Moscow Diary

by Marjorie Farquharson

  Irina and her mother were also affronted by TV pictures of the Salvation Army giving relief to people dressed like them. Lia Davidovna had got a box of food from her relatives in Australia, but sent through a Soviet firm, so it contained “Soviet” things like flour, rice, salt etc. She had burst into tears, finding it awful to be treated as though she’s poor, and awful to be forced into poverty. She’s sick of being paid in beetroots and potatoes, and wants money to decide for herself what she’ll buy. This question of relief is an odd one. The place is like a big baby being fed by the rest of the world.

  It was desperately cold today. Tolya and I met early to sort out Amnesty’s new PO box, then went over to the office and had a very productive five hours. He regulated the fridge, then waited with me for the kitchen furniture to arrive, and we assembled it together. Then we fixed all the lightshades, and finished with pancakes and cocoa at the local café. He’s very thorough and inventive, and I enjoyed our time together. It really feels as though we are making progress.

  The rest of my day was spent on social calls. First to Viktor where we had one of our nice peaceful talks together. Thence to the Teplitskys’, for dinner, which we all ate with a lot of hilarity. Lena was agonising over her latest essay: “What does Tolstoy mean at the beginning of Anna Karenina, when he says, ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’?” Apparently they have a philosophical topic a week.

  Sunday 23 February

  My new flat is on one of Stalin’s main avenues out of town, lined with five-storey brick house blocks whose ground floors are given over to shops. It feels Central European. Although the avenue is straight and rather boring, you can get almost anywhere through courtyards and little paths leading off the beaten track. My way to the metro is a nice path through gardens and up steps. Although there’s thick snow, you always hear birds there.

  Today I went exploring in the other direction. I took a path by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences and came out looking over the river, with a marvellous view of the city on the other bank and people skiing and tobogganing to my left on the Sparrow Hills. I climbed down and walked along the embankment path then did a big circle home. It was a lovely day and I enjoyed all the space and fresh air.

  Father Nikon came round, looking thin and handsome, not having eaten for two and a half days, because he has absolutely no money. He has had it with here and applied for refugee status in Argentina, because he saw on TV that they’d opened a quota. I fed him for two and a half hours and enjoyed his visit.

  The church where the Quakers now meet is right in the middle of the zone where people were demonstrating to mark the old USSR Armed Forces Day, so was cordoned off by rows of militia. Sasha Lukin climbed over a back fence to get in, and the rest of us talked our way through. Good meeting. A new man with a starved and tortured face, who I assumed was from the Russian provinces, turned out to be from California.

  Afterwards I went through the underpass to the Rossiya Hotel to change money. The sound of a saxophone was wafting through the darkness, and on the other side of the street Russian flags were decorating the lamp posts every few yards and the Kremlin was illuminated from below. The atmosphere was charged because of the demonstration. For the fifth day running there were no roubles to be had at the exchange kiosk. This is getting alarming as I’m down to my last 50 and have a lot of Amnesty expenses to meet.

  Monday 24 February

  I saw the Armenian ambassador today to ask for their death penalty statistics for London, and in the afternoon trudged back and forwards between the Central Prefektura and PREO, where I learned that before I get their seal I must get certificates from the gas and electricity boards, the fire inspectorate and the health and safety people.

  But I was mentally elsewhere all day. I feel very dissatisfied with the stress I continually put myself under and the ridiculous business of doing work till 11.00pm. I read a Buddhist book on breathing and mindfulness in the evening, which was marvellous, and also wrote half my next radio programme.

  Half the schizophrenics in Moscow seemed to call me tonight. Someone pointed out it was the full moon.

  Tuesday 25 February

  A beautiful day with hard snow underfoot. I began my trail of the fire inspectorate etc., and a good thing for the Buddhist book, because I kept calm and plodded on for eight hours, and quite enjoyed the different bureaucrats I met. With a sinking heart I discovered that before I started, I first had to go back to the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises at Krasnopresnensky, to get three stamped letters. Their building is now quite transformed: it has a snazzy perspex stall in the lobby, and paratroopers in skin-tight jumpsuits defending the place at every corner.

