Monday 3 June
The woman who drove me mad at the Bureau of Technical Administration was actually called Dementyeva. She wasn’t there today and the ground plan was waiting for me at 12.00, before the office formally opened. However, the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises has moved again since last Monday, and no one knew their address or had their new number.
It was that kind of a day. I was feeling a bit lousy, so spent the afternoon at home, catching up on Izvestiya. I see Vanessa Redgrave has been meeting the Deputy Foreign Minister about her orphans’ fund. Also Moscow Regional Soviet has opposed merging the region with Moscow city under a new mayor in the elections on 12 June. They warned Moscow not to “tempt the region with its lifestyle and the goods in its shops”. That must say volumes about the standard of living in Moscow Region.
There was a weird news programme from Alexander Nevzorov at night. He interviewed the rather wooden and ineffectual general, Makashov, who is standing as RSFSR President, and kept provoking him to promise he would use force to solve political problems. It was hard to tell if Nevzorov was making him look ridiculous or was really encouraging a hard line. He’d already broken news of the as-yet-incomplete USSR Procuracy investigation into the killings in Lithuania, exonerating Soviet soldiers, and said, “Who could have thought that our soldiers would have killed women and children?” Anyone in Tbilisi in 1989, I suppose. But this use of the word “ours” – which everyone, even the most unofficial people, use here – chills me. It’s like the country is sealed tight and outside there’s always “them”.
Tuesday 4 June
Today was the opening up of Irina. She came round to collect a translation and to let me read the draft article about medical workers her mother had written. They’d done a very good job, putting eloquent things into my mouth and even, thanks to Irina, a couplet from Andrey Voznessensky. Irina stayed for two hours and was very interesting and funny. She dropped out after graduating in 1983, when she saw no point in continuing with nineteenth-century Danish and English literature, particularly as she couldn’t go abroad and still hasn’t.
I tried to buy a bottle of cognac today. The booze shop looks like a cowshed and was packed with bodies jostling for their bottle. I couldn’t buy one in the end because I didn’t have an empty cognac bottle to give them. But how do you get hold of your first?
Misha invited me for an ice cream at 5.00pm. It was a super place in Oktyabrsky Square and we had bouillon with egg-filled rolls, bliny with fruit and nuts inside, and ice cream. We then came back here for whisky and on the spur of the moment went to see Fellini’s Juliette and the Spirits, which I liked a lot. At one point Misha recited the whole of Gumilyov’s poem, ‘The Sixth Sense’. This only happens with Russians in my experience. The voiceover spoiled the film for him because he can’t stop noticing misplaced stresses. Conversation with me must be a slow death for him.
Last night as I was lying in bed I could hear a mosquito approaching my head from different directions. It then went straight up my nose, which must have surprised it even more than me. The sound cut out and it made me laugh out loud.
Wednesday 5 June
A man wearing a hankie on his head, pyjamas and slippers walked into the milk shop today. People thought he’d come over from the hospital across the road.
Lunch at the Writers’ Union where the Russian-Soviet PEN Club has its office. It’s on Vorovsky Street, a very beautiful tree-lined street of old mansions. A man was sitting under the trees selling fruit juice from a full-sized fridge which he had fixed up on the pavement. The Writers’ Union is in the house Tolstoy described as the Rostov mansion in War and Peace. I was to meet PEN Club people and Marina Rumshinskaya, to receive materials on an imprisoned Turkmenian poet. Marina and I are on a wavelength, but the other two had no idea how to publicise or help a case, never having had pre-perestroyka experience. Maybe one virtue of the last few years is that new people are getting their first taste of this kind of lobbying, and of helping prisoners. We ate in the high-beamed dining room of the House of Literary Buffs and I noticed the prices were dirt cheap and that the two PEN Club people ate and drank with gusto. A trio of heavy men with T-shirts and ponytails came in – apparently they were from Brighton Beach. They were joined by three Soviets: thin, with dark glasses and long hair.
A quick call to the Shevardnadze Association to deliver our annual report, then home, to find that I couldn’t unlock the door. Eventually a neighbour helped me get in. Things are making me uneasy again. My phone is so bad I might as well open the window and shout out of it. Last night I only worked the lock with great difficulty and this morning the landlord reckoned it had been tampered with. He said he couldn’t rule out that “someone had slid inside”. The word sounded awfully sinister. He is still weighing up the risks of putting some money in the bank. They seem large and immensely complicated.
Thursday 6 June
A day of work that ended at 1.00am, and a mixed day it was too. I spent the morning psyching myself up for an interview with Moscow Radio, then spent the lunchtime in utter frustration, unable to track down the journalist at the massive TV/radio complex at Ostankino, and unable to phone through to him. Eventually called it a day.
At the other end of town I became the unlikely ally of Olga Ivanovna Lavrova and the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises, as they were invaded by two totally boorish and aggressive men while I was sitting there. I saw the stone faces and defence mechanisms come into good play as they beat them off and shut the door. Olga I. L. actually has a nice face – though her secretaries don’t – and looks on the point of a nervous collapse with that wretched job. For the first time they were quite helpful to me and I came away with all my documents complete, shaking the dust of the Fund for Non-Dwelling Premises off my feet forever, I hope.
A tremendous thunder, lightning and hail storm then broke, which I saw by the evening had uprooted great chunks of tarmac and cobblestones from the roads and pavements. The Quakers have been given a two-year visa with journalist status to set up an office in the USSR. I went to visit two British Quakers who are running a conflict-resolution workshop here, and spoke with an interesting Ossetian journalist who was doing the course.
Past 11.00pm someone rang from Georgia to say a political prisoner on hunger strike wants to meet the Amnesty representative in Moscow.
Friday 7 June
Today I met a fresh surly face at the Privatisation Commission, where I had to take our premises papers next. My day began at 7.30am with a visit from Nikolay, dropping off a letter for the London office. I was feeling lousy, with a sore throat, a temperature, and very tired. I realise my maternal instincts are very limited. Giving Nikolay breakfast again and having to read through his English essay, I was fighting resentment.
Then someone came round with a letter for me to translate from three gay men to a Dutch contact group. He said he had to be careful who he showed the letter to, and, here, I’m sure that is true. While he was here the sister of the Georgian prisoner rang, crying down the phone. She kept calling me Margaret Thatcher. The morning seemed surreal.
Had a disastrous afternoon trying to fax our news release on the UK to various Soviet newspapers. It was the kind of day when I should have rubbed myself out and started again. Dinner was at Mary Dejevsky’s and it was a very nice evening. On the one hand an archaeologist and the new Times leader writer were there – very Oxbridge and very “British” – and on the other hand, John Lloyd from the Financial Times and Sue Jameson from the Evening Standard, whose backgrounds I don’t know, but who seem more politicised and irreverent. We talked about Soviet racism.