I took the birthday cake to Nikolay’s mum and we had tea with her childhood friend Alla, also a Communist and supporter of the coup. I decided to agree with everything I could. It was odd: they believe social morality has gone and look back to a time when there were principles and hope. I expect the people in the church earlier think at last there is a possibility for principles and hope. There’s actually no real reason why one group should exclude the other either, is there? There was a bizarre moment when Maya Nikolaevna and Alla started naming scientists who survived the purges and concluding triumphantly, “Well, they didn’t destroy him!” each time, as though somehow this was a big favour. That is the point at which you can’t agree.
A US Quaker has been getting Quaker literature translated here and trying to get it published. Tonight at the meeting she burst into tears and said the bureaucracy had broken her and she was going back to the US with nothing finished. I could sympathise with her, but I think her despair is actually a measure of her own willpower. The meeting was great and so was our talk afterwards. We’re getting to know each other better. There was a very nice electrician there from Dubna. The meeting seemed to have knocked him out.
Monday 6 January
A rather springlike blue sky like yesterday, a thaw, and a breeze rustling the branches. I’d heard the Dutch Embassy was offloading old furniture and thought it might suit our office. They were very nice, but the furniture has already gone.
I popped to the Desperate Donnegans to wish them Happy New Year and they gave me Christmas dinner as tomorrow is Orthodox Christmas. Alexei and Anya were just back from the UK, where they seem to have mixed with an extraordinary bunch of people who went to Westminster, wear cravats and are members of the Royal Automobile Club. I felt embarrassed to be British as we listened to their tales. Grandma came through – a very beautiful blonde forty-eight-year-old in black velvet dress, with a kind of smoke-ridden voice. They’re all very nice and natural with me.
Gamsakhurdia has fled his bunker and a racing driver in Spain is ready to become constitutional monarch of Georgia.
Another opera. Meanwhile the queues outside the milk shop here are like constant pickets.
Tuesday 7 January: Orthodox Christmas
A huge banner is hanging from the Lenin Museum, praying for “Christlike insight”. There was an amazing scene in the underpass at the foot of Tverskaya Street. A young man with wild hair and a loud checked suit was playing an accordion, stamping about and singing in a loud gravelly voice about the sufferings of Russia and “Lord, come down to earth”. The whole underpass filled, listening to him in silence, then streams of people came forward in their Sunday-best clothes to give him money. “What’s your name?” someone shouted. “Revolution,” he replied. It was extraordinary.
I had lunch with Peter Jarman and two people from “Memorial”, back from South Ossetia, and they discussed the possibility of sending conflict-resolution workers there from Northern Ireland. Apparently quite good. The “Memorial” woman invited me to do a weekly five-minute slot on their radio programme. Great!
In the afternoon I took a walk to see what’s coming on at the Conservatoire. I live in a very beautiful city, and calmly strolling through the snow past all these lovely buildings in the peace and quiet, I realised how lucky I am that this is “home”.
War and Peace was on TV tonight. Brilliant.
Wednesday 8 January
I felt awful by the end of the day. I think it’s because I was hungry, but there’s almost nothing I can bear to eat – something seems to have happened to my stomach. There are no potatoes and there was no bread again today. I saw some milk in a shop but it turned out to be reserved for children. I seem to be living on soup. The cold also makes me very tired.
It would be nice if something happened without complications. Six boxes from the London office are still waiting for me in customs, where they have been since October. The man who eventually agreed to clear and deliver them for me is off ill. The actor Peter Gale has authorised all his roubles to be transferred to Amnesty, but when I went to the bank today they wanted a notarised translation of his request from the USSR Consulate in London! When I offered to translate it myself they said I might make up anything. Since he’s giving me all his money, what is there to make up? Also all my computer payments to the Wells Fargo Bank in California have gone missing.
