Friday 6 March
I’ve just had Andrey round for dinner. With a face deadpan with embarrassment he brought me a present for Women’s Day. He said when he first started practising “mindfulness” he almost fell under a bus. He’s an immensely attractive man.
The cost of mailing stuff to London has gone up to 900 roubles (!) from 30 last January. Othmar and I were hard pushed to assemble the cash. In the afternoon I visited the Trans-National Radical Party to share Amnesty’s material on the death penalty. Although they have a pleasantly anarchic philosophy, they are also down to business and I like talking to them. I also got an appointment with the Electricity Board to survey our office.
Saturday 7 March
Irina and I continued our tour of Moscow graveyards. Today we walked down to Novodevichy monastery. Although it was only zero degrees and there was no wind, it was deadly cold for some reason. A chill seemed to rise up between the graves. There were nice modest graves for Chekhov and Bulgakov and then as you approach the 1970s section, there are more and more giant heads of nobodies on big pillars. Ex-President Gromyko is lying next to ex-Chief Ideologist Suslov. How ghastly to be buried together. They probably hated each other in real life.
We then went on a search for bread for me, stopping en route in a grocery store on Kropotkin Street, which had a nice display of fish, cheese, jams, booze, butter and meat. Even though the prices are stupendous, there is definitely more around, and it is a relief to the eye.
Irina came back for soup and beer, and we listened to my Philip Glass tape: minimalist electronic music called Life Out of Balance. When you listen to that and look at Yury Gagarin’s statue outside the window, like some insistent silver boy, it seems a perfect match.
After she left I caught up with Izvestiya. Shevardnadze has gone back to Georgia and Mutalibov has resigned in Azerbaidzhan. The situation seems wide open in both countries.
Sunday 8 March: Women’s Day
Today is also Forgiveness Sunday in the Russian Orthodox Calendar and the day before the Lenten fast begins, so it was pancakes, pancakes all the way.
I took my vacuum cleaner to give to Misha’s wife, and we had a fine time with wine over lunch. She told me that the father of Yegor Gaidar, the Finance Minister, was a national hero in the Second World War, and at school they used to sing a song about him called ‘Gaidar in the Frontline’! Now people are sending in ironic letters to the radio about the young Gaidar and his economic reforms, saying he should be in the frontline too.
The Quaker meeting was very fine today. Afterwards I talked with Marina, who’s a psychologist devising recommendations for reconciliation in ethnic conflicts. The trouble is, they have no one to send their recommendations to. I told her how I’d learned that losing my temper seems to work in office here, but I don’t know how to square it with other things I believe in. She said, “You have to shout, because it’s the only thing they understand”, and then we both laughed, because she doesn’t know how to square it either.
Felt surrounded by great warmth and affection. Misha Roshchin had brought me an inscribed book; Sergey the electrician had brought me a tulip and a book. I was kissed by the elder in the Russian Orthodox Church who handles the key.
Monday 9 March
I’ve three weeks left and in that time I have to pack and ship my things; do interviews with Izvestiya, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Sovetskaya Justitsiya; and tie up the rent agreement for the office. Hit the road with renewed energy.
The electricity inspectors were round at the office in the early morning. It turns out that the Moscow Electricity Board has no meters (!) and so we have to find and install our own. Tolya is working on getting us a phone, and said that to get it quickly we need to give the secretaries a “present”. I went to a hard currency shop and bought a big tin of foreign biscuits. We also need to chivvy up the Health and Safety people, and I actually contemplated giving the inspector the flowers I had bought – but decided against starting on this path. However, when I saw her sitting in her bleak room, I offered her a carnation to cheer it up and we exchanged a complicated sort of look. I then went back to the Bureau of Technical Administration to pick up our replacement ground plan for the office. They hadn’t done it – but something seems to have changed there. The doors are open, people are busy and they were full of pleasant apologies for keeping me waiting.
A funny thing today: I popped back into the flat at midday, picked up the phone, and the mouthpiece reeked of vodka. First time I’ve noticed anything strange in the new flat. I wonder who, and when. When I picked up Amnesty’s letters from the PO box, several were torn open and one arrived closed, but empty.
Tuesday 10 March
This was a bit of an endurance test. The morning went on paying bills to the Electricity Board and telephone station, then doing the ninety-minute-round hike to the photocopying shop. In the afternoon the Armenian Embassy called me in to give me their death penalty statistics, and I went on the search for my train ticket home to the UK. I had three false starts, then eventually found a bureau that would sell tickets to a foreigner with a credit card, travelling on their own, across the border. It’s on Petrovka Street. It was a two-hour wait in the queue, and I listened to two women behind me discussing how they were travelling to “capitalist countries”. I asked them what they called a “capitalist country” nowadays. One of them looked at our empty service desk and said bitterly, “Capitalist countries are where they sell tickets.”
After she saw my visa and that it was issued by the Foreign Ministry, the ticket woman became immensely ingratiating and almost flirtatious. It was quite nauseating while she was flicking away Russian customers at the same time.
In the evening I wound up at Tolya’s for another exchange of bills and papers. By this time it was 9.00pm. I wondered which woman would be with him this evening, but he was alone and thoroughly enjoying the space and solitude of his empty flat.
Wednesday 11 March
This was one of those days that went on castors and totally lifted my spirits. The six boxes arrived from Customs! Only five months late.
Two editors from a law journal in Yaroslavl outside Moscow rolled up unexpectedly, with proposals for cooperation with Amnesty. He was a people’s deputy for his region and she had taught law to one of the judges on the Russian Constitutional Court. They were very middle of the road, but for that reason very interesting. They think repression is on the increase in Yaroslavl and fear their paper will be shut. They described the coup as a “fight between clans” and said it had nothing to do with Yaroslavl. They were simply forced without a moment’s notice to take sides. Words like democracy, “right” and “left”, have no relevance to today’s situation, according to them. I see what they mean.
In the afternoon I managed to change £100; pay more bills; collect a decree from Nikita at the Moscow City Justice Department; and – most amazing of all – get an estimate of the utility charges our office will have to pay from a pleasant woman economist at the REU office.
Zaure is visiting Moscow from Alma-Ata, and I spent the evening with her at her friends’ house. We had a splendid dinner, then Zaure read our fortunes in our coffee cups, using the opportunity to say what she really thought of us. One of the women fared rather badly. Zaure said to me, “The easy part of your life is behind you.” Blimey.
I enjoy these easy and daft Russian evenings. Zaure is a bit of a riddle. She has the easy and constructive manner of some intelligent women who did quite well in the Party, and she’s also got their puritanism and idealism. She has apparently pushed her sister into becoming a broker in the commodity exchange, which is in Alma-Ata’s old Palace of National Economic Achievements. When she said this a delightful, ironic and enigmatic expression passed over her face. I would love to know what she was thinking at that point.