It was another day with precious little to eat. In the evening I went to Hella’s and made up for it. Other journalists were there and we talked about “the scene” until 2.00am. Although it’s been ghastly I’m quite glad I’ve had the experience of finding property and working through the system, because it is an education. I also have the advantage of knowing “ordinary Russians”, which foreign correspondents miss out on.
Friday 10 January
A great thaw and rather a steamy, rainy morning. By afternoon it was snowing and at night it was bloody freezing – so you were always in the wrong clothes at any particular time of the day.
I stayed over at Hella’s then came back and took our mail down to the International Post Office. Three hundred and sixty roubles obviously seems cheap by current prices, and there was a huge queue of Caucasians sending blankets and boxes to unspecified destinations for literally thousands of roubles. The money was all in fives and tens, and so the poor woman was counting it all by hand, losing her place and starting again. I was in the queue for over two hours. On the way home I shopped at the market and bought bread, some goat’s milk for 40 roubles, a chicken the size of a sparrow, and some honey.
Irina and I were supposed to be going to a Sibelius concert in the evening but, as keeps happening to us, it was cancelled. She came back here and we ate potatoes, cranberries, and relished goat’s milk in our coffee. She says she too is hungry, but can’t eat properly and some things she can no longer eat at all. It’s probably something you have to come out of gradually.
Sasha Lukin from the Quakers rang. The Peruvian Ambassador had just sent him a telegram inviting him to the embassy to discuss the Amnesty case he had written about. He was alarmed. We’ll go together.
Saturday 11 January
Took a complete break today. Had bread and butter with the Desperate Donnegans and they urged me to go to the police about my theft. Their grandma insisted on giving me three types of bread to take home with me.
I read Ilf and Petrov all afternoon for pleasure, then went round to the Teplitskys for dinner. Natasha’s so caught up in her translations that it’s like talking to someone who’s doing crosswords. One minute she’ll ask you if “framesaw” is the right word, then in the next sentence she’s off onto Database Information Management Systems. Her translator friend Olga was there, pulling out a scarf and reknitting it into socks, because there’s no wool. I said how the food situation is affecting my stomach and they said they’d just been saying the same thing. Natasha had made a cake out of macaroni.
While I was there someone rang from Yaroslavl to say butter that was 170 roubles yesterday is 230 today. There is no butter in Odessa, but there are potatoes at 35 roubles. They were 8 roubles here yesterday.
I’ve remembered two things from the evening at Hella’s. Yeltsin was on TV doing a tour in Ulyanovsk, and it was exactly like the early days of Gorbachev. I don’t see the honeymoon lasting so long, however. The other thing was a story about Ira Yakir, who is now working as an assistant in the Russian Parliament. She heard the name of one of Vice-President Rutskoy’s assistants, and turned cold. He was the one who interrogated her after her father, the dissenter Pyotr Yakir, was arrested in the 1960s, and almost provoked a miscarriage. She asked if she could see him, and it was he. She asked if he remembered her and he was thrown into confusion and said, “Who could forget Ira Yakir?” “So you do remember me?” she said, and he said, “No, I don’t know who you are and we’ve never met.” Death and the Maiden.
Sunday 12 January: Old “New Year”
The Quakers were very good again. Peter and Roswitha were falling over their Russian with fatigue and I felt for them. Russians are by and large very sympathetic and uncritical about your mistakes. They all listened patiently and then Valentina Konstantinova said quite sincerely what astonishing progress they’ve made in two months. On the bus home I asked if her feminist group has contact with the Libertarian Party, a radical lesbian group here. She said no, firmly. “So you have no common ground with them?” I asked. She said, “I think it’s impossible to be a vegetarian in this country.” She’d misheard me.
It was Old “New Year” and Irina and I went to a great midnight Prokofiev concert at the Pushkin Theatre, put on by young musicians. Another glimpse of culture reviving. Afterwards we took a walk through the backstreets in the dark and the snow and it all looked very beautiful, then Irina stayed over at my flat. She’d all but brought her own bedding, she was so anxious to be no trouble. She also gave me a tablecloth, some cheese and some ointment for my blotchy hands. I gave her some Lithuanian tampons I had come across. Present-giving is very nice here, like mutual grooming.
Monday 13 January
Desperately cold. I saw the Latvian Ambassador in the morning. I liked his attitude to me and he talked freely enough to give me a picture of the full scope of their preoccupations. On the way home I picked up copies of my article from the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences, and they put me on the list to receive a food parcel. I also delivered a request to the Foreign Ministry Consular Division for a multiple re-entry visa for people in the London office. The Consular Division has become the “Russian” Consular Division since the last time I was there, but it still has the same bad-tempered staff and now a seething crowd trying to get in. An official took my envelope and said, “We don’t like this, you know” and I said, “I don’t like it either”, in a quiet, but probably quite expressive, voice and for some reason this shut him up and he agreed to do it.
Viktor came round in the evening, the first time I’ve seen him alone for about eleven months. I gave him dinner of potatoes and tinned sprats, and he said it was the biggest blowout he’d had for ages. We have an unusual and valuable sort of relationship. Whatever the prevailing storms I always feel immense goodwill and respect from him, stemming from I’m not sure what. I asked his advice about my theft and he treated it in just the sort of imaginative way I was wanting someone to. How to catch out the thief. He now earns the equivalent of $2.50 a month as a research chemist, but hopes for a rise in February to bring it back up to $6.00. And he laughed.
Tuesday 21 January
Scenes from Russian life: I got paid for my article in the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences with two packets of macaroni, a tin of meat and some tea. The Desperate Donnegans said their father was paid two pints of milk for an art lecture. Must have been quite a good lecture to get two. Today I saw a very smartly dressed woman on the metro in a fur coat, fur hat and a string of toilet rolls round her neck.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday the temperature dropped to -24 degrees. The atmosphere feels empty when it gets so cold, as though all the warmth has been sucked out of the earth and you’re walking round in some giant, sterile refrigerator.
I’m in the middle of an intensely busy, but interesting, two weeks. I’ve got to move the office stuff to Herzen Street, move house, and then there are a lot of meetings.
On Tuesday I went to see the Representative of Tajikistan and then talked my way into the first session of the Russian Constitutional Court. They were discussing Yeltsin’s decree combining the KGB and police, and decided it was unconstitutional. It was terribly impressive, mainly because the court was demanding respect and got it. If their ruling holds, it may be the first step towards a law-based state. I was struck by how young the main figures in Russian politics are today – hardly a grey hair to be seen. It made me think about the international Conference for Young Political Leaders that is apparently taking place round about now. All the real young leaders would be too busy to go.