Moscow Diary Read online

  Sunday 21 April

  I cleaned and tidied in the morning. As the weather has got warmer a really horrible smell has started hanging round the stairway, as though something is lying dead somewhere. I went for lunch at the Teplitskys’. It was so nice to have her open the door in jeans, wave me in, and dash back to the kitchen, where she was trying to make me some Yorkshire puddings. It was another fantastic meal, with fish stew cooked with laurel leaves – apparently a common spice here – smetana cake, and homemade cherry wine. I feel very much at home with them. Yasha arrived back from the train station with vegetables his parents had sent them from Odessa. This putting of things on trains has largely replaced the ordinary post. What a trachle.

  I went from there to the Quakes. A Lithuanian was there who brought us cheese with cumin in it. He was from Kaunas but had happened to be at the TV tower in Vilnius in January when the Soviet troops had tried to storm it.

  I’m in a dreadfully emotional state. Any kindness makes me feel like crying and any lack of kindness makes me feel the same way. I feel very much thrown onto my own resources and they feel very slight. I keep thinking of Paul Auster and Moon Palace. The character there is gripped by the idea that travellers in olden times only knew where they were by figuring out the stars. They had to know what was where up there before they knew where they were down here. Experiences far away from home certainly do define you very sharply. I suppose the stars are the same everywhere, but you only look at them when you’re travelling, i.e. actually going somewhere, so maybe there’s comfort in that.

  There are red flags on my building again, for Lenin’s birthday. At night I watched the good Sunday arts programme, this time on wartime musicals. Very like British ones, except that the heroine sang a damn sight better than Gracie Fields.

  Monday 22 April

  I worked at home in the morning then went to see Yelena in the afternoon. She is a lovely person – when she smiles to greet you the smile stays on her face while she is hanging up your coat and afterwards. She had a dog with her – Kara – who lived with her for three years in exile. She invited me to have my summer holiday with her in the hut where she was exiled at Krivosheyno on the River Ob. Rather an unusual summer holiday, but I would like to. I had brought macaroons and she walloped through them as though she hadn’t eaten for a week. I asked if she was hungry and she said, “No, they just taste very nice.” She was just back from her first trip abroad, to France and Germany. In her mild way she said she’d never noticed before how dusty Moscow is. She agreed to publish our advert in the journal she produces about prisoners.

  After paying more visits to other people, I met Kate at the Kropotkin metro in the evening to hear an amateur concert at the House of Scholars. It was a nice place with good buffets and excellent amateur paintings on display. The smell of the toilets, however, haunted me throughout the concert, in the buffet, and even now as I write this. The conductor was pretty dire and reduced everything to the same speed. Came home in the heavy rain.

  One of the women in the post office is terribly sour, but I realised today what a ridiculous job she has. It was she who handled my phone bill, then she wrapped my book and registered it, then she sold me some stamps and envelopes – all the time, being pestered for poste restante mail and trying to wrap up newspapers people had subscribed to.

  Tuesday 23 April

  Snow! Today’s leitmotif was vodka. I went to take my bottles back to the glass recycling shop and got mobbed by people who needed bottles to buy booze at the shop next door. They had their hands in my carrier bag and were stuffing money in and taking it out of my purse. It quite pissed me off. There’s a great shortage of glassware.

  Then I made the trek to see my Bashkir invalid. His neighbour popped by, bringing him his vodka rations for March and April. Today seemed to be the ration day, because there were all sorts of men tottering across the road drunkenly by lunchtime. I found it quite unpleasant today, after my experience in the bottle bank. Vanzetti has been passing blood for 10–15 days now, but is convinced that he is being irradiated through the wall. It is not unusual for people here to sense a threat from one source and interpret it as a political threat from another source. I find I start to do it myself. In this society I think it’s not surprising, when no one thinks anything happens by chance.

