Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  Friday 4 October

  At the CSCE conference today a peasant woman was sitting on the balcony, under a chandelier, with a headset on under her headscarf and walking stick close at hand, listening to governments interpreting what they meant by “migrant workers”. I wonder what she was thinking.

  The meeting finished at 2.00pm then I went to renew my visa. I got a lift in a new car from a man who didn’t seem to be able to drive. He forced it along in second, then changed up to third and immediately slowed down. We went the wrong way down a one-way street, then he reversed out into three lanes of traffic. There was a huge crowd at the Visa and Registration Department and I stood in a tight, hot queue for forty minutes, with the man behind poking his book into my back. I was ready to whap him.

  I did so little today, but got back exhausted and went to bed at 6.00pm. Irina rang later. The boats to Uglich have great names: one’s the Felix Dzerzhinsky, named after the first Bolshevik head of the secret police, and the other’s the Ivan Susanin, named after the bloke who led some Poles to their deaths in the seventeenth century.

  Saturday 5 October

  Had a very interesting and social day. Irina and I went to the travel agency to suss out Uglich. No glossy brochures here, just some handwritten notices about “two rooms available in such-and-such a pensionat, between such-and-such dates”, and a barking woman behind a glass screen. We had to fill out forms giving our professions etc. I wrote, “Colleague of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, as it says on my visa, but as the moths have had a field day with my gloves and I looked like Albert Steptoe as I handed the form over, this probably looked like a bald and unconvincing narrative. We queued at two windows for pieces of paper, although we were the only people in the place, and came out with our “putyovka” – travel authorisation – for 14 October.

  Then we went to look round the Andrey Rublev museum, the first time it’s been open in the four years I’ve tried to visit it. Irina told me about their Marxism-Leninism classes at university. One of the ‘best’ students became a priest straight afterwards and another, rather vacant, girl got top marks because the lecturer said she was “a Bolshevik by nature”. “And you, Irina”, he said, “say one thing and think another.” I do like her – she has her own opinions and is one of the few people who never asks me for anything.

  I had lunch at Tanya’s. During the coup she’d spent the time talking to the tank drivers in the street, then gone home, cut up a blue suit and red skirt, and sewn Russian flags, which later departed from Moscow on some tanks.

  I then met Natalya Vysotskaya and another lawyer who works on capital cases. Because it was cold, we sat in the foyer of Izvestiya and chatted. Natalya invited me home and when we got to the tube, she turned round to survey the people behind us and see if we were being followed. That some ordinary professional woman should do this so naturally really struck home. It has got to me, and I don’t like this part of living here.

  I then had several hours getting to know the riddle that is she. She took me home via the church which she hopes to expand into a rehabilitation centre for ex-convicts. It was until recently a warehouse and tonight a service was going on in amongst the scaffolding, and there was an immensely good atmosphere. People had also brought bedding etc. for her ex-prisoners. She’s totally dedicated to her project, an immensely good lobbyist, and immensely hard working. When we got home she put on old blues numbers and told me about her life before she became religious.

  Izvestiya says an amnesty is being prepared for army deserters.

  Sunday 6 October

  The lovely weather continues. Today was the day of unhappy families.

  I took corrections to the Peru translation down to the Teplitskys. There was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife: all three of them sitting in separate rooms, the tension brought on by Lena’s Turgenev homework. Natasha says she’ll give it two more weeks then is going to do something about it. Poor Lena was fed up to death and fighting tears because she couldn’t do her essay.

  I think Soviet newsreaders are going through a reaction to the coup and the mechanical way the readers behaved then. They’re full of comments and asides about the world at large and the news they are reading. One woman interviewer was so full of tragedy and sighing when she introduced the subject of deaths in the army that I think the guests were quite reluctant to say anything in case they intruded upon her grief. It got worse when it turned out the actress she was featuring next had been widowed that day.

  Monday 7 October

  The oddest public holiday today: to celebrate Brezhnev’s Constitution. I suppose there isn’t a Constitution at the moment so they can’t celebrate that.

