It was interesting watching what Yelena and Stanislav decided I needed to have with me on my journey back home, and a bit funny. In the end they gave me a jar of jam, a bag of raw potatoes, some dried mint and a candle. Scenes like that make me feel very fond of humanity at large.
I remember on the train to Tomsk we were dipping into a bag of sweets. Yelena noticed I liked the flat ones, so she looked out the last three for me, and that one gesture opened up the whole gap between a Russian background and a Scottish Presbyterian one. Here, life is seen as hard and nothing is nicer than to indulge someone and give them a treat. There, the fact you like something is no particular reason to have it: “You needn’t think life’s always going to be so easy.” Somehow the child in me really responded to those three sweets.
I’ve been thinking about what is so appealing about so many of the people I know here who, despite difficulties or imprisonment, try to build the life they want and be what they want to be. It seems to be connected with a real intelligence; an urge to make sense of their surroundings and of themselves, which is in no way connected to an Oxbridge education and smart remarks. Nor is it connected with all the recognisable trappings of the Soviet intelligentsia.
Yelena walked us to the crossroads, then Stanislav and I went on over the bridge, past the rows of huts with their geese, dogs and chickens, and up to the bus station next to the cinema, which shows Rambo and Indian melodramas. We then bussed to Tomsk, passing fields of sunflowers and Siberian cowboys rounding up their cattle on horseback. Intensively farmed, however, it definitely is not. The trees and the fields were gorgeous and more natural and beautiful than an autumn in Massachusetts.
We spent the day in Tomsk before my evening train. Called in on Tomsk City Soviet, which now occupies the imposing Communist Party building on a main street. There I re-met the nice Vladimir Kryukov, whom I first met briefly in Leningrad last year. He’s bought his plane ticket to come to our death penalty seminar in Moscow. Apparently Tomsk City Soviet was one of the first to come out against the coup; they did it by Monday midday. There was a movement for autonomy here in the nineteenth century and it is now reviving, along more rational lines. They no longer want to be a dumping ground for prisoners and exiles, nor to have their natural resources sucked away.
I took the train down the branch line to Tayga Junction. As we rounded the corner out of Tomsk we came bang slap onto what was recognisably a corrective labour colony: the big sliding gate, watchtowers, a soldier with an Alsation, and a flat-capped commandant standing about, looking at his watch. I spent an uncomfortable hour in the dark at Tayga Junction, trying to hear the loudspeaker announcement for the Vladivostok train to Moscow.
Wednesday 4 September
What a journey home! Until Tyumen I shared the coupe with a couple who were deeply suspicious of this foreigner who had stepped onto the train at Tayga Junction. Then, in a very Russian style, the woman suddenly burst out laughing at me and said I looked like a rabbit when I was eating.
Their place was taken by three young gas workers on their way to Moscow for a holiday and dying to get drunk. They were sharply dressed and had a bag of US chicken legs – altogether very chic. I left them to it and they eventually had a fist fight over a shirt in the corridor. The good woman conductor broke it up and one of the boys came to me and very nicely apologised, looking up at me with short hair, big ears and earnest blue eyes. He said he was reading Seneca and Nietzsche and trying to “discover himself for himself”. I asked him what he did and he said, “Nothing. I’m a criminal.” I was half amused, and half thought, Oh blimey.
One of them passed out and snored from 4.00pm to 7.00 the following morning. At Sverdlovsk we were joined by a portly oil prospector, who also snored. The oil man and the gas workers instantly disliked the look of each other, but by the end of the next fifteen hours I came to the conclusion that more united them than divided them. They were all pro-Yeltsin; all felt that capitalism is not for Russia, although new economic forms are needed; all had a mystical faith in “the people” – “narod”; and all felt there is no racism in the USSR and couldn’t understand what all the fuss with national minorities is about. By this time they were all sitting in a chummy row on the opposite seat. I asked if any of them spoke any USSR language apart from Russian and none did. They felt this was unwelcome provocation on my part and drew closer together. All of them hated blacks.
