Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  I felt too down in the dumps to go to Hella and Siffra’s party, but they told me on the phone that Gorbachev has left the Communist Party and disbanded it, and the Baltics and Ukraine have declared independence. Suddenly things look interesting again, so I went to the party – all journalists and Dutch Embassy people – and we discussed the situation to death.

  In the moonlight Sverdlov’s massive statue came down, nose first, before an exultant crowd.

  Sunday 25 August

  I visited Yelena and Stanislav. I was once again struck by how remarkable Yelena is; in her personal relations she is nothing short of saintly, and at the same time immensely strong. All her inner workings seem to move in the same direction; I suppose that’s what integrity means. She has no doubt Gorbachev was involved, and alone of anyone I know, was always convinced it would be over quickly. She also said immediately she would oppose the death penalty for the plotters. No one else was so sure. They’d all been on the barricades, like her.

  The Quaker meeting was seven Russians and two Brits. Afterwards we had quite a bitter argument about law versus diktat and the prospects under Yeltsin – probably a sign of all the conflict that’s still to come in the larger scene. Tatyana was marvellous as usual. She said when she saw Sverdlov’s statue come down and the Party building sealed, she felt at one level a sense of glee and revenge. At another level she feels the only hope for the future is to avoid that.

  On the metro a young man gave a lovely smile to a little girl opposite and she smiled back. Her mother yanked her closer and shot him a pre-coup scowl. I’m certainly seeing a lot more Russian teeth these days; more smiles on buses and the metro, and this morning shopping was positively pleasant.

  Well, what do you know: last thing at night it was reported that Belorussia of all places has also declared independence. Tonight I found a mouse sitting right inside my fridge.

  Monday 26 August

  My next task is to find 200 cups and 200 headsets for the seminar, and a toilet and water heater for the office.

  I met Natalya Vysotskaya at the USSR Ministry of Justice, and with a fascinating mixture of charm and aggression, she got them to clarify in writing that we are not eligible to register as a public organisation. She suggests we do the same about registering as a commercial enterprise. I think the coup last week has brought more tension than relief. She said all the lawyers at her consultancy had supported it, except her, and they told her she was dishonouring the calling of an advocate. She got annoyed with me and said that if I lived here for a month as a Soviet, I would hang myself. She can’t bear the strain of going to bed at night and not knowing what will happen tomorrow.

  She wanted to pop into the Baptist headquarters nearby and I wanted to start my search for the toilet. I was just getting tired of waiting for her, when I was invited in to eat with them all. It turned into a very interesting day. Their centre is an imposing old private house, totally wrecked inside. They were busy with many visitors. Everyone looked rather poor and the young people were the sort you might expect to see at a youth club in Britain. We ate a very nice home-cooked meal at small clean tables, and after some painful small talk we had a very interesting discussion about the coup. Vera, a middle-aged Baptist, had also been at the barricades. She couldn’t understand why the KGB, who are so adept at planning and forestalling coups abroad, couldn’t pull it off here. She also thought the attempts to resurrect the Union Treaty are a “Bolshevisation of thought”. Republics will have their sovereignty or independence, then cooperate without it.

  We went to meet the head of the Soviet Baptists, Bychkov, and here the tensions re-emerged. He got angry about the role of the Russian Orthodox Church now and right back in 1917, because he said it had bolstered the state so significantly and enabled the revolution. However, I was struck that Baptists obviously do good prison work. He was very positive about Amnesty and about Quakers.

  The amazing thing was that I left the Baptists with a toilet! I got talking to some of the nice ordinary staff, who then produced the toilet free of charge and got someone to drive it and me round to the office. I wondered what I would find as I was arriving unannounced, but the lights were on and three men were busily working. They were very pleased with the toilet and all said goodbye, smiling nicely.

