Last night I woke up and a full yellow moon was hanging right in the middle of the window, making the sky quite green. I woke again in the first light and there was a rosy glow on the buildings. It was a spectacular day: clear, bright and sunny. I was down in the dumps one way or another, but the beauty of old Moscow made me shake out of it. On my way home I looked at the Rembrandts in the Pushkin Museum.
Did my usual trip to the PO box and found a letter, my first. “Someone’s written to you!” cried the nice woman in charge of the sorting office, with just a bit too much surprise in her voice. It was from the abolitionist on the Belorussian Clemency Commission – obviously not quite sure of me, but nevertheless willing to work with Amnesty on the death penalty. He described the uphill struggle he faces, since he is normally in a minority of one, then added, “However, I think one should not lose heart.” That drew me to him.
Sunday 3 March
Another wonderful day. The air was hot about your head but cool in your lungs, and altogether invigorating. The meeting for worship was excellent. Diana and John Lampen were there, over from Ulster to mediate in the Checheno-Ingush and to do peace education with children in Minsk. Those of us based in Moscow were all feeling the strain a bit and more mellow than last week. Roswitha told me how Rembrandt uses light. In his Prodigal Son the light falls on the father’s forehead and she thinks this points to his dawning understanding of what it is all about.
Afterwards Tatyana, Margaret and I walked to Teply Stan summit in the snow, through the birch trees and under a blue sky. In a clearing we came across an elderly woman in hat, coat and ankle boots, who had hung up her handbag and was doing press-ups against a climbing frame.
This weekend prices rose 5% – the “President’s tax”. I dreamt I was trying to hang up a map of the world. I’d managed to pin up the top left-hand corner, but two people helping me kept getting it twisted, or missing the nail. I was seething inside.
Monday 4 