The oil man had some interesting and original points of view, but every time he mentioned “power” he made a gesture with his fist, as though he was squeezing someone’s testicles, hard.
Friday 6 September
I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. Wrote thirty letters and took Amnesty’s paper on the USA to the Institute of Systems Analysis, where some moonlighters are prepared to print it on the side. Began the stations of the cross with the USSR Foreign Ministry to get my visa renewed.
Tanya came round and gave me a fantastic massage. She’s part gypsy and was brought up in an orphanage. Her Russian is too difficult and colloquial for me most of the time, but it’s quite nice to be reduced to a state of almost mute incomprehension with this extremely earthy and vigorous person. She told me how she had nearly drowned at the age of seven, and had inwardly said goodbye “to the Motherland and to Stalin”.
Saturday 7 September
Irina and I went to the Henry Moore Exhibition at the Pushkin Museum. Everyone was poring over the pictures then giving a quick look at the labels, except Irina, who was poring over the labels and giving a quick look at the pictures. A true philologist. She also wanted to see a visiting US Baptist choir, but as she had felt too inhibited to cheer with the crowd in the Square of Free Russia after the coup, I wondered how she would take to it. It was quite a chilling experience, we both found. I thought one song was about using the Bible as a doorstop, but it was about using it as a roadmap. There are no detours on the road to heaven.
Monday 9 September
Thus began an immensely busy week. I walked from one side of Moscow virtually to the other, delivering an invitation to our death penalty seminar to the USSR Ministry of Justice; paying the Baptists for the toilet; dropping into Stolitsa with ideas for an article; lunching with a British actor who wants to do a benefit for Amnesty; going to the Moscow College of Advocates; seeing the Russian Foreign Ministry about our registration; and seeing the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs about my visa.
I was met at the USSR Foreign Ministry by Rumyantsev and Aleksandr Khlopyanov and taken for coffee. Khlopyanov is now a political analyst for Churkin, the press spokesman of the ministry, but has still kept our brief, apparently. To his great credit he does not pretend to have been a closet democrat all along, and when I gave him our report about women, he quoted Lenin about the importance of women in society. He’s rather subtle and in the twilight of the Press Centre café, dropped enigmatic hints for half an hour about how Amnesty is perceived in the USSR. Basically positively, I thought was the message.
They extended my visa only until 4 October and I said that wasn’t totally satisfactory. They then very nicely said, “We don’t know if we’ll be here after then – this is best, trust the experience of old bureaucrats.” They said that Communists now face the risk of persecution and asked if Amnesty would take up their cases. I said we defend imprisoned Communists in many countries and would in the USSR too. They then asked if we would protest a death sentence against the coup plotters, and when I said yes, we all smiled and savoured the irony a moment in silence. I felt I was witnessing the twilight of the gods.
Khlopyanov has always been unfailingly courteous and efficient with me and I quite like him. His impression is that no one is yet prepared to take responsibility for Amnesty.
From there I headed to the Russian Council of Ministers, which yesterday moved to the old headquarters of the Communist Party on Staraya Ploshchad, newly “unsealed”. Vladimir Chernyega was busy with the Russian Foreign Minister so
I waited downstairs. A group of US visitors swept in, apparently to check security for James Baker’s visit. Affirmative action was obviously at play, because there was one black guy, whom everyone ignored, a forceful woman, and an absolute pillock. The Russian police guarding the building were the new generation: heavily armed, but totally approachable and nice. I went to the toilet and one of them carried my briefcase. I said it was the first time I’d been to the toilet at rifle point and he said, “Look on it as protection.” The corridors were strewn with old Communist Party furniture, which I fancied having for our office. Chernyega was very positive about our registration and said the man handling it would be Vyacheslav Bakhmin, the ex-prisoner of conscience. Light at the end of the tunnel!