  From there I went to Tchaikovsky Street, past a sign saying “Danger – leaking gas”, and into the Fire Inspectorate, which is a dilapidated hole. On to the Health and Safety people at Taganka, whose building stank like a toilet and was covered all over on the outside with some kind of cladding, so they looked like they were sitting in a tent. They were nice to me, but it turns out they won’t accept letters. So I had to take mine to Dr Chirigyeva at Kuznetsky Most, in the town centre. I found her in a white coat, looking exhausted, with her dyed hair in a bandana and finger in a bandage. She reminded me of one of those exhausted, basically good doctors in The First Circle. She has to post the letter to the Taganka office, which in Moscow can take eight days.

  From there I went to the Electricity Board on the embankment near the British Embassy. By this time some frozen cherries I had bought were defrosting, so I was dripping a trail of what looked like blood wherever I went. I must have walked about six miles in the course of the day. The remarkable thing was that all these offices were connected to the old Krasnopresnensky District Soviet, although they covered half the city. Presumably each district must have its own set of electricity boards and fire inspectorates. Now I have to make appointments for inspectors at all these agencies to come and look round the office.

  Wednesday 26 February

  A hormonally chaotic day which I spent putting together the mailing for London, not really able to settle. In the evening Andrey had invited me to a booze-up with a group of ex-prisoners and their wives. I was terribly glad to have gone, and slept soundly afterwards. They also sold me some roubles, for which I was grateful. Amnesty in action: getting money from prisoners.

  Andrey Shilkov was there and told me some more about Nina Petrovna, whom he also loves. She had started a relief fund for political prisoners before Solzhenitsyn did, raising the money from among her friends. For this she had not only been sacked from the Academy of Sciences Institute where she worked, but most recently from a cleaning job in 1986. He has been recording her stories of her life because he too fears she may be on the decline.

  His teeth are still missing from where he was force-fed in prison and he is deeply interested in Buddhism and in Tibet. Somehow the combination of all these things makes me feel he has a hard-won, independent view of the world that is worth listening to. In the nicest way he was sceptical about Amnesty and its group-building orientation, and I felt there was a lot there for me to understand. On the way home he clutched my hand as he said goodbye, to show no hard feelings. I don’t know on what grounds, but I feel an immense good friendship from him, Andrey, Ruslan and others. As though they like you despite, rather than because.

  Thursday 27 February

  I finished writing my radio programme in the morning and gave tea to Othmar and his sister, who were taking the mail. In the afternoon I learned that the Central Prefektura has lost the ground plan of our office, so I will have to go back to the Bureau of Technical Administration and get another one.

  I went from there to Irina’s birthday dinner, taking a bottle of Turkmenian madeira. We had a very good time with a lot of laughter, but it also felt valedictory. Natalya Ivanovna had sewn me a napkin with rowanberries on it, and raised her glass and said they were glad I had come into their house. I said
I was too. We sat and looked through their old photos. Natalya Ivanovna was like Anne Bancroft in her youth.

  Last thing at night there was a very disheartening email from London, saying the delivery of office furniture has been held up.

  Friday 28 February

  The Fire Inspector surveyed the office today – a young, friendly guy from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who was reeking of vodka at 11.00am.

  As money is still very short, I then went to the bank to claim the roubles that the actor Peter Gale has bequeathed to me from his account. I had got his letter translated, the translation stamped by Natasha Teplitskaya, and had brought my passport and visa with me as identification – but wouldn’t you know, the transliteration of my name in the visa had a mistake in it which I had never noticed before. The bank staff pounced on it with glee.

