Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  In between I had a nice hour with Ruslan, who’s at long last got his foreign passport. I’ll miss him when he leaves on 29 September. He’d brought apples because it was too cold for beer, and as usual had a lot of silly anecdotes and interesting observations about human nature. He really seems to be over his imprisonment.

  A strange thing today in the metro: the sexy woman’s voice that normally advertises job vacancies for plumbers etc. announced that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s books were on sale at the Sports (?) Bookshop. Everyone silently pricked up their ears and when I looked round the escalator the man behind me was trying to memorise the phone number.

  Lada from the Moscow Amnesty group came round and collected four boxes of materials from my flat, to my great relief.

  Friday 20 September

  A letter in Izvestiya today was like a short story. It was from a man who felt guilty that he had not prevented a suicide. He’d seen a guy standing on a ledge on the fifth floor of the Hotel Vostok, but as he stood there wondering what to do he was suddenly afraid he would be dragged through the courts as a witness. He wondered if he should get the hotel concierge, but then thought they might frighten the man into jumping, and so become accomplices to murder. So he went to the bathhouse and had a shave. When he came out the guy was on the tarmac, dead. He learned later that the concierge had rung the police, an ambulance, the district Soviet etc., but had also gone nowhere near the man on the ledge.

  I spent five hours today at the Customs Department in Butovo, trying to retrieve the computer which a Swedish Amnesty group had sent to the ex-prisoner, Pavlo Kampov, back in February. The depot is way beyond the forest south of Moscow and I took a metro, a bus, and had a long walk through seas of mud to get there. Butovo itself looked like some Solzhenitsyn village by a railway line: ugly, brutish and small. I had to liaise with a woman in the main building and a man in the warehouse, and one or the other of them kept disappearing for an hour at a time. “Well, it’s Friday,” someone smiled, as though that explained it all. “It’s my Friday too,” I said acidly, and for some reason this seemed to cut some ice, probably because I’m foreign. Eventually it got sorted out.

  The Unpardonable Sin of Maud Allen had been replaced by Edward Albee, so Irina and I came back here for a chat. She was wearing everything she’d made herself, and at six foot looked immensely stylish, a characteristic she shares with her mother.

  Saturday 21 September

  I’m dying for a break, but no chance just yet. I met Alexander Kalinin’s wife in the metro. A local city deputy, he’s just finished his nineteen-day hunger strike over appointments that Moscow City Soviet is making. Then I had lunch at Yugo-Zapadnaya with Yelena’s aunt and uncle, he’s a retired army man. An office block is going up opposite them and there were handwritten posters saying the Turkish workers were on strike. A division of tanks had been stationed by them during the coup, and they could see and hear this deafening procession setting off for the centre of town.

  I then met Tolya and in the pouring rain we went to the Moskvoretsky flea market to buy an electric cooker for the office: £50, new. We negotiated with a man with an army van to take it to Herzen Street and it was all in place by six o’clock. At 7.00pm I took a visiting Danish Amnesty member out for dinner, and then he collected three boxes of materials from my flat. He’s here to follow the CSCE human rights conference.

  Sunday 22 September

  The view from the window this morning was like a tarot card. Three birds were sitting in the tree with their faces into the breeze and yellow leaves streaming away behind them. Autumn is really here. I had a lovely morning in bed, reading.

  In the afternoon I went to Tolya’s for dinner. He’d made a lovely borshch, casserole and salad, and an apple pie. We listened to his son playing his own very good piano compositions. He can’t write words in English, so had made settings of old folk songs like Carrickfergus. They sounded strange and quite wonderful. Valya arrived, as usual dynamic and full of schemes and interesting ideas. We’d just watched an hour of Walt Disney and then a US gospel group started up. The breathy lead singer said how wonderful Soviet people are: “Why, they are just like Americans!” Valya said, “Gee, thanks for the compliment.” She is boycotting the cinema because she can never see any good Soviet films – there are so many bad US ones.