Today was my introduction to the Central Prefektura, who have to make a rent agreement with me about our premises. Valentina Olekhnovich is one of those people with a brisk, businesslike manner who’s totally chaotic. It turned out they’d lost all our papers during an office party at Christmas. We eventually found them and after a lot of shuffling and tapping of them, she said, “Well, I think that’s where we’ll stop today.” When I made mild noises of protest, she sent me to get a chitty from the District Office of Exploitation – good name – to prove the premises have not been promised to anyone else in the meantime.
I went across town to Tatyana Andreyevna Krasynova, a surprisingly young woman, sitting in the bleak little PREO office. She rang Olekhnovich about me and I listened to their New Year conversation. “We must be kinder, and support each other, or at a time like this we might all go under.” Dismal. They’re all a bit too good at supporting each other. Krasynova asked if it was I who had put the new door on the office, and with quailing heart I said yes. “Well done,” she said, unexpectedly. I took the chitty back to Olekhnovich and now our case has to go before a commission on 22 January. I asked if it could be decided any earlier and she turned blank and stony eyes on me.
The Prefektura is trying to charge us the normal rent for public organisations: 1,600 roubles per square metre. I said this did not seem fair as we’d been refused permission to register as a public organisation. The alternative is a 70-rouble rate as a charity. Great if we can get it.
Thursday 9 January
I meant to have a domestic day but got caught up in writing and really enjoyed it. Wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Estonia about the death penalty, another one to a paper in Kyrgyzstan and one to the head of a college of advocates in Kazakhstan. Is it my imagination, or did we have no contacts like this at the beginning of the year? I also did a running phone interview all day about imprisoned homosexuals for a reporter from The Advocate in the USA. He was very pugnacious and polemical about it all, and I think was struck that I wasn’t. I get a bit fed up with all the breast-beating on this issue.
Valery Rudnev rang from Sovetskaya Justitsiya, wanting me to do a round-table discussion on the death penalty next week with a professor of law who favours retention. He also wants to interview me for Izvestiya, which I suppose has been my ambition for Amnesty this year.
It was another day with precious little to eat. In the evening I went to Hella’s and made up for it. Other journalists were there and we talked about “the scene” until 2.00am. Although it’s been ghastly I’m quite glad I’ve had the experience of finding property and working through the system, because it is an education. I also have the advantage of knowing “ordinary Russians”, which foreign correspondents miss out on.
Friday 10 January
A great thaw and rather a steamy, rainy morning. By afternoon it was snowing and at night it was bloody freezing – so you were always in the wrong clothes at any particular time of the day.
I stayed over at Hella’s then came back and took our mail down to the International Post Office. Three hundred and sixty roubles obviously seems cheap by current prices, and there was a huge queue of Caucasians sending blankets and boxes to unspecified destinations for literally thousands of roubles. The money was all in fives and tens, and so the poor woman was counting it all by hand, losing her place and starting again. I was in the queue for over two hours. On the way home I shopped at the market and bought bread, some goat’s milk for 40 roubles, a chicken the size of a sparrow, and some honey.
Irina and I were s
upposed to be going to a Sibelius concert in the evening but, as keeps happening to us, it was cancelled. She came back here and we ate potatoes, cranberries, and relished goat’s milk in our coffee. She says she too is hungry, but can’t eat properly and some things she can no longer eat at all. It’s probably something you have to come out of gradually.
Sasha Lukin from the Quakers rang. The Peruvian Ambassador had just sent him a telegram inviting him to the embassy to discuss the Amnesty case he had written about. He was alarmed. We’ll go together.
Saturday 11 January
Took a complete break today. Had bread and butter with the Desperate Donnegans and they urged me to go to the police about my theft. Their grandma insisted on giving me three types of bread to take home with me.
I read Ilf and Petrov all afternoon for pleasure, then went round to the Teplitskys for dinner. Natasha’s so caught up in her translations that it’s like talking to someone who’s doing crosswords. One minute she’ll ask you if “framesaw” is the right word, then in the next sentence she’s off onto Database Information Management Systems. Her translator friend Olga was there, pulling out a scarf and reknitting it into socks, because there’s no wool. I said how the food situation is affecting my stomach and they said they’d just been saying the same thing. Natasha had made a cake out of macaroni.