  Natalya’s the first person to tell me she’s at risk by having contact with me. In the evening I went round to people who don’t feel that. Irina and her mother gave me a lovely dinner, including my first fish outside a restaurant. It was their first fish too. It’s interesting watching them together. Natalya Ivanovna is another of these redoubtable Soviet mothers, e.g. she has done a translation of Keats’ sonnet ‘To Sleep’ in her spare time, and is basically terribly intelligent and philosophical in her style. They both seemed worried about me and about my future.

  Natalya Ivanovna had a funny story about visiting Czechoslovakia in 1977 and the terrible hostility she felt, which was hard to bear as she also opposed the invasion. The taps in her bathroom didn’t work, so she eventually asked if she could change rooms. The woman at the desk said, “You work to a five-year plan and so do we. Your request will go into the next one.”

  Gorbachev’s secretary has been telling how she smuggled a tape out of Foros in her knickers. She didn’t seem to be able to get over it, because she mentioned it three times, with giggles. Later the interviewer held up a tape and she said, “That’s the one I smuggled out in my knickers!” “No it isn’t, it’s another one,” he said crossly.

  Tuesday 27 August

  It’s cold and wet again, but my hot water came back on again for the first time in six weeks. A day of writing letters and phoning round about headsets, water heaters and the costs of typesetting and printing Amnesty materials here. Later finished off by doing my accounts for July and August. I’ve got an embarrassment of toilets: Todd Weinberger has come up trumps with one for me.

  A French Amnesty member came round with her Norwegian friend. They had been on the trans-Siberian railway when the coup started and felt vulnerable in a moving train somewhere outside Omsk. Yelena and Stanislav have bought me tickets for a week in Tomsk with them. Marvellous!

  Wednesday 28 August

  I managed another trip to the steam baths at midday, but otherwise the day was a great race against time to catch the night train to Siberia. More phoning and trading in the morning, then an afternoon spent delivering things.

  When I met Svetlana Polubinskaya to give her the interim report of the World Psychiatric Association Review Committee, I was having trouble with my ice cream. She very nicely held a polythene bag underneath to catch the drips. She’d been at her dacha all through the coup and said, “Things are far from over.”

  Called on the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to apply for advance passes for Amnesty to observe the human rights conference in September. Not possible, apparently. The whole event sounds like an exercise in damage control by the USSR Foreign Ministry. In a way that made my blood run cold, Zaitsev said, with some satisfaction, “I hear you’re having trouble with premises for your seminar.” “Not as far as I know,” said I. Apparently the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs had rung him to say there would be complete redecoration at Moscow University’s Faculty of Journalism, so they wouldn’t be able to host Amnesty. It half-crossed my mind to ask if the Ministry of Internal Affairs was always so involved with redecoration plans, but I decided not to react – although I’m sure my face gave me away.

  I came away feeling really threatened. They’ve blocked our office registration, they’ve blocked my visa, and now they’re trying to disrupt our seminar. At least it does show that the seminar is in a good place and they are taking it seriously.

  Two very funny things happened before the end of the day. Oleg rang up out of the blue, offering me another hall with facilities for synchronised translation. Then I called the Dean of the Faculty of Journalism, expecting to hear his excuses about the s
eminar. Instead he was charming and positive, and said there are no problems with the premises. He made some caustic remarks about the Friendship Society and how they would love to ensure a small audience. So, the fight is on!

  Journey to Siberia

  I never thought I would set off for Siberia with only a light jumper, but Yelena and Stanislav assure me it is summer in Tomsk. It was a dark wet night in Moscow, and when I arrived at Yelena’s, nine adults were standing waiting for me in the hall with luggage. We set off, a raggle-taggle group of ex-prisoners and hangers-on, then flagged down a car to take three of us and nine bags to the Kazan station.

  Once we were in the coupe, out came the computer, the water melon and all the other things essential when you’re travelling light here. It turned out we’d remembered and forgotten all the same things, so we had lots of bread, cheese and carrots, and no cups, spoons or knives. We sat round sharing tea from a jam jar. The fourth person in our coupe was a young and silent Kirghiz soldier, on his way to Novosibirsk. Yelena eventually asked him if he’d been involved in the coup in Moscow, but he said not. Throughout the three days I kept seeing a long brown arm descending to drop a melon rind, or a bare calloused foot slipping down into some big muddy army boots. The door to our coupe continually jammed shut and provided a leitmotif for the journey. When Yelena and I were having an English lesson, the soldier was throwing himself at the door as though he couldn’t get out fast enough.

