Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  Tanya came round to give me a massage at 7.00am. She’d gone to bed at 3.30am, was up at 5.00am and full of beans with me. Her woollen leggings were itching her to death, so I helped her wrap newspapers round her legs underneath them. She was off to her old orphanage to give them 2,000 roubles and be Father Christmas. She said anyone listening to my voice would think I was the most unhappy person on earth. Then she overheard some of my phone calls about executions, and I think she saw why.

  I went up to Moscow Psychiatric Hospital No. 4, where I had been asked to introduce the AGM of the Independent Psychiatric Association by Dr Savenko. It was rather an interesting day: about fifty mainstream psychiatrists, who work voluntarily, giving independent diagnoses and helping rehabilitate former victims of psychiatric abuse. What was most interesting is that they are also publishing independently, so that the stranglehold on the profession is loosening in one respect at least. They all knew each other well and the atmosphere was nice.

  Irina’s mother was there and sat next to me. She said after she’d written an article criticising the Ministry of Health, two psychiatrists had been sent round to see her at her office – and that was Moscow, 1990. This week she’d also been No. 138 in a queue for Dutch cheese, but refused to give the shop assistant her hand to write the number down – so her number went to the person behind. She invited me round for Christmas.

  Father Nikon came round for five hours in the evening. It was a struggle lasting out. He wants to market an ancient preparation for removing unwanted hair, and is sure it will make him a million in the West. He too is in the throes of registration and described various encounters where he came out in a sweat and was filled with dread. Only someone who’s been through it can understand it.

  These past few weeks I’ve been trying to organise an invitation for a friend from home to come and stay over Christmas. My own invitation was not enough to get her a visa and so in the space of a week I managed to get an official invitation for her from Natalya’s Legal Fund, courier it to London, and she got her visa today. Apparently Gromovik at the USSR Embassy in London said, “Marjorie should have known better”, i.e. it should have been obvious that people who’ve never heard of Sarah should pretend to invite her for reasons that don’t exist. Silly me.

  Saturday 21 December

  I slept on the floor last night and it was much better than the lumpy couch. Woke feeling better than I have in ages.

  En route to the second day of the psychiatry seminar, I dropped off death penalty materials at Viktor’s place. Viktor has made contact with Gorbachev’s assistant and is suggesting he commute all death sentences as a final presidential gesture. Viktor predicts a coup in January.

  After that it was quite peaceful to spend the day discussing schizophrenia and anti-psychiatry – a very interesting seminar by any standards. Some psychotherapists spoke – all of them young and in jeans, and alluding to art rather than science. It was quite refreshing. I spoke with one over lunch, who is trying to do “social psychotherapy” in St Petersburg, i.e. trying to give people a sense of hope and calm. She said one newsreader ended his broadcast with: “See you tomorrow, if you’re alive!”, and this is the kind of thing she hopes to change. She also said people are now beginning to laugh in queues there, but it’s not a healthy sign. She thinks it shows they’re near the edge. Another speaker referred in his talk to a “Russian theory of psycho-analysis” and he and the audience stopped to laugh.

  Dr Savenko is rather impressive. He sat on the platform, wiry and slightly theatrical, the stringy flowers in the vase next to him mirroring his long wispy hair. I sat with Natalya Ivanovna again and we had some nice talks. She said I have managed to get myself quite deeply into the scene. I hope so.

  On the way home I had potato pie at Viktor’s place. They watch the news at 9.00, 11.00 and 12.00pm and 1.00am. So do I, and so does Natalya Ivanovna. Viktor arrived back with Dima, another politico from Syktyvkar, and they compared notes about the day’s events. From the point of view of the country’s political culture, Viktor thinks Yeltsin is behaving abominably to Gorbachev. Both are watching Zhirinovsky in the wings. Today the Minister of Internal Affairs confirmed there were tank movements round Moscow. Eleven republics have joined the “Commonwealth” today.

  Sunday 22 December

  Another good night’s sleep on the floor. Anna Bochko and I spent three hours with Professor Avetisyan, drafting a statute for Amnesty’s Information Office, which should help us register with the Russian government. Professor Avetisyan was just out of bed, unshaved and hair unbrushed. It was pretty boring but very useful and I think it’s a good statute.

