Discovered I left my earrings at the house where Fadeyev shot himself.
Monday 18 March
I worked at home till 2.00pm. I’m beginning to go back to my student style, reading something but always thinking what I’m going to eat next. I felt mildly poisoned and squeamish all day. Decided I must exercise every day, and walked down to the Tretyakov Gallery, but found it was closed on Mondays. The militiaman on the door said, “Do you really want to go in?” and gave me a ticket from his pocket. So I walked round the Serov exhibition, virtually alone. The new gallery extension is beautiful by any standards and the paintings were luminous and wonderful.
This morning, to my surprise, I found Sokolenko at his desk at the Foreign Ministry at 9.00am. He said his bosses had vetoed a re-entry visa for me and I will have to reapply from London. Poor guy, always having to break the bad news. He was “ty”-ing me again for all his worth. I also called Mr Zhukov to ask what is the next step on the premises. He said Krasnopresnensky Soviet had worked all day Sunday as a protest against the referendum and that I should get my answer on Wednesday.
The landlord came round and very demonstratively counted out 144 roubles to pay half the TV repairs. I have since donated it to Amnesty on his behalf. He then began totting up how much money I had spent on the things I brought him as rent, with many a flourish on his pocket calculator. However, I noticed the flourishes got smaller as it turned out I had overpaid by £100, i.e. at least another month’s rent. He had obviously thought I was owing him something.
Tuesday 19 March
Professor Kelina said she would leave updates on her death penalty speech for me in her office. Three years ago, I wonder if she ever thought she would be giving someone from Amnesty free run of her office? When I dropped by I bumped into Svetlana Polubinskaya, just back from the USSR Supreme Soviet.
I worked flat out all morning revising the April newsletter and catching up with things, then spent four hours travelling the length and breadth of Moscow from post office to the Institute of State and Law and then the British Airways office to pick up my plane tickets. Pretty tiring.
In the evening I went to see Liquid Sky at the Udarnik, which I liked very much. It was made by Russian émigrés in New York, which amused the audience. A bisexual Annie Lennox type is used by both the men and women she sleeps with, until a being from outer space gives her the power to kill them when they have an orgasm. The orgasm releases a chemical in their brain which the film shows with the same music and visual effects as an injection of drugs – beautiful sequences. Both are deadly. Rather pitifully, the heroine is safe because she has never had an orgasm.
The film was 100% style, and about total alienation in 1980s New York. When I stepped outside the cinema, the scene could hardly have been different: a houseboat on the river, ice floes on the water, Art Nouveau railings on the bridge, old chimneys above the factory, people muffled in caps and scarves. It felt like a scene from Mayakovsky’s life in the 1920s.
I’d been listening to Laurie Anderson in the morning and enjoying it, though also feeling it was light years removed from life here. It too is often about alienation; but like Liquid Sky, it is the alienation of people who live with a lot of things, and through their things. They are the subject of their world and they just have a lot of trouble getting another subject to come into contact with them.
Here people are often alienated, and I feel alienated, in quite a different way. It’s because you are an object, and not able to control things. Nevertheless, you have no trouble coming into contact with other “objects”, because you are always fighting with them in shops, or sharing meals with them. The food you buy is real, not synthetic. It is less lonely. Also there’s more politics, less style.
Wednesday 20 March
What a day! Four hundred per cent price rises for meat, bread, tea and something else will be brought in on 2 April. That means meat will be 160 roubles, or over £10 a kilo. At the end of the day I learned the striking miners have dropped all their economic demands because they believe the current political system is incapable of providing them. They are pressing only for their political demands to be met, i.e. for Gorbachev and Pavlov to hand over power to the Council of the Federation. The Deputy Minister of Health of Russia has joined five miners in an open-ended hunger strike for Gorbachev’s removal! There’s very little official coverage of the strikes.
Had visits all morning, then was out of the house working from 2.00 to 11.30pm. Lydia Zapevalova was anxious to talk to me about her son’s death sentence. I decided to take her to Kolomenskoye Park, and feared I was late, but we both got off the same train, carrying identical bunches of yellow flowers for each other. We did not find the park but by chance found ourselves at the Kolomenskoye monastery, a rather bleak but beautiful place on a high bluff overlooking a bend in the Moscow River. Above the blue cupolas and gold stars of one church there were crows circling nests in the tall trees. Their noise was everywhere. We went through an arch at the top of a slope and came onto a very elegant but stark church – all white pillars and towers, lined and roofed in black. The river lay behind it.
The Clemency Commission had decided to pardon Andrey Zapevalov, five votes to two, on 11 March. Now it is up to Gorbachev to have the final say. Lydia seems to be less hopeful than before. She has a recurring dream that Andrey phones and says, “Mama”. She looks out of the window and sees him looking at her in the courtyard. She waves him to come in but he thinks she is saying “go away”, and turns round and walks off. She runs after him but he is already at a crossroads in the distance and beyond her reach.
We had quite a peaceful hour. As we sat on a bench an old man came up raging about “this savage country”, because someone had used planks from the other bench to make a bonfire. “They’re criminals! Criminals!” he shouted, absolutely beside himself.
She took me to a café. I said no to goulash but while I was sitting enjoying a cucumber salad she whipped out a huge sausage and ham from her bag and sliced some of it onto bread for me. I really must get out of this stupid position, because I felt I had to eat a piece but was trying not to gag as I did so. Lydia is really made for happier times; she is very warm, ready to laugh and a real sensualist.
Afterwards I rushed to Sergey Gitman’s to collect materials for Amnesty’s Women’s Campaign, which I am going to photocopy. They opened the door with much laughter and pleasant smiling: apparently they had turned the house upside down but could not find the materials, so Sergey was going to have to retype it all. I felt a combination of my heart sinking and my blood pressure rising and wanted to reach for a cigarette. However, I sat it out and even though I only got home at 8.00pm, it was all quite enjoyable. There is a relaxed and smiling atmosphere in their home, and although Sergey was meant to be racing against time to finish the job, he kept moving to the easychair and telling me another story. I kept thinking, “What are we doing talking about this?”, but enjoying it all anyway.
From another part of the flat we could hear someone playing Debussy Etudes very well, then Dave Brubeck. They told me it was their nine-year-old son, Alexander. I visualised a small genius with huge specs, but popped my head round the door and found a nice and normal boy playing, with his budgerigar – Elizabeth Beast – sitting on the keys.
As I was tired when I got home I asked Viktor if he would come to me, but he was ill and so I went over to him. Two hundred copies of Amnesty’s death penalty report were stacked in his grandmother’s room for Viktor to distribute to the Russian Supreme Soviet. His grandmother was totally confused by them, and told me she didn’t need them and they should have gone to a shop. “They’re all by the same authors and they all say the same thing,” she said. She very nicely made me a cup of tea in their best china, but it was lukewarm and full of sugar. She wouldn’t let me take it through to the other room, so I had to sit and drink it in front of her, trying not to gag. She went off to bed and I later asked Viktor where the pigeon was. It was apparently asleep in the grandmother’s room with her and the death penalty reports. Poor woman.