THE LAST LAP: NOVEMBER 1991–MARCH 1992
Monday 18 November
British Airways lost my luggage, so I got home late. Had a bath and watched a slow tide of cockroaches crawling up the walls. The wild patterning of my wallpaper and the kitchen floor leapt out at me this time when I walked into the flat. Glad to find nothing had been stolen.
Tuesday 19 November
I’ve the feeling this will be a tough time and so am taking things softly-softly, in particular sleeping whenever I feel like it. In the morning I laid out my cockroach killer and fly poisons, and in the afternoon I shopped for food. It was twilight at 3.00pm and there was a crowd of dark shapes queuing outside the booze shop and outside the milk shop too. I was shocked by the prices at the market. A jar of smetana that was 15 roubles in January is now 70. A tiny chicken is 50. According to Izvestiya, Yeltsin is “freeing” retail prices and wages next. Piyasheva, who heads the Prices Committee, then plans to free wholesale prices and distribution prices all in the space of two months. It is quite frightening.
I took eggs to Irina and her mother in the evening, but someone slammed a metro door on them and they broke. Natalya Ivanovna said that previously they had not wanted to take part in the hurly-burly of the outside world, but now they had no idea how to. I have never seen her so depressed – no longer the statuesque, animated woman of previous meetings. They must be on a combined income of about 360 roubles (under £10). Their favourite sausage which was 11 roubles in January is now 150. On my way home an old man in the metro began criticising my boots and said they were fit for an eighty-year-old. He was a cobbler and wanted to see how my zips worked. I said they worked perfectly fine, thank you very much.
There is a very noticeable change even in the two and a half weeks I’ve been away. The inflation is disturbing and I would say the atmosphere is suppressed panic. I now wonder if Amnesty can develop here. It seems too much to expect of people.
Terry Waite was freed today, and Shevardnadze is once again USSR Foreign Minister.
Wednesday 20 November
I swept up the corpses of cockroaches and flies which are succumbing to my poisonous vapours, then spent the day answering letters. Nikolay was round and says his mum is still mixing with Marxist groups and is in the committee to keep Lenin in his tomb. To a Westerner it sounds like a mix-up of generations. She sent me some bread.
I collected my luggage from British Airways. Learned in the evening that Yelena had a daughter last night, so far anonymous, but bang on time.
Thursday 21 November
I’ve been hiding from the phone in case it was my landlord, but today he caught up with me and came round. To my very great surprise, however, I seem to have won that round, because he will let me stay until the end of January at the old rent and also started to mend my door lock. In fact, I feel so shocked by the prices now that I was on the point of offering him a much higher rent. He is not a bad man, but terribly intimidated by the West and I think that’s why he acts so tough. I personally think he is mean though.
In the evening I walked down to the hard currency shop to buy light bulbs for the office. In an underpass that was almost pitch black a small brass ensemble were playing Latin American numbers, and an appreciative crowd was listening. The band were in their cloth caps and working togs, with big chapped hands, but they had obviously practised their routines and were extremely good. It was like a scene from the Weimar Republic. I felt that wrench of emotions: I love the place and it also frightens me.
I woke up in the small hours with a brilliant light shining in my face. It was the moon, looking like a stadium spotlight for some reason. I lay and watched night turn into day, and thought I had a sudden illumination about Shevardnadze. It could really be that he has been acting in agreement with Gorbachev all along. When he resigned in December it was possibly because both of them anticipated a rightward lurch, and Shevardnadze would be a free agent ready to attract all the perestroyka forces if anything happened to Gorbachev. Now he’s back in the USSR Foreign Ministry I think it’s because the “Gorbachev line” is best served within the system now and not outside it. I don’t see it as a manoeuvre against Yeltsin so much as a clear line of communication to the outside world – that outside world including Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other republics.
Friday 22 November
The landlord’s father-in-law, Arseny Panteleevich, came round to mend the lock but got his key stuck in the inside of it and went away again. He seemed nice – an ex-fireman.
