A great box of food arrived for me today from the office – a great morale boost in amongst everything else.
Armenia has appealed to the UN for help “against Soviet aggression”.
Monday 13 May
In the afternoon I collected two translations from the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences. They let me in behind the closed door where I thought they all worked in serried ranks, but it was empty except for Valya and Tanya, drinking coffee. The deputy editor and editor-in-chief joined us and we had a nice relaxed chat. They want me to do an article by mid-June.
I would have liked to sit on, but had an appointment to meet Irina Kruglyanskaya at Izvestiya. She is the journalist who recently wrote a good piece about the execution of strikers at Novocherkassk in the 1960s. She has a large office to herself on the seventh floor, works on social issues and is promoting free enterprise. The departmental editor, Albert Plutnik, dropped by and I liked him very much. Kruglyanskaya wants to do an interview with me next week anyway, to my surprise.
From there I went to meet Ruslan and a friend of his, who incidentally had been put through the Serbsky Institute in the early eighties, after he tried to visit the US Embassy. They walked me to the Pushkin monument where I met Robin et al. for a great dinner at Moskovskye Zori. It had been hot all day, then there was a refreshing shower and as we walked home in the dark everything seemed peaceful.
Tuesday 14 May
Blow me down, the Law on Exit and Entry failed to get through the USSR Parliament.
I worked at home all day and did a Russian translation of our letter to Shevardnadze. London have rather blithely sent me train tickets for the AI member who lives in Drohobych – a tiny Ukrainian town – assuming that Semyon Gluzman would be an intermediary in Kiev. As Gluzman’s away, it’s been no go, Joe. So Nikolay has been cabling Drohobych, I’ve been looking for someone to travel to Kiev with the tickets, and a poor Kiev family I do not know has got roped in, trying to find someone travelling to Moscow who could pick them up. All of this has taken many phone calls at 7.00am and midnight, because otherwise the lines are engaged. Now it seems Nikolay or I will have to take the tickets across Moscow on the night train to Kiev so someone can pick them up at the other end. All of this because the post is unreliable. I dread Amnesty’s International Council Meeting.
I ran to the Leningrad train, clutching tulips, to wave off Robin, Helen and Sheila. Robin was looking happy and skinny and young, clutching my tulips as we took photos. Then I met Irina to take her to a Mikhail Pletnyov concert at the Conservatoire. She is fascinating. She’s tall. However, what strikes you is her great intelligence and wit. We were talking about the tarty look that is so prevalent here and she said appearances were deceptive: sometimes the most disciplined-looking people have towering passions. I think she has. All the friends she played music with have emigrated, and I felt very sympathetic and sorry for her, but realised that’s probably quite an inadequate reaction. She’s very much her own person. I got the impression she’d come to the concert rather to humour her mother, who feels sorry for me.
At home I called Natalya Vysotskaya to apologise for my catatonic behaviour over the phone yesterday, and the nice woman had drafted a letter for me to send to the Krasnopresnensky Executive Committee about renovating our premises. She says she specialises in tear-jerking letters. It seemed that’s the first time anyone has spontaneously helped me – but as I keep thinking it, I realise I’m being helped all the time.
Wednesday 15 May
An early visit from the landlord to deliver his translation. Then came Rachael – my third volunteer – a Cambridge student who feels at a loose end. Looking at her pale face and listening to her, I feel we are all going through some kind of existential experience here, if I knew better what existential means. We’re all finding it immensely tough, we’re all alone, none of us is really happy, but we’re all committed in some way to experiencing what there is here. She sat at one end of the room and I at another, both of us revising translations, and it was nice to have the company. While she was there Tanya Ilina rang. The Journal of Humanitarian Sciences was putting in its office’s order for food and did I want to be included? Another spontaneous kindness. I explained about my food box from London and said no.
Lunch with the new Portuguese Ambassador. The embassy is on an unprepossessing industrial street, but is a very open, low building with lilac trees in the garden. I could see the ambassador in the picture window, reading his paper, waiting for me. He’s been at the UN in New York and Geneva, and also spent three years in China. Only two of them work at the embassy and he covers Mongolia too. We were waited on by a Soviet maid who seemed to make him cringe. He doesn’t have Russian, and so isn’t into the fascinating minutiae like the man at the Norwegian Embassy, but also perhaps it is a generational thing. He looked at things in broad sweeps, which I wasn’t so able to do. He says Amnesty is a “giant” at the UN. Ninety per cent of the 1503 submissions come from us. I do feel a flush of pride when I hear things like that.
From there to the Shevardnadze Foreign Policy Association, clutching my letter and the lists of all the documents we put out in 1990. It’s in a former embassy building on a side street and, rather refreshingly, has no furniture. So even they are experiencing premises problems. An electrician was sitting on the floor outside the office where the Executive Secretary, Sorokin, received me. He’s young and slim with short, brylcreemed hair, like a London advert. He was also informal and pretty clued up. He’d heard about our plans to set up an office all last year and in principle wants both our organisations to stay in contact. I hope somehow it will help us with our registration. He was explaining the Russian phrase “a wedding General” to me, and said, “Say you and I were getting married…”. Most people would die rather than use an example like that.
I went out again at 6.00pm to meet Ruslan and his friend Andrey. After talking, Ruslan took us to a place he knows, where we drank a bottle of champagne. It was a bare room above a shop, with pools of rain on the floor, building rubble in the corner, a table at forty-five degrees, and stinking of toilets and mice. However, we could look out of a big window onto the ring road and Andrey said, “Cross your heart – what use do you think AI can be here?” So I told him, and some of my arguments seemed to make sense to him, though not others. It was good practice. They walked me to the Pushkin monument and Andrey, to my surprise, thanked me for the company.
When I got home I waited till midnight to get a free line to Kiev to ring about these blasted train tickets.
Thursday 16 May
Another early morning visit from Nikolay. His mother, the good soul, has agreed to take the tickets to the Drohobych train. Nikolay was in a daft mood, constantly contradicting himself then agreeing with me. I said, “Are you a Yes Man?” and he said “yes”. Then I went to the Stolitsa journal to do an interview, which went fairly well. I managed to bring in one of our thirtieth anniversary appeal cases from Vietnam and also to counter Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of AI.
I travelled to the other end of town to post the mail – that trip is a real drag – then came back to revise rather a poor translation of one of the speeches to the Eighth UN Crime Congress. Funny how hard and time-consuming it is to rework a poor translation. At about 8.00pm Nikolay’s friend Kostya came with his article on Amnesty, which will go to Moscow newspapers then get syndicated to Arkhangelsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Baku and elsewhere. I realise he and Nikolay have put in lots of work reading and translating Amnesty publications, and what they’ve come up with is very fresh and balanced and interesting. My bits in it are the worst. Somehow there seems to be a bit more hope in the work. I also got a phone call from Denjoe in Dubno, saying there’s a lot of interest there, and would I come and address a meeting.