  After getting another stamp from the Visa and Registration Department, I went up to the Leningrad Station and, after standing in several wrong queues, got myself a ticket for the weekend. Three stations stand facing each other up there: the Leningrad was built in the mid-nineteenth century and is graceful and classical; the Kazan station opposite is red and grey, like a rather rococo Kremlin; then there is the wonderful Yaroslavsky station in Art Nouveau style. Quite fabulous and pleasing on the eye.

  I met Oleg Gorshenin at 5.00pm and he took me to meet his friend, Father Nikon, who turns out to be a young man and a priest of the hitherto banned True Orthodox Church. The flat where he lives with his sister is his church. There were icons on the wall and a long poster crowded with a picture of the Kremlin, Christ on the cross, the saints and members of the Tsar’s family. At first sight it reminded me of the people who crowd the cover of the Sergeant Pepper LP, and oddly enough it turned out Father Nikon is a mad-keen Beatles fan and sees them in quite transcendental terms. He put on his long black vestments and a black velvet hat with silver cross, and I thought maybe we were going to have a service, but this was simply to talk with me and then to make the sign of the cross over the vodka, before we began our meal.

  I wondered if there was some element of showmanship in all this. There was something quite diabolic about this athletic and expressive figure in black, entertaining us all with real charm. His poor sister worked away in the kitchen and did not eat or drink with us. Every time she began to speak Nikon would interrupt and say we really should listen to her because she is a clever woman. It was as though he feared we would be bored unless he was pepping up the atmosphere. One of the guests was a True Orthodox taxi driver and they all drove me home at 1.00am, Father Nikon in a black Homburg and all of us listening to Pink Floyd.

  To complete the weird and wonderful, Jimmy Swaggart now broadcasts on Leningrad TV. Nikolay thinks it’s because they get the programmes cheap.

  Wednesday 24 April

  I have my first volunteer. She’s Brigitte, a German from the Canadian Section of Amnesty, who came bang on 10.00am and took the mail down to the Warsaw Highway post office. It was a great help to me and I liked talking to her.

  I worked away sending our advert to organisations and newspapers in Moscow, Ukraine and Estonia. At 3.00pm I was just about to go out for some fresh air when the bell rang and in walked a smart middle-aged woman, looking rather like a family doctor. I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. It turned out to be my mistake though, because she was Natalya Ivanovna, a journalist who specialises in medical issues, and I was the one who’d set up the appointment. Not a very impressive start, but I think it turned out to be a very good conversation and she stayed three hours. She had worked with Meditsinskaya Gazeta for over twenty years and now works as a freelance, pushing on psychiatry issues. She was very intelligent and politically savvy, and in that Russian way would fall silent when she thought something I said missed the point. I tried to interest her in the issue of medical involvement in the death penalty, and also to encourage Soviet doctors to join Amnesty. The phone rang and while I answered it, she went over and mended my television plug, sitting amid a pile of my cast-off clothes. Rather a homely scene and a very easy, Russian way of behaving. She invited me to meet her daughter, who incidentally studied with Oleg Vakulovsky, the journalist who wrote black propaganda about Amnesty in the 1980s.

  In the evening I went to see Viktor, and found a very silent and saddened household. Viktor has been off work for a month, feeling ill. Their grandmother died, I was sorry to hear, on 8 April. Viktor and I sat in the kitchen listening to the taps dripp
ing, he silent and looking troubled. Later, when he was discussing the price rises, he said some friend had brought them some potatoes for a present. His salary as a research chemist is now $10 a month. For some reason a horse was standing on its own at the metro when I left to go home.

  Thursday 25 April

  My phone has been driving me absolutely bloody mad. It’s been working for about twenty minutes a day this week, then going dead or giving a continuous bleep. Today I banged it on the couch so hard I gave myself a headache. Later I saw sparks coming out of the wire, so insulated it with sellotape, and suddenly the phone began to work again.

