Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  On the way home Yeltsin’s fly posters had been put up in the metros. Someone had scrawled on one, “At ten o’clock the tank drivers came over on the side of Russia.” I heard later from the Trans-National Radical Party, who are at the barricades, that ten tanks are rumoured to have swapped sides.

  I keep being overwhelmed by the arrogance of the non-elected Extraordinary Committee, but then I’m just a naive foreigner. They will have their hands full anyway, and I don’t know how they expect economic help from the West. Yeltsin is in a fantastically difficult and important position, but his first statement looked good. Radio Liberty said Georgian troops had been brought into Moscow. An odd choice, I’d have thought.

  News from elsewhere: I got through to Leningrad at midnight. They’ve still got their TV channel and Sobchak, the Mayor, has done a strong half-hour broadcast calling for a general strike, threatening to prosecute anyone who obeys the Extraordinary Committee, and promising to defend Leningrad against attack. Viktor is convinced the coup is a bluff, badly timed, and will be over in a week. Apparently two people were named as Extraordinary Committee members without their consent. They have dissociated themselves from it and vowed loyalty to Yeltsin. I lay under my mosquito net, watching the ballerinas and listening to Radio Liberty until the small hours. TV and radio have been seized in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and there was shooting in Riga. The Soviet Embassy in Washington says it has no information except for what it receives from US media.

  Tuesday 20 August

  The morning news said ten tanks outside the RSFSR Supreme Soviet had turned their turrets round to protect the Parliament. Some paratroopers have also swapped sides. Only nine newspapers are allowed to publish, but one of them, Izvestiya, has joined the general strike. Bush came out against the coup, has called for Gorbachev’s reinstatement, and refused US economic aid. The World Bank too. The London office rang: half the Kuzbass mines are out on strike. If Gorbachev is under house arrest, Amnesty will take him up as a prisoner of conscience.

  I think today was the day of the generation gap. Nikolay came round at breakfast, with no coat, even though it was raining heavily. He’d moved out yesterday because his mother supports the coup. He had no information and was quite frightened. I filled him in with what I knew. He said the Armenian president had come out in favour of the coup. Odd – I’d have thought their future lay with close contact with Russia. It turned out later to be a false rumour.

  When I went to pay my phone bill I found a bitter row going on in the queue between a man in his forties and an old guy with short back and sides and rows of medals. The young man was saying, “and what did you defend the country for?” The old man and his wife kept saying, “at least there was order and good discipline. The trouble with young people today is that they are degenerate.” “And who brought them up that way?” the postwoman suddenly shouted. “Their parents!” According to the medal man, the worst sign of economic collapse is that young men are now selling flowers at the metro. I had to bite my lip several times. Another case of old men’s dreams.

  I lost Mum, Dad and Elspeth in the metro in the morning, so came back home to await their anguished call. In the afternoon we went to see the Icon Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery, which was beautiful, and then sailed down the Moscow River. At night we went out for dinner, picking our way past eleven large tanks outside the USSR Foreign Ministry Press Centre, all their armoury trained on Progress Publishers, for some reason. During the day I noticed all the bridges into the centre are guarded at both ends by tanks, and soldiers were digging something in the roads.

  Have had a creeping sense of unease all evening. I learned from wall posters on the way home that there is now a curfew from 11.00pm to 5.00am. I only learned it at 11.30pm. The shortage of information is very disconcerting. Irina rang when I got home; she’d been trying to tell me about the curfew all evening. She’d been to the meeting at the RSFSR Supreme Soviet at midday and said the atmosphere gave a false sense of security. The rumours this evening are that the Moscow Mayor, Gavriil Popov, is under arrest. I saw a fly poster of Sergey Stankevich’s speech today. He said the Crimea is sealed off and a number of Gorbachev’s assistants are under arrest with him. No one knows what has happened to his wife and daughter. Alongside this there were reports of strikes in Sverdlovsk and Vorkuta, but they seemed like whistling in the dark by comparison.

