Moscow Diary

  Shevardnadze wrote today, inviting concrete proposals for cooperation from Amnesty.

  Thursday 8 August

  The men with newspaper hats came and mended the toilet, silently. Tolya sat in and even cleaned the bathroom floor afterwards. We have written our application form to get a phone reinstalled in the Herzen Street office. I’ve also sent out invitations to our September seminar to people in the provinces who are interested in abolishing the death penalty.

  At lunch I went for a steam bath with Irina and, dripping with sweat, we discussed the finer points of Justice Bhagwati’s speech. The bathhouse is in an old factory district and you can buy bunches of oak twigs outside to beat yourself with, though we didn’t. Inside it was like stepping into limbo, with all these women sitting silently on steps and benches in the semi-gloom, apparently waiting for something. It was even more like limbo when they started beating each other with these twigs. Eventually we became part of a chummy, chubby team that kept going in together. Everyone was wearing shoes and a hat, and some people were carrying handbags, so it looked as though they were going for the bus but had forgotten to put their clothes on. Irina was great fun to be with. I asked her afterwards if she felt purified and she said in English, “I’m fully clear” – George Fox’s last words, which she must have picked up from the Quaker article I lent her.

  My landlord came round to ask me again about cheques and credit cards. I sympathise with him. He’s totally able to work the complex system here, but is literally an innocent abroad. At six had two big gin and tonics at the Metropol hotel with the Portuguese Ambassador – gorgeous. His hot water has been cut off too, but he has a reserve supply and so invited me to come and wash my hair there. Nice man. He’s heading the Portuguese delegation to the CSCE conference. I gave him our background paper and the annual report.

  Friday 9 August

  I was unable to get the BBC this morning, but learned from Radio Moscow that John McCarthy must have been released.

  I had my last Russian lesson with Misha today. His wife is coming back from Yugoslavia tomorrow. I brought him flowers and he opened the door in his apron, as is our wont, and we had another good lesson. I felt prematurely nostalgic about finishing our classes; he really is the most accomplished teacher I’ve had and, as is not always the case with conversation teachers, we both like talking to each other. He has great tact about what is right and what is wrong behaviour and is very kind. Today he told me about all his troubles in getting a job as a Jew. Although he is not at all militant about it, he says at some point it broke his spirit. He thinks de-Partyising the workplace will be a great step forward. In Leningrad Lyuda told me about all the pressure she is under to accept bribes for exam results and how the system works. The employment system sounds designed for waste, but in a different way ours seems to be too.

  In the afternoon I delivered Amnesty’s visa applications for the September seminar to the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies, then connected up with Natalya, who had found out all the legal niceties involved in registering as a commercial company. Apparently it is not for us. Oleg Gorshenin came round looking thin and exhausted. After dealing with prisoners so much I used to regard emigrating as a bit of a soft optional extra, but my views have changed since I’ve been here. I worry about the office, but that’s nothing to what faces him and others. Their whole life here slips down the tubes as they try to surmount endless, incalculable obstacles to leave, and they have no idea what faces them next. I really felt for him. Fed him – his first meal in over two days.

  The courier I sent to London on Monday still has not arrived. I wonder if they get intercepted too.

  Saturday 10 August

  I’ve enjoyed today very much. I went to get Viktor’s advice about registering Amnesty with the Russian government. His mother answered the door. Viktor was asleep, so I had a plate of potatoes and a glass of champagne they’d saved for me from last night. There were seven people in the flat, including one woman who was just standing in the hall and two who continually carried boxes out of a room to a car outside. I’ve no idea who anyone was, but their life carried on regardless. I went to read the paper, but also fell asleep, and so Viktor and I woke up two hours later on divans at opposite ends of the room and discussed Amnesty’s registration. As usual his advice was good and to the point. Apparently he had accidentally taken one of his mother’s tablets and was feeling comatose. He said someone had brought him sugar as a birthday present and wondered if next year he’d get bread.

  Then I met Ruslan and we drank a beer in the Kremlin Gardens. His foreign passport expires at the end of August and he is pitting all his wits to use the human rights conference in September as a lever to get permission finally to leave. He seems in better nick than Oleg, but is also not eating anything.