While I was there someone rang from Yaroslavl to say butter that was 170 roubles yesterday is 230 today. There is no butter in Odessa, but there are potatoes at 35 roubles. They were 8 roubles here yesterday.
I’ve remembered two things from the evening at Hella’s. Yeltsin was on TV doing a tour in Ulyanovsk, and it was exactly like the early days of Gorbachev. I don’t see the honeymoon lasting so long, however. The other thing was a story about Ira Yakir, who is now working as an assistant in the Russian Parliament. She heard the name of one of Vice-President Rutskoy’s assistants, and turned cold. He was the one who interrogated her after her father, the dissenter Pyotr Yakir, was arrested in the 1960s, and almost provoked a miscarriage. She asked if she could see him, and it was he. She asked if he remembered her and he was thrown into confusion and said, “Who could forget Ira Yakir?” “So you do remember me?” she said, and he said, “No, I don’t know who you are and we’ve never met.” Death and the Maiden.
Sunday 12 January: Old “New Year”
The Quakers were very good again. Peter and Roswitha were falling over their Russian with fatigue and I felt for them. Russians are by and large very sympathetic and uncritical about your mistakes. They all listened patiently and then Valentina Konstantinova said quite sincerely what astonishing progress they’ve made in two months. On the bus home I asked if her feminist group has contact with the Libertarian Party, a radical lesbian group here. She said no, firmly. “So you have no common ground with them?” I asked. She said, “I think it’s impossible to be a vegetarian in this country.” She’d misheard me.
It was Old “New Year” and Irina and I went to a great midnight Prokofiev concert at the Pushkin Theatre, put on by young musicians. Another glimpse of culture reviving. Afterwards we took a walk through the backstreets in the dark and the snow and it all looked very beautiful, then Irina stayed over at my flat. She’d all but brought her own bedding, she was so anxious to be no trouble. She also gave me a tablecloth, some cheese and some ointment for my blotchy hands. I gave her some Lithuanian tampons I had come across. Present-giving is very nice here, like mutual grooming.
Monday 13 January
Desperately cold. I saw the Latvian Ambassador in the morning. I liked his attitude to me and he talked freely enough to give me a picture of the full scope of their preoccupations. On the way home I picked up copies of my article from the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences, and they put me on the list to receive a food parcel. I also delivered a request to the Foreign Ministry Consular Division for a multiple re-entry visa for people in the London office. The Consular Division has become the “Russian” Consular Division since the last time I was there, but it still has the same bad-tempered staff and now a seething crowd trying to get in. An official took my envelope and said, “We don’t like this, you know” and I said, “I don’t like it either”, in a quiet, but probably quite expressive, voice and for some reason this shut him up and he agreed to do it.
Viktor came round in the evening, the first time I’ve seen him alone for about eleven months. I gave him dinner of potatoes and tinned sprats, and he said it was the biggest blowout he’d had for ages. We have an unusual and valuable sort of relationship. Whatever the prevailing storms I always feel immense goodwill and respect from him, stemming from I’m not sure what. I asked his advice about my theft and he treated it in just the sort of imaginative way I was wanting someone to. How to catch out the thief. He now earns the equivalent of $2.50 a month as a research chemist, but hopes for a rise in February to bring it back up to $6.00. And he laughed.
Tuesday 21 January
Scenes from Russian life: I got paid for my article in the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences with two packets of macaroni, a tin of meat and some tea. The Desperate Donnegans said their father was paid two pints of milk for an art lecture. Must have been quite a good lecture to get two. Today I saw a very smartly dressed woman on the metro in a fur coat, fur hat and a string of toilet rolls round her neck.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday the temperature dropped to -24 degrees. The atmosphere feels empty when it gets so cold, as though all the warmth has been sucked out of the earth and you’re walking round in some giant, sterile refrigerator.