  Dom, a correspondent for the Moscow Guardian, came round with very beautiful red freesias to do an interview on Amnesty for his paper, which is a sort of ex-pat gossip sheet. I was invited to the Norwegian Embassy at midday to meet two people from their Immigration Department in Oslo who handle refugee cases. They are trying to assess the risk would-be refugees would face if they returned to the USSR. One of the embassy staff had good views on the USSR, I thought. He said the Western press was committed to the cohesion of the USSR and to Gorbachev’s role in this process – an ahistorical approach he said, and I must say I agree with him. Shevardnadze, he said, was still very active. Some reckon he has made “a brilliant move” and has a long political life ahead of him.

  I took materials on North Korea to the Deputy Editor of Moscow News and he immediately offered me an opinion piece in the 7 May issue. He’s a bit like editors in films: “When do you need it for?” “Yesterday!” he cried. Quite an offer anyway.

  After other rounds, I was knackered when I got home, but it was a beautiful evening. Nikolay came round from the Moscow Amnesty group, to collect his mail from London and bring me a nice loaf of bread from his mum. I think she has told him he should leave after an hour, because he always does. I then did my Russian homework.

  Friday 26 April

  I must work out some way of handling all the material which is coming to me from London by post and electronic mail.

  Had a great Russian lesson. I recited the Pushkin poem I’d learned – “If life disappoints…” – then Misha asked, “Has life ever disappointed you?” and we were off on one of those Russian conversations. I was struck by some of his grammatical examples, which were a great exercise in free association, e.g. “I’m afraid of Prime Minister Pavlov.”

  Afterwards I spent a fruitless hour at the women’s art gallery with our campaign material, then at night I left for a weekend in Leningrad by train. There must have been about sixty people in my open carriage, but when I woke up in the morning they were all dressed and packed with their bedding all neatly rolled up. I hadn’t heard a thing, even though I slept badly because of the draughts. Everyone behaves a bit as though they’re on an Outward Bound course: disciplined, ready to forego sleep and comfort, and ready to press on regardless.

  Saturday 27 April – Monday 29 April

  This was a lovely weekend. Ludmila took me for a seven-hour walk on Sunday, looking at the Art Nouveau buildings I wanted to see. Leningrad is so beautiful, but looks wrecked, as though the circus has just passed through. When I arrived early on Saturday I walked down the length of Nevsky Prospekt in the cold sunshine. There were signs of life – renovation and new shop signs – but also bricks had been through three shop fronts, including the Regional College of Advocates. I haven’t seen that kind of hooliganism here before.

  My liking for Ludmila grew greatly over the weekend. She took me to her mother’s birthday party and was ready to run the gauntlet of her highly placed establishment family. There were about ten people there, mostly in their sixties, and Lyuda’s younger brother who is in the army. They gave me Stalin’s favourite wine, which they’d laid down before perestroyka. When I said I was from Amnesty the table literally fell silent and I felt as though I was in a French film of bourgeois manners. Lyuda didn’t soften the blow and stuck by me, and did the same thing when her brother teased me about being a vegetarian. God knows who everyone was, but at one point one of the women asked in English, “Do you think you are in an ordinary Soviet household?” and I said no, I thought I was in rather an extraordinary household.

  Lyuda’s husband had brought in beer, and when we got home we sat up watching late night TV and talking till 4.00am. A satirist on the box was talking about how everyone is arming themselves, and Viktor suddenly pulled a gun out of his pocket and slapped it on the table. To reassure me he said it wasn’t a real gun, it only fired CS gas (!). Apparently they are legal and people carry them to frighten off the thugs who follow them into booze shops etc.

  Two scenes hit me in Leningrad. We passed three Cossacks singing in the metro, down at heel, caps pushed back on their heads. They looked like something from the days of War Communism. We also went to the flea market at Moskovsky Prospekt. The road was being dug up, which didn’t help, but the sight of very poor-looking people standing round watching a secondhand umbrella opening and shutting was quite depressing. Also for sale were pieces of wire nine inches long and mismatched shoes. I kept finding myself thinking, Ooh, that would be useful, because odd small things are so hard to find here.

  I took the plusher Intourist train back to Moscow. As we drew in, music started up on the intercom. In 1975 I remember it was sentimental Russian folk songs. This time it was Grace Jones.