  I had a lovely stroll along Vavilov Street, not hurrying anywhere. At night a phone call from home telling me I’ve got a court summons from Lambeth about my poll tax.

  Tuesday 24 September

  I feel we are making real progress. This morning I took our China news release to the Soviet World Service, and Oleg Solovyov volunteered any help he could give us, through contacts or publicity. Tonight the editor of Izvestiya rang, having got my note, and wanting all our press releases in future.

  I had an interesting meeting today: new people are turning to Amnesty, and some funny ones at that. I had to speak with two nice women from the Gagauz minority whose husbands were arrested in Moldova straight after the coup. They are sponsored here, however, by Russian nationalists and were accompanied by a woman from the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, who couldn’t hide her hostility to Amnesty, and looked at me as though I was offering her dog dirt when I shook her hand. However, I cheerily included her in the interview, gave her Amnesty’s advert, and asked if she would like our new report on the USA. When she was bemoaning the injustice inflicted on these women’s husbands, I wondered if any sense of irony or conscience flickered behind those impassive features, but very much doubted it.

  Got chilled to the bone with all this sitting on benches and so popped into McDonald’s for the first time, for a cup of tea. Unlike other Soviet shops, the customer area is a sea of tranquillity, while people are going frantic behind the counter. It looked and sounded like the floor of the Stock Exchange. US division of labour driving them to an early grave.

  Wednesday 25 September

  Today Le Monde casually ascribed a 30% reduction in Moldovan production to “a group of overexcited Ukrainian and Russian women, blocking the trains”. What a world we live in. Will they ever ascribe the First World War to a group of overexcited men?

  I seem to have an internal body clock here, and although things are alright I’m suddenly ready to go home. I’m sick of speaking Russian, and really tired. I spent the day catching up on letters to enquirers and also trying to arrange the beginnings of a medical support network. Sleeping really badly and woke exhausted again.

  Thursday 26 September

  Suddenly an Indian summer. Despite all our efforts, none of today’s papers carried our China report. I met Tolya to pay the next instalment of the builders’ money and gave an interview to Hungarian radio. Four big boxes of computer bits arrived from the Customs Depot at Butovo for Pavlo Kampov, to add to the lousy mess of fifteen boxes already in my room. Very depressing to live with. I fell asleep again, then went round for tea with a friend at the British Council.

  Her flat smelt of Flash; we drank tea with milk, and had Sainsbury’s lime marmalade. The Britishness felt like a brief respite. She had just won a one-woman strike to prevent Moscow University moving three unknown men into her flat on 1 October. She had a funny story about Margaret Thatcher’s visit to MGIMO in May. An adoring student asked how she had managed to be a wife and mother and to run the country? Brushing aside Denis’s millions and the staff of twenty, she said, “There are no queues in Britain”! Would that these remarks got home.

  From there I hitched a lift to Yelena’s place with a pleasant man from the defence industry. He’s worried that the Russian government is not doing enough to fill the shops and that soon the situation will be ripe for a second coup. At Yelena’s place we were saying goodbye to Ruslan, about to start his big adventure in the US, with only a shoulder bag and not a word of English. Since my holiday with Yelena I feel I’ve reached a new level of warmth with her mother, which is very nice indeed. She had never met Rus
lan’s friend Andrey, but I was interested to see the way the conversation developed. None of this: “What do you do, where do you live and isn’t the Northern Line terrible?” He suddenly said he thought execution was preferable to loss of freedom, and she said she thought people needed constraints in order to be happy. He said that was the happiness of an animal, but she said no, if you’ve ever lived with an animal you see that their happiness is far greater than a human’s. And so the evening progressed in a leisurely way, and underneath, quite sad. I kissed Ruslan goodbye and he was so startled and shy, I had the impression it was the first time anyone had kissed him for a long time.

  I was tried in absentia today in Lambeth about my poll tax. They’ve never accepted that I left the country in January.