  A journalist friend called to say he’s cutting short his stay in Moscow because of threats he is receiving. Interesting. When I got home tonight a woman in the courtyard, whom I’d never seen before, told me the DHL van had called with a box, but “I told them you always get back late.”

  Sunday 11 August

  The weather has suddenly become much cooler and we’ve had some thunderstorms. People here look on August as the start of autumn, unfortunately. However, it doesn’t seem to dampen down the wildlife. I’m sitting here at the kitchen table with an ant on my arm, flies copulating on the table, mosquitoes in the air and a cockroach crawling over the cooker.

  It was my birthday and I had nice calls from home and from a trickle of ex-prisoners here. Irina came round to bring the Bhagwati translation and also to have lunch. My efforts to make a nice meal were pretty dismal, for lack of plates, an oven and half the ingredients.

  A very nice birthday call from Misha. Here’s a big difference from the UK: I had assumed when his wife came back they would rather shut out the world, but they were ringing to invite me round next week. Lovely.

  Monday 12 August

  Had a very productive day, going to the post and mailing more invitations to our death penalty seminar. At 4.00pm I went to see Valery Rudnev at Sovetskaya Justitsiya, the journal of the RSFSR Supreme Court. I complimented him on his recent articles in Izvestiya, which were good. He said he thought the de-Partyisation of the RSFSR Supreme Court was a historic step. Not only had they disbanded the Party cell, but the judges had left the Communist Party – something Yeltsin’s decree had been careful not to ask. I wondered how he knew they had and he must have read my mind, because he said he was at the Party meeting, he was a Party member and had no intention of leaving it in the foreseeable future.

  He’d written a good article from my interview, though if in Irina’s rendering I was uttering lines of Voznessensky’s poetry, in his I was eulogising Herzen and musing on the “democratisation” of Western society in the 1960s. But I suppose it’s horses for courses. Sovetskaya Justitsiya wants to run a regular Amnesty column and also wants to become a collective Amnesty member.

  From there I went to the USSR Foreign Ministry to collect my visa extension. I was met by Rumyantsev and Sokolenko, both of them in a giggly mood somehow and leaning against the coat desk like wideboys at a bar. My visa has been extended only until 10 September. A joke! They began to ask intensive questions about our death penalty seminar – who was the Soviet organiser? I said, “I am – if I’m still here”, unable to keep the ice out of my voice. They seemed surprised; I don’t know what they think I do here. Like people at the Foreign Ministry’s Human Rights Division, they seemed bothered that we’ve invited Galina Starovoytova to speak at it.

  Dinner with the Portuguese Ambassador, who was very interesting, saying what it was like to be ambassador at the UN when there’s a revolution going on back home. He also talked about the speed of political change in general. In 1955 someone wrote a book about the possibility of giving Zaire independence over thirty years. The critics descended on him. Zaire was independent in four years.

 
Ian Martin called from London when I got back, and said that if we don’t get Soviet approval for our office by the time of the September human rights conference, we will reconsider the whole thing. I hope our listeners-in took it to heart.

  Friday 16 August

  I’m just back from a two-day trip to Riga to open an Amnesty exhibition which the local group had put on in the Central Library there. We got on the main Latvian-language TV news programmes at 9.00pm and 10.00pm and I did three press interviews.

  Since Tuesday I’ve spent twenty-eight hours on the train and on Wednesday worked a twenty-hour day, starting at 5.00am. I think I do feel age creeping up on me because I wasn’t able to bounce back the way I think I used to.

  I left Moscow from Riga station: two tracks in leafy greenness, looking rather like the outer reaches of Southern Region. It was an extraordinary trip. There were nine of us in our small compartment, dominated by Soviet mothers fussing over their fully adult children. There was also an elderly Kazakh lady with no sleeping berth, who’d travelled up from Alma-Ata by train and was going to visit her sick sister in Latvia. When she got to her station she faced a nine-hour wait for her bus and then a two-mile walk with her baggage.