  By midday I saw a guy with a shopping bag trying to negotiate the corner of a building like a vaudeville drunk. He had even more trouble with a puddle. The other night I saw a drunk trying to pee up against a wall, holding his shopping bag in front of him.

  I managed to shake myself out of the lethargy which has been threatening. In the remaining weeks while our registration is on ice, I think I should systematise our death penalty mailing lists and also introduce Amnesty at all the republican embassies in Moscow.

  A Japanese student at Moscow Law Faculty came round to visit in the morning and immediately arranged ways to promote Amnesty at the university. She’d been at our death penalty seminar but unfortunately leaves on 26 October. She said she was only sorry we hadn’t met earlier. Me too.

  Another person at the seminar wrote me the nicest letter, giving the phone numbers of about twenty people who were in the now-defunct Society to Abolish the Death Penalty. I began to ring them up for their addresses, and despite my odd introduction – “Hello, I’m ringing about the death penalty” – the reaction was universally interested and warm.

  Tuesday 8 October

  Delightful weather continues. I spent the morning trying to find the official in the Russian government who could give Amnesty the list of death sentences commuted in September. I thought, Why not try the intimidating woman at the Statistics Department in the USSR Ministry of Justice?, and sure enough, her defences were down and she was quite maternal to me. Got some numbers from her and short shrift from the people at the other end of them.

  Tanya gave me another good massage. I wonder what the neighbours think: she speaks at the top of her voice, there’s slapping and the occasional shout from me. She’s an immense sensualist and takes a childlike pleasure in anything that looks, sounds, or smells nice: a bar of soap, flowers, the sound of church bells.

  I revised the translation of our Peru document, then composed a letter to Pink Floyd for Vladimir Alimov. All in a day’s work.

  Wednesday 9 October

  It was touch and go how this complicated day would work out, but it did. In the morning I managed to fix an appointment with the President of the Russian Clemency Commission. He said they don’t give out lists of people who have been pardoned. I said we just wanted to spare him from being bombarded by superfluous appeals. He laughed and said, “Well, OK.”

  Nina Petrovna Lisovskaya came round with Pavlo Kampov, bearing flowers and fruit from Ukraine and here to collect his long-suffering computer. It was very satisfying to see the immense pleasure it gave him, to bring the whole saga to an end – and to have four fewer boxes in the room.

  I then dashed to Megapolis Express to do an interview with a very nice, un-Russian sort of woman. She looked as though she might be called Pauline or Christine. Five women worked in the room and one man, but the walls were plastered with pin-ups.

  Got back half an hour late to meet Vera Millinship and take her walking round the Kolomenskoye monastery, but I needn’t have worried; it had taken her two hours to travel the equivalent of four tube stops, because she couldn’t find petrol for the car. It’s a funny thing this being late. I find I’m doing it all the time here, perhaps because you always have to walk further than you think.
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br />   To crown it all I got the wrong bus at night, so arrived panting for the piano concert at the Stanislavsky museum with Yelena’s mother. She excused me because she remembered I’m “always late”. It happened to be the seventh anniversary of Yelena’s trial. Her mother remembered she’d got a surprise call from the KGB saying Yelena wanted a blue dress for her court appearance.

  Yelena’s mother really is the unsung heroine of all this. She supports Yelena down to the ground and takes in all her waifs and strays, some of whom live with her for two months at a time. She said of one woman, “It would have been alright if she didn’t talk.” She told me people from the House of Architects want to make a sign for our office and also a “symbolic” arrangement of dried flowers. These nice gestures are the most satisfying thing about this job.

  At 10.00pm I met Anne-Marie, visiting pollution hot spots in her new ecology job. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other in a year and we stayed up late, drinking and smoking.

  Thursday 10 October

  “Svyatye mesta pustye ne byvayut”, as they say here, and the place of Oleg and Ruslan seems to have been taken by the very nice Andrey. He brought me some lovely wooden spoons, then we stayed on chatting and had an ice cream. Another reasonable and low-key man living on the fringes.