  Oleg rang me at 12.00 and said, “Thank God – you’re home.” Every time I eat this past week, I get an unpleasant sinking feeling in my stomach. I wonder if it’s the start of an ulcer. Heard late at night that the Ukraine has finally come out against the junta.

  Wednesday 21 August

  Was woken at 5.00am by loud radios through the wall and the ceiling. The neighbours seem to have found some channel of news I don’t know about.

  The morning BBC said an attempt to take the RSFSR Supreme Soviet fell short last night. One armoured car was petrol bombed, one demonstrator was shot and three were crushed by tanks. There were mass meetings in Leningrad and the army and police are loyal to Sobchak. Tanks were on their way to Leningrad but did not enter. Japan has declared an economic boycott of the USSR. Apparently Pavlov has backed out of the Committee, pleading illness. There are rumours Yazov may have left it too.

  Tolya rang about the building works, just back from the barricades where he has spent the last two nights. I felt immensely grateful to him for going there and also admired him. He said Yazov has definitely resigned as Defence Minister and that the feeling is that the KGB are running the coup. Demonstrators apparently seized several cars in the underpass where Kalinin Prospekt intersects with the ring road.

  I called several other people. Yelena, seven months pregnant, was also just back from the barricades. She said people are organised now, there are bonfires, and a huge number had just arrived for the morning shift. It is a dismal cold morning with heavy rain.

  Tatyana rang. Her son, Sasha, has spent the last two nights at the barricades too. He reckons there were between 30,000 and 60,000 people there. They are being organised by a general who was in Afghanistan, and are divided in blocks and chains, with strict instructions not to resist tanks. Though they are unarmed, their morale is high and the crowd is disciplined. The Ukrainian miners are apparently out on strike. Sasha had called her at midnight to say all was well. Ten minutes later she heard they were about to storm the Parliament and the radio went dead. So she had a worrying night.

  I realise I’m in a real state of nerves, constantly running to the toilet, can’t settle to anything, and my stomach’s very sore. Decided to send the first part of this diary to London with Mum and Dad.

  Oleg came round, massively depressed. He feels most of Moscow is apathetic about the coup and many are in favour. Like me he hasn’t been to the barricades and got information firsthand, and it seems to be more disconcerting that way.

  The British Embassy is asking people to register in readiness for a quick getaway. I’m reluctant to, because I don’t want to be made to go “forcibly”. Instead I decided to go and register the extension to my visa. On the way into town I noticed the tanks had gone from the bridges. The buses were all up the creek, so I took a taxi for the last stretch. The guy tried to fleece me for dollars, until I convinced him I live in Moscow. Suddenly they announced that the Extraordinary Committee had been arrested! I couldn’t believe it. The Visa and Registration Department was shut, so I called on Nikolay and his mother. Nikolay answered the door and said, “They’ve been arrested!”

  He and his mother had bought me flowers as a belated birthday present and had laid out a tea. We then had a very difficult hour, while they argued about the political scene and I was turned to as arbiter. His mother was visibly distressed that the coup had failed. She’s a good woman, but thinks the people protecting the Supreme Soviet are all extremists, that they fired first last night, and that the unconstitutionality of the coup is merely a legal trifle. The fact that the
Vice President is leading it makes it all kosher. Everything she was saying echoed things I’ve read in Soviet newspapers for years. When I left she handed me a letter explaining her views. It was immensely sincere and courteous, and ended saying my parents were witnessing “a historic defeat of a bourgeois revolution”. She’d written it yesterday. I was struck that she’d taken the trouble to write to me, and perhaps that is the most important thing in our relationship with each other, because I do not know how to write back.

  I felt immensely relieved by the news and I think I was not the only one. People on the tram and the metro were talking about the coup for the first time. Posters had appeared, asking, “Who were the Gang of Eight?” and showing their faces like a “Wanted” poster. When I got home, TV was broadcasting a live session from the Russian Parliament, with Yeltsin reporting back on the stages of the coup. Free television was like rain after a drought and it was a real pleasure watching it.