  Irina came for dinner. Apparently there are soldiers with machine guns on the outer ring road where they live. She seems to be caught in the wrong play somehow. One ghastly thing after another unfolds and the years pass.

  I saw my first 200-rouble note today in the market. Apparently 1,000-rouble notes are being prepared.

  Russian TV ended tonight with a valedictory interview with Gorbachev. Artyom Borovik said the whole film crew felt Gorbachev has been dealt with too harshly.

  Monday 30 December

  A US friend phoned, here for about two months and now beginning to feel the strain – one thing being the constant phone calls and demands. She was also complaining that she can’t get milk at the hard currency shop. Interesting: there’ll probably be a rash of pieces in the Western press now about the parlous state of the economy.

  Sarah has been and gone back to the UK. We had Christmas dinner of salad and cabbage pie with Irina and her mother. Natalya Ivanovna said Irina had unpicked all her childhood clothes and reknitted them as jumpers for them both. As I translated this for Sarah, I thought Irina looked pained. For two immensely talkative people they seemed very embarrassed by our company and a silence descended as we listened to Billie Holiday. On the way back into my flat Sarah stood on a live mouse. When I looked out of the door five minutes later, it was half a corpse with the house cat lying next to it, and another dead mouse behind it. It keeps bringing me love offerings.

  Somehow we missed Gorbachev’s resignation: Irina’s phone and TV had gone phut! at the same time on Christmas Day. Meanwhile the war in Georgia was raging all week. I carried on trying to do some skeletal work during Sarah’s visit, trying to catch all the bureaucrats before they go off on holiday in early January.

  I discovered that property ground plan forms have now been changed, and so I had to revisit the Bureau of Technical Administration and get them to fill out the new form for our premises. These offices go on forever, but all the staff seem to change in the space of five months. This time I had to see a man who was about my age, looking dismal, reading Pravda under a picture of Lenin, and with eczema all over his hands too. I also took inscribed books to the Moscow City Justice Department to thank Nikita and Yury Kostanov for helping us to register with the Mayordom. Nikita flushed with embarrassment and all the secretaries looked proud and pleased for him.

  Today a Tajik who had been at our death penalty seminar came round and offered to sell our death penalty reports at Moscow University. He is going to a placement in the Tajik Foreign Ministry next year, and was a very personable, intelligent type. He says he faces racist abuse almost every day in Moscow, but that Slavs in Tajikistan are mild and lovely people.

  During the week I made the discovery that all my hard currency has been stolen from inside the flat – about £350. I have my suspicions but don’t know how to handle it. Pretty sickening.

  Since Tatyana did a talk on local radio, a number of new people have been coming along to the Quakers, a few of them one plate short of a picnic set.

  Tuesday 31 December: New Year’s Eve

  After answering Amnesty letters all day, I went to Yelena’s in the evening. I had expected there would be a feast and many guests as usual, but it was just me. They’d obviously thought that I might be seeing in the New Year on my ow
n. It was a very peaceful family evening, finishing with a meal at midnight. As we got the food ready we listened to a Russian Orthodox priest on the radio, who started criticising foreign religions imported from abroad. Yelena switched it off to her mother’s annoyance, but I think it was to avoid offending me. She later said she didn’t like him saying unpleasant things about Western influences.

  They’re all devout Russian Orthodox and on their pre-Christmas fast. I asked what they thought about their new “Commonwealth”. Yelena and Stanislav laughed, and Yelena’s mother looked at me blankly then carried on with what she was doing. Yelena said, “It’s nonsense – but it was a terrific break-up.” We listened to the Kremlin bells bringing in the New Year, but there was no speech to the nation on the radio. Yelena’s mother reminisced about seeing Stalin, Kalinin and Beria on the Mausoleum on May Day in 1941, shortly before they went to war. She’d written all about it to her aunt who was then in exile. Same aunt now plays with the Israeli Philharmonic.

  We ate exclusively food from Yelena’s hut in exile: mushrooms, potatoes and berries. In an odd way Yelena’s exile has kept the family going; it is where she met Stanislav too. They all said how strange it was that I have been there and know what they are talking about. Yelena’s mother had gone there in -45 degrees frost.

