I was met by Denjoe and his Kazakh friend, Arsen, and we had a pleasant afternoon in the sunshine before the evening’s talk. There were ten people in the audience, from Bulgaria, Romania, Peru, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the RSFSR and Eire. I don’t know how adequate my talk was, but I realised I did the whole forty minutes and the question time in Russian without any sense of strain, so maybe I am making progress.
We all retired to Arsen’s room for a spontaneous party that I left at its height at 2.00am, when they were playing guitars and singing. The ten did not know each other before and I felt a sudden wrench at leaving Amnesty. I realised I will miss the kind of closeness that it can produce in like-minded strangers. I sat looking out at the Volga with the woman from Mongolia, listening to Suzanne Vega in the background and a nightingale outside the window. We were joined by Anca, who told us about pre-revolutionary Romania. They had everything except food and heating, she said. She had icicles hanging from her radiator and used to do her cooking at 1.00am when the gas was higher. However, she reckoned that the general economic situation had been better in Romania than here.
We ate a salad made of lime leaves Denjoe had picked from the tree.
Thursday 30 May
I had an interesting travelling companion on the way home: a middle-aged woman who heads a research information centre on agriculture. We were both very tired and did a lot of sleeping, her with a bad back and me with a stiff neck. She reckons peasant farmers can’t pull the USSR out of its food crisis and that state farms are needed for some time yet. She had the kind of authority Professsor Kelina exudes, so I wasn’t surprised to learn she is the head of her outfit. She also had a discreet, and I thought probably informed, interest in Amnesty. She had noticed Denjoe’s badge, and asked non-intrusive questions about our information office. She saved me from a drunk who was trying to resell my train ticket, then invited me to visit her in Vladimir. I said all I knew about Vladimir was that it had ancient churches and a famous prison. She smiled quite receptively at that.
I dashed for a meeting with Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary at the Human Rights Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had the ease about Amnesty which Soviet diplomats at the UN have, but which they largely lack here in Moscow. With some, but not too much, exaggerated familiarity he was basically asking for Amnesty materials to help them define their position on Kuwait, Cuba, China and administrative detention. We touched on Amnesty’s registration and he said there was a gap in the law because there weren’t many representatives of international non-governmental organisations here. “In fact, you’re the only one,” he said, and laughed.
From there I tottered off to the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to get their latest plans for holding parallel activities during the September Human Rights Conference in Moscow. The outside of their building is tremendously baroque and reminded me of my fridge when it needs to defrost. The inside was like Gormenghast Hall, except for Lenin twinkling down from the carpet hanging on the wall. Their preparations seem to be very few.
Realised at 6.00pm I had neither eaten nor been to the toilet all day. When anyone here starts to say, “Marjorie, we’re both women…”, I know they’re going to ask me how old I am. Then they ask if I have children, or if I’m married (in that order).
Friday 31 May
In my Russian lesson Misha told me how he’d collected idioms in Arkhangelsk in the far north as a student. He’d stayed with a peasant woman who slept above the stove. He’d slept on a cupboard where she kept the goats and he said the noise was deafening. After our lesson he took me to see an exhibition by Aleksey Svitich, who died early this year. He really could paint and there were some lovely things there. His widow showed us round and was wrung with grief. It had quite an effect on both of us.
From there I popped into the Bureau of Technical Administration to pick up the promised ground plan of the office premises. Had to wait twenty minutes until the woman reappeared from her shopping trip, then she treated me to a display of gratuitous rudeness. “What are you sitting there like that for with that piece of paper in your hand?” “That file doesn’t exist.” “That property doesn’t exist.” Well, she picked the wrong one, baby. I got very coldly furious, insisted on seeing the boss, and told them Starovoytova and others are following the progress of our building application. Lo and behold, the file was found and the boss apologised to me. But they still hadn’t prepared the ground plan, so I have to go back at 12.00 on Monday. They behave like you are wasting their time, but the only time they are wasting is yours. I hate acting like this, but I hate being treated like a piece of shit even more.
My spirits revived when I met Oleg Gorshenin and his friend Igor for a pizza. We had champagne and Igor asked to join Amnesty. I came home at 9.00pm and worked till 1.00am, just handling mail and writing up the week’s meetings for people in London.
I realise I am getting some real friends here I can relax with: Oleg and Natalya for two, and also Misha, who was concerned that I’ve lost weight and look tired. He’d been waiting with some excitement for the Moskovsky Komsomolets article to come out, and said this morning that Radio Liberty carried a piece about our information office.
Apparently someone has thrown paint over the memorial plaque to Sakharov on Chkalov Street. The newspaper kiosk down the road has had a big picture of him in the window for two weeks.
Saturday 1 June
It’s 10.00pm and I’m already in bed. There was a scene in the milk shop today. A customer thought someone had pinched her butter. From her face I don’t think she was lying. The shop assistant thought she was being accused and worked herself into a state, crossing herself and throwing her cloth around. The man who delivers the milk was standing in the doorway, killing himself laughing.
After a month of hot, thundery weather, there was a heavy, cold downpour all day. I couldn’t strain my cheese on the balcony so fixed a nail above the kitchen sink. A friend from Washington dropped by for a three-hour chat and I learned more from her about what is happening in the USSR than I’ve read or heard in Moscow.
I did May’s accounts.
Sunday 2 June
Valya gave Tolya and me a lovely lunch of okroshka soup and meat she had bought from her hairdresser’s (?). As we were all feeling celebratory we finished with cognac and waffles. They were commenting with some irony on the militant patriotism of the US people they meet, something I’ve noticed too – even among US Communists. Valya got onto the well-worn subject of how uncultured Soviet leaders always are. She said that during Gorbachev’s honeymoon period with the West, he’d ended a press conference in Vienna with the Russian equivalent of: “Last question please, I must rest my plates of meat.”
I seem to be going through a period of heightened awareness, because I was almost in an ecstasy back at home, looking at the sunlight on my bunch of lilacs and listening to Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I used to hear it as an allegory of a tragic life, but now I just hear it as extraordinarily beautiful sound. I think I also hear the sense she had of what she was playing, and how beautifully she judges it. The orchestra just seems to fall in behind her. You wouldn’t immediately think it was someone in her twenties playing.
The Quakers were good tonight, with a Tolstoyan from Latvia visiting. Sasha said his grandmother had met Tolstoy when she was a child and had written a book about it – she was a child author. Apparently Tolstoy had a collapsible walking stick and was very good at enchanting children with it.