Unexpected visit from the landlord when I got back. He’s preparing forms to register me with the police and thinks it will take two weeks. Ye gods! He talked non-stop for 1.5 hours and I watched his face working away, then suddenly breaking into a smile. Then he abruptly left with no goodbye – very tall, in a fur hat and big boots. It was exhausting – a sort of whizz through the Financial World Tonight. He goes on so much about how poor he is that I find I start doing it myself.
Entertaining dinner with a visiting Quaker, who has lost a stone since she came here in November and has only seen two pints of milk. Sent me away with frozen pineapples.
Felt immensely happy today.
Wednesday 30 January
My luggage arrived before breakfast and I spent the day assembling it, unable to fit the last screw into the arm of my IKEA easychair. The landlord and his wife came, to start the process of registering me with the block superintendent, the district finance department and the local police. After two hours Sasha had made some progress, but before the police can register me they need documents from the Visa and Registration Department, so I’ll have to go there tomorrow.
Sasha was looking like a boyar, in long coat with fur lapels and high fur hat. Yuliya stayed with me for the two hours and we had mutual difficulty understanding each other. She pointed to the black sisal plant-pot holder she had macraméd, and said, “That’s horrible isn’t it?” Apparently the Ambassador’s wife in Tanzania had got all the Soviet wives making things out of macramé – even tables and chairs.
I do so little here, so slowly, that I began to feel overwhelmed by what faces me. In the evening I sketched out an advert for AI, which I hope we can place in the press, along with the new PO box number.
Thursday 31 January
When people here say it is 30 degrees, they mean -30 degrees, which is what it was today.
I have discovered that a Soviet courier service will take mail for £10, instead of the $60 which DHL asks. I took the tube and a bus to the main Warsaw highway and tottered with my mail to the International Post Office. Prices have gone up: the courier apparently cost £9 last week.
I then made for the Visa and Registration Department (UVIR) in the centre of town, everything looking absolutely lovely in deep snow and a pink light. Found UVIR had moved from Kolpachny Pereulok and left no sign saying where to. Eventually tracked them down at the end of Chernyshevsky Street, to find they were shut. Far from the metro I couldn’t face more walking, so caught a bus – foolishly as it turned out, because it crawled along the ring road for about fifty minutes and I got chilled to the bone. I really was feeling peculiar by the time I got home and immediately slept. Yelena’s mother rang to see how I was coping with the cold and to offer me another blanket.
I put socks and a pair of leg warmers on top of my tights and went off to UVIR again. There was a big disorderly queue, which moved quite quickly. When it got to me, eight or nine people crowded in from all sides, saying they’d got permission to jump the queue, and a big argy-bargy broke out. “Well, I am the queue, and I’m next,” I said grimly. An African diplomat on my left was playing with a biro which turned into an aerial (?). It turned out UVIR can’t provide papers for me, it has to be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There was great pushing and shoving to get onto the No. 25 bus home and I noticed nine of us, all women, didn’t make it. When we eventually caught the next one, we were picking up the female residue at all the stops.
There’s a big mirror by my phone in the hall and, what with tiredness and -30 degrees, it looked like ET looming up at me. Out with the cream. I made the mistake of doing “simple” domestic things as an antidote to the day. Decided to replace the split and unsanitary toilet seat with the one I’d brought from home, but could not get the two screws at the back to budge. So now have no toilet seat at all.
I can’t explain why I find my surroundings so absolutely beautiful. I came home in the dark through the glade behind the church. The mixture of snow, shadows, and shapes in their winter clothing was lovely.
Friday 1 February
Minus 18 degrees today and comparatively warm, although it was today I noticed the inside of my nose was freezing.
I went to the independent weekly journal Stolitsa to talk with their editor-in-chief about placing an ad with them. They are also interested in our Prisoner of the Month column. The foreign editor, Vitaly Yerenkov, is a former Novosti journalist and very interested in, and interesting about, the international scene. Without any access to agency reports or foreign press, because they can’t afford them, he has to write pieces about the Persian Gulf. He had some scathing things to say about the Western press and their actual lack of freedom. At Novosti he had watched them eating out of Gennady Gerasimov’s – the press spokesman’s – hand, totally unwilling and unable to challenge the US/European consensus that Gorbachev is a “good thing”.
I lunched at Pizza Hut and was almost embraced by a Finnish financial journalist, who was just back from the oppressive, secret and hothouse atmosphere of Nizhny Novgorod. She thrust her garlic bread at me and was anxious to talk. Today is the day Soviet troops start to accompany police on patrols. Troops withdrawn from Central Europe are now massed on the Finnish border and the Finnish armed forces are in a state of low alert. All these things gave her an apocalyptic vision, which I must say I don’t actually share at present. She kept looking at her watch as four o’clock approached, as though she expected the armoured cars to start rolling in.
The dingy half-light in my flat in the evenings drives me mad, so I thought I’d finish setting up my lamps. Repeated last night’s mistake re domestic tasks and decided to transfer some Soviet two-pin plugs onto my things. But whereas UK plugs are fairly compact and smooth inside, everything inside a Soviet plug is loose and wobbles, so that trying to attach the wires is like stepping from one moving boat to another in a high sea. Gave up and wrote this diary. Now my lamps don’t work, nor does the TV, because I removed the plug. As for the toilet seat…
Saturday 2 February
Extremely tired, but decided I would go and strut my stuff at the Moscow Aviation Institute where the Moscow Helsinki Group were holding a seminar. There was a ballroom dancing lesson going on in the hall outside, very much like our own class in Herne Hill – a lot of European hips trying to get their way round the Cha-cha-cha. Moscow Amnesty members had arranged a good stand on “Different Faces of Repression” around the world and I added our Death Penalty Report and UN Codes of Conduct. Extremely chuffed that I sold 20 roubles’ worth.
A woman spoke about the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. It was intelligent, confident, in good Russian, and what people wanted to hear. But I felt very uncomfortable during it. She made it sound like what is laid down in the US constitution and in laws always actually happens. Surely in any study like that you’ve got to look at the people who nevertheless fall through the system and see how that happens too. She made it sound as though it’s all OK, as long as lobby groups are protesting – like they form one cosy whole with the government.
It reminded me of the book Critical Psychiatry: in the US psychiatry is treated as a kind of “mental hygiene”, to accommodate the individual to their surroundings – a substitute for any radical political sentiment. I noticed the guy from the Soviet Foreign Ministry walked out.