  In the afternoon I went to the Democratic Russia Party to see if their bookshop would be interested in carrying our death penalty report. I think they were, but suspected I’d stolen the books. They’ll decide tomorrow. I also met up with Natalya Vysotskaya, who’d just addressed a congress of businessmen, hoping some would help to sponsor her prisoner fund, but hit a brick wall. All her frustration boiled down to the fact that they were sloppy, there was dirt everywhere, and “they all had things sticking out of their pockets”. She despairs if they are the only challenge to the old order.

  At 6.00pm I had my appointment with Nikolay Vedernikov, the head of the Russian Clemency Commission. The Parliament building looks nice inside, and the offices and signs look businesslike, rather than pompous. Downstairs they had an exhibition of children’s art, depicting Lithuania in January and Moscow in August. There does seem to be life in the place.

  Vedernikov is a criminology professor from Tomsk University, but if Tomsk has been a closed city, he seems quite an open man. On his recent trip to the USA he especially asked to meet Amnesty people in Washington; he has just ushered through the first large group of commutations on capital cases; and he gave me the unpublished list of their names on trust. However, the Clemency Commission itself seems to leave a lot to be desired: its members are picked at random, have no criteria to work by, and someone who works on it told me most members don’t read the case material. They just listen to the presentations and vote on the nod.

  Friday 11 October

  Had an interesting evening watching TV. There was Come Dancing from St Petersburg, with a line of adverts for carpenters and plumbers continually running across the bottom of it. One advert was for a computer firm called “Arse”.

  Then there was a TV doctor answering readers’ letters – absolutely amazing letters and amazing replies. After a crop of questions from people with bad legs and backs, he read out letters from insomniacs and they were terrifying: one woman was so afraid of a famine she couldn’t sleep. Another had seen a war invalid attacked in a queue because he was taking time over choosing a small piece of meat, and now she was too frightened to go shopping and also couldn’t sleep. The doctor explained it as “situational neurosis” and got himself more and more worked up as he described the political scene, ending with quotations from non-democratic politicians, which he happened to have brought with him. After reading out something by Zhirinovsky, he said, “I’d make him have psychiatric tests if it was up to me.” So, cold comfort for the people who couldn’t sleep.

  I, however, could hardly stay awake all day and went to bed at 4.00pm. I wonder if it’s massage that brings it on. Tanya walked me to the tube, slapping me to make me straighten my back. I had a very interesting lunch with one of the people I had phoned about the death penalty. He turned out to be in the navy and a young judge on a military tribunal, training other judges. He was very intelligent and very interested in Amnesty. He’s also pretty brave. When the coup was announced, his institute decided on loyalty to the coup committee, but to give institute employees the opportunity to resign. He had collected Yeltsin’s statement from the Russian Parliament and was suddenly hit by terror as he began to distribute it at the institute. He heard the underground radio’s call for all able-bodied men to defend the White House and went there on the Tuesday night. When the firing started he and his wife kissed each other goodbye. He laughed at it all in hindsight, but the terror must have been real.

  A very nice phone call from Andrey today, offering to give me a blanket, as the heating hasn’t come on in my flat. Theirs has been on since the end of August (!). According to Mr Kostanov at Moscow Soviet Justice Department, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister has given his blessing to register Amnesty. Various papers are supposed to be trundling back and forth in the post.

  Managed to buy myself a pair of felt boots for winter today, for less than £1.

  Saturday 12 October

  Deep fog. Up by six and out of the house by 8.00am to buy tickets for Leningrad next weekend, which I managed to do in ten minutes, beating the queue. There were eggs in the peasants’ market! Fifteen roubles for ten – not bad. As I nursed them home on a crowded bus, several people asked me where I got them from. Given the continuing general dearth, that really does seem to be “the market” working.

