. It was the postwoman, asking why I hadn’t collected a book that had been lying waiting for me for the last month. No one had told me about it, but apparently it was my fault.

  Ruslan rang to say he too had got caught in last night’s storm and his clothes now looked as though they’d been gone over by a cold iron that had been rubbed in dirt.

  I rang my Foreign Ministry minder to tell him I was off to Dubna for the night, then off I set to speak to research physicists interested in Amnesty. Savelovsky is like a village station in the middle of Moscow. You buy your ticket at a Nissen hut and people sit out knitting and reading at the buffers of the train. It was 130km north through deserted provincial Russia, with the odd cupola glinting across vast fields, and two peasant women sitting chatting on a furrow. Dubna is the USSR’s answer to CERN. I expected an impersonal science city, but found a leafy provincial town with lots of lilac trees and people cycling by. The river Volga bends north here. The grand old houses were built by German POWs, and the newer science blocks were put up in the last twenty years.

  I was met by Denjoe and his Kazakh friend, Arsen, and we had a pleasant afternoon in the sunshine before the evening’s talk. There were ten people in the audience, from Bulgaria, Romania, Peru, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the RSFSR and Eire. I don’t know how adequate my talk was, but I realised I did the whole forty minutes and the question time in Russian without any sense of strain, so maybe I am making progress.

  We all retired to Arsen’s room for a spontaneous party that I left at its height at 2.00am, when they were playing guitars and singing. The ten did not know each other before and I felt a sudden wrench at leaving Amnesty. I realised I will miss the kind of closeness that it can produce in like-minded strangers. I sat looking out at the Volga with the woman from Mongolia, listening to Suzanne Vega in the background and a nightingale outside the window. We were joined by Anca, who told us about pre-revolutionary Romania. They had everything except food and heating, she said. She had icicles hanging from her radiator and used to do her cooking at 1.00am when the gas was higher. However, she reckoned that the general economic situation had been better in Romania than here.

  We ate a salad made of lime leaves Denjoe had picked from the tree.

  Thursday 30 May

  I had an interesting travelling companion on the way home: a middle-aged woman who heads a research information centre on agriculture. We were both very tired and did a lot of sleeping, her with a bad back and me with a stiff neck. She reckons peasant farmers can’t pull the USSR out of its food crisis and that state farms are needed for some time yet. She had the kind of authority Professsor Kelina exudes, so I wasn’t surprised to learn she is the head of her outfit. She also had a discreet, and I thought probably informed, interest in Amnesty. She had noticed Denjoe’s badge, and asked non-intrusive questions about our information office. She saved me from a drunk who was trying to resell my train ticket, then invited me to visit her in Vladimir. I said all I knew about Vladimir was that it had ancient churches and a famous prison. She smiled quite receptively at that.

  I dashed for a meeting with Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary at the Human Rights Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had the ease about Amnesty which Soviet diplomats at the UN have, but which they largely lack here in Moscow. With some, but not too much, exaggerated familiarity he was basically asking for Amnesty materials to help them define their position on Kuwait, Cuba, China and administrative detention. We touched on Amnesty’s registration and he said there was a gap in the law because there weren’t many representatives of international non-governmental organisations here. “In fact, you’re the only one,” he said, and laughed.

  From there I tottered off to the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to get their latest plans for holding parallel activities during the September Human Rights Conference in Moscow. The outside of their building is tremendously baroque and reminded me of my fridge when it needs to defrost. The inside was like Gormenghast Hall, except for Lenin twinkling down from the carpet hanging on the wall. Their preparations seem to be very few.

  Realised at 6.00pm I had neither eaten nor been to the toilet all day. When anyone here starts to say, “Marjorie, we’re both women…”, I know they’re going to ask me how old I am. Then they ask if I have children, or if I’m married (in that order).