  I had dinner at the Cosmos with Mum, Dad and Elspeth. The TV was on loud and Yeltsin’s voice was booming in the hall. The staff all flocked to watch the nine o’clock news, and I noticed as we left that the service staff downstairs were all glued to the TV news too. The curfew has been lifted and Kravchenko, the head of TV and radio, has gone. There may still be civil war, I think, but this battle has been won on the best possible terms, it seems to me. It seems like a “coming of age” somehow. Presumably the republics will now be able to reap some capital from the centre.

  I took Mum, Dad and Elspeth to their Leningrad train. They’d spent the day in the rain at Zagorsk in a bus with only ten tourists. An American had asked if tourism had dropped off noticeably since the Gulf War (?). The Intourist guide had said to Elspeth behind her hand, “I don’t know, but it’s dropped off considerably since 19 August!”

  When I got home Lyuda rang from Leningrad and said, “Congratulations!”

  Thursday 22 August

  Lovely weather, symbolically enough. Izvestiya published its uncensored account of the last few days and said that for the first time in possibly seventy-three years Russians had begun to realise “We’re not slaves!” I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. The newsreader on Russian TV broke off to say that for the first time in his life he saw happy faces on the metro. I think that was a bit overdone, but there certainly is a lot of animation and buoyancy. The Visa Registration Department was very busy, but remarkably pleasant and helpful when I went to hand in my visa papers. When I called the USSR Foreign Ministry Humanitarian Affairs Department, Nikolay Smirnov answered and said, “Hello Marjorie, it’s Nikolay”, with unaccustomed palliness.

  I watched the Victory Meeting from outside the Russian Parliament at lunchtime. Muscovites were given their due in good speeches by Yeltsin and Popov, and the crowd was euphoric. All sorts of decrees were announced: nationalising the Communist Party headquarters in Moscow, renaming the square “The Square of Free Russia”, proposing a Russian national army, de-Partyising the armed forces, and nominating Yeltsin as Hero of the Soviet Union, which he has undoubtedly been. It was his day and Gorbachev wasn’t mentioned once.

  But for all the understandable joy, things teetered on the disconcerting. Father Gleb Yakunin invoked all the Messianic tendencies and said how “Russia” had saved the country, and had saved the world. Shevardnadze, who got the warmest reception from the crowd, said that the dead should be buried in the Kremlin wall and if there wasn’t enough room, the other bodies should be dug out. The crowd loved it, but of all sophisticated politicians, why did he say that and appeal to those sorts of instincts? The TV commentator later asked why Shevardnadze hadn’t taken action to stop the first coup attempts last January. (Irina said she had a lot of questions for the TV commentator, who had led a charmed life in the Brezhnev era.)

  Dr Yury Savenko came round in the afternoon and said, “I think we may congratulate each other.” Tolya came round after his third night on the barricades and gave a Victory sign.

  Gorbachev came back to Moscow – for the first time not sawing the air with his hand, and looking more relaxed and smiling than I’ve ever seen. In some ways the coup is like an operetta: the President held in some remote exotic place, then restored to the kingdom; the baddies all fleeing to the land beyond the east river. Where were they going? It all seems odd to me. Apparently Yelena Bonner has been asking the same questions. A number of people think Gorbachev was involved in the coup and prepared to come back in charge of the State of Emergency if it was a success. I saw a handwritten sign in the metro that Pugo had shot himself.

  Irina and I had planned to go to an Italian film, but it was cancelled, so instead we walked round the barricades, as many other people were doing. There was a huge stench where thousands of people had been going to the toilet over two nights. Lorries and cars were lying on their sides and some things were still smouldering. For all that, the place looked more alive and human than usual. It’s normally a very sterile and remote part of town. As we walked back down Herzen Street we were congratulated by a number of drunks, then a huge shower of fireworks burst up over the Kremlin – an impromptu Salute to Victory Day.

