Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  The Mayor of Moscow has signed our registration papers and Oleg Malginov at the Foreign Ministry’s Human Rights Division has pulled strings to try to get my visa extended. I also managed to make contact with the Russian parliamentary human rights committee, who want my help translating comparative legislation. The number of things I’ve bought, English lessons I’ve given and things I’ve translated, to help with our registration! (Not enough apparently.)

  In the morning I met a young seamstress whose brother is doing seven years for economic crimes connected with his garage, and she took me for chips at McDonald’s. She had real charm and seemed to be enjoying campaigning for him because of the interesting people she met.

  In the afternoon my naval judge bearded the lion in his den, met me in full military uniform, and took me round the military law institute. I like him immensely. He’s very proud of his institute and the Soviet armed forces, but resolutely against the death penalty and totally intelligent about Amnesty. No slouch either when it comes to law. He is prepared if need be to take part in the death penalty round table with Sovetskaya Justitsiya.

  The TV equipment is booked for tomorrow at 10.30am to record the Human Rights Day programme. I prepared my bit until 1.00am and was very impressed by all Amnesty’s materials on Morocco. It seems to have been a fantastic campaign.

  Tuesday 3 December

  Had a dreadful day. For some reason my interview was in the snow on the street outside the TV centre. As I had no hat and was holding pictures up in gloveless hands, it was bloody freezing. Vladimir Alimov was counting away the minutes with his fingers, off camera, and two minutes from the end my Russian collapsed and I just gabbled.

  The Consular Division of the USSR Foreign Ministry was supposed to have my new extended visa ready from 9.00am, but knew nothing about me. I went to sit in the queue and nodded off, then was suddenly surrounded by policemen and a very strident woman, who was extremely patronising and wouldn’t let me finish a sentence. I suddenly sprang to my feet and bullied her back. She was startled. It’s a terrible place. Fat men with bull necks and red faces burst out of an inner sanctum and rage at poor people stuck in the queue, who are only trying to renew their blasted visas. The worst parts of Soviet life writ large. No wonder it’s fallen apart.

  I made my second trek to collect some private photos, only to find they’d taken an early lunch break. I stood and battered on the glass door, shouting “Open up!”, until they did and gave me my pictures. I’m afraid I’m going to leap at someone’s throat and dismember them before my time here is up. I find my own behaviour quite alarming.

  I went to bed in the afternoon then had a nice evening. The Desperate Donnegans from next door came, bringing me homemade cakes. I had a massage and then Siffra came over late to pick up a letter, and we sat drinking whisky until 2.00am. Gorbachev had sent an ultimatum by letter to all USSR Members of Parliament today, pushing them to accept the Union Treaty, and she’d had to write a late article about it. He really has pinned his colours to the mast about this treaty, even though in essence it is bound to evolve between the republics in time anyway.

  Wednesday 4 December

  Today the Consular Division had my visa ready in five minutes with a smile. I delivered a list of non-governmental organisations to Oleg Malginov at the USSR Foreign Ministry and more materials to Sovetskaya Justitsiya, before calling again on Yelena and Stanislav. Various ex-prisoners have been bringing Yelena food to help her with nursing the baby. We sat eating white bread and butter and it was really lovely. My eyes must have lit up when I saw the cheese they’d got from the Baltic, and she insisted on giving me some to take home with me.

  I couldn’t think what on earth to take to Kazakhstan as presents, so eventually bought a bottle of port and chocolate from a hard currency shop.

  Trip to Kazakhstan: 5–11 December

  The plane was delayed for five hours because of snow, and then we were diverted via Semipalatinsk for two hours at midnight. It was -18 degrees there and a strange chemical smell was wafting in across the ice on the runway. Got in to Alma-Ata at 7.00am their time. Poor Zaure had been to the airport three times that night to meet me.