  I wondered why everyone went to get their bedding at 4.00pm, but when I went for mine I found out why: there was none left. However, it was an extraordinarily convivial compartment, and two women went and persuaded the conductor to give me his sheets, free. We all shared our food and it was a beautiful ride into a setting sun, through hilly farmland and villages, looking every bit like Cumbria. I fell asleep for an hour and every time I woke up everyone had changed places, like in some Agatha Christie thriller. The old woman sitting next to me suddenly turned and said, “I think God helps you, but sometimes you are a volcano.” Rather a conversation stopper. She was a lift operator in an economic institute and said her parents were wonderful people, “real Bolsheviks”, who worked all day, then came home and studied. She thought perestroyka was all a big mistake.

  Riga is small and like a brighter Amsterdam. There were blocks of cement and huge pieces of twisted metal left over from the January barricades dotting the streets like modern sculptures. Officially people talk about “the January events”, but in conversation they call it “the war”. The ice cream kiosks are clean and have little flower arrangements on the counter. You can get coffee and pleasant meals in cafés, and it was like a breath of fresh air to hear a middle-aged woman talking to the shop assistant in Latvian. There were long queues in the street for cigarette rations, but otherwise there was a lot of food in the shops, though more expensive than in Moscow.

  I was staying with Alexander and Irina, two Russians who have started the local group. They’ve got a big light flat in the centre of town but no water during the daytime, which is a bugger, because we could only eat at midnight. Irina then stayed up till 4.00am washing clothes. They’re helped by Aleksey, who’s been collecting signatures outside the Roman Catholic cathedral for a Catholic imprisoned in China. He’s spent the last year dossing down at different places and wearing clothes people have given him, but he looks much better than when I first met him in spring in Moscow: tanned, big-boned and with a very sweet smile. He seems to be on some spiritual high and told me about the religious books he is studying. He thinks each religious movement and each phase of the Bible represents a stage in the religious unfoldment of the individual. “For some Christians,” he said, “Christ is not yet crucified.” I wondered about the lonely life he is leading and asked him how old he is. Eighteen.

  The exhibition was beautifully laid out in the main library, with great cooperation from the library staff, who presented us with flowers and gave us coffee afterwards. I had to toe a careful line not to seem like the hand of Moscow, and also to treat Latvia as separate from the USSR. As many times before, I found it a great help in interviews to have a Scottish surname.

  The journey home was extraordinary too. Just after the doors closed and we started moving, a strained young woman began proclaiming the Bible the length and breadth of the carriage. I found it absolutely outrageous in a confined space with nowhere to go, to have this voice hammering on right through my earphones for over two and a half hours. However, everyone else seemed much more tolerant than this professional human rights person and listened, or ignored her amiably. Only, when she cried, “Satan’s coming!”, someone said, “No, it’s the conductor with the tea”, and got a laugh.

  It’s now 2.30am and I’ve had a very social Friday, eating three full meals in the space of four hours, but none of it went amiss, so I must have been hungry. First there was dinner with Misha and his wife, then I went to the Quakers, then on to the birthday party of Father Nikon’s sister, Ira, at 10.30pm. They were all in their cups by the time I got there, so there were some right daft conversations going on. Nikon was sober though and so was Oleg, and in the kitchen he very nicely asked if I would marry him to help him leave the country before the autumn draft. He pointed out that having a Soviet husband would solve my visa problems too. Now that’s something we never thought of!

  Saturday 17 August

  A call from the local post office at 6.30am. Something heavy had arrived, could I collect it? Later, as I was staggering back across the courtyard with two boxes of documents for the CSCE conference, a woman shouted over to me, “Where did you get it?”, obviously thinking it was a dinner set or something. Spent the day working and in the evening met Mum, Dad and Elspeth for dinner at the Cosmos Hotel.

  Sunday 18 August

  I took them round Red Square, back home for tea, then out to Tatyana’s for the Quaker meeting. Elspeth is very excited by her first step outside Europe and loves Moscow. Dad, however, is going to write a stiff letter to Aeroflot because they didn’t give her the vegetarian meal he’d ordered. Nikolay says the minister will probably resign. When we came home from the Quakers there were fireworks in the distance for Pilots’ Day and children in the metro were wearing their fathers’ military caps. There was a lot of activity in my street and a priest was out walking with people in his full priestly garb. Tomorrow is the feast of the Transfiguration, a big date in the Russian Orthodox calendar.