  Friday 27 September

  More lovely weather, and I’m beginning to catch up on my sleep. After a massage I went shopping and bought a beret for 75p. Spend, spend, spend all the way. Viktor rang, about to take his first trip abroad, to Finland, and asking what I would like as a present. Very nice! I said cheese.

  Saturday 28 September

  Professor Boris Nazarov from the Information Centre on Human Rights rang up, offering to help Amnesty with its registration. It seems we really are being nudged towards him. Perhaps it is because I am here on my own, but I do find the push of these unseen forces threatening and quite depressing.

  The rest of the day was a long goodbye to Misha, who is on his way to Yugoslavia for two years. He seemed sad and said he had waited for this moment for six years, but somehow something didn’t seem right. Everyone at the table was talking politics. Inflation is over 2% a week. People don’t trust Yeltsin. Everything seems to be built on thin air and no one can guess what the future will be. I think I’ve been here too long, because I began an immensely “Russian” conversation with Natasha, about whether in real life good is more interesting than bad, as Simone Weil said. I was saved by her great interest in these kinds of things and the speed with which she forms her own opinions and disagrees.

  It was the same crowd I first met in April, but it struck me how unhappy almost everyone looked: husbands and wives ignoring each other and a lot of drink. Natasha has got thin and seemed immensely tired. People seem to be grasping the chance to work or travel, and putting themselves through massive personal and family strains.

  Sunday 29 September

  The clocks moved back today, and I and everyone else had forgotten. Valya thought there’d been another coup when she switched on the radio and heard more classical music.

  When I rang Irina to check on tonight’s play and asked her what she’d been doing since we met, she said, “Thinking.” I will definitely miss all this when I go home.

  This weekend I saw a woman on the metro carrying a massive cardboard box, the size of a small cello case. She said it was full of cornflakes (!).

  Monday 30 September

  Bright fresh weather. I did a mailing to all our seminar participants who said they wanted to know more about Amnesty, and in turn got a nice letter from an Amnesty member who used to be in Donetsk and is now back home. She said that the French Section of Amnesty are wishing me well, which is nice to know.

  The afternoon was my first visit to the CSCE human rights conference, and what a pleasant, civilised way it was to spend time. The draft concluding document is ready and there were five contributions about it, the USSR’s bristling with proposals and suggestions. It is very hard to meet delegates without sticking your nose in their top pocket to read their label. I managed to deliver our death penalty materials to six of the USSR republican delegations.

  Thence to meet Valya and Tolya to assess the final touches to the office. The tile flooring is just being grouted, but otherwise almost everything has been done. We decided we may have to take a day trip to Estonia to buy light shades. Valya suggested we also go to Parnu, where they sell good mittens. Today she’d met a woman who had a ticket to prove she is No. 503 in the queue for sugar. There have been no eggs around for about a month. Tonight’s news said the firm which produces 90% of the total has no more hen feed. Today I managed to lay hands on my fourth pint of milk since 16 July. I couldn’t get my laundry back because the factory had no hot water and it hadn’t been done. My jeans are catching on the heels of my shoes in a very irritating way, and I realise it’s because I’ve lost weight again.

  Tuesday 1 October

  We are having gorgeous weather. There’s a warm air blowing on the breeze. Lydia Zapevalova came round in the morning, bringing beautiful roses, grapes and apples, and looking quite beautiful after all the stresses early in the year. When the coup was announced she was on her way back from visiting Andrey in prison. He was terrified his death sentence would be reinstated. Apparently the journal Ogonyok is running pieces about corruption in the Voronezh judicial system – the people who sentenced him to death.

  After more meetings I had a very interesting massage with Tanya, who thinks my back is improving. Her adult son had come round yesterday and fallen asleep, then suddenly she had gone down with food poisoning. She threw up and threw up and still he slept. She was in such pain that she started crying, and still he slept. She was too weak to wake him up and barely made it to the kettle, before collapsing – and he slept on.

  The way she told it made me laugh out loud.

  As she was talking about things, I asked her if it was boring before perestroyka. “Boring?” she said with real feeling. “It was so boring. But it wasn’t boredom. It was despair.”