  It turned out their grandfather had died just ten minutes before I arrived, and so my trip coincided with Muslim family mourning. I felt awkward at first, but they obviously didn’t, and so it was alright. Zaure’s mother is a fantastic figure: tall, with high cheekbones and a turban, from the Kypshak tribe in the north. She sat on a stool in the kitchen, warming her back on the radiator. She’s a professor of biology who has specialised in wheat culture all her life and got various awards, but now says she spends her time worrying about what they will eat. She’s developed a kind of asthma and lost 40lbs in the last year. A very beautiful woman. The flat was very hot and dry and I too got a tight chest and cough.

  Alma-Ata is a long thin town, sloping downhill with a fantastic view behind to a mountain range, all in snow. On the other side of the mountains is China. During Brezhnev’s time it got a lot of money and the main buildings all look quite new and prosperous, with very attractive oriental arches everywhere. Nevertheless, the city is on a grid system, and as a whole is not desperately attractive or interesting.

  People in Alma-Ata are just coming up to the fifth anniversary of the 17 December massacre, and a commission will be reporting its findings at a public conference next week. All around the Parliament building where it happened there were white rags tied round branches and bushes to commemorate it. Zaure works in a laboratory which is 90% Russian, and where the ethnic relations are very good. She’d been to see what was happening when the massacre started and got her back teeth knocked out by the police. When she went back into the laboratory, the Russians had been given plastic sticks filled with metal by the District Party Committee, and told to join the fray. They went, laid down their sticks and came away again.

  It’s a very complicated scene and hard to understand. Most people I met had apparently been connected to the Party with more or less cynicism, and are bewildered and cynical about what has replaced it. Both Zaure and her mother thought her grandfather had died at the right time. People’s attitudes to Nazarbayev are mixed. Some people said what a pathetic reflection on “democracy” it was, that there was no one to challenge him in the elections. Just like old times. Zaure had urged her friends to vote nevertheless, just to underline the idea of Kazakh statehood. Otherwise she was afraid they would be carved up and clapped together with who knows what republics. However, during my stay Nazarbayev was invested as president in a ceremony carried out on TV in Kazakh and Russian in a very relaxed way, and everyone admired his speech.

  There’s no real history of political imprisonment in Kazakhstan and I realised that in an odd way it means a lack in society now. There’s no pole of behaviour by which to measure things – everyone apparently compromised – and I met no one as “free” as Moscow ex-prisoners seem to me. Instead the Afghan war veteran movement seems to be one of the strongest social forces, and I heard many discussions of the war at different mealtimes. People also seem to be united in a sort of suppressed outrage about the 1986 massacre. However, Zaure says the atmosphere reminds her of Riga in 1981: everyone stays at home in the evenings and there are discussions in public.

  The Minsk agreement, uniting Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine in a “commonwealth”, was struck while I was there and it was actually a real eye-opener to be in a Muslim republic when the news broke. “Another coup,” Zaure’s mother said. “A Slav Union.” Their first thought was for the Muslims in Russia. “Get walking,” she said to me. “There’ll be a hard January and civil war in spring.” My first thought was for my Russian friends, shunted about again like so many pieces of furniture, with not even Parliament involved in this massive constitutional change. Both Shevardnadze and Gorbachev had met Yeltsin behind closed doors last week, and I wondered if they had agreed this step in advance, as a way of keeping Ukraine in th
e fold.

  I found the cultural change in Kazakhstan very difficult. Underneath their immense hospitality, I felt my hosts do not like Westerners. My port and chocolate were laid aside and I thought perhaps I’d been too showy, so after a few days bought them some apples – which were also laid aside. They were forever appearing mysteriously in my bag or by my bedside. I actually began to feel offended that they wouldn’t accept anything from me, because it didn’t seem much basis for a friendship. I had been thinking of buying Zaure’s mother a carved wooden box, but decided not to because it would look expensive again. On the last day it occurred to me that I probably offended a code by offering my hosts food, as though they weren’t feeding me properly. Very different from Moscow. They were probably offended that I hadn’t given them something like a box too.

