Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  It has also been the Moscow Film Festival and for someone who likes watching films with a Soviet audience, it’s all been really enjoyable. The Teplitskys wangled me free tickets to Europa Europa, Dillinger is Dead, The Garden and, tomorrow, The Decameron. To my surprise The Garden, which has a gay theme, got an award and was well written up in Izvestiya. It seemed rather pretentious to me.

  The real difference this time though has been coming back to friends which I didn’t have three months ago. I have to find a hall where Amnesty can hold a seminar in September, during the CSCE human rights conference. Natalya immediately agreed to contact the Moscow College of Advocates, Misha is contacting Moscow University, Viktor is contacting Moscow City Soviet, and Natasha and Galya are approaching the State Cinema organisation. I think something will work out.

  My own situation is shakier than ever before, however, as I was given a visa only for a month this time, so should leave on 15 August. In my absence too, the Privatisation Commission refused to give us our “order” unless we are registered. I can’t judge if that’s serious; if it is, bang go our hopes of opening the office by autumn. Although these things drove me frantic earlier in the year I can’t get bothered about them now. That’s probably when they suddenly throw you out.

  Nothwithstanding, Tolya and I went round 22 Herzen Street on Thursday, taking measurements and planning wiring and sockets, ready for the builders to start repairs. We were joined by Natasha, an Amnesty sympathiser from the House of Architects, who had some good professional advice. She and Tolya took an immediate dislike to each other. I realise this will be quite an exercise in management.

  Some nice personal updates. Irina was round to collect the Brodsky book I had bought her. She said she’d held her last political post when she was ten, when she was made head of her Pioneer brigade. After that she decided something was not quite right with the way things were. As language students in the early 1980s they were always being groomed as potential military interpreters. They had to do one day’s military training a week (!) and were groomed in how to withstand interrogation by the enemy.

  Have fitted a mosquito net and had my best sleeps for ages.

  Sunday 21 July

  More gorgeous weather. At weekends the streets are beautifully quiet in the early mornings, and today there was a smell of kebabs. Tonight someone was playing an accordion in the yard.

  Irina and I went to the gymnastics competition at the Luzhniki Stadium and had to stand up nine times for the Ukrainian national anthem as they walked off with the prizes. All these young girls of 9–15 are professionals, constantly being trained at throwing ribbons, sticks and balls during their floor exercises. They were brilliant, but they all left the arena looking totally downhearted and you wondered if it was all worth it.

  Irina hadn’t been in the stadium since she worked there as an official interpreter in the Moscow Olympics. They’d been trained in how to handle difficult questions like, “Why is there no shampoo in Moscow?”, but she said all the foreign journalists had been too busy to ask these “Soviet questions”. It was a heatwave, but she was given the task of rooting out people in shorts and telling them they couldn’t come into the stadium. She’s got a big brain and not enough stimulus, so remembers and ruminates on everything, e.g. “Was Margaret Thatcher carrying wild flowers when she met Gorbachev in London?” or “Was Jim Morrison’s father an admiral?”

  On the spur of the moment we got the boat back up river into town. The view from the boat was like the East River when you sail round Manhattan. The gymnastics and the river trip cost about 5p altogether. However, Irina earns less than £5 a month.

  Monday 22 July

  Sixty-three letters were waiting for me when I got back this time, so interest in Amnesty is growing. Today Misha and I went to see the Dean of the Journalism Faculty at Moscow University to ask if Amnesty can use their hall for our seminar. He was elderly and sat surrounded by pillars of books on every table and chair, all of them apparently new. He kissed my hand and agreed before I’d even finished asking. Apparently he was an old friend of Sean MacBride’s and also opposes the death penalty, quite vehemently, as I discovered. So, we’re all set.

  I queued for one and three quarter hours to buy a ticket for Leningrad this weekend. In the middle there was a ten-minute “technological break”, after which the woman came back with her mouth full of biscuit. I also waited half an hour at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss my visa, as requested, but the guy didn’t show up.