In the afternoon I stood in a queue for four hours and twenty minutes to get a plane ticket for Kazakhstan in December. It absolutely did me in. Had dinner with someone from the UK I was meeting for the first time, who is out here looking for jobs. I have increasing difficulty being lightly sociable and I could see the bubble going out of her as she got down to my level. Being here is playing up my serious side no end.
There is now a cross where Sverdlov’s statue stood, dedicated to the “Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists and others who died in 1917 fighting against Bolshevism”.
Last night’s Fifth Wheel was an excellent tour of US Midwest towns, seeing “how ordinary Americans live”. It was all white and all Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but the team had been quite thorough, looking at farming, commerce, the family, the Sunday etc. The Americans were all very at ease with the camera, laughed a lot, and to some extent were in their element, showing off their microwaves and furnishings, and talking about their “job skills”. A lot of them said the Union flag makes them cry. It occurred to me that if the Soviet crew asked them why they worked so fantastically hard, spent so long on the phone, were divorced etc. they would possibly have been equally in their element saying how rotten their lives were.
The TV showed all the goods without comment and the implication was that they were there to be admired and envied – but I wonder if either the crew or the viewers had such an uncomplicated reaction. The only time the interviewer sparked into life was when she spoke to an old man who trained horses, played the organ, and said love was the most important thing in his life. She asked him, “Why do we exist?”, and he said, “I don’t know”, after some thought and with a laugh.
I don’t think Russia will attain a free market economy and at some crucial level, I don’t think it will want to. Those Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Anarchists are all too recent and real.
Saturday 23 November
Irina had bought us tickets to hear Mikhail Pletnyov play and conduct Mozart piano concertos in the afternoon. A lovely concert. She had fallen down a hole running for the tram on Thursday and must have hit the ground at 100mph, because one leather glove was shredded, her right knee was gashed and she had to have her left leg x-rayed and it was all bandaged up.
There was a strange woman at the concert with her head all in a bandage like a helmet, sitting with her feet on a bag of rope and writing copiously the minute the music started. We decided she was either the music correspondent for Soviet Culture, or writing to Amnesty and that I’d get the letter in a couple of days.
There were 150 people in the queue outside the milk shop today.
Sunday 24 November
I met Simon Cosgrove for lunch and liked him immensely. He’s here researching the journal Nash Sovremennik and has just spent three years teaching in Zimbabwe. We had very similar views on Britain and it made it more interesting to discuss the USSR.
I also looked round a new two-roomed flat at Gagarin Square and decided I’ll take it after January, if I’m still here. It had a big main room and was all wooden – no wild wallpapers. They are also keen to give me bed linen and an iron, and the fridge works. All for £110 a month. It belongs to Tolya’s ex-wife and her new husband, both of them in ballet. I asked if they thought Russians want a free market economy and they said no. She later said, “I don’t like Russian people.” After we’d talked politics for two hours she said she
didn’t think women should be involved in politics because it gives them wrinkles, looking at me. These childlike personal remarks are quite funny, because they’re so thinly veiled, you’d have to be an idiot not to get the point.
Then it was the Quaker meeting, with a Soviet feminist present and visiting US Quakers on their first trip to the USSR, but nevertheless giving advice on how to handle a second coup d’état. We spent a long time talking about all the compromises people made in order to succeed in Soviet society, when almost everything we said could have applied to the UK or the US, where a cocoon of untruth and self-deception also seems to prevail to my mind. One of them said, “A lot of forgiveness is needed now”, which I discovered later that Nikolay agreed with. But I thought, How do you “forgive” someone for having a car, nice flat and trips abroad when they’ve still got them and you still haven’t? I think a lot of justice is also needed.
The late-night newsreader ended the broadcast with a card trick! In the night a cockroach scurried over my face in bed.