  I loved the cosmopolitanism there though. Some of Zaure’s friends had Chinese guests staying with them. Some Uigur relatives came to the grandfather’s funeral, including some professional “wailers”. Zaure speaks Kazakh, Russian, Czech, English, Italian and now French. As Nazarbayev’s investiture came to an end on TV, he held out both palms then wiped them down his cheeks – a Muslim custom. Watching the TV, Zaure and her mother did the same thing. Friends came round and sat with the family when they heard about the grandfather. They all talked about him and raised toasts to life and death, and the grandmother wept. It all seems a better way of mourning than in the West.

  On the Saturday two of Zaure’s friends took me walking up in the mountains. We ended up at a so-called ski resort with a dilapidated hotel, where everything was shut. The lobby was like some NUPE headquarters, with lists of “Orders and Instructions” on the wall, all reading like the statute of an insurance company. I think it’s holidays that bring home the most depressing parts of life here. You can’t go where you want to, but have to connive to get some pass to share a room with a sixty-year-old and have your meals in a canteen with strangers. When you would like to get away from the system, you’re brought bang up face to face with it. It snowed quite heavily on the way down and suddenly everything looked natural and beautiful, and we seemed removed from the city.

  I was struck on the flight over that we were given no safety instructions but instead they read out all the punishments for smoking on board. Administer and command, not explain and persuade. My flight back made perfect time and we travelled in blue skies over hours of snowy wastes.

  When I got into Moscow the bread shops were shut with signs saying “No bread” on them. I went scavenging round the shops and found my first pint of milk since I arrived on 18 November.

  Saturday 14 December

  I felt ghastly all the time I was in Kazakhstan and immediately felt fresher when I got back to Moscow, but today a cold has come out that maybe I was sickening with in Alma-Ata. I spent Thursday catching up with my Kazakh report and chasing six boxes which the London office has sent me, but which have got stuck in customs. Apparently the papers for registering our office with the Moscow Mayordom are now ready.

  On Friday Irina and I went up to the Quakers to interpret at a meeting with Moloccans from Armenia. Like all Protestants here they impressed me because they work hard and they keep their word. Simple things, but a breath of fresh air here. They are returning to Russia from exile in the peripheries of the USSR because they say they want to be “a stream of clean water in the surrounding muddy turmoil”. They sang some psalms, and interestingly enough, they too use the oral tradition of “hooks”, like the fourteenth-century Greeks.

  Nazarbayev has brought Kazakhstan and the other Islamic states into the Commonwealth of Independent States as co-founders, which is being greeted with relief by Moscow and Western papers. Nevertheless the feeling among ordinary people, and me, is apocalyptic. I’ve just had Andrey round for dinner and he foresees a military clampdown by late January, followed by civil war in Russia. While he was here two friends phoned, making their plans to get to the UK before “the next time”. For the first time in my life I’ve come out in eczema on my hands over the last three weeks, which is maybe like my stomach complaint during the last coup.

  Somehow the job is paling against the background of events. I keep pushing ahead on registration etc., without any confidence that the office is feasible. I am also scared of being trapped here by accident. A friend said tonight that trains out of the country are cancelled and flights are packed. Meanwhile I keep trying to take each step as it comes. Today I was wondering how I would move my furniture to the new flat. As keeps happening, tonight Andrey offered spontaneously to get me his friend’s ambulance.

  Sunday 15 December

  Yesterday’s contribution seems to have been written in a state of delirium.

  Today I decided to fast and was interested to see my cold steadily get better. I sat writing Christmas cards in the afternoon and realised I was sitting there, plain scared. In the evening I went to the Quakers and there were eighteen people there, most of them very enthusiastic about the Minsk agreement and uncomprehending when I told them the Kazakh reaction. Valentina said she couldn’t forget the way women were raped in Baku during the pogroms. I said they were raped during the Brixton riots too, and Azerbaijanis are not Kazakhs. Sasha was honest enough to say that when he looks inside himself, he sees that he doesn’t like Muslims; he fears them.

