Moscow Diary Read online

  The promised documents for registration have still not appeared at the Foreign Ministry, so what’s new. As I clipped my bus ticket, the bits fell into the bouffant hair of the woman underneath, unbeknown to her. So did everyone else’s.

  Friday 12 April

  A really beautiful morning. I stood out on the balcony before breakfast feeling at last I’ve slept myself out. The Foreign Ministry gave me my documents for registering with the local police today, so perhaps we’re making progress. Last time it took seven weeks. This time too they registered me as “the representative of Amnesty International” – a very positive sign, everyone says. I carted the computer into town in the afternoon and Leonid actually went through my electronic mail and word processing systems slowly and thoroughly, explaining things to me. I appreciated it a lot and told him.

  In the evening I flew back home to meet Nikolay from the Moscow Amnesty group at 9.00pm, startling a girl sitting on the steps in the dark in her nightie when I got out of the lift. She fled like a nineteenth-century heroine, but later came back to ask me the time. I don’t know if she was locked out or what.

  While Nikolay and I talked there was suddenly a huge explosion and then the back yard lit up. Not shell fire, but immensely powerful fireworks for Cosmonauts’ Day. The dogs were all terrified. Nikolay had told me he has a tortoise and I asked if she would be frightened. “The fact is, she has no ears,” he answered solemnly.

  I almost missed my tube stop today watching a pale woman with glasses tatting with pale thread. All her fingers were ticking up and one hand darted backwards and forwards with an apparently invisible thread. Every so often she’d undo a minute knot with a small hook. It looked about as relaxing as undoing a telephone wire.

  The strike in Belorussia has been temporarily lifted. One of their demands is Gorbachev’s resignation. It’s strange that this was the venue for his presidential campaign in February/March; they gave a huge yes vote in the referendum on 17 March; and four weeks later they’ve made their biggest show of political dissent to date.

  Saturday 13 April

  I very much enjoyed today. Wrote letters in the sunshine on the balcony this morning. Five more letters in the PO box, which makes eighteen for this week. I shopped at the Danilov Market then went over to Michurinsky Prospekt to visit friends of Helena’s family. I popped round at four for tea then ended up staying for a riotous dinner and left at midnight. Various of their friends had come round to welcome Yasha back from Paris, and they were all very positive to me and to Amnesty, and all absolutely charming about including me in, and translating slang etc. I came away with a new translator, a possible taker for Brian’s play, an interview with the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, and a potential Russian-language coach.

  The Academy of Sciences had offered Yasha a plot of land outside Moscow to grow his own food. Apparently all his colleagues were offered the same. One woman at the dinner was going to take up a farm in Tver region, twelve hours away. We ate and drank with gusto while two dark-eyed children sat and watched us at the end of the table, like Fanny and Alexander. The conversation got round to political limericks and rude jokes and we learned how to say “sweet FA” in each other’s languages. I liked one of the Brezhnev jokes: during the Olympics he was handed a speech with the Olympic logo on it and began to read, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh…”

  Sunday 14 April

  The day began and ended with narrow Christianity. A dour Scottish voice on the World Service said we had grown soft on good and evil in the name of “tolerance”, and we should go tough on them again. “It’s like science – positive and negative.” For me the analogy told me more about him than about good and evil.

  Then at the Quakes in the evening we were visited by a Christian businessmen’s fellowship from the UK, who arrived in an Intourist bus and wanted to see “Russian Christians”. They were very anxious about whether Islam is gaining ground in the USSR and one Scottish voice asked how Christian evangelists could attract more people here than they do in Scotland. By making their religion bigger, I would have thought. I came home with two Russian bibles to give away, and was touched to see an inscription in the front of one, written painstakingly in Cyrillic by a lady in Albert Street, Millom.

  I had a lazy day. I put my sour milk in a hankie and hung it from a stick on the balcony to make cheese. Karmit rang, just back from a whistlestop tour of the USSR. After Dushanbe she said she flew in to Moscow and thought, Ah – freedom!

