In the afternoon I mailed two lengthy letters and enclosures to Kazakhstan and Leningrad. Farewell dinner with Margaret, who goes back to the UK on Thursday. Disposed of the pig, but came back with sausage and a tin of ham.
Wednesday 20 February
So, the Foreign Ministry will not decide finally on my status until mid-March, i.e. this whole visit is a probationary period. It helps to know more clearly where I stand. A journalist rang to arrange an interview on doctors and human rights, and was cut off three times. She then asked me if it would be OK to do the interview in my flat, what with the phone being so funny. The phone does indeed seem ostentatiously bugged. I wonder if the flat is too.
A conscientious objector asked me to meet him and we spent an hour on a bench in the snow. Afterwards, I popped to Viktor’s to pick up some papers, but got embroiled in another long evening round the teapot, listening to people I’d never met before having flaming rows. I’ll have to adapt to a Russian sort of schedule, because I was dragging myself round all day, totally exhausted and wanting an early night, but in fact I was doing work of some sort from about 10.00am to 12.00pm.
Anyway, it was very fruitful at Viktor’s. He has positive suggestions for our premises and drafted letters for me to use with a range of officials. He got “Memorial”[1] a building and so is a great help to have on our side. He sits in the back room typing messages, because he says he can’t bear the fuss and noise in the front room. It occurred to me tonight that his mother is courting me with food, and always pushing us together. Viktor himself has a natural and lovely charm.
Thursday 21 February
Cherry pickers were out knocking long icicles off gutters, and squads were hacking impacted ice on the roads and pavements. It’s very efficient. I popped out early to take materials to the Stolitsa office and stayed an hour, chewing the fat. Apparently a film of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is in the making and a British crew is out shooting scenes of frozen London in Moscow. The rest of the day I worked at home with great pleasure, part of the time copying out Viktor’s draft letters in my best handwriting. It reminded me of school, and I made the same kinds of mistakes.
In the evening I made myself a vocabulary book. A backlog of letters arrived today, including a cobalt blue tile design from Turkey. The colour was beautiful, brilliant and warm. I opened it in the snow at the bus stop, and thought of heat and sun-baked roofs.
Friday 22 February
Hardly anyone slept last night, it seems. Bridget Kendall was on the BBC at 8.00am, commenting on the Iraqi reaction to Soviet peace proposals, which happened early in the morning. John Lloyd of the Financial Times then rang, too knackered to come round because he’d worked till 4.00am. I popped into town to collect Tanya’s translation of the Morocco piece. She staggered in half an hour later, having watched the RSFSR Parliament on TV till 3.00am. Conservative deputies have called for an extraordinary congress to recall Boris Yeltsin before the 17 March referendum on “national unity” takes place. They object to his TV speech on Wednesday, when he called on Gorbachev to resign. They’ve chosen their moment well. I think things could be over quite quickly here.
When I got home they’d stuck a red flag on the side of the house, preparing for tomorrow’s “Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Day”. It was so sunny today I went out without a hat. The streets are being cleaned and workmen are pushing snow off the roofs.
In the evening I went to the House of Literary Buffs to hear presentations on Vyacheslav Ivanov, with Viktor and a friend of his from Moscow City Soviet, Lena.
Lena left the Communist Youth Organisation in 1987, is clever and seems totally enthusiastic about what she is doing. She belongs to a small group of Utopian socialists, and she and her pals have had non-violent action training from Dutch Greens and keep order at mass demonstrations. (I saw them march on 30 October last year and they were good.) She reminded me of one of those politicised young people in early twentieth-century Russian novels, or the young Golda Meir. She and Viktor took me right home to the flat.
Vladimir Posner has an interesting talk show with young people. When he asked for a show of hands, all of them said they thought the Soviet media deliberately distorts nationality issues, and they each told him why, with concrete examples. Impressive.
Saturday 23 February
The landlord’s brother-in-law rang: the landlord has plans for my old TV tube and had told him to come round for it today. Ye gods! I said that would be difficult as I was going out. Stayed in and carried on with Burlatsky’s memoirs, interesting in many respects, but partly because they explain the names of many Moscow streets: Marshal Biryusov, solemnly catching carp on an official visit to Prague, killed in a plane crash months later; the twenty-six Baku Commissars – apparently Mikoyan was the twenty-seventh, who got away.
In the evening I saw Tosca at the Bolshoy. The set was good – like a Rococo cathedral – but the singing wasn’t up to much. Nina, the Russian with us, said people are paid to shout “Bravo!” from the audience, and at tonight’s performance I could believe it. Interesting insight from her as we went for our coats: “We can jump the queue, because we’ve got binoculars” – and indeed we could.
I watched the TV show for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Day. At home it would be a military tattoo followed by Reach for the Sky and Dad’s Army. Here it was hours of singing and dancing: a tipsy fellow in a greatcoat dancing as an archetypal sort of rascal; and a woman in army jacket, skirts and heavy boots, nevertheless spinning and dancing in folk patterns. It made the army seem like an ancient part of the whole culture, not a thing apart.
The pro-Yeltsin group in Parliament has apparently won out: they have postponed the extraordinary congress until 28 March, after the referendum. It’s hard to believe, but a land war has started in the Gulf.
Sunday 24 February
A most enjoyable day. Friends returned from the UK, bringing me plugs and soap. Then I walked along the boulevards from west to east, about five miles in all, through old Moscow.
Thence to Quake. Afterwards we were talking and I told them about the man who threatened me. Tatyana said a man had jumped out at her on a walk and tried to rape her. She had started talking to him furiously, and the odd thing was that throughout the whole scene she called him “ty” and he addressed her by the respectful “vy”. She eventually pushed him into a public place and the worst was over. He was shaken and said he’d like to smoke, and she said she would rather too, so they sat and talked. He was distraught to find she was the author of the book his mother had given him the day before. He insisted on walking her to the metro “so she’d be safe”. Weird.
There were new Quakes there tonight. I can quite understand how some people find Quakers make them sick. So well spoken. So bloody slow to chide. So bloody quick to bless.
The Daily Mail has finally caught up with Izvestiya and says Margaret Thatcher will stand down at the next election. As I read Izvestiya this morning I listened to my Spanish guitar music. It suddenly made me think of Mexico, and walking along the beach to the hotel; blue sea and black shapes of sharks in the pool. I sat thinking about it, staring at my Soviet wallpaper, with the snow gleaming in through the window.
1
A Russian historical and civil rights society (NGO) which focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Union’s totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in Russia and other post-Soviet states.