  Monday 16 December

  I tried to be very methodical today and plodded through the snow, finishing what I had to do. I met a guy from Tambov, prosecuted on a sodomy charge, then picked up our registration papers from the Mayor of Moscow’s office. They were some of the last that Gavriil Popov signed before resigning as Mayor, and symbolically ours were done on Human Rights Day.

  I took advantage of talking to the lawyer in the Protocol Department of the Mayordom, who horrified me by saying that since the coup all property has passed into the hands of the Mayor’s office, so Krasnopresnensky District Soviet no longer have the authority to grant us office space. We need a new authorisation from the Mayor’s office. I felt almost tearful, as it took five months to get the first one – never mind all the building work we’ve had done to the office. On sober reflection though I decided to consult with the Moscow Justice Department about it all, and have an appointment with them tomorrow.

  I changed money to pay the builders’ last instalment. £1 = 160 roubles today. Apparently it was 110 roubles last week. Tolya and I had a misunderstanding and each cooked dinner for the other tonight. He came here and I gave him a birthday present and paid him for all the good work he has done.

  Erich Honecker is hiding out in the street next to Irina and her mother.

  Tuesday 17 December

  Another methodical day. I went to check out the Moscow Property and Privatisation Fund, which has moved from Kuznetsky Most, hopefully with all our documents still festering inside it. There I had rather a miraculous morning. They were technically shut, but I was passed from one kind person to another, who tried to decide if my new registration paper from the Moscow Mayordom would be enough to clinch our property order for us. There’s a fifty-fifty chance it will be.

  Just to be sure, I also took advice with Nikita at the Moscow City Department of Justice. He advised against trying to get another property permit from the Mayordom, which would be hard, and said instead we should try to go locally through the Prefect of the Central District. He photocopied papers for me, free of charge.

  All this actually took seven hours, but it bucked me up. When I got in a man called who thinks the KGB is controlling his thoughts by parapsychology. He sounded in quiet despair. I talked to him for quite some time.

  Wednesday 18 December

  I’d had a telegram from the sister of a man on death row: on 6 November Gorbachev had refused to give him clemency, but the family found out only on 25 November. Meanwhile the press is full of new evidence that suggests he’s innocent, and the family doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. This morning I did a lot o
f ringing round at the USSR Supreme Soviet to find out. No one knows, but there’s no record that he has been executed, so I sent a telegram to this effect to his sister. The telegram woman blinked when she read it, as I was standing there with my bag of laundry, waiting to pay.

  In town I queued for a cake, and without any warning two men in the queue suddenly hit each other. It was horrible and immediately put everyone’s nerves on edge. The cake woman bawled me out for having the wrong change. I felt beaten.

  Galina Starovoytova and the ex-prisoner Valeriya Novodvorskaya were debating on a current affairs programme, In the Corridors of Power, tonight. Both are masters of the soundbite and sharp remark, and the dynamic between them was very interesting. Basically Starovoytova’s line was: “You try doing it and you’d shut up after five minutes.”

  Someone called to say Ekho Moskvy radio station had reported on our registration tonight. Unexpected!

  Thursday 19 December

  I’m terribly down in the dumps this week and can’t shake it off. Basically I don’t feel well. I spent the morning trying to contact the Turkmenian Embassy without any luck, then tried the Estonians on the off-chance. They asked me to come within the hour, so I had to change and read up all our stuff on Estonia in ten minutes flat. Had quite an interesting hour with the Chargé d’Affaires, but although he was quite nice and forthcoming, Estonia seems to be rather an inward-looking little country.

  Irina and I saw Placido Domingo in the film of Othello, marred by the sound, which came and went. She’d brought my boots from the menders near her house, and had even polished them.

  Got home very cold and exhausted. Felt immensely lonely and depressed in the evening. Tolya said Radio Rossiya had announced our registration. Nikolay said it was on the front page of Izvestiya and very nicely complimented me.

  Friday 20 December