  I spent the first day in a kind of bovine stupor. Yelena woke me up when we crossed the Volga and we later pulled in to Kazan in Tatarstan. The train passed through endless meadows and birchwoods, with little peasant huts occasionally dotted by the railway. The next day we travelled through the Omsk steppe, which looked the way I imagine the US prairies to be: grasslands with occasional herds of cattle. The towns en route were like frontier towns too: water cylinders on tall legs, dwarfing wooden ranch houses. In the evening we pulled into Omsk, passing a lot of US containers going west from the Pacific, then crossed the big Irtysh River. Yelena got out at 1.00am to pay her respects at Barabinsk, the town where Anatoly Marchenko was born. The temperature plummeted in the Siberian night. We headed across the Ob River and when I woke up, we were going north up the single-track branch line to Tomsk. This whole trip has cost 71 roubles, or under £2. It costs £2.10 to get from Heathrow to Brixton.

  The first time Yelena came here she was under escort by three armed soldiers and beginning her five years’ exile. I first met her two years ago, when she was profoundly depressed at the end of her sentence and also planning to enter a convent. I was musing on how she’s changed since then, and watching her sorting her reflection in the train window, adjusting her dress and fiddling with her hair. When everything was looking nice, like all nice people, she said, “Ghastly!”

  We’re spending the day at Stanislav’s hut in Timiryazevo outside Tomsk and have been out gathering mushrooms in the rain. When we got here it was like a scene from Chekhov. We were met by Boris Anatolyevich, a small, faded man with bright blue eyes, and a young guy called Aleksey, whose wire spectacles were all at an angle. Stanislav sat on the stoop telling them about the coup and showing them pictures from the Moscow newspapers. They didn’t know Dzerzhinsky’s statue had been pulled down, and were incredulous and tickled to hear that it had. “Did it immediately shatter?” Aleksey asked.

  Yelena and Stanislav put me in the new room to write this diary, looking out at the garden, while they got water, washed the floor, chopped wood, dug vegetables and were generally fantastically busy. There was no spoon, so Stanislav carved one out of wood. We had borshch and stew from vegetables in the garden, then Stanislav sang a nice song about being lonely travelling by train. Yelena and I slept in the kitchen by the stove with the dogs and cats, and Stanislav slept up in the loft.

  Sunday 1 September

  When I woke Yelena was dressed and standing in a corner with her back to the room, saying her prayers. We had one lazy breakfast, then discovered the delights of raspberries from the garden, so had another one.

  We then set off across the fields for the bus to Tomsk, this time with nine bags, a cooking ring, frying pan and a dog. A little girl in Pioneer uniform came running up with a certificate, back from her first day at school. Tomsk is an ancient, wooden town with tramlines running down the middle, all overgrown with grass. There is a small Tatar quarter with mosque down by the river, but the main street reminded me of small towns in the US Midwest. Until January this year it was a closed town. The local Party buildings have just been sealed up and the “Boards of Honour” were all blank. Yelena and Stanislav gave me some Tomsk ration cards for soap, flour, butter and sugar, all worthless because, despite rationing, the goods are just not there to be had. Apparently to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, everyone got a ration card for meat, as a present. People were not amused and it almost provoked a riot.

  We’d missed the hydrofoil river bus up the Ob to Krivosheyno, so spent the day visiting their friends. We had baths and a meal at the Strombergs, a lovely family of Soviet Germans, all physicists and chemists. Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Soviet Germans. There’s a four-hour time gap with Moscow and so they’d only learned about the coup at midday from someone’s car radio in the street.

