In amongst all these comings and goings I managed to buy a pint of milk.
Thursday 21 March
I was at Viktor Zarsky’s by 8.30am giving him mailings for Minsk. He’s probably the nicest person I’ve met here. I then went for breakfast with a visitor from the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights in New York, at the Communist Party Central Committee’s hotel. It’s the anonymous modern and prosperous building on Dimitrov Street, which has electronic gates. Inside there’s some nice lighting, plants, wood and marble. Apparently Richard Nixon is staying here, and Ivan Polozkov, head of the Russian Communist Party, lives here, because the Moscow Soviet won’t give him house room. As I was waiting outside Mary’s room, “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door” came wafting over the sound system.
Mary’s here arranging exchanges and seminars on the independence of the judiciary. I ate steadily throughout our meeting. There’s going to be a human rights conference here in September of all the governments who are part of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Mary said the Lawyers’ Committee is planning to focus only on the USSR, because in their view “it’s really a conference on the human rights situation here”. I said Amnesty would be focusing on human rights in all the participating states, dropping a sour lemon into the generally pleasant conversation.
I was home by 10.30am and had a fruitful hour of phone calls to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow News and the Moscow Amnesty group. Then I went over to Krasnopresnensky to see Zhukov about the premises and up to Hella and Siffra’s, to use their photocopier for our material on the Women’s Campaign.
At night I grappled with my accounts, ready for going home. Heather rang from Kiev, pretty tired but extremely excited by the beginnings of a new group in Drohobych. Good! We are beginning to take off here.
I was very thirsty in the afternoon and bought what I thought was flavoured mineral water in a green bottle, outside the metro. I asked the man if he would help me open the top. He said uncertainly, “Are you going to drink it?” I took a mouthful and found it was cooking oil. Didn’t know whether to spit it out all over 1905 Street station or swallow, but eventually swallowed it. I was running to the toilet for the next four hours.
Friday 22 March
Another day which began promptly at 9.00am and ended with my last visitor at 11.30pm, and last phone call at midnight. In the morning I put together a long letter and materials for Galina Starovoytova, asking amongst other things if she would nudge Krasnopresnensky Premises Fund about our office when I am away in the UK.
As I was writing to her I got so many calls making confusing arrangements, that when Aleksandr Golding from the Sakharov Foundation arrived at the door, I just stared at him blankly. I was up a ladder changing a light bulb at the time, and although we’d never met before he took his coat off and went straight up the ladder, like a ferret up a drainpipe.
I had lunch down at Valentina’s. She’s now feverishly optimistic that the “democrats” will “win” by autumn, because of a Nostradamus prophecy. I don’t know how we get from here to there. After a visit to the Deputy Editor of Moscow News, who promised to advertise our Thirtieth Anniversary Campaign, I went to meet Zaure, Viktor Zarsky’s friend from Kazakhstan.
It was a very memorable three hours at the flat where she is staying on the Arbat. I can’t think I ever have conversations like that outside the USSR – we started off strangers and left arm in arm. She’s a molecular biologist at the Academy of Sciences and a Party member in her mid-thirties, with an exceptionally pleasant manner. She gave me some interesting insights: because Kazakhs have always been herdspeople, she reckons that land privatisation will mean big purchases for outside buyers. In Uzbekistan, where the population works the land, she reckons the locals will benefit from privatisation. She reckons blood will be spilt in the USSR by winter, but that Kazakhstan may escape the worst; simply because the President is in such a vulnerable position he is being very responsive to all sectors of the population. Zaure adores European classical music. “How about Renaissance music?” I asked, but she said no, the Renaissance was a dark, deeply European tradition that she does not like. That puts us in our place.
We talked a lot about Amnesty, God, different styles of friendship. Through the Afghan-Vietnam veterans’ work she does she’s met a lot of people from the US. One had stayed with her for two weeks, then one day had cut her dead, which devastated her. She mentioned it again later. In some ways US and Soviet friendship does seem like opposite ends of a pole.
From there I hiked down to the Moscow Hotel to speak with Galina Starovoytova’s assistant, Ludmilla. The TV was on in the lobby, booming through the ground floor and she said Galina was sharing the platform in Leningrad with Yeltsin. We watched together, and it seemed quite a fateful address, presumably part of his election campaign for the 28 March Congress. A lot of deputies from the hotel were glued to the set. Ludmilla Vasilievna reckons there will be violence here by summer.
Hurried home to pack for going home tomorrow. The phone suddenly went dead for three hours, just before Lydia Zapevalova arrived, bearing gifts for the Amnesty team in London. She immediately began dismantling the rags that bind the phone lead together and started knotting wires together. I must say Soviet guests are immensely practical. Last thing at night Dr Savenko rolled up.
Two odd things about the landlord: he waived the phone bill (only 2 roubles, but never mind). He then referred in passing to the many visits I’ve made to the USSR. He doesn’t actually know I’ve made many visits here. As far as he is aware this is only my second. I wonder if he has been making enquiries, or if he always knew.
I saw a vivid scene today. Officials in leather coats were stacking boxes of Panasonic equipment into the back of an official car, running backwards and forwards from an official building. A few yards down the street a man with a banner was collecting food and money for the striking miners, and a poor couple were giving him money. Perhaps the Panasonic equipment was for orphans, but I kind of doubt it. I just felt, God, the Party has got it coming to it.
I am continually struck by the beautiful faces I see on the escalators and in the metro. Russians seem immensely physical somehow and today I tried to think how. They’re not healthy, like some Californian fitness people, but they seem to express themselves and to be fully present in their bodies. With the Californian “type”, you’re not particularly aware of anything expressing itself. Physical, spontaneous, subtle, brutal, collective, dark – I suddenly thought, We’re talking “anima” here. Equally suddenly it seemed clear that for all its similarities, the US is the land of the animus. And Britain somehow doesn’t figure in this scheme of things!
I rang the head of the USSR Clemency Commission to express our London office’s interest in the outcome of Andrey Zapevalov’s case. It is due to come before Gorbachev in the next ten days. Cheremnykh is a big fan of our Secretary General, it turns out. He said, “We will do everything we can to save that young man’s life.” He will present the case to Gorbachev.