  Friday 31 May

  In my Russian lesson Misha told me how he’d collected idioms in Arkhangelsk in the far north as a student. He’d stayed with a peasant woman who slept above the stove. He’d slept on a cupboard where she kept the goats and he said the noise was deafening. After our lesson he took me to see an exhibition by Aleksey Svitich, who died early this year. He really could paint and there were some lovely things there. His widow showed us round and was wrung with grief. It had quite an effect on both of us.

  From there I popped into the Bureau of Technical Administration to pick up the promised ground plan of the office premises. Had to wait twenty minutes until the woman reappeared from her shopping trip, then she treated me to a display of gratuitous rudeness. “What are you sitting there like that for with that piece of paper in your hand?” “That file doesn’t exist.” “That property doesn’t exist.” Well, she picked the wrong one, baby. I got very coldly furious, insisted on seeing the boss, and told them Starovoytova and others are following the progress of our building application. Lo and behold, the file was found and the boss apologised to me. But they still hadn’t prepared the ground plan, so I have to go back at 12.00 on Monday. They behave like you are wasting their time, but the only time they are wasting is yours. I hate acting like this, but I hate being treated like a piece of shit even more.

  My spirits revived when I met Oleg Gorshenin and his friend Igor for a pizza. We had champagne and Igor asked to join Amnesty. I came home at 9.00pm and worked till 1.00am, just handling mail and writing up the week’s meetings for people in London.

  I realise I am getting some real friends here I can relax with: Oleg and Natalya for two, and also Misha, who was concerned that I’ve lost weight and look tired. He’d been waiting with some excitement for the Moskovsky Komsomolets article to come out, and said this morning that Radio Liberty carried a piece about our information office.

  Apparently someone has thrown paint over the memorial plaque to Sakharov on Chkalov Street. The newspaper kiosk down the road has had a big picture of him in the window for two weeks.

  Saturday 1 June

  It’s 10.00pm and I’m already in bed. There was a scene in the milk shop today. A customer thought someone had pinched her butter. From her face I don’t think she was lying. The shop assistant thought she was being accused and worked herself into a state, crossing hersel
f and throwing her cloth around. The man who delivers the milk was standing in the doorway, killing himself laughing.

  After a month of hot, thundery weather, there was a heavy, cold downpour all day. I couldn’t strain my cheese on the balcony so fixed a nail above the kitchen sink. A friend from Washington dropped by for a three-hour chat and I learned more from her about what is happening in the USSR than I’ve read or heard in Moscow.

  I did May’s accounts.

  Sunday 2 June

  Valya gave Tolya and me a lovely lunch of okroshka soup and meat she had bought from her hairdresser’s (?). As we were all feeling celebratory we finished with cognac and waffles. They were commenting with some irony on the militant patriotism of the US people they meet, something I’ve noticed too – even among US Communists. Valya got onto the well-worn subject of how uncultured Soviet leaders always are. She said that during Gorbachev’s honeymoon period with the West, he’d ended a press conference in Vienna with the Russian equivalent of: “Last question please, I must rest my plates of meat.”

  I seem to be going through a period of heightened awareness, because I was almost in an ecstasy back at home, looking at the sunlight on my bunch of lilacs and listening to Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I used to hear it as an allegory of a tragic life, but now I just hear it as extraordinarily beautiful sound. I think I also hear the sense she had of what she was playing, and how beautifully she judges it. The orchestra just seems to fall in behind her. You wouldn’t immediately think it was someone in her twenties playing.

  The Quakers were good tonight, with a Tolstoyan from Latvia visiting. Sasha said his grandmother had met Tolstoy when she was a child and had written a book about it – she was a child author. Apparently Tolstoy had a collapsible walking stick and was very good at enchanting children with it.

  Monday 3 June

  The woman who drove me mad at the Bureau of Technical Administration was actually called Dementyeva. She wasn’t there today and the ground plan was waiting for me at 12.00, before the office formally opened. However, the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises has moved again since last Monday, and no one knew their address or had their new number.