The promised documents for registration have still not appeared at the Foreign Ministry, so what’s new. As I clipped my bus ticket, the bits fell into the bouffant hair of the woman underneath, unbeknown to her. So did everyone else’s.
Friday 12 April
A really beautiful morning. I stood out on the balcony before breakfast feeling at last I’ve slept myself out. The Foreign Ministry gave me my documents for registering with the local police today, so perhaps we’re making progress. Last time it took seven weeks. This time too they registered me as “the representative of Amnesty International” – a very positive sign, everyone says. I carted the computer into town in the afternoon and Leonid actually went through my electronic mail and word processing systems slowly and thoroughly, explaining things to me. I appreciated it a lot and told him.
In the evening I flew back home to meet Nikolay from the Moscow Amnesty group at 9.00pm, startling a girl sitting on the steps in the dark in her nightie when I got out of the lift. She fled like a nineteenth-century heroine, but later came back to ask me the time. I don’t know if she was locked out or what.
While Nikolay and I talked there was suddenly a huge explosion and then the back yard lit up. Not shell fire, but immensely powerful fireworks for Cosmonauts’ Day. The dogs were all terrified. Nikolay had told me he has a tortoise and I asked if she would be frightened. “The fact is, she has no ears,” he answered solemnly.
I almost missed my tube stop today watching a pale woman with glasses tatting with pale thread. All her fingers were ticking up and one hand darted backwards and forwards with an apparently invisible thread. Every so often she’d undo a minute knot with a small hook. It looked about as relaxing as undoing a telephone wire.
The strike in Belorussia has been temporarily lifted. One of their demands is Gorbachev’s resignation. It’s strange that this was the venue for his presidential campaign in February/March; they gave a huge yes vote in the referendum on 17 March; and four weeks later they’ve made their biggest show of political dissent to date.
Saturday 13 April
I very much enjoyed today. Wrote letters in the sunshine on the balcony this morning. Five more letters in the PO box, which makes eighteen for this week. I shopped at the Danilov Market then went over to Michurinsky Prospekt to visit friends of Helena’s family. I popped round at four for tea then ended up staying for a riotous dinner and left at midnight. Various of their friends had come round to welcome Yasha back from Paris, and they were all very positive to me and to Amnesty, and all absolutely charming about including me in, and translating slang etc. I came away with a new translator, a possible taker for Brian’s play, an interview with the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, and a potential Russian-language coach.
The Academy of Sciences had offered Yasha a plot of land outside Moscow to grow his own food. Apparently all his colleagues were offered the same. One woman at the dinner was going to take up a farm in Tver region, twelve hours away. We ate and drank with gusto while two dark-eyed children sat and watched us at the end of the table, like Fanny and Alexander. The conversation got round to political limericks and rude jokes and we learned how to say “sweet FA” in each other’s languages. I liked one of the Brezhnev jokes: during the Olympics he was handed a speech with the Olympic logo on it and began to read, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh…”
Sunday 14 April
The day began and ended with narrow Christianity. A dour Scottish voice on the World Service said we had grown soft on good and evil in the name of “tolerance”, and we should go tough on them again. “It’s like science – positive and negative.” For me the analogy told me more about him than about good and evil.
Then at the Quakes in the evening we were visited by a Christian businessmen’s fellowship from the UK, who arrived in an Intourist bus and wanted to see “Russian Christians”. They were very anxious about whether Islam is gaining ground in the USSR and one Scottish voice asked how Christian evangelists could attract more people here than they do in Scotland. By making their religion bigger, I would have thought. I came home with two Russian bibles to give away, and was touched to see an inscription in the front of one, written painstakingly in Cyrillic by a lady in Albert Street, Millom.
I had a lazy day. I put my sour milk in a hankie and hung it from a stick on the balcony to make cheese. Karmit rang, just back from a whistlestop tour of the USSR. After Dushanbe she said she flew in to Moscow and thought, Ah – freedom!
Monday 15 April
I went to Avtozavodsky district early in the morning to see Karmit before she flew home. It reminded me of Glasgow in the 1960s: very heavily industrial with traffic careering through and things brown with impacted dust. People chatting in doorways looked pale and poor too, and the stairs and door to Karmit’s flat were exactly like my grandmother’s tenement. Karmit had been seeing sometimes a hundred people in a day during her trip. In the hour I was there she saw five. She’s soon going back to Israel to help with family problems. Their flat got blown up by a Scud missile. Some people’s lives…
On my way back I went to register at the Visa Department and, amazing to relate, I was in and out in twenty minutes – no queue, no fights, no nothing. Before doing an interview with the legal journal, Za i Protiv, I had lunch out in a park. A lorry rolled up, two men got out and made us all get up while they moved the bench about two feet further along. They then went round all the other benches doing the same thing. There was a Mexican wave of people scrambling to their feet clutching their Pepsis and food and bags.
The interview was quite good: about the Soviet scene and international standards. I felt he was asking genuine questions, like “What is an inalienable right?” I stood waiting for a bus outside the KGB and noticed there is actually a constant traffic of normal-looking people going in and out of it. Unnerving.
In the evening I took presents to Bridget Dunbar’s friends. The grandmother was portly, in glasses and a housecoat. It turns out she is an Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation and a former star of operetta. She’d just got a tape of her radio recordings today and played me some, including an operetta by Shostakovich (about the new dormitory suburb, as it was then, at Novocheryomushinsky)! Her voice was beautiful and her four-year-old grandson leaned back and started stroking her when the music began. I got a sense of what a grand lady she must have been. She and her daughter have also been offered plots of land by the theatre where the daughter works.
Another nocturnal visit from Dr Yury Savenko past eleven o’clock and then bed. The cheese I made in the hankie tastes really lovely.
Tuesday 16 April
Things are beginning to move. The MP Galina Starovoytova had agreed to chase up our premises for me today. It turns out the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises has now been shifted directly under the Executive Committee of Krasnopresnensky District Soviet. It must approve the recommendation of the Deputies’ Commission, then the request goes to the Privatisation Commission (?) under Kotova. Galina told them that Amnesty’s request for premises was a precondition for the USSR holding the human rights conference in Moscow this September, and leaned on both the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises and the Privatisation Commission so that they will treat our request as a top priority. She’s going to try to call the Executive Committee at Krasnopresnensky tomorrow. As she put it: “There are three links in the chain and two are in our pocket already.” I could never have hacked through the undergrowth to get to this point on my own.