  Monday 15 April

  I went to Avtozavodsky district early in the morning to see Karmit before she flew home. It reminded me of Glasgow in the 1960s: very heavily industrial with traffic careering through and things brown with impacted dust. People chatting in doorways looked pale and poor too, and the stairs and door to Karmit’s flat were exactly like my grandmother’s tenement. Karmit had been seeing sometimes a hundred people in a day during her trip. In the hour I was there she saw five. She’s soon going back to Israel to help with family problems. Their flat got blown up by a Scud missile. Some people’s lives…

  On my way back I went to register at the Visa Department and, amazing to relate, I was in and out in twenty minutes – no queue, no fights, no nothing. Before doing an interview with the legal journal, Za i Protiv, I had lunch out in a park. A lorry rolled up, two men got out and made us all get up while they moved the bench about two feet further along. They then went round all the other benches doing the same thing. There was a Mexican wave of people scrambling to their feet clutching their Pepsis and food and bags.

  The interview was quite good: about the Soviet scene and international standards. I felt he was asking genuine questions, like “What is an inalienable right?” I stood waiting for a bus outside the KGB and noticed there is actually a constant traffic of normal-looking people going in and out of it. Unnerving.

  In the evening I took presents to Bridget Dunbar’s friends. The grandmother was portly, in glasses and a housecoat. It turns out she is an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation and a former star of operetta. She’d just got a tape of her radio recordings today and played me some, including an operetta by Shostakovich (about the new dormitory suburb, as it was then, at Novocheryomushinsky)! Her voice was beautiful and her four-year-old grandson leaned back and started stroking her when the music began. I got a sense of what a grand lady she must have been. She and her daughter have also been offered plots of land by the theatre where the daughter works.

  Another nocturnal visit from Dr Yury Savenko past eleven o’clock and then bed. The cheese I made in the hankie tastes really lovely.

  Tuesday 16 April

  Things are beginning to move. The MP Galina Starovoytova had agreed to chase up our premises for me today. It turns out the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises has now been shifted directly under the Executive Committee of Krasnopresnensky District Soviet. It must approve the recommendation of the Deputies’ Commission, then the request goes to the Privatisation Commission (?) under Kotova. Galina told them that Amnesty’s request for premises was a precondition for the USSR holding the human rights conference in Moscow this September, and leaned on both the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises and the Privatisation Commission so that they will treat our request as a top priority. She’s going to try to call the Executive Committee at Krasnopresnensky tomorrow. As she put it: “There are three links in the chain and two are in our pocket already.” I could never have hacked through the undergrowth to get to this point on my own.

  I feel things are moving in the wider world too. People keep emphasising the extreme tension in Moscow. I missed two weeks and so may not be in touch with the real mood, but to me it seems there is a slight relaxation. I have just watched a good documentary on the former prisoner of conscience, Vladimir Osipov, and the Russian nationalism he represents – and this was on the Moscow channel, not the more adventurous Leningrad one. Gorbachev has brought Aleksandr Yakovlev back in to the Presidential Council again as
“senior advisor”, and yesterday I read a good piece in Izvestiya, larded with references to Lenin and Marx, but also citing the Eighth UN Congress on Crime and arguing against simplistic approaches to stamping out crime. It said humane punishments are more effective than harsh ones.

  My day began at 8.00am with a visit from the landlord, looking more tense and driven than ever. He’s trying to cut down on his sleep and is doubling his working hours. I ended up revising his translation until 11.00pm. It was very good.

  I went back to the bleak monastery at Kolomenskoye today, this time to meet the ex-prisoner of conscience, Oleg Gorshenin. He was looking great, in a baseball cap, his hair growing back after prison, and relaxed and happy, the way people often are when they have been through a big test and come out the other side. Another conscientious objector was with him, who was very nervous and kept looking round behind us.