  Ninety minutes later I ended up with the manager and deputy manager, both of them young. He kept barking down the phone to people, “Well, that’s your problem. There’s a special form to follow!” SLAM! So I began thinking aloud and said to him, and to all bureaucrats all over Moscow, “You keep talking about a special form, but you never explain what it is.” The deputy manager got furious at me for this and called me “Woman!” I tapped her knee and said, “Don’t ‘woman’ me”, and so she didn’t. We all sat it out and the woman finally said she would sign my document. I congratulated her for taking the responsibility on herself, and the manager said, “No need for irony”, bouncing his fists on the desk, but I think also pretty embarrassed that he hadn’t dared to. I said I wasn’t being ironic, I was being sincere, and I was. So, I got the 1,100 roubles. I hope the rouble famine soon ends, because there are big bills to pay.

  Tolya invited me round in the evening, the night before he moves. He’s under immense strain and doesn’t seem happy at all. I felt sorry for him sitting in the relics of his flat, with a very uncertain future. He gave me tablets for my eczema and a piece of cake to take home with me. Last night Natalya Ivanovna had offered to get an alternative doctor to examine my jaw. She said he hadn’t actually been able to help her, apparently, but that was because she was, she said, “a funny bugger”. “Marjorie’s a funny bugger too,” cautioned Irina.

  Professor Avetisyan and I also finalised the office statute today. He proudly showed me round his offices at a Western law firm in the centre of town, and took me right into the boardroom where the directors were having a meeting. Great culture clash, because he sat down and wanted me to “speak English with them”. I think it was only because I was so obviously embarrassed that they contained their disbelief and annoyance and ordered us coffee. So, we spoke English together.

  Saturday 29 February

  Irina is immensely kind to me. She is painstakingly translating an anatomical diagram of feet for me, because she knows I am interested in doing a reflexology course when I go home. There is something very innocent about my friendships here, which reminds me of childhood friendships, and is lovely. I think it is maybe because people aren’t transient so, unlike me, they don’t have a host of floating associations in different countries, whose relative importance is not clear, even to me. If they like you they like you, and you come to the house and meet the family. They also talk about you and think about you a lot, and in a place like this, that is a lovely feeling.

  We went to a concert in the Scriabin Museum, looked around the exhibits, then went to the twentieth-century photography museum and finally to see Cinema Paradiso at the Kino Centre. A nice day.

  Sunday 1 March

  Spring began today with a bright sun, a big thaw and mighty rushing of waters along the street. I must have been so keyed up this week that as I began to relax my body was sore and my brain was dead. I spent all day fretting about the delivery of office furniture and feeling extremely sorry for myself. I walked all along the embankment and into town to the Quakers, where I fell into a kind of trance and couldn’t believe an hour had passed. There are more than twenty of us now, and some very good people among us. I felt very much better and came home and worked on the death penalty, to prepare myself for the duel with Professor Baskov in Sovetskaya Justitsiya.

  Desperate Donnegan came round with his paper on Walter Pater, wanting my views on it. Somewhere from the midst of my gloom, I admire his intense enthusiasm for nineteenth-century English.

  Monday 2 March

  Today I took the Health and Safety Inspector round the office. She was a hefty woman, who swept over the rooms with one glance in three minutes. For this they were going to charge us 2,000 roubles, if I hadn’t pleaded poverty. Because I was foreign she liked me and began showing me photos of her family, and talking about religion. Interesting: she was a paramedic, but had been to both Syria and Pakistan in the Brezhnev era.

  I also tried to tackle our banking problems by opening up an account. The simplest thing would be to have a rouble account at the Savings Bank opposite the office, but they sent me up to their headquarters in Krasnopresnensky to get a letter of authorisation. The headquarters was distributed through an ordinary block of flats, oddly enough, so I came across a room of tellers counting notes furiously in what would normally be the basement area for rubbish. I was batted between two women who didn’t want to deal with me, and finally both of them refused to let Amnesty open an account because we are not a “small business”.

  I came home via Pushkin Square where I picked up documentation from some HIV sufferers. After dinner I went out to Yelena’s place to return the saucepans I borrowed from them over a year ago. Yelena’s mother is being made redundant on 5 April. Their neighbour is going to all the right-wing demonstrations. Yelena gave me spare cardboard boxes for packing up my things and going back to London. So the crates which brought relief from the Solzhenitsyn Fund will be carrying out things for the Amnesty rep.