  At night had a great dinner at the Teplitskys’. They all had a flaming row about democracy.

  Tuesday 23 July

  Today I met a very nice man, Viktor Leontiev, given two years’ correctional tasks in Kazakhstan for defaming Gorbachev. He’d sold a calendar showing Gorbachev swathed like a cherub and listing dates of the Tbilisi massacre, the invasion of Soviet troops in Baku etc. Apparently they’re on sale in other places but no one has been prosecuted.

  In the afternoon I tried to make contact with a Mr Larichev in the Moscow Department of Justice, to discuss our premises. The woman who gave me his name yesterday told me today that he doesn’t exist and put the phone down on me. I called again and we carried on talking as though nothing had happened. It’s like tiptoeing through outbreaks of lunacy. At 7.30pm I met Rumyantsev, the young and handsome Second Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to discuss my visa. They’re all working late with Summit fever for next week. Rumyantsev has to handle Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbacheva’s programme.

  Saw Pasolini’s The Decameron with Misha, Natasha and Galya, which was lovely. The day ended with very nice Soviet jazz on TV.

  Wednesday 24 July

  Nina Petrovna, the old lady I liked so much, has had an infarkt and is in intensive care. I was supposed to see her today, but a neighbour rang to tell me.

  Today I met Vladimir Alimov, the head of the Fund for the Individual, who’s doing a six-hour TV slot about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Human Rights Day in December and wants Amnesty to take part. He described himself to me over the phone as “rather good-looking”, but I couldn’t make him out at all. His organisation is non-governmental – he says he was a worker for ten years – but he obviously has high support in the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also didn’t seem to want to let me go, so we tramped all over looking for a cup of coffee, without success, and he finally walked me all the way home.

  Just in time to meet my landlord, with whom I had the most human conversation I’ve ever had. He was wrecked after a ten-day interpreting trip in the UK and Europe. They’d sailed to London on a big sea in a small boat over five days and the minute they arrived he’d had to translate for MPs, businessmen and the BBC, although he was up to the eyeballs with sea sickness tablets. It was interesting to hear his views on London, where he’d got photographed with Margaret Thatcher’s statue in Madame Tussaud’s but managed to see no other sights. He was aware of being followed in London, in particular by two rockers, who popped up wherever he went. It amused me to think of maybe two Oxford Firsts in Russian donning the gear.

  In the evening I went to “Memorial” to a meeting of the local abolitionist group there. I wanted to meet the RSFSR Deputy, Kononov, who’d written a good article on the death penalty. I realise there are two rhetorical styles in Russian meetings. In one you talk loudly and override everyone else until you’ve finished your sentence. In the other you sit silent while everyone burbles and then speak with dramatic quietness, so you sound like the still small voice of God. This used to deceive me, but now I realise it can be just as pompous and silly as what everyone else is saying.

  Thursday 25 July

  Quite a lot of my mail is apparently going missing, so I met up with yet another person who’d sent stuff back in June which I never got. Then off to Tanya’s to deliver a translation. She was charming company as usual and told me how, when Andropov was a plain old member of
the Communist Party Central Committee, she used to see him in the bread shop with his string bag. To my surprise the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences had liked my article on the death penalty, and apparently genuinely so. A lawyer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs wants the right to reply.

  As it was heavy rain I took a cab, with a woman driver. She said there were very few of them and they were burying one tomorrow, who got murdered. They work twelve-hour shifts on alternate days.

  Near midnight Oleg came round in a flap. He’d lent me the statute of Boris Nazarov’s Information Centre on Human Rights to read, but found out he had to translate it by tomorrow afternoon. The statute is very like ours, and I wonder if that’s significant.

  In the morning, oddly enough, I bumped into the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov, and he said, “The ways of God are unfathomable.”