Monday 25 November
I was tied to the house all day, waiting for a DHL courier who didn’t come. Andrey called, out of his sick bed, to say he’d seen me on TV in The Law and Us. He said the kitchen towel didn’t show. I’d been worried that there was a dirty kitchen towel hanging behind my head throughout.
Tolya came round straight from work, looking exhausted and twitching a lot. He says the only way he can make ends meet is to move out of his flat with his son, and let it to foreigners. He has nowhere to live though. I also spoke on the phone to Nikolay’s mum, who sounded very low and finds the current situation utterly depressing. Last thing at night, though, I spoke to Tanya the masseuse, who is over the moon that you can now privatise your apartment at a flat rate of 250 roubles. She said, “This is a huge step forward.” And so to bed.
Tuesday 26 November
I called Alexander Khlopyanov about extending my visa and he said, “A sacred task – it’ll be done immediately.” I have to say he’s a very good diplomat: whatever the prevailing winds, he conveys them with consistent smoothness.
I spent an odd morning at the Human Rights Division of the Foreign Ministry, where I had been invited by a young attaché who has applied for a job with Amnesty in London and wants to know if he will be called for interview. He was solicitous about our registration, but I did not totally play along and told him we found the USSR Foreign Ministry’s position rather difficult to understand.
His place was taken at the coffee table by Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary, also looking for new jobs, and wanting Amnesty’s help with a new non-governmental organisation he is setting up. He then asked me how they should go about registering it, which felt like pure mockery. I suppose he was trying to be very friendly when he started to “ty” me. I was thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit more respect. The coffee cups all had “Russia” on them, and I asked if they reflected the current situation. The woman serving the coffee suddenly laughed.
On the Arbat a middle-aged woman in woolly hat and old boots was playing the accordion and singing an old Communist song in a lovely contralto. It sounded very natural and unforced, and I gave her a lot of money.
Good Evening Moscow is a great current affairs programme. There was an item on some slums, where the woman reporter managed to be very funny but totally on the side of the slum dwellers. One woman’s flat had caught fire, but when she rang the housing department they said, “What’s it got to do with us? We didn’t set fire to it.” Some people had had no hot water for years. Others had had 18” of boiling water in their basement for over twenty years. The reporter ended with: “People complain when they’ve no hot water and they complain when they have hot water. Why are they not satisfied?” Programmes like that in the UK tend to be very pro forma and dull.
Natasha Teplitsky called, back from four days’ simultaneous translating at a political conference. She’s a very cynical translator and quite funny. It had been quite easy, she said, because it was just political speeches. “It would have been harder if people were saying what they really meant.”
There was a very strange news bulletin: “All was quiet in the city today except that a seventeen-year-old girl had a baby at the house of her parents and threw it out of the window.” End of bulletin.
Wednesday 27 November
The queue for visa photos was one-hour long, but just time for me to read Izvestiya through. Most of the developed photos were being put in the “foreign passports” tray, so a lot of people are travelling, or leaving, or maybe that size of photo just suits other needs. Afterwards I called into the office. The glass has now been put into the kitchen door and the place looked fantastic. I felt a real swell of pride.
Last night the TV gave a long blow to the opening night of The Russia House, put on by the Soviet-British Creative Association. I kept seeing Amnesty’s “ai” symbol on the souvenirs, invitations and pennants, and thought the UK Section of Amnesty had pulled off a brilliant advertising coup. Today I went to meet the association to see if there are more openings for us to advertise, but found that the symbol is theirs, faintly adapted from ours. A bugger!
The night news said someone had been beaten up and left for dead in Leningrad within sight of a meat queue. No one moved from the queue.
Thursday 28 November
I spent the morning at the Russian Parliament, speaking with Nikolay Vedernikov who has now shed his chair at the Clemency Commission and is in the Russian Constitutional Court – looking a lot better for it too. I put him in touch with criminologists abroad and he told me about the procedure in clemency cases.