  When I’m with them I feel like a child with three extremely nice adults. There’s something about the way they care for me in an unfussy way, and their relations with each other, that seems very mature. Stanislav is a very unusual man. He will spend a lot of time talking and telling you about his feelings. He also doesn’t present himself as the hero of his stories.

  1992

  Wednesday 1 January: New Year’s Day

  Thick snow and a bright blue sky. I met Irina at 10.00am to go and visit Sakharov’s grave in Vostryakovo cemetery. It got colder and colder, and we froze on a bus with iced windows that trundled round and round the outskirts of Moscow. The cemetery is outside town near a forest, and although the bus stop was deserted, round the corner there were a lot of people in the cemetery. It looked beautiful in the snow: big wide alleys of trees stretching between the jumbles of graves, and black-coated figures in the distance, going to pay their respects. It was funny, we’d be walking along a deserted alley, when suddenly there’d be an old man with a walking stick tottering on ahead of us and we had no idea where he’d come from.

  Sakharov’s grave was signposted. Candles were burning in front of it and there were fresh flowers, to which we added our two yellow carnations. What moved me most was seeing the grave of Yelena Bonner’s mother there too, and the empty plot between it and Sakharov’s, which is presumably reserved for Yelena Bonner. It is sobering when you remember someone very much alive then see the spot where they now lie.

  It must have been -10 degrees with a strong wind when we waited for the bus back. Irina got something in her eye and wanted me to help take it out, so we stood gloveless in the freezing cold and I could hardly move my fingers, let alone do advanced surgery. It was only 1.00pm when we got back, so we decided to go skiing. The sun was setting behind the birch trees as we went round Kuskovo Park. A fantastic deep yellow sky, great silence, and little dark figures in the distance.

  Back to Irina’s for dinner and to listen to the new jazz tapes I’d got from home. We were sitting by candlelight as their bulbs have gone. There’s also no bread in their area so we ate something Natalya Ivanovna had baked without milk, eggs or butter. Before the public holidays I stood in a really vicious queue for bread. The tension and aggression between people were palpable and there was a running political commentary going in different parts of the shop – the sort you might hear in a London taxi. People were shouting insults over at other parts of the queue, like: “Why don’t you go and live in Georgia then?” Today, however, there was a relaxed atmosphere and people were very pleasant in the metro and in the cemetery.

  Thursday 2 January

  I spent the day with Professor Avetisyan’s statute for our office, first translating it into English and sending it to London, then typing it up onto the computer in Russian. In breaks from the computer I tried to pin down the Property Privatisation Fund and finally succeeded. They said our property papers have now been forwarded to the Prefect of the Central District. We’re slowly getting there.

  The shops were all shut so I couldn’t take a look at the prices that were liberalised yesterday. At 10.00am a rather deranged woman came to the door and walked straight into the flat, before I barred her way. A rather deranged man had done the same thing to Natalya Vysotskaya last week. Someone is obviously giving out our addresses.

  All the homilies from Russian newsreaders are getting a bit hard to take. Each item ends with, “God grant it won’t happen here”, and each broadcast with, “Be kinder to each other” etc. There was a nice report about a British gift of beef, which had failed the Russian Ministry of Health’s hygiene test. With silent irony the camera focused on down-and-outs in a filthy street while the woman reporter said, “though why it was not good enough for us is a mystery, when it feeds half the European Community”.

  Bakatin has left the KGB with some dire remarks about its unreformability and Izvestiya has gone back to an old typeface. Neither encouraging omens. Talking of which, after the news there is a five-minute astrological prediction for business people next day. Tonight they were warned not to take decisions or do deals after 2.00pm. The economy somehow feels as though it is guided by astrology.

  Friday 3 January

  Yesterday’s snowstorms continued. The laundry ladies warned me it would be expensive, and it has gone up from 2 to 20 roubles. The place was deserted and I’m sure their work will be cut down.

  Another day of hunting by phone. Apparently our property documents have already been cleared by the Central Prefektura. We seem to be moving on an inside track here. I got quite punch drunk, clipping four Izvestiya in one day.