  I took Irina to look round our office, now half-plastered and whitewashed, but still a bit of a mess. I asked her to use her imagination and she later said the door frames reminded her of the palace at Kuskovo, so I guess she was. She came back for a cup of tea and we had a nice talk. I like her motivation for doing things. She says she’s still a lieutenant in the military reserve.

  On TV there was a rock concert live from outside the Winter Palace in Leningrad. Somehow rock music seems to sum it all up. It’s energetic and defiant. I heard it blaring from a parked car near the Taganka today and loved it. Everything was so silent during the coup.

  Friday 23 August

  Last night a crowd pulled down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky outside the KGB. So, less than a year after it was laid, the memorial stone to Stalin’s victims stands alone in Dzerzhinsky Square.

  I had a massage from Tanya, who’d also been at the barricades. She was seething about the coup and full of “those Red fucking bastards”, through clenched teeth, as she hammered my back. She reckons Gorbachev was in on the coup, after seeing his press conference yesterday. She kept calling him “Gorbaty” – “the hunchback”. She said she’d seen a war veteran with all his medals go up the front of the queue yesterday and the crowd had driven him back. Very unusual. It really does seem to be a generational thing, this political divide. One of her nice quotes: “They say Raisa had a heart attack. I bet she did – worried about her fur coat.”

  Saturday 24 August:

  Official Day of Mourning in Moscow

  I’ve spent most of the morning crying or near to tears. What seemed like a victory seems more like a tragedy inflicted on a very misfortunate people, and it’s not all over yet. Many people spoke at the Manezh, including Gorbachev, but on occasions like that, who people really are shows in their tone of voice and the way they can understand grief and express it for everyone else. Yelena Bonner spoke with real suffering in her voice and linked the deaths in Moscow with Baku, Karabakh, Alma-Ata and Vilnius, and also with all the prisoners who died in Perm and Mordovia. She said to families of the dead in Moscow that nothing will ever take away the pain for them, “but I promise you, they did not die in vain”. A young Afghan veteran also spoke very simply and movingly.

  A rabbi said the Kaddish and a Russian Orthodox choir sang, most of the men young and some crying as they sang. The TV commentator said fighting has started in Georgia and in Baku, so it looks like the civil war comes nearer.

  I too think Gorbachev’s role in the coup is very suspicious; there are so many unanswered questions. Why, when the RSFSR MPs came to “liberate” him, did he have Lukyanov and Ivashko in one room and three of the putsch committee in another? If he was supposed to be incommunicado, how did he manage to call Arkady Volsky? Shakhnazarov was supposed to be under arrest with him, then r
olls up in Parliament on Wednesday. He’s now appointed as Minister of Defence the man who supplied the tanks for the coup in Moscow. Really, the country doesn’t feel safe from him.

  My laundry is shut until 9 September, and as I have no hot water I took my washing up to Hella and Siffra’s. They were both writing their copy until midnight and hyper with exhaustion, after all the last week’s events. We started discussing the conspiracy theory, all sceptical at first, then talked ourselves into it more and more. They think Gorbachev will be out in a few days.

  Yesterday I took a letter from the London office to the Human Rights Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Smirnov received me, grinning broadly, and said Alexander Bessmertnykh had just been replaced as USSR Foreign Minister. He certainly had a very bald and unconvincing narrative to tell at his press conference, and I later learned that he’d instructed all Soviet embassies to remove Gorbachev’s picture. I also dropped material off at the Shevardnadze Association. Shevardnadze was giving many TV interviews. His assistant, Sorokin, said simply, “We have had a great victory.”

  I finally got my visa registered at the Visa and Registration Department. For the first time they had a TV on, very loudly, and the staff and the queue were watching Gorbachev answering questions from the RSFSR Parliament. Yeltsin humiliated him, using the showman tactics which so disconcert me.

  The newspapers are so interesting now, I’m reading them from cover to cover and they take ages. Izvestiya has immediately removed Lenin from its masthead and quickly settled its year-long dispute, by getting rid of its reactionary editor.