The late-night newsreader ended the broadcast with a card trick! In the night a cockroach scurried over my face in bed.
Monday 25 November
I was tied to the house all day, waiting for a DHL courier who didn’t come. Andrey called, out of his sick bed, to say he’d seen me on TV in The Law and Us. He said the kitchen towel didn’t show. I’d been worried that there was a dirty kitchen towel hanging behind my head throughout.
Tolya came round straight from work, looking exhausted and twitching a lot. He says the only way he can make ends meet is to move out of his flat with his son, and let it to foreigners. He has nowhere to live though. I also spoke on the phone to Nikolay’s mum, who sounded very low and finds the current situation utterly depressing. Last thing at night, though, I spoke to Tanya the masseuse, who is over the moon that you can now privatise your apartment at a flat rate of 250 roubles. She said, “This is a huge step forward.” And so to bed.
Tuesday 26 November
I called Alexander Khlopyanov about extending my visa and he said, “A sacred task – it’ll be done immediately.” I have to say he’s a very good diplomat: whatever the prevailing winds, he conveys them with consistent smoothness.
I spent an odd morning at the Human Rights Division of the Foreign Ministry, where I had been invited by a young attaché who has applied for a job with Amnesty in London and wants to know if he will be called for interview. He was solicitous about our registration, but I did not totally play along and told him we found the USSR Foreign Ministry’s position rather difficult to understand.
His place was taken at the coffee table by Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary, also looking for new jobs, and wanting Amnesty’s help with a new non-governmental organisation he is setting up. He then asked me how they should go about registering it, which felt like pure mockery. I suppose he was trying to be very friendly when he started to “ty” me. I was thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit more respect. The coffee cups all had “Russia” on them, and I asked if they reflected the current situation. The woman serving the coffee suddenly laughed.
On the Arbat a middle-aged woman in woolly hat and old boots was playing the accordion and singing an old Communist song in a lovely contralto. It sounded very natural and unforced, and I gave her a lot of money.
Good Evening Moscow is a great current affairs programme. There was an item on some slums, where the woman reporter managed to be very funny but totally on the side of the slum dwellers. One woman’s flat had caught fire, but when she rang the housing department they said, “What’s it got to do with us? We didn’t set fire to it.” Some people had had no hot water for years. Others had had 18” of boiling water in their basement for over twenty years. The reporter ended with: “People complain when they’ve no hot water and they complain when they have hot water. Why are they not satisfied?” Programmes like that in the UK tend to be very pro forma and dull.
Natasha Teplitsky called, back from four days’ simultaneous translating at a political conference. She’s a very cynical translator and quite funny. It had been quite easy, she said, because it was just political speeches. “It would have been harder if people were saying what they really meant.”
There was a very strange news bulletin: “All was quiet in the city today except that a seventeen-year-old girl had a baby at the house of her parents and threw it out of the window.” End of bulletin.
Wednesday 27 November
The queue for visa photos was one-hour long, but just time for me to read Izvestiya through. Most of the developed photos were being put in the “foreign passports” tray, so a lot of people are travelling, or leaving, or maybe that size of photo just suits other needs. Afterwards I called into the office. The glass has now been put into the kitchen door and the place looked fantastic. I felt a real swell of pride.
Last night the TV gave a long blow to the opening night of The Russia House, put on by the Soviet-British Creative Association. I kept seeing Amnesty’s “ai” symbol on the souvenirs, invitations and pennants, and thought the UK Section of Amnesty had pulled off a brilliant advertising coup. Today I went to meet the association to see if there are more openings for us to advertise, but found that the symbol is theirs, faintly adapted from ours. A bugger!
The night news said someone had been beaten up and left for dead in Leningrad within sight of a meat queue. No one moved from the queue.
Thursday 28 November
I spent the morning at the Russian Parliament, speaking with Nikolay Vedernikov who has now shed his chair at the Clemency Commission and is in the Russian Constitutional Court – looking a lot better for it too. I put him in touch with criminologists abroad and he told me about the procedure in clemency cases.
I gave lunch to Othmar, my volunteer, then had a dispiriting afternoon trying to regularise my visa. Khlopyanov had not left the promised permission to extend it. At the photo shop I spent fully an hour rummaging through hundreds of photos, trying to find my prints. It was like a nightmare. The woman would come and dump new ones on the heap. Customers would take away random piles and sort through them. There was no way of knowing what you’d checked and what you hadn’t. I began to feel desperate and decided to have a new set taken. As it was my turn to sit in front of the camera, my prints miraculously appeared at the top of a pile, and I vamoosed.
Although it was such a tiny thing I felt almost ill with nervous tension when I got home and had to sit and calm myself. In the evening I had my first chat in a long time with Nina Petrovna, recovering from her infarkt. She’d spent the coup in the hospital, listening to Radio Liberty and arguing with different patients. When she had her infarkt the doctor gave her an injection and said it would make her head swim round. “Is it swimming?” he asked. “No, the cupboard is,” she replied. She’s a good, self-effacing woman. In the last two weeks she’s trained her cat to do the toilet actually in the toilet.
Friday 29 November
My visa expired today and neither Khlopyanov, Rumyantsev or Sokolenko were contactable at the USSR Foreign Ministry. I have no idea what this means, or how it will affect my trip to Kazakhstan next week.
My DHL delivery was full of more problems and my nerves immediately got ragged again. Maybe this is a combination of living here and not having proper holidays, but it worries me a bit. It is a reason for not carrying on too long.
There was a shout from the courtyard and Tanya the masseuse appeared in a long skirt, glitter on her face and black stovepipe hat. Not your average Soviet punter. She was locked out. She said she didn’t like the look of me and asked what was wrong. She’s got a very sure sense of people’s vibes, because I’d only just opened the door with what I thought was a welcoming smile on my face.
I’ve spent the week chasing our registration papers round like a puck on ice, and now they are with the Mayor of Moscow.