I’m in the middle of an intensely busy, but interesting, two weeks. I’ve got to move the office stuff to Herzen Street, move house, and then there are a lot of meetings.
On Tuesday I went to see the Representative of Tajikistan and then talked my way into the first session of the Russian Constitutional Court. They were discussing Yeltsin’s decree combining the KGB and police, and decided it was unconstitutional. It was terribly impressive, mainly because the court was demanding respect and got it. If their ruling holds, it may be the first step towards a law-based state. I was struck by how young the main figures in Russian politics are today – hardly a grey hair to be seen. It made me think about the international Conference for Young Political Leaders that is apparently taking place round about now. All the real young leaders would be too busy to go.
Wednesday I spent writing my radio talk about the Morocco campaign. I was quite relaxed about recording it, but the producer leapt down my throat at each misplaced stress and my nerve began to go. In the evening I went to a gay party given by people from San Francisco, working here on an AIDS project. Some people with HIV who are facing imprisonment wanted to speak with me. A very Soviet solution, to imprison people who are HIV positive.
I just had to take Friday off. Irina had offered to help carry bags of papers from my flat over to the office, so we staggered through snowdrifts and slipped on black ice with three massive bags and a rucksack. As we wove our way round the queues for food on Herzen Street, being given the once-over by everyone in them, Irina said, “We’ve got our food – our bananas, avocados and salmon.” It was funny. I’m sure they all thought we had.
Father Nikon came round in his black “Ciao Roma!” T-shirt on his way to celebrate an all-night eucharist for the Feast of Christ’s Baptism. His registration papers had got lost too. I translated a good appeal he’d written to the Pope about Croatia, and we discussed Paul McCartney’s wife’s face.
After he left, the Desperate Donnegans invited me for homemade biscuits and a bottle of Greek wine at 11.00pm. We all eat so little that we got smashed and quite hilarious until 2.00am. They thought Greek wine would be sweet because of something they’d read about Socrates. I said they took a very academic approach and they said, “What alternative have we?” We talked about the Cold War and our countries’ attitudes towards each other. Anna was taught that if there was an atomic explosion, she was to lie down on th
e floor and not to look at it (!). It really was very nice being able to talk about this with my real Soviet neighbours, and laugh over a bottle. It was amazing really.
There’s been a great debate here about the last change of the hour, which made it dark at 3.00pm. People suspect the government robbed them of more than one hour. “If that’s all they’d robbed us of,” sighed Irina. Anyway, the upshot is that we changed back again at the weekend. Ukraine wasn’t informed and there was a terrible pile-up of trains and planes, working to different clocks.
It was the same story of inflation when I went to the local post office on Monday to make arrangements to have my newspapers forwarded and renew Amnesty’s PO box. What cost 40 roubles for twelve months last year now costs over 2,000. The post office woman sidled up to me and asked if I was leaving. Apparently her cousin lives in Tübingen and is involved with Amnesty there. “It’s a very good organisation,” she said.
On the Tuesday evening I went round to Nina Petrovna, who now wants to arrange medical help for ex-prisoners. I wonder how well, and how well off, she herself is. She’s only just over an infarkt, has cataracts, and for dinner was eating a plate of bread she’d soaked in milk and fried. I brought her some of my cheese, but she would hardly accept it.
I really enjoy spending time with her because she’s funny and interesting, and so modest that fascinating things slip out obliquely. It turns out she was sacked from her laboratory for writing a letter in defence of Zhores Medvedev, the biologist who was put in psychiatric hospital in the 1970s. She also gets her medicine cheap now because she got a medal in the war. She was one of the people who dug the defences outside Ulyanovsk in the middle of winter, when the Soviets feared the Germans would turn north after Stalingrad. She says she’s always enjoyed digging since then. After she mentioned a few of her brushes with authority I asked if she hadn’t been scared. She said she was almost permanently scared, but when it came to a confrontation she was always enraged. I can understand that, I think.
Moscow Diary Page 25