  Monday was rather depressing because it rained heavily all day. Our office address is going to be 22 Herzen Street, flat 53. That at least came through today from the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises. Last thing at night the new Portuguese Ambassador to the USSR rang up, wanting to meet. This is really a very unusual job.

  Tuesday 30 April

  Nikolay came early to collect the Moscow group’s mail from London. He’d walked all the way – about three miles – because he couldn’t afford the 15-kopeck bus fare. At the new exchange rate that is less than a ha’penny. He brought me a lovely and unusual May Day card from his mother, in which she’d copied out part of a W. H. Auden poem for me:

  “There is no such thing as the State

  And no one exists alone;

  Hunger allows no choice

  To the citizen or the police;

  We must love one another or die.”

  She and I met once for five minutes and have developed a great fondness for each other.

  My landlord came to complete my registration at the passport desk. While I answered the phone he looked through all my things. He started on again about the authorities’ attitude to Amnesty and about whether the KGB has me under surveillance. I couldn’t resist saying, “Well, you know better than I do”, and he flushed, then said no. We walked to the police department together then, rather oddly I thought, he walked back with me. He’s usually in such a tearing hurry. I expected he was weighing up the next favour he was going to ask me, but no, he eventually left me and wished me all the best.

  I stayed at home all day working. Drafted my opinion piece for Moscow News and read the press. Galina Starovoytova was on TV. She’s very smart: she speaks very much to the point and reuses Lenin and Marx to illustrate her own points.

  Wednesday 1 May

  Half of the bench outside my window got repainted at the beginning of April, but it was never finished. I notice the old women who sit on it can never decide which bit is new. They always sit on one side or the other, but never the whole thing.

  I stayed in all day working. People who rang me today were pointedly saying, “Happy Spring Day” and not “May Day”, so I did it to other people. I notice Izvestiya has dropped its monthly “rags-to-riches” stories. At night I hit the smokes.

  Thursday 2 May

  I dreamed I was riding a very beautiful black horse and watching the back of its beautiful head. It moved so smoothly you wouldn’t think it had four feet. I was a bit nervous of it though and kept it on a short rein, riding it along the pavements. It turned out it had a kind of bag rou
nd its nose and was peacefully reading press clippings for me.

  I went to change money and also looked up our new premises on Herzen Street. Once again it is a terrific location – just down from TASS, on a backstreet to Moscow Soviet, near Red Square and close to the Arbat metro. The entrance, however, is from the courtyard up a very dilapidated stone stairway, through which you can actually see daylight. The hidden access makes me uneasy about security and the repairs we need are daunting. But there’s a lot to be said for it too.

  I popped to the Teplitskys’ in the evening. They were already two bottles of vodka down so Yasha was speaking English and Italian. Volodya, a consultant to Moscow Soviet, was there. He bemoaned the political scene and I asked him if he’d lost hope. He said no, and his whole demeanour changed. At the end of our talk he asked me what struck me about Moscow, and when I told him the things I liked, I could see he was suddenly moved. I think people would feel more relaxed if they knew more about other countries. Maybe Amnesty really can play a role there. The whole company got talking about Soviet/Russian poets from the thirties onwards. None of them were specialists in literature, but they really knew the verse and had their own views about it. I have never heard people in Britain discuss Auden, Owen etc. like that.

  Friday 3 May

  People do come out with some unexpected things. The Moscow Guardian rang me to find out when it would be best to send a photographer. I said, “Early morning” and the woman asked, “Why?” The other day the phones were up the spout again and I got the same wrong number twice. The woman at the other end told me to “dial the number properly!” as though I was seven years old and doing it on purpose.

  The street trade is very interesting too. At Arbat metro you always get copies of the Bhagvad Gita next to a tray of disposable syringes. At Barrikadnaya metro they have a tray of Italian perfume and tins of fish. In Paveletsky metro a dour-looking man sells copies of the Erotic Digest in front of a dour-looking woman holding strings of dried mushrooms.