Afterwards I said my goodbyes to Natalya Vysotskaya, sitting on a bench in a park. She is totally burned out. We realised all our conversation is about rapists, murderers, arsonists etc. we know in common, and it made us quite giggly.
Tuesday 24 March
Since laundry prices were freed, the laundries have apparently stopped doing their “express” (i.e. five-day) service. I eventually tracked down a laundry, handed the stuff over, then found out it will only be ready on 8 April, when I’m already in London. Took it all back and had to cart it with me to lunch at the Café Orient with a visitor from the human rights group, Helsinki Watch. It was the first time I’d met her and privately I was waiting for the moment when, like other US visitors over here, she would tell me how much she loves her own country. However, it turns out she is strongly against the death penalty and said of the USA: “Talk about arrogance and complacency!”
In the evening I returned bedding to Yelena and her mother. They each staggered to the front door, looking the worse for wear, and I discovered they had an exhausting stranger visiting them: an ex-prisoner who recited Valentin Zek’s poetry at the drop of a hat. We were all inventing pretexts to call each other out of the room and get a break from him.
Wilhelm Fast from Tomsk was also visiting them. He’d been at the Congress of Soviet Germans, which is getting increasingly militant about Yeltsin’s treatment of them. Wilhelm will also be going to the Congress for an Independent Siberia. They want to own all their own resources and ban foreign investment. Although I could understand their wish for autonomy I didn’t understand the economic thinking, and when I asked him about it he didn’t seem to either. It was like some eighteenth-century idea of a static “common weal”, based on land.
By contrast, today I passed a row of old ladies in the metro, who were selling the Financial Gazette and Guides to Taxation. When I picked up my mail from the old flat I also overheard the landlord negotiating a lorryload of Belgian goods from St Petersburg docks. All changed days since last year. It’s changed so much, you feel there’s either some strong mercantile instinct getting its head, or that it’s totally superficial and can be swept away at a stroke.
Trade has fallen so dramatically for my old laundry since the price rises that its two departments have been knocked into one and half the premises are now for rent.
Wednesday 25 March
I went out early to visit the Russian Supreme Court, which was hearing the Krasnodar death penalty case on appeal in open session. A woman in a blue cardigan unlocked the courtroom and shouted at the defence lawyers, “Are you just having a get-together, or are you here for the trial?” This was the prosecutor.
It was a fascinating trial to watch, though I’ve read about them a thousand times. One judge read a book and periodically looked out of the window. The Chair of the Bench interrupted the defence, the prosecutor interrupted the chair, and also insisted on having first look at any papers the defence intended to hand to the bench. At one point the chair literally exchanged looks with the prosecutor and rolled her eyes heavenwards. Presumption of innocence rules OK.
When the judges retired to deliberate, a bitter squabble broke out between the prosecution and the defence, at quite a personal level. The prosecutor said she was happy to hear a defence speech, as long as it didn’t “distort the truth”. She also said that anyway, if there had been a jury, they would have voted for a death sentence in the case too. That’s a point: why was there no jury at the first trial? The judges upheld the death sentence. That’s probably how people are condemned to death the world over.
Anna Bochko and Viktor came round for a joint English lesson in the evening and were marvellously funny in acting out scenes together. We had cake and cognac, and laughed a lot. It was goodbye.
I did my big Izvestiya interview this afternoon.
Thursday 26 March
I ate four meals in rapid succession today. Nina Petrovna invited me to breakfast to say goodbye. She told me how she’d been beaten up in her fifties, she reckons by the KGB. As she left her institute in the evening a young man reeking of vodka came up and started chatting, then beat her up in cold blood, breaking her nose and jaw. You must need to get drunk to beat up an elderly lady without provocation. She kissed me goodbye.
Straight after lunch at the Soros Foundation, I had another meal with the defence lawyer from Krasnodar, now wanting to help Amnesty in any lawyers’ actions we do. Really, these personal contacts bear some of the best fruit.
Dashed home just in time to prepare a meal for Irina, come straight from work, and then we went to a wonderful concert of Metner, Rachmaninov and Scriabin, played by the Tchaikovsky Prize runner-up, Vladimir Ovchinnikov. It was nervy and brilliant and for that reason I found it terribly Russian. Irina found it very Russian too and I asked why. She thought, then said, “Because it is inconclusive sound.” She was tired and unhappy, I think. She says she feels there’s less and less oxygen to breathe. We walked home sharing an umbrella in the rain. She says she won’t see me off when I go.
Friday 27 March
What a day. I worked at home and had a stream of people delivering and collecting papers and documents by the hour. Father Nikon came round in the early evening. It’s funny, whenever he is on a high, he starts talking about marketing his hair-removing preparation.
Saturday 28 March
Today I had to move my filing cabinet and twelve more boxes from the flat to the office. Siffra nicely came round with her car and we sweated up and down the stairs. When we got to the office Tolya arrived to help us with the carrying, and to put up shelves.
Viktor had said he would collect my armchair today. When I got home a Dickensian man in black Homburg and long black coat was hovering round my door. He produced his card from his waistcoat, and offered to help me in any way possible. It turned out he owns warehouses and two docks, and is the head of vegetable and fruit distribution in Moscow. Would that I had known earlier! Though why he was collecting my chair for Viktor is a mystery.
I went to Irina and her mother’s for dinner, and then Irina and I had an evening’s jazz at the Paveletsky Cinema: Keith Jarrett and Wynton Marsalis. I’m resisting any morbid goodbyes with Irina and her mum.
Sunday 29 March
Some Lithuanians are asking for help for the relatives of the people killed in Vilnius in January 1991. I went to collect their list of names, and then had a late breakfast with Elena and her family, and we reminisced about how we met in 1989. They gave me a beautiful wooden Siberian honey pot, and want to see me off at the station.
I checked over my Izvestiya interview in the afternoon with Valery Rudnev and said goodbye to the Quakers. Irina and I met to look round Tolstoy’s museum-house. Rather a gloomy old hole.
Monday 30 March
John Crowfoot took me up to meet Semyon Vilensky, the man who compiled the prison memoirs which I will be helping to translate. He told me what my author was like as a person and I got very enthused by the whole project. My woman was the most realistic and most reserved of the group, apparently, and wrote her own memoir only because she disapproved of the sentimentalised memoirs of her friends.
I spent the afternoon at home packing and receiving a stream of visitors, who were literally passing in the hallway. I finished my last bit of computing, then struck north to Hella and Siffra for dinner and to say goodbye. At about 11.20pm I got round to Irina and her mother’s to deliver my computer and the office money for safekeeping, until my replacement arrives.