During the day, and thanks to a friendly secretary, I delivered Amnesty’s complaints to the USSR Foreign Ministry about poor access to the September human rights conference. At night Vladimir Babenkov, the man responsible for the arrangements, called me at home, very angry, and asking what all the fuss was about. The upshot was we got the access we wanted.
Tuesday 10 September
This morning the USSR Ministry of Justice called, saying they were interested in helping us to register and suggesting a meeting tomorrow. All this attention is getting ridiculous.
I sorted out office repairs with Tolya and the printing of our document on the USA, then in the afternoon went to suss out the lecture hall for our seminar at the Faculty of Journalism with the sound engineers and Oleg. There was an interesting moment when the Dean asked them suspiciously, “Who are you? Are you with Amnesty?” Oleg said, “Yes, I’m with Amnesty”, and exchanged a nice look with me. I discovered he’s going to do all the interpretation himself, and free of charge. A real gift, because he’s good.
Wednesday 11 September
I had a maddening morning at the USSR Ministry of Justice with Natalya Vysotskaya. We met Nikolay Zubkov, who smiled and smiled as he fiddled with his glasses nervously, and whose sole concern seemed to be how to put off writing an official reply to the letter we sent him about registering. You would have thought we were discussing disarmament in Europe, not some simple bureaucratic task. Little wonder the USSR has fallen apart.
Had a better afternoon, meeting a young psychiatrist who works in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, oddly enough, but who staffed the medical unit at the barricades during the coup and wants to join Amnesty. He says lots of people come to him severely depressed by the situation. He feels a fraud, because he persuades them they’ll feel better in two months, then two months later there’s a coup. Since the coup I’ve noticed lots more drunks in the street, and lots more children playing with plastic guns.
I looked over the finished interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist. He’d made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and it was very good indeed. From there I dashed to see the British actor Peter Gale starring in The Unpardonable Sin of Maud Allen. I went backstage to congratulate him and found him telling local reporters that all proceeds would go to our Amnesty office in Moscow. It was touching.
Thursday 12 September
We have managed to track down the materials that were sent to the Moscow Book Fair and then disappeared into limbo. Twenty-five boxes arrived at my flat this morning. In the afternoon Misha kindly came with me to persuade the kitchens at the Faculty of Journalism to prepare refreshments for our seminar. He is the most unpresumptuous of men, but I was amused to hear him introduce us as the Organising Committee of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Anyway, it worked. I bought plastic cups for hard currency.
In the evening I escaped for dinner with Irina and her mother. At some magic moment her mother instructed us to open their bottle of vermouth and after three tumblers-full each, she began to recite sonnets she had written herself.
Friday 13 September
People from the London office are over here for the conference, so I took them out for a good dinner. Had a good lunch too, at the Metropol hotel with someone from the Council of Europe Human Rights Division. He said Shevardnadze is far from euphoric after the coup, and is particularly worried about the Ukraine.
On Saturday afternoon I showed someone from London round the office, which looked great. They are levelling the floor, everything is replastered, the rooms are painted pale grey or pale beige, the windows are white and the toilet is in place and the room all cleanly tiled. Very satisfying.
Yeltsin commuted twenty-one death sentences tonight.
Sunday 15 September
I spent thirteen hours crouching by the twenty-five boxes, collating and stapling materials for our death penalty seminar, helped by two good folk from Amnesty in London and Germany. Finally finished at 1.00am. I’m very worried that I can’t make contact with Galina Starovoytova. Irina thinks she saw her speaking from Paris yesterday.
The USSR Ministry of Justice rang again (!) urging us to try registering with Moscow City Soviet’s Justice Department.
Monday 16 September
Our seminar and a beautiful crisp day. Oleg arrived at 8.30am to take me and materials to the hall, and as we passed the Communist Party’s hotel on Dimitrov Street I asked if he thought Honecker was hiding out there. He said no, there were mansions outside Moscow for people “of that calibre”.
