When I was scanning Izvestiya I found a piece by their Rio de Janeiro correspondent about the Brazilian Health Minister’s visit to Amnesty in London, which vindicates our report on abuses against children in Brazil. Curiouser and curiouser. You could hardly get more oblique than that.
Last night a fly seemed to spend most of the night on my face. I’ve now got cockroaches in the living room as well as in the kitchen and bathroom. It’s probably the weather.
Stolitsa uses paratroopers to staff the reception desk. Two strapping men sat and watched as two old women carted out stacks of the journals to a distribution van. It’s funny, whenever I see workers in motion here they’re women, and when they’re stationary they’re more often men.
Friday 17 May
There are so many cracks in my Academy of Sciences cup that the tea seeped out almost as fast as I drank it at breakfast.
Not a sparkling start to the day. Everyone was out, then the secretary at the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises put the phone down on me four times.
I went to my Russian class, which was interesting and helpful as usual. Misha’s wife is studying in Yugoslavia and he said he was a bit frightened by her last letter, because she was having such a terrific time and going on holiday in Greece with a new friend she’d made. He, meanwhile, was trying to prepare all the food for their teenage son’s birthday party tomorrow. He was trying in every way to remind her of them: sending their photo to await her in Greece, buying her a bag and planning to send her chocolates, but afraid they wouldn’t be good enough for her new company. He was also planning to turn up in Greece unexpectedly – always rather a disaster I’d have thought. When his son, Andrey, came back, he seemed rather frightened by me, and came out into the hall to ask us what we had been translating and where we were going. It must be very tough for them both.
I did an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, which has a circulation of 1.5 million. The journalist, Katerina Deyeva, invited me to speak to their anniversary meeting at the end of June, which has a huge audience. There must have been a more personal vibe between us, because I felt I was speaking gibberish.
As I was nearby, I popped in on the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises and amazingly came away with the Executive Committee Resolution and the key to the premises. Olga Ivanovna Lavrova looks so immensely strained and made a battery of phone calls, just because she knew my “President” is coming out here. Fortunately the same hierarchical strain doesn’t exist in Amnesty. Mind you, we also work a lot harder without it. Meanwhile, her secretaries sat by idly watching.
I decided not to go home before having dinner with two people from “Memorial”. I sat outside the Conservatoire listening to someone practising Brahms’ second Piano Concerto very well, until a thunderstorm broke and drenched me. Herzen Street turned into a river 9” deep, and so a whole chain of women pedestrians had to negotiate the 3’-high pipe that blocks the pavement. We all held each other’s bags and helped each other over, me in a short, tight skirt and high heels. I arrived at the dinner like a drowned rat. The “Memorial” people were two Americans who are helping to computerise the archive. They too have been finding it tough – they also arrived during the dreadful winter and the Gulf War.
A bomb went off in the headquarters of the Democratic Russia Party tonight.
Saturday 18 May
The Museum of the Revolution has an interesting exhibition of posters which I went to see this morning. Not only Red propaganda but White too, and sometimes they had literally used the same pictures but supplied opposing captions. The fact it wasn’t totally Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik made it very good. Some of the posters in 1918 were like posters in 1991: “X – the only hope of Russia’s Salvation!” or “Bolshevism = hunger and violence!”
At night I visited a neighbour, Tamara, who by the oddest coincidence is a close friend of Zaure in Kazakhstan. She’s head of a jazz faculty in Moscow, and blow me down, amidst everything else it seems jazz is going through a crisis too. It would be nice to hear about something that isn’t. Tamara and her daughter are planning to go to Israel, and her daughter treated me to a barrage of English that was intended to impress but felt like an aggressive assault. Her mother obviously thought so too and sent her to bed.
Tamara was immensely kind to me and has a lovely face, but in the course of the conversation got onto the subject of “blacks”, whom she doesn’t like, though she’s “not a racist”, according to her. Soviet racism really is a deep thing and will bring lots of trouble in the future. For me it feels like a yawning gap in front of me when I’m trying to get closer to people I like here.
In the afternoon I cleaned and tidied like mad for Ian’s visit – maybe some hierarchical strain after all. I also drafted a longer article for Moscow News. I am very tired and can’t remember when I last had a day off.
Wednesday 22 May
Ian has been and gone, and a lot has happened since I last wrote up this diary. We mainly pursued the premises and the vexed question of Amnesty’s legal status. On the Monday morning we met up with Natalya Vysotskaya and Valya Levina and went to look round the office space at Herzen Street 22/53. It was recently occupied by squatters and was full of rubbish and crap. It’s also in need of major repairs. But it has four rooms and a hall and is in a great place. Ian had the bright idea of talking to the neighbours, and Natalya used her charm to get us into what turned out to be a neat little computer firm next door. They said their place had been in even worse nick when they took it over (rent 12,000 roubles/year) and they gave us useful advice on firms to use for repairs. So, bucked up by that we decided to order a security door and set up shop.
We also had three meetings with Foreign Ministry Departments about our status. The Information Department told us they couldn’t register us as a press outfit. The Humanitarian Affairs Department was pretty clueless and said, “How would you like to be registered?” The best meeting was with Igor Yakovlev, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Legal Department. He made calls to the head of the Information Department, the head of the International Organisations Department and Deputy Minister Petrovsky, and undertook to devise some new status which would fit us and other international organisations. The meeting had its funny sides. We were escorted up by an apparition in chiffon and spangles, who seemed very friendly but a bit dippy. She left us outside the office door, which I couldn’t open. Ian gave it a shove and I fell into the room, creating the serious impression we strive for. Later Yakovlev went through his battery of five phones, trying to work out which one was ringing. It was a sort of Dick Van Dyke show brought to Moscow.
In the two days we also attended the Sakharov Conference, amongst many other things. I never thought I would be pleased to see the international human rights crowd, but I was, quite. It was like stepping into another life. The staff at the Rossiya Hotel had loosened the regime for the conference, so it wasn’t like crossing the border getting in. All a totally false impression. As word got round more Muscovites and ex-prisoners began to attend the sessions. When they heard that tomorrow’s session is to be in the Sovincenter though, they said they wouldn’t come because security was seven-deep, and they’d never be allowed through.