  Thursday 1 August

  I’m just back from Desert Hearts with Nikolay. As we rode the empty trolley bus home I waved at someone standing out on his balcony enjoying the night air. Nikolay said, “Goodness, he might have had a rifle!” Unduly pessimistic, even for him.

  Friday 2 August

  This has been a fantastic week. I’ve had a marvellous time since I got back from London, and more fun these two weeks than in the last three months put together.

  The week began with a long weekend in Leningrad with Lyuda and Viktor. More lazy breakfasts with the cognac bottle. They took me up to the dacha to see Lyuda’s intimidating mum and dad, and we swam in the lake, I gathered mushrooms for the first time, at long last, and we had a whacking great meal.

  Lyuda and I also walked around Leningrad, which is now looking quite a bit more prosperous. People are better dressed than in Moscow and we passed a row of six nice clean cooperative cafés, all doing good business. Viktor also took me to a joint venture publishing firm – very impressive desktop publishing – who might take on our newsletter.

  We also looked round the waxwork exhibit at the Museum of the Revolution, called “Reform or Terror?” It was basically a gruesome catalogue of every political figure who’s been killed or bumped off since 1800, but the commentary was interesting and very definitely in favour of reform over revolution. Stolypin was the hero of the hour; Lenin had an ugly snarl. In the room of Influential Thinkers they had Sakharov next to Marx, Plekhanov and Dostoyevsky. Someone had laid flowers at Sakharov’s feet.

  On Saturday night Lyuda and I saw Genet’s The Maids, all played by men from Konstantin Raykin’s Moscow Company. It was beautifully done – very erotic and anguished – and it was hard to believe these were Soviet performers in front of a, very appreciative, Leningrad audience. There’s something peculiar in the way that mainstream audiences flock to gay art, even when they can’t tolerate gay life. There was a gay film festival in Moscow later this week and Vitaly Yerenkov of Stolitsa made the same point to me. He said it was the equivalent of holding a Mafia festival in the centre of Moscow.

  On Tuesday night Irina took me to a chamber music concert at the stately home near her flat. Fantastic sunset over the lake and parkland as we walked home. She showed me her sweetpeas and lobelia and as we couldn’t find a torch we used candles.

  On the work front, Tolya has got the workmen starting on Monday. I went to the USSR Foreign Ministry to brief them on all our endeavours for the CSCE human rights conference in September, and revisited the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to put them in the picture. The documents have also arrived from London for me to start the process of registering Amnesty.

  Saturday 3 August

  A sweltering hot day. I saw a new leafy part of Moscow when I went to DHL to pick up a parcel. They work from a small basement, all nicely plastered and whitewashed, the way I would like our office to be. Later I popped to Father Nikon’s. He was excited about an article he was writing about “paganism”, which was actually very interesting. We sat in his kitchen as the light faded, drinking balsam in our tea, and I translated the John Lennon tape I’d brought him. He was weepy listening to ‘Imagine’ and so was I. The balsam tea brought us both out in a sweat.

  I’ve been having some curious dreams lately. Last Tuesday I dreamt of a constellation of three stars on the top left of a screen – the Leo constellation – but I knew there was something beyond them to the top right. In the morning I switched on the radio and heard that scientists had discovered a new constellation.

  Sunday 4 August

  In the morning I met Alexander from the Latvian Amnesty group. The two friends with him were Moscow journalists specialising in rock music, which they say has gone underground again in the USSR. The sound of the hour is reggae and the best reggae groups are in Kaliningrad, oddly enough, where they play reggae with Baltic and German motifs. Hard to imagine. Alexander said it was “reggae with beer glasses”. As I left them I bumped into the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov again. The ways of God seem to be getting more unfathomable by the hour.

  After a domestic day Hella and Siffra took me to a satirical cabaret at the “Sovremennik” by the Spartakovsky company. It was very lively and entertaining and, unlike British equivalents, it seemed unforced and had no reference to TV, or to TV personalities, themes or adverts. The whole company stood in the dark, wearing white gloves under purple luminous lighting, and slowly performed Japanese martial arts to the sound of disco music. There was no point to it, but it was inventive and it worked.