Had mixed feelings about the seminar: the sound system, the interpretation and buffet were very good, as were Larry Cox and Roger Hood, the two guest speakers. The audience was very serious and we collected some money, but there was not a huge turnout and it was a big lack that our Soviet speaker did not turn up. The woman from the Statistics Department of the USSR Ministry of Justice came, commandeered the microphone, and declaimed from the podium. One interesting point though: she said, “Of course the death penalty is not a deterrent.” She’s changed her tune since we met in March. Larry and Roger visited the GUM department store and were appalled. I think they got their first insight into life here.
Tuesday 17 September
I was absolutely knackered and spent the day being late. Everyone else seemed to be in the same state. I couldn’t get a bus to the Justice Department so eventually flagged down a car. The driver was a very interesting man from a foreign relations institute, specialising in Ethiopia and Somalia, and said what an impact Amnesty had had on President Siad Barre. However, he still had the lurking suspicion that we are always sticking our noses where we’re not invited. I said that in a sense that was true, because very few governments invite you to look at the way they treat political prisoners. Eventually he refused to take any money from me, parked the car, and escorted me to the Justice Department so I arrived on time.
Here Natalya Vysotskaya and I met a very different animal from the people at the USSR Ministry of Justice. Mr Kostanov has got our death penalty report, would like to have it autographed and thinks Amnesty could really help their efforts to humanise the prison system. He recommended that we apply for a “mini-embassy” status attached to the Moscow City Soviet or to the Ministry of Justice, and promised to push our case within the week. Natalya and I fell silent.
From there I made my way to the Russian TV Centre to discuss our Human Rights Day programme on 10 December. I stopped off in a park for a breather, and who should be there but the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov again, also drawing breath before our meeting. He was looking utterly exhausted and ghastly.
Saw off the London gang at lunchtime, then bumped into Lev Yelin from New Times, who said he’d done a piece on Amnesty’s report about China and got an official complaint from the Chinese government. Good sign. I also bumped into Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary at the Humanitarian Affairs Division of the USSR Foreign Ministry. He asked, “How are your relatives?” Apparently he had heard at the UN in Geneva that Mum, Dad and Elspeth were here during the coup.
Komsomolskaya Pravda published my interview today – half a page spread over five columns.
Wednesday
18 September
I met people from the Krasnodar group against the death penalty. As we chatted on the park bench the woman next to us butted in and said we were a threat to society. We began to talk with her, and suddenly the young man next to her butted in. Eventually there were five of us all discussing the death penalty, and I must say that Olga from Krasnodar was excellent.
In the afternoon I did an English-language interview with the Soviet World Service, with a very nice elderly China specialist, Oleg Solovyov. He threw in a gift question about China, and ended by announcing to the world that he hoped Amnesty would soon get official registration. He drove me home in time to meet the landlord, lo and behold with his wife in tow – the first time she’s seen the flat since I moved in, and there it was looking wrecked with twenty-five cardboard boxes. However, they were very excited by the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda and seemed to be treating me with a new respect. Yulia had brought me apples and Sasha had a sort of man-to-man talk with me about world affairs. Interestingly, he said he was against a death sentence for the coup plotters. That also represents a change since the beginning of the year. The poor guy is still trying to get his cheque out of the bank; it’s been three months now. He’d spent one and a half days in one queue, only to find it was the wrong one. Great basis for doing business, this banking system.
Thursday 19 September
A beautiful cold autumn day, and it was my day for meeting prisoners. First Valery Yanin, released from Camp 35 in Perm last week after sixteen years, and still suffering from broken ribs after the pulverising he’d got before his release. He’d spent seven years in solitary confinement. He was thin, white and very revved up. I wonder what it will be like for him when he hits the ground.
In the afternoon I met a conscientious objector from Ukraine, who is probably about twenty, but very withdrawn and rather “tough”. Every time I asked a question, like “How are your parents?”, he said, “Meaning?” He wants to join Amnesty.
Moscow Diary Page 18