  Everyone looked very tired, but it was a leisurely family evening as usual, with Yelena’s mother listening to the radio in the kitchen, and the baby asleep. Yelena and I played the piano to each other, using the music she had copied out by hand in exile. It was a very vivid picture: Yelena with her long dark hair and face slightly strained with the effort, baby’s bath on top of the china cabinet, and the room strewn with boxes of things for prisoners. Late twentieth-century woman, who has been exiled in her own country. I wonder what her daughter’s friends will remember about her in future years.

  I had a new postman today: someone from the USA who is doing research into nuclear policy. He took Amnesty’s article to the Journal of Asian and African Studies.

  Tuesday 3 March

  Nice weather continues, with the streets like the seashore, continually running with little ripples of water.

  Every time I try to buy something in the street, or flag down a car, some good-hearted woman leaps to my elbow and tells me not to because it’s too expensive, or tells me where I can get it cheaper round the corner. I don’t usually have time go round the corner, but feel inhibited to carry on buying there in the street. So I’m not getting very much at the moment.

  Wednesday 4 March

  Prepared this week’s courier and also got myself ready for an interview on China tomorrow at the Russian World Service. Took the afternoon off and went with Irina to see an exhibition at 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya, the place where they held underground art shows during Brezhnev’s times. From there we walked up to Chekhov’s museum at the house where he used to practise medicine, now on the Garden Ring. Whichever museum you go into, you always find Shalyapin and Gorky gracing the photos, like something out of Jennifer’s Diary.

  In the evening Simon Cosgrove came round to take away my cups and glasses. I’m starting the pruning for moving.

  Thursday 5 March

  Since I’ve read about Buddhist “mindfulness” I’ve left my handbag overnight at the Sannikovas’, and this morning I locked myself out of the flat. Obviously being too “mindful”.

  I had an early morning ap
pointment with Nikita at the Moscow City Justice Department, to ask his advice about how we register with the Russian authorities. I’m afraid we are straddling two horses, going along simultaneously as a “charity” with the Moscow Mayordom, and as a “foreign business” with the Russian government. He thinks so too. He gave me an hour of his time, looking up decrees and phoning contacts. At one point he sat with a phone at each ear, discussing decrees down one, and some bargain food down the other.

  Afterwards I did an interview with Kirill Mikhailov at the World Service and he took me for lunch. His questions were all very general about human rights, but very interesting. The interview will be broadcast to China, North Korea, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

  Friday 6 March

  I’ve just had Andrey round for dinner. With a face deadpan with embarrassment he brought me a present for Women’s Day. He said when he first started practising “mindfulness” he almost fell under a bus. He’s an immensely attractive man.

  The cost of mailing stuff to London has gone up to 900 roubles (!) from 30 last January. Othmar and I were hard pushed to assemble the cash. In the afternoon I visited the Trans-National Radical Party to share Amnesty’s material on the death penalty. Although they have a pleasantly anarchic philosophy, they are also down to business and I like talking to them. I also got an appointment with the Electricity Board to survey our office.

  Saturday 7 March

  Irina and I continued our tour of Moscow graveyards. Today we walked down to Novodevichy monastery. Although it was only zero degrees and there was no wind, it was deadly cold for some reason. A chill seemed to rise up between the graves. There were nice modest graves for Chekhov and Bulgakov and then as you approach the 1970s section, there are more and more giant heads of nobodies on big pillars. Ex-President Gromyko is lying next to ex-Chief Ideologist Suslov. How ghastly to be buried together. They probably hated each other in real life.

  We then went on a search for bread for me, stopping en route in a grocery store on Kropotkin Street, which had a nice display of fish, cheese, jams, booze, butter and meat. Even though the prices are stupendous, there is definitely more around, and it is a relief to the eye.