  We had dinner and they told me that the USA-USSR Summit had been a totally US event. Journalists were invited to briefings with footage from CNN, free Coke, and all in English. Soviet journalists were desperate. Bush seemed reluctant to promise another summit, presumably because he doesn’t know who his counterpart will be, they said.

  Monday 5 August

  Knocked myself out today racing all over Moscow. Had a morning interview with Sergey Maslov at Komsomolskaya Pravda (circulation: 17 million), which lasted three hours and delved into all sorts of philosophical points like: Is it possible to speculate on conscience? Doesn’t free exit jeopardise the economic wealth of a country and people’s social and economic rights in it? etc. All very interesting, but exhausting, especially in Russian.

  From there I dashed to the International Post Office to drop off translations – the equivalent of riding from Finchley to Morden – then up to Krasnye Vorota to meet Misha and get the invitations to Amnesty’s September seminar photocopied. One hundred for 30 roubles, i.e. about 75p. From there to Irina’s to take her Bhagwati’s speech on the death penalty to translate – the equivalent of trekking from Leytonstone to Guildford. I sat in a heap for about three hours, but we had an interesting talk. It was a boiling hot day, but she had just finished knitting a thick woollen jumper, so was wearing it.

  Tuesday 6 August

  The day ended with a massive minor chord – my first since I’ve been back this time. I went up to Natalya’s legal consultancy, where I thought we would just draft an application form to register with Moscow City Justice Department. However, she knows the law on registration much better than I do and pointed out that we are ineligible to register with the city as long as we have “International” in our title. Unless we have ten official representatives over here – and we don’t – we are also ineligible to register with the Russian or the USSR authorities. We called the Non-Government Organisations’ Section of the USSR Foreign Ministry to check, and learned that, contrary to their earlier friendly noises, they have made no arrangements to support our application, nor are they planning to.

  I began to have very dark thoughts about official motives in the whole of this experiment and to despair of finding a way out. Although lots of my mail is going missing, a disturbing anonymous letter still managed to get through, wishing me dead.

  Ivan Polozkov resigned from the leadership of the Russian Communist Party today. They said he’d let morale slide.

  Wednesday 7 August

  A very cha
otic morning. A visit from Penal Reform International, then Tolya came to report on the building works: the workers are stripping the plaster and have taken out the old door frames. As he was talking two men suddenly came to the door wearing hats made out of newspaper and said they were plumbers. Something in my flat is leaking down into the neighbours’ below. They removed the kitchen tap and heaved all sorts of garbage out of the bathroom cupboard onto the hall floor, then said they would come back tomorrow. I couldn’t get over it! For some chivalrous reason Tolya said he would come back tomorrow and supervise them. I now have no hot water or toilet.

  After hours on the computer I had a maddening afternoon. I went to the Foreign Ministry Information Department to collect the visa extension they had promised, but there was no sign of it, and Rumyantsev was uncontactable. I then roamed around Komsomolskaya station in hot, thundery weather, trying to find where I could buy a ticket for Riga and the Amnesty meeting next week. There are seven main buildings there and every desk I went to said, “It’s in the other building across the square.” Which other building? Nothing was signposted, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the ticket distribution. Eventually got a ticket after queuing two hours.

  I then went to Viktor’s birthday party. His mother loves me somehow – I feel she hangs on me when we meet or say goodbye. Viktor’s the only Russian I know who smiles broadly and for no immediate reason. It’s nice, and not totally in character, because he often looks quite tortured. Viktor is in charge of organising the first Knesset visit to the USSR/Russia this autumn. He says he’s been drafting Yeltsin’s letters to the Israelis, then drafting the replies from the Israeli Consulate to Yeltsin. A very Soviet scenario: presidential assistant in his impoverished flat, wringing with damp and pigeons.