I gave lunch to Othmar, my volunteer, then had a dispiriting afternoon trying to regularise my visa. Khlopyanov had not left the promised permission to extend it. At the photo shop I spent fully an hour rummaging through hundreds of photos, trying to find my prints. It was like a nightmare. The woman would come and dump new ones on the heap. Customers would take away random piles and sort through them. There was no way of knowing what you’d checked and what you hadn’t. I began to feel desperate and decided to have a new set taken. As it was my turn to sit in front of the camera, my prints miraculously appeared at the top of a pile, and I vamoosed.
Although it was such a tiny thing I felt almost ill with nervous tension when I got home and had to sit and calm myself. In the evening I had my first chat in a long time with Nina Petrovna, recovering from her infarkt. She’d spent the coup in the hospital, listening to Radio Liberty and arguing with different patients. When she had her infarkt the doctor gave her an injection and said it would make her head swim round. “Is it swimming?” he asked. “No, the cupboard is,” she replied. She’s a good, self-effacing woman. In the last two weeks she’s trained her cat to do the toilet actually in the toilet.
Friday 29 November
My visa expired today and neither Khlopyanov, Rumyantsev or Sokolenko were contactable at the USSR Foreign Ministry. I have no idea what this means, or how it will affect my trip to Kazakhstan next week.
My DHL delivery was full of more problems and my nerves immediately got ragged again. Maybe this is a combination of living here and not having proper holidays, but it worries me a bit. It is a reason for not carrying on too long.
There was a shout from the courtyard and Tanya the masseuse appeared in a long skirt, glitter on her face and black stovepipe hat. Not your average Soviet punter. She was locked out. She said she didn’t like the look of me and asked what was wrong. She’s got a very sure sense of people’s vibes, because I’d only just opened the door with what I thought was a welcoming smile on my face.
I’ve spent the week chasing our registration papers round like a puck on ice, and now they are with the Mayor of Moscow.
Saturday 30 November
A gorgeous bright morning. I caught up with Amnesty letters and did my first ironing in eleven months, shameful to say – on the floor, because there’s no
other surface.
After lunch Irina and I met up at Perovo station to go to an exhibition of sculpture by Vadim Sidur. Oddly enough I knew the work already, because the Moscow group is using it on Amnesty postcards. It was mostly good, in the style of Henry Moore, but you could see why Henry Moore is better. We walked back to Irina’s, had dinner, then played Mozart duets. It was fantastic being back at a piano.
Today the country felt like a runaway train. The State Bank is refusing to pay state employees, because it has no more money. Passengers struck at two Moscow airports and threatened to occupy the runway, because they face such long delays. Hello Kazakhstan. The tourist exchange rate has been abolished because the rouble is so worthless. How does that affect travellers’ cheques?
Notices signed by “The Workers of Moscow” appeared today calling for a protest march on 22 December, and demanding that the TV and press be taken away from “the hands of capital”. Here we go again.
Sunday 1 December
A grey stony day that never brightened up. Yelena opened the door with a fantastic smile on her face. As usual there was a great atmosphere of peace and cleanliness in their flat. We sat by candlelight and drank some wine, while Stanislav held Alexandra, all tightly swaddled up. Apparently the maternity ward was deserted because so few people are having babies these days.
It occurs to me that I know some fantastic people here. Very free of illusions about themselves or other people. Very deep too.
The Quaker meeting was full of new people, including a one-eyed tour guide from Uglich who had also stood on the barricades, and who impressed me. Remarkably, all the Soviet men there were very interested in what the Soviet feminist was saying. All the young members of the meeting are a thoughtful lot and seem to feel responsible for what they must do in the future here.
Monday 2 December
Every day here is an unpredictable blank, from which you have to try to cobble together a coherent timetable. No one is at their desk. We all seem to be running about the streets trying to call each other. Mind you, not many people have desks.
Moscow Diary Page 22