  Wednesday 2 October

  I tripped over the telephone wire tonight and yanked it and the computer out of the socket. After an hour of fiddling around, during which I lost the screw in my slipper, I managed to reconnect the phone, but not the electronic mail. Unfortunately instructions from the London office for tomorrow’s CSCE meeting are on it.

  Inflation is more than 100% in some places. When I came, the courier cost 30 roubles and this morning it was 360. I didn’t have enough money with me, so paid by credit card. No one could remember how to use the machine, so we waited twenty minutes for the manager and another ten while they discovered today’s exchange rate, which turned out to be a fictional 10 roubles to the dollar. I commented on it and they said, “Well, it’s our rate.” I said, “You mean everyone can invent their own?” They shrugged sympathetically: “It’s the Soviet Union.”

  I called in on Irina’s library on my way home. Sitting under a dusty map with a picture of Lenin on the wall, she looked like a photo of the classic Soviet bureaucrat. I was amused that she had been thinking of my yellow towel that disappeared from my flat while I was in Siberia. She’s planning to lend me another one to hang up, so I can watch who looks guilty when they see it. She’s also found out the details of a sailing trip to Uglich for us. I was touched, because I am sure it’s not something she will enjoy, and that this is an indulgence for me planned by her and her mother.

  Today I had a visit from Othmar, an Amnesty member from Austria, who wants to volunteer with me. The landlord came hot on his heels and, after listening to five minutes of our conversation, Othmar asked if I was here for Amnesty or with a business. I’m not surprised he was confused. Sasha engaged him in intense conversation about the Austrian schilling, then I stood up and rather firmly showed him out.

  The post seems to have speeded up since the coup. Letters from the UK have been reaching me in two weeks instead of four to six.

  Had a small triumph at 11.20pm. Finally made contact with Vyacheslav Bakhmin, who handles registration issues at national level, within the Russian Foreign Ministry. He has got ours in hand, is taking it to Yeltsin and expects an answer by the end of October. A nice boost, but the nicest things were his voice and whole attitude. A great weight off my mind.

  Thursday 3 October

  One of the interpreters at the CSCE conference accidentally leaned on his button and during the US delegate’s speech, everyon
e heard, “Of course, she hates to be hurt, but all alcoholics do…”

  It was a real marathon today, until 8.30 at night. I had an extremely interesting talk with the Latvian delegation, who were finding their first CSCE a talk shop. They were relatively frank about prison problems in Latvia, about the death penalty and about alternative service for conscientious objectors. They said they’d copied European practice in making the length of alternative service punitive. I said a lot of European practice troubled us, and they said they could change it. I also enjoyed talks with the French and the Portuguese.

  In the morning I was thinking I could quite enjoy life as a professional conference observer, but by the evening I was crawling the walls. I also had visitations from Soviets in trouble, including one man who was off his rocker, who talked with me for half an hour. I feel I’d be off my rocker if I’d been born and brought up here, and it all seemed alright. Hearing some of the other stories though, I just wanted to run away.

  Rows of Soviets in woolly hats with petitions in their hands sat in the foyer downstairs, while we floated up to deal with “human rights”. I arranged to meet one woman tomorrow and she said uncomplainingly, “They let me in today, but if they don’t tomorrow, will you please come out onto the street?” There seems to have been some intensive filtering going on: the French delegate said they’d only met ex-prisoners from camps or psychiatric hospitals – no conscientious objectors, or eviction cases, or national minorities. Vladimir Babenkov, the Foreign Ministry man responsible for access to the conference, came up to me and other non-governmental people, exuding relief at the end of the conference and wreathed in smiles: “Hello dear friends! Dear colleagues!…”

  Moscow’s a small place. Yesterday I bumped into Vladimir Alimov for the fourth time, and today saw a London University student I know, with a ring in his nose, crouching in an underpass with a man selling drums. Not to pass up an opportunity, I gave him some Amnesty leaflets to take to Armenia with him.