Tremendous sense of relief when I got home by 6.00pm with nothing pressing to do for 1.5 days. Actually managed to fix a lamp and wrote letters home. Soviet cosmonauts can see the fighting in the Gulf – fires and smoke.
Sunday 3 February
Slept twelve hours then luxuriated, washing the kitchen walls and listening to a programme of Mongolian throat singing. Quite haunting. Dr Yury Savenko came round in the afternoon and we talked about his Independent Psychiatric Association, then in the evening I went to a Quaker meeting at Tatyana Pavlova’s. She, like Savenko, anticipates ten years’ totalitarianism, but she does not think there will be civil war. She thinks the army is too strong and united. I wonder. We had a very good Quaker meeting, and both of us ministered in Russian. As she walked me to the metro, she rhapsodised about the weather in February, the promise of spring etc.
Monday 4 February
I could see what she meant today. The air was lighter, the sun brighter, and I could hear birds on the rooftops.
I trekked to the Warsaw Highway again with a courier for London, and thought I would buy food on the way back. No go, Joe. The Danilov Market was closed for cleaning, the fish shop was shut and there was no milk in the milk shop. So I came home with half a kilo of cranberries. I made rather a weird soup from my remnants, then carted the computer to the SOVAM computer firm to discuss setting up an electronic mail link. The guy was nice to me, but shouted at four other people who came in. On my way home I spotted a cabbage in the local shop, darted in, and snaffled it up. Found the landlord waiting for me, wanting to talk.
He is getting edgy about having an AI person as his tenant. He told me a bit about his past: when he was working abroad as an interpreter his wife had a breakdown and had to spend time in a psychiatric hospital. The Foreign Ministry then broke the contract because he and his wife had “spoiled the psychological climate of the collective”. “You may not know what that is, but I do,” he said bitterly, his face twisting all over the place.
He then spent over an hour trying to unscrew the two nuts on my toilet seat and eventually succeeded. He is very thorough and hardworking; his translation for us was the same. After talking non-stop for three hours and predicting catastrophe and floods of refugees, he turned on his heel abruptly and said goodbye.
The Sakharov Committee rang at 11.30pm, just making contact about the commemoration they are staging in May.
Tuesday 5 February
Probably about -12 degrees today, but it felt mild and springlike.
The PO box is becoming a bit of a hostage to fate as there is no rhyme or reason to when the post office opens or shuts. Today they locked it in front of another woman and me, then heaped abuse at us through the glass. I somehow found it immensely depressing. On top of that I lugged my laundry to the shop, to find it had been closed “for technical reasons” since 5 January. I’ve also been ringing the Foreign Ministry since Friday but getting the run around. Got very fed up and went to the Pushkin Art Gallery in the afternoon to see the Bernard Buffet exhibition. Pictures of Paris with translucent skies. There are also a few nice Matisses there; when I looked closely I was very struck by what he had painted out.
Went to bed very early with a cracking headache and feeling exhausted. It seemed a very long day today. I spoke to no one and had my first lonely pangs.
Twenty-six army lorries passed me on my way back from the market.
Wednesday 6 February
My ears seem to have unstopped, my brain has switched to Russian, and I was listening to the radio and whizzing through Izvestiya with ease. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so tired. Today Sokolenko at the Foreign Ministry was apologetic and said he was still “waiting for an answer” about my specific rights here. He also asked if I’d just been to the Baltic – although I can’t imagine how he thinks I would have got there without any documents from him.
Enjoyed myself in the afternoon drafting letters for a mailing list. Thought I’d go and see Clark Gable in It Happened One Night at The Illusion. But it didn’t happen that night, and I got a mouthful from the ticket seller, because I hadn’t understood the programme correctly. So, watched Waterloo Bridge instead, a 1950s film about London in the First World War, with London shrouded in fog. The place was packed and all the men and women round me were weeping by the end. I love going to the cinema here because the audience is so attentive. Good night out for 7p.
Thursday 7 February
Still no progress with my accreditation at the Foreign Ministry. More Izvestiya reading in the morning. They say Margaret Thatcher will not stand again for Finchley. The courier I expected from London didn’t arrive, so eventually I popped out and discovered a funny local shop with motorbike parts and lace shawls hanging on the walls, and jars of stewed fruit on the shelves. Bought stewed grapes for a friend from the UK, who is in bed with bronchitis.
Another scene at the post office today. This time I was joined by a young man who went demented and almost battered the door down, so they let us in.
The IRA fired mortars at No. 10 today.
Friday 8 February
I had thought I would devote this week to fixing the computer and getting my papers from the Foreign Ministry, but there’s precious little to show for it. Also, the courier from London has still not arrived, so I couldn’t mail our newsletter, or give out the UN materials on the death penalty for translation. On the other hand, I’ve had good food, my Russian has improved, and I’m working out a bit of a routine.
I’ve been feeling out of touch with no TV this week, so thought on Monday I’d explore the possibility of getting a small new one from a hard-currency shop – over 1,000 hard roubles (i.e. over £1,000)! So I decided I’d try to get a new tube for the big old set in my room. Went to the local TV repair shop, where the woman shouted at me, twice, that they only repair radios. Today I made the trek down to another TV repair shop, past Tula station. I was taken to the back room to meet Oleg Fyodorovich, an exhausted-looking man in a brown overall, sitting in an office lined with books on Lenin and Soviet labour legislation. He promised me a tube for 238 roubles, but I didn’t have enough money with me. Almost everyone I have visited has a large, but defunct, TV. Apparently the tubes began to give out round about the same time.
I went to the Rossiya Hotel to change more money, then thought I would try getting dinner. Walked into the spacious, empty restaurant, and the woman said they were fully booked. Bit of an argy-bargy then I left.
I have been thinking about how I will have to let these constant refusals and defeats just wash over me, without letting them affect my basic drive. It occurs to me that this is what Soviets must be doing all their lives. So it is not easy to know how defeatist, or otherwise, people are being. At the beginning of the week the people I spoke to seemed very defeatist, but who knows?
Visited a friend in her British Council flat in the morning. Comfortable even by London standards.
Saturday 9 February
I passed four nicely dressed people in the street, huddled round a corner, tearing up raw steak.
Amused to see a poster outside the Maly Theatre for an actress celebrating her seventieth birthday and fifty years on the stage. She was starring in The Living Corpse.