One of the US delegates invited me for a drink at the Rossiya bar and I apologised that I don’t have any hard currency. He said lightly that if he lived here he’d always carry some. It’s no reflection on the Sakharov Conference, which has been pretty good, but to me there increasingly seems to be a major problem about this blindness to wealth. If you were to have a conference about untouchables and exclude all Indians it would be more obvious, but this oblique discrimination is just as effective and few people seem to be bothered about it. I only have the smallest sense of what it’s like living here, but I feel most of these people have none. The pity of it is that so few Russians or Soviets seem to object. They’re not (yet) in a position to.
Real life impinged more today when Viktor crept into the session, looking pale and starved as usual. His mother’s legs seem to be paralysed and she can’t get out of bed. When he got up to leave I touched his arms saying goodbye and he looked at me with real gratitude. At the end of the row he very embarrassedly blew me a kiss. At night Nikolay came round, on the eve of his first trip abroad – to an Amnesty meeting in Hungary. We sat drinking whisky and I deciphered the words of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s a Sin’ for him. I lent him my camera for his trip, but he was reluctant to take it because he wasn’t sure he would be able to use it, never having had one before. In the morning the landlord had been round, preparing to make the big experiment of putting money in a bank account for the first time. He didn’t want to put in too much, because he was afraid the government would not let him have it back on some pretext or other. Quite a realistic fear here, I think.
The highlight of the last few days was definitely the memorial concert on Sakharov’s birthday, at the Conservatoire: Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and the Virtuosi of Moscow. It had me in tears at many points. They ended with the ‘Lacrymosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem. The audience sitting at the back of the stage turned out to be a choir. They began singing sitting down, then slowly rose to their feet as they reached the first crescendo. I’d never seen anything like it and it was immensely moving.
Yelena Bonner said some unusual things for a maîtresse d’. In her opening speech she said, “Very few of you shared the thoughts and ideas of Sakharov; even fewer of you were his friends; the most you can say is that you were alive at the same time that he was in history.” Absolutely true. When the Dutch Academy of Sciences gave her a medal for Sakharov she said, “This is a lesson in doing things on time. You were late in inscribing it and now you have to give it to me and not him.” She is largely driven by “zlost” and anger it seems, but I think she has earned the right to say all these things. She must be sickened by human nature as displayed over the decades to Sakharov. When she and Rostropovich were together on stage it was like a family show, Gorbachev sitting unacknowledged throughout in the box nearest the stage. The whole evening was both solemn and informal, and matched the occasion perfectly. I wondered what a Hollywood version would have been like.
It was very nice to have Ian here, both because he was someone to compare impressions with and take decisions, but also because he is so quick on the uptake on the Soviet scene. On the human level too he came carrying a big heavy bag of presents from him and the London office, and he also seemed to be prepared to spend a lot of time with me, just talking.
A few weeks ago I looked at the Old Testament to reread the story about Samuel, but I found the stories so good I’ve carried on reading, and am now up to Nehemiah, reading things I’ve never looked at before. The stories are all set in a political context, and people’s bad sides only seem to make them come a cropper when they pretend to be better than they are. People’s psychological motivation is very modern and very clear. What has kept me reading is that almost every day the story has fitted what I am doing. Just as I am contemplating the renovation work we need in the office, Ezra and Nehemiah are considering the repairs of Old Jerusalem and economic inequalities are giving Nehemiah pause for thought. A local human rights wallah has also just appeared on the scene as Sallambat, Tobiah and Geshem the Arab, disparaging the building efforts. No Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises to contend with yet.
Friday 24 May
Today I ground to a halt. Stayed in bed till 10.30am then had a blissful day at home. I prepared letters on the premises, and basically tidied up loose ends before the big leap forward into new waters/bogs in June.
I took the laundry in – something I’ve been trying to do for four weeks – and on the way home found the local cake shop was selling chickens, so I bought one. The local church has erected a scaffold on its grounds and installed a beautiful big bell. I could hear it tolling tonight and it was deep and peaceful.
Saturday 25 May
This was the last day of the Sakharov Conference. I bumped into Yelena Bonner’s daughter and asked how the fact-finding trip to Armenia was going. She said, “Mother’s written to Gorbachev again”, as though this was the most normal thing in the world, which for her it is. By the end of the day they had the official permission to do the trip.
I was very impressed by the conference. It was businesslike, as far as great discussions like that can be, and it came up with some half-sensible suggestions, particularly on legal procedural reform. When Baroness Cox was intoning the recommendations of our working group, some people from the audience silently went on stage and began holding up posters about their misfortunes. Yelena Bonner’s gentle son went to speak to them, but they didn’t move until Yelena Bonner marched onto the stage in a fury and shoved them off.
She later told the auditorium that they’d fought to get free access for all to the plenaries, but it wasn’t a demonstration and anyone who tried to disrupt the meeting would get thrown out. Very few people would have dared to say that, or if they dared, very few would have got away with it – but she has indeed earned the authority.
The day ended with a press conference in which successive Soviet journalists, official and unofficial, tried to imply Bonner had sold out or that the conference would not be following up seriously on prison reform etc. Most people on the platform were put on the defensive, until Bonner took the microphone and said, no, the conference would not be doing follow-up work. She had worked round the clock for eighteen months to put it on: “Now you do the follow-up work yourselves! You’re not three-year-old children. You’re all adults. There are 150 MPs here. Organise it yourselves!” My liking and admiration for her rose throughout the week. She’s not only honest, she’s smart. But I was struck again how harsh the Soviet press and public are.
Irina and her mother were there and I sat with them in the morning. Irina was talking about literature again and said when she was at university they were all taught that capitalism was going through a crisis and as they waited for the crash they watched it reflected in the literature. She gave a merry laugh. She said Mandelstam wrote so well as to be almost incomprehensible: “… and in our country if we don’t understand something, we kill it”.
I had an early night and watched the RSFSR Supreme Soviet discussing its draft law on a constitutional court. As there is not yet a multi-party system I don’t really understand the procedure they use, but the presidium seemed businesslike and the Congress was packed with people.
Sunday 26 May
It was a glorious day and I walked down to the riverside. It could have been Holland or provincial France on my strolclass="underline" cafés, people strolling clutching bunches of lilac. I sat with a fisherman, watching a festival on Red Square for Whitsuntide. Pleasure boats went by playing rock music. The fisherman told me you could catch huge fish at the riverbank and held out his hands. Here too. Someone had written “My heart beelongs you” in the dust on a lorry parked near us.