  I’m starting to clear and tidy the flat, ready for moving on 25 January. In the evening I was ironing clothes on the floor by the light of one lamp bulb, listening to Rachmaninov, and suddenly felt immensely happy. I’ve had a great year, one way or another.

  There was a tribute to an actor on TV tonight and people were reminiscing about their youthful exploits with him. One actress was remembering how they’d stolen a light bulb in the street: “It was the 1920s at the end of the New Economic Policy, and light bulbs were hard to come by.” “You mean like now?” the interviewer said. “Now it’s absolutely impossible,” the actress said, “then it was just hard.” A lot of people’s reminiscences are quite funny, because either things haven’t changed or they’re worse. The piquancy moves forward.

  Tonight the news ended with an astrological prediction, about disaster when the sun/moon moves into Capricorn on Sunday, but telling us not to believe it. We seem to be living in a stream of the subconscious here. I wonder what it would take for the BBC to switch to the same style.

  Saturday 4 January

  I spent fully five hours trudging round the square mile of local shops. First the shoe repair shop wouldn’t take one boot on its own, then the bag repair shop was just shutting with a lot of bad temper, then by the time I got to the bottle bank it had shut. Eventually I got my boots and bag repaired and also a new zip put in other boots. The boot repair that was 12 roubles in autumn is now 119.

  I also went in to town and bought a St Petersburg train ticket for a colleague who’s coming out from the London office. The waiting room at the station is now paying only, and people were sitting in tidy rows, watching a bank of TVs. The cost of a single ticket has risen from 12 to 30 roubles – and there was no queue! I’d been dreading it.

  I then went in search of a birthday cake for Nikolay’s mother tomorrow and ended at Yeliseyevsky’s posh gastronom on Tverskaya Street. There’s a picture of Yeliseyevsky in pre-revolutionary subfusk high up among the mosaics and chandeliers. I watched some deaf and d
umb women in woollen hats gesturing up at it, apparently not very impressed. The queue for the cash desk took over an hour. The cashiers were having trouble remembering the new prices and had to keep shouting, “How much are oats?” “Thirty roubles,” came the reply, and a sort of shriek came from the queue. I felt there was a masochistic pleasure in people’s reaction, as though they were ready to give their opinion to any passing correspondent at a moment’s notice.

  I find all the economic reports really interesting now. Before I used to wonder why they listed such a random bunch of things, like macaroni, oil and beetroot. But there aren’t supermarkets or shopping arcades, and shopping is just a discovery of random items, never the same two days running, so one random list is as good as another.

  On my way to Leningrad Station I passed a man in black shirt, trousers, boots and black leather Sam Brown, selling fascist leaflets, under a sign saying, “The Black Hundreds – Russia’s last bastion”. About five men had stopped and were chatting to him. Other people looked and hurried by.

  Misha sent me a good letter from Yugoslavia this morning. His classes are being interrupted by bomb scares and a student of his has been called up. Vukovar is only one hour from Belgrade. He’d asked his students to write an essay on “What concerns the youth of Yugoslavia today?” and regretted it, because the despair and trapped feeling which came through what they wrote was terribly upsetting to read.

  Saw milk on the black market today – 7 roubles a carton.

  Sunday 5 January

  At 2.00pm Peter Jarman and I visited the church of All Saints at Kitay Gorod, where we may hold the Quaker meetings in future. Although it’s Russian Orthodox they’re ecumenically minded. It’s a brick church built in the 1600s on the remains of a fourteenth-century wooden church there. Inside it’s stripped back to the brick, with a cardboard iconostasis and the odd nineteenth-century fresco glimmering through patches of plaster. I liked it immensely. We had to wait until Father Martyry had finished baptising a family, and I was interested to watch how it was done. After wetting their heads he dabbed water on their eyes, ears, mouth and feet, which Peter probably rightly interpreted as “God be in your seeing, listening, the things you say and where your feet lead you.” Afterwards they had to process round the font three times, with their boots undone and flapping round their ankles. Although they looked really uplifted by the baptism, I thought they looked self-conscious about the boots.