  The fog cleared and it was a lovely day, which I spent sleeping and working in the evening. I made the chilling discovery that a thief has been in my flat. A bowl I kept on a high shelf with some donations in it was empty. Bad feeling.

  Sunday 13 October

  There was a great dividing-up of cabbages today from the back of a lorry in the middle of our courtyard. I don’t know how people knew about it, but they were all there, loading them into the back of their cars.

  I cooked my first half-decent meal today: fried carp, potatoes and some nice salads, including my first cauliflower in smetana and honey, for US friends who were coming to lunch. Tanya Smith is a very smiling person, which makes a refreshing change here.

  The Quaker meeting was excellent, the ministry being on “forgiveness”. Somehow we seem to be hanging together better as a group, despite all our differences. We were visited by a US electrician from Minnesota, who had been repairing the electrics in a Russian monastery. Very nice man. I brought Nikolay back to give him some eggs and we had a very good, deep talk.

  Monday 14–Wednesday 16 October:

  The Trip to Uglich

  This was my boat trip with Irina up the Moscow River and into the Volga to visit the ancient town of Uglich, where one of the Tsarevich’s sons was murdered. We seemed to spend a lot of time in canal locks and almost every time we looked out of a window we saw a wall. Uglich itself was a poor Soviet town in the drizzle, with dusk falling. One shop was selling apple slices covered in flies for 2.60 roubles a kilo. Irina got immensely depressed by it and annoyed by my cheerfulness, which she said showed I have “a reserve of my own life somewhere else”. Yes, but I also get irritatingly cheerful when I can sense someone else’s spirits failing. I also noticed that Irina cannot bear the average aggression of Soviet officials, from the booking clerk to the waitress. It must be a dreadful handicap and torture for someone brought up here. It usually makes me want to fight, but it seems to make her want to run away. She’s the only Soviet I know like that.

  We had brought our own food and had a very nice lazy time, living in a cabin the size of a cupboard. When we bit into our hard-boiled eggs at the first breakfast we both stopped and looked at each other; it was so nice to eat an egg again. Irina said, “It was high time to have an egg.”

  All was well until I got home and found the
bottom lock had jammed and I couldn’t get into the flat. Aleksey from No. 36 was wonderful. Although he had just been getting into the bath, he came and stood on the cold landing for two hours, trying to fiddle the lock, and finally cutting it open with an axe. He then mended it for me, and wouldn’t accept anything in exchange. The house cat darted in and dashed around my kitchen – and it was curtains for mousey. So, an unexpected boon.

  Aleksey told me what he had done during the coup. He’d heard that Yelena Bonner had been on Radio Liberty already, so by some strange instinct he went to Chkalov Street, but realised he didn’t know which flat she lived in, so just stood there, hoping to see her. Tanks were already rolling up the ring road, but he noticed they were all stopping when the lights were red. A law-based society indeed. He went up to defend the White House, and said that from the tension his legs were simply exhausted, as though he’d walked a hundred miles. I remember I thought I’d got an ulcer.

  Thursday 17 October

  Othmar came to take the mail again, looking lonely and down in the mouth after his first month here without a word of Russian. He’d spent three hours trying to find the post office last week. You forget how hard all these things are without the language.

  Tolya and I looked round the completed office, making a list of doors that jammed and two windows that leak, which we’ll get done before we make the final payment. He’s going to cook dinner for all the workmen tomorrow night, and advises me to buy them all small presents. Part of me rebels at this cringing servility to the builders, but he wants to keep in with them in case we need future repairs, and his judgement is usually right.

  Today, amongst other things, I gave my first English conversation class – to Anna Yevgenievna Bochko, the woman who defended Andrey Zapevalov on appeal. Her English was good and I enjoyed my first experience of teaching. I also learned what may be the real reason that his death sentence was commuted. One of the members of the USSR Clemency Commission was taught law by Anna’s grandmother, so some telephone calls were made and the whole Commission read her appeal thoroughly. However, I must say it was a very good one. Anna was perfectly frank and illusion-free about the patronage system here.