  Monday 19 August

  At 7.30am Valya rang to ask if I’d heard the news. Gorbachev was deposed last night and a committee of Yanaev, Pugo, Kryuchkov and Yazov have appealed to the nation. I spent a maddening half hour trying to get news. The TV was showing cello and piano duets, and only one channel was working. A strained new newsreader read a long statement about the Union Treaty. I couldn’t get the BBC and finally got an official Russian channel, which quoted TASS as saying a state of emergency had been declared nationwide for six months. The Emergency Committee had decreed that all its pronouncements took precedence over republican laws, and said it would honour its international obligations. Radio Liberty said the states of emergency were localised. Apparently the coup may have been timed to forestall the signing of the Union Treaty tomorrow, which would formally have reduced the USSR to nine republics.

  I went out to get bread and milk. The shops were busy but everyone was silent, the way they were when the Joint Patrols were introduced. I admire the way Russians take things; they’re very politicised, but have an inbred sense of when to keep their own counsel. I couldn’t get any line to the Cosmos Hotel – all apparently jammed. I tried to make my appointment with the USSR Foreign Ministry as they had asked, but Marina the secretary said expressively, “Nikak sevodnya” – “No way today.”

  Managed to call the Cosmos Hotel from town at 10.30am and told Elspeth there’d been a coup. “Where?” she asked. Went up and took them all to the Botanical Gardens in the morning, then down town to drop them off at their Intourist City Bus tour. When we came out of Prospekt Marx metro a young man was leafleting at furious speed. It was a call for a general strike by Moscow students. Someone else had the official statement by Yeltsin, Silaev and Khasbullatov, and a big crowd quickly gathered to re
ad it. A man in a black shirt was pressed up behind me and I could feel his heart pounding on my arm. Yeltsin denounced the unconstitutionality of the coup and called for a general strike until Gorbachev is allowed back to report to Parliament.

  When we rounded the corner onto the main street we saw the strike had already started. Trolley buses were pulled across the road, blocking each main junction. There was no traffic and people were milling around the streets. Red Square was blocked off by busloads of troops. Gorky Street was empty except for a lot of pedestrians, all very quiet, but like us, watching for something to happen. A young man walked up the centre of the street shouting that the RSFSR Supreme Soviet was surrounded by troops and calling people to a meeting at 4.00pm. Dad was terribly concerned that Elspeth should get a bus ride round the city, so I came home in the rain. There were armoured cars pulled up in the Manezh amongst the trolley buses and I wondered if they too had joined the strike. Three tanks were lined up by Kammenny Most and foot soldiers were taking up positions. On the way home I bought a melon from two girls in the street and told them there were tanks in the Manezh. They were startled and said, “Maybe something will happen then.” They’d seen armoured cars and all sorts passing all day.

  I listened to the radio and made phone calls. Viktor`s mother said that she’d had a very cultured day watching Swan Lake, classical concerts etc. and totally deprived of news. When I got back at night Swan Lake was starting its second round. Managed to contact the office, and also the landlord phoned me, asking me to call if anything was wrong. Nice.

  Met Mum, Dad and Elspeth for dinner at the Moskovskye Zori. Not surprisingly their bus tour had been cancelled. The nine o’clock news came on and we had the full benefit of the Extraordinary Committee’s press conference, decree and statements. I noticed nobody watched except me, but everyone must be attuned to the language because suddenly people would guffaw without turning their heads – particularly when Yanaev said they were giving Gorbachev a rest so he could “recoup his strength”; and also when the Committee said that after the first day of the State of Emergency “everyone was visibly breathing more easily”. I learned from the broadcast that there is a State of Emergency in six places: Moscow, and presumably the five breakaway republics. Also, oddly enough, that the Committee for Constitutional Supervision has denounced the State of Emergency as unconstitutional. It is quite refreshing and heartening that opposition to the coup is based on legal grounds.