  From there we visited other friends and ended up at another German family, the Fasts. He’s a terrific, prophetic-looking man. In years gone by they had made it their business to find out who was exiled to Tomsk Region and had helped them, at great risk to themselves. Now Wilhelm is on Tomsk Regional Soviet and has been compiling lists of local people killed in the purges for “Memorial”. He himself was imprisoned in the Tayshet camps.

  Their three-year-old grandson, David, wants to be a deacon. He stood on a stool facing the icon on the wall, and all the adults stood behind him, while he said grace. I couldn’t follow a word of what he was saying, but every so often everyone else would cross themselves. There was also no stopping him and he went from one prayer to another. Eventually someone said, “That’s enough, David, or we’ll never eat.” He seemed extraordinarily bright and over dinner looked up and said, “What’s a category?”

  Monday 2 September

  We had a fantastic sail up the River Tom and along the River Ob to Krivosheyno: the length of Britain and more, for 12 roubles (25p). The sky was blue, some of the trees were turning yellow or red, and the Ob makes huge sweeps to left and right. The riverbanks are eroding at a great rate, so at some points there are big sandy cliffs with trees lying tangled in the water. There were cows on the shore when we reached Krivosheyno jetty. We piled out and walked 1km up a grassy cliff to the last hut on Kolkhoz Street, which was Yelena’s place in exile. The vegetable plot was shoulder-high in weeds. When we went into the hut my heart quailed, because it was like the seventeenth-century cottages at Culloden. There was a shed and an outer room, both dark and dilapidated, then an inner room, which was somehow recognisably Yelena’s. The walls were whitewashed, there were yellow curtains, books on the shelves, and a beautiful icon in the corner. Thieves had been in previously and stolen a lamp and some books. Yelena had lived here, washing floors at the club and making hockey sticks at the local factory.

  The weather was gorgeous and the forest was light and peaceful, but for seven months of the year the temperature is -40 degrees, and the snowdrifts so deep you can’t get down the street. I don’t know how Yelena did it. In the evening we visited neighbours who had a phone, so I could call the USSR Foreign Ministry about my visa. They lived in a bare, neat cottage, and although it was in deepest Siberia, it seemed suburban somehow. The wife was in a nice housecoat, with two children hanging around in the background, and she seemed to be waiting for something. All the locals had been warned against Yelena when she was in exile, so I wondered how they would react to her now. I think everyone liked her very much, but her political remarks are so acute, I noticed everyone would laugh and agr
ee with her, then shoot her a disconcerted glance. On the way home we stopped by an eighty-year-old woman and her daughter, both still farming, and got a jar of fresh milk. The eighty-year-old looked at me and said, “Who’s this you’ve got with you?” She bemoaned the political situation and said, “I’m for Soviet power.”

  A friend of Yelena and Stanislav was also staying at the hut with her son. I realise I’m a useless guest, because she immediately began washing the floors and digging potatoes, while I sat there in a dream. We then had rather a strange evening in this silent, starry Siberian night, with enough emotion in the hut to drive a battleship. Ira, the friend, had a desperately unhappy face. I was the first foreigner she’d ever met in her life, and it seemed to have a peculiar effect on her, as though she felt compelled to account for herself and tell me everything. Stanislav lit a bonfire and sang some songs, and every so often the other two would rise up out of the circle of light and stand in the dark by the gate, or in the garden, sighing.

  We ate inside by candlelight and so the effect was repeated: Ira’s face opposite me, unburdening everything, while the other two moved about the room in the dark, listening. At one point Ira moved out of the light and in moved Yelena, to ask me if I knew an English poem with the words, “Our hands have touched, but not our hearts, and they shall never touch again”. Apparently it’s the only non-jolly poem they learned at school and so she’d remembered it.

  Just time to negotiate the outdoor toilet with a dynamo torch that you have to continually pump, then bed. In the middle of the night the dog went mad catching a mouse in the dark. Frightened me to death.

  Tuesday 3 September

  Had a lovely breakfast with Yelena. For some unspoken reason she very much wanted me to see the hut, and I very much wanted to see it.