  When I passed the church on Serpukhovskaya today various people were looking up at the window in the dome, where some man was working in his labouring togs. He was lowering a very large long radiator out of the window on a shaky pulley. As we watched he reminded me of the scene in Andrei Rublev where the peasants watch the church bell being levered into place and the cast being broken.

  Wednesday 17 April

  Valya woke me this morning, ringing to say Literaturnaya Gazeta has published a one-page piece on Amnesty. She was very excited and so was I. I tracked down a copy: it was a description of work in the office in London, 85% favourable, and then – more exciting I thought – the twelve recommendations we made to the Soviet government after our visit in 1989, with a commentary by a Soviet professor of law, also mostly favourable.

  In the afternoon I managed to get through to London by electronic mail. A red letter day. I rang Leonid at the computer firm and he said with genuine pleasure and relief, “Wonderful!”

  I then took mail down to the courier service on the Warsaw Highway. The post may be express but the service isn’t, but this time it wasn’t me who lost my temper. The assistant went for her lunch break when there were still ten people in the queue and only twenty minutes till the desk closed altogether. She began a grand soliloquy, saying, “Aren’t I human, can’t I have lunch?” A man and woman ahead of me went absolutely mad. “Of course you can, but if we’d known we wouldn’t have trekked all the way across Moscow to watch you!” Behind us a young man with one arm was trying to get a parcel of books ready for posting. The assistant just gave him a sheet of paper and told him to get wrapping. He asked me to put it on the floor then refused all further help.

  In the evening I went down to the student residences at Yugo-Zapadnaya for dinner with Margaret. She made a great meal from very simple things. There was a rather finely worked cloth on the table which I assumed was some family heirloom from home. However, she said it was just an old rag she had picked up then tatted round the edges. So – tatting reviled and tatting redeemed all in one week.

  The shower was like Psycho this morning – so much rust in the water.

  Thursday 18 April

  This was a very varied day. At 12.00 I went to meet Tatyana Sudakova of the Moscow Committee of Human Rights Fighters. She’s in her forties, handsome in a Mayakovsky-like way, and knows what she wants to do and why. They are a smallish group and, amazing to relate, have no hankering for money or technology. A friend was letting her use his flat. It was in a courtyard behind Gorky Street and remarkably quiet. The first room was bare but for three dog bowls and some pools of animal pee on the floor. We sat in a room with a bra hanging over the back of the chair and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Predator on the wall. ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’ was on the radio. Our host was a very dapper man, trying to set up his own business, who nicely brought us tea. A young woman in a flimsy dressing gown flopped in and out, but we were never introduced.

  Tatyana deals with local lawyers and I hoped to find the names of people who would help with civil liberties cases which are outside Amnesty’s mandate. She was quite useful in that respect. The subject of rape came up, and all of us betrayed our different cultures. Tatyana thought “attempted rape” should be made a less serious offence and requalified as “hooliganism”. I thought that would reinforce the habit of treating women like objects. We got talking about a specific case in Donetsk where a woman was raped by two men and left with her clothing and tights torn. Our dapper host overheard and suggested that not only might she have wanted it, but she might even have paid for it. We were all looking at each other in disbelief at one point or another.

  Today is the first time I’ve been aware of being followed in Moscow. When we went into the flat a young guy was hanging about near the doorway watching us, and I could hear a walkie-talkie crackling under his coat. When we came out I looked behind, and an official-looking man with a raincoat came out behind us and got into a car. I think all this may have been for Tatyana’s benefit rather than mine, because she has been helping to organise Vladimir Bukovsky’s visit. He’s here for the first time since he was expelled as a prisoner in 1976.

  I then went to see Tanya Ilina, bringing her our paper on Turkey to translate. Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where she lives, is the long, straight, broad highway out of town, lined with grand apartment blocks for the elite, designed to delight Stalin’s eye as he drove out of town. Her block had a plaque to Andropov on the wall. Inside there was a broad and light courtyard with a view through to the Moscow River. Tanya had invited Vladimir Chernyega round to meet me. He is the former Vice-Rector of the USSR Diplomatic Academy and now Senior Counsellor to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs. In one year the ministry has expanded from twenty to 200 people. Chernyega’s perhaps forty, with a closed, tense face and charming manner. His attitude towards me was more complicated than Tanya’s, but he expressed an interest in receiving our material.

  After tea there I went to meet Alexander Kalinin at the Timiryazev monument. He’s a Deputy of the Moscow Soviet and a Quaker sympathiser, and I took an immediate liking to him. He was freezing cold and nervous about a demonstration he was arranging for the demilitarisation of Soviet society. Because of a mix-up over permissions, he was afraid it would be broken up with truncheons. I lent him my gloves and followed him at a distance to watch the demonstration. Oleg Gorshenin and friend were there and came up to chat.

  It was a lovely spring evening and I ended the day at the Conservatoire with Bill Millinship of The Observer, listening to last year’s Tchaikovsky Prize Winner, Boris Berezovsky, play Mozart, Schubert and Chopin. We discussed whether or not things are more relaxed. He thinks they are and it’s because Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Lukyanov and Pavlov are all away. He’d been in the Kremlin a few weeks ago, in the part where Gorbachev works, and bumped into Alexander Yakovlev wearing a cardigan, as though he lived there.

  Friday 19 April

  Another varied day. This has been a very interesting and quite productive week. My blues have gone.

  A very cagey voice rang and said, “It’s Vladimir, we met yesterday.” I cast my mind back over the demonstration, assuming it was someone from there, but realised it was the ex-Vice Rector of the USSR Diplomatic Academy. He offered to help Amnesty with our accreditation here, so I should call him if need be.

  I gave an interview in the morning to Nikolay’s journalist friend Kostya and was OK until I got self-conscious about my Russian. Then I went off to meet Misha, who has agreed to be my private coach. He is a linguist and teacher at Moscow University. I like the way he speaks and the way he explains derivations. He gave me lunch at his place near the Yasenovo woods. From seeming rather depressed and withdrawn at Natasha’s dinner party last week, he was immensely relaxed and easy to talk to today. He’s refusing to take any money from me, which may be kindness and may also be that he doesn’t want any financial link with Amnesty. It’s an odd feeling to arouse suspicion in people so regularly. Talking to him it occurred to me that the Russian language is a bit like a Russian plug. All the bit
s inside the sentence are constantly moving and declining, and if you stick in a negative suddenly the whole lot shifts around again.

  I spent three hours at the women’s art gallery in the afternoon with our campaign material about women on display. They’ve rehung some pictures since I was last there and there seemed to be a bad atmosphere between two of the women, so it was rather a demoralised little troupe. However, their tactics with people dropping in were awful – totally offhand, like Soviet shop assistants. I made a point of at least smiling at people and going up to exchange a few words with them, and it made a hell of a difference to the atmosphere. However, I only got rid of four leaflets. Maria Esmont, the exhibition organiser, is a natural live wire. She immediately came up with the idea of a poster competition for Amnesty and donating pictures to use as postcards. Her collective listened with scepticism and apathy. The most sceptical is the one who smiles at me most. I notice she never touches any of the Amnesty material Maria hands round.

  Krasnopresnensky District Soviet are now offering us 80 square metres at a different address, which they say is also in the centre of town. Details to follow next week. Blow me down, I’d decided to have an evening without politics, when suddenly the main TV news carried our report on Kuwait – with no commentary and no other sources cited! The tide really is turning.

  Saturday 20 April

  It was very warm and sweaty outdoors today, but chilly inside. In the evening it rained very heavily, then there was a beautiful sunset, which reflected in the puddles. I worked my way through the electronic mail handbook. My computer really is a fantastic machine, able to switch between electronic mail, fax and telex with one command, and send messages out from Moscow via San Francisco to my electronic mailbox in Finsbury Park. I feel my messages are falling from the heavens through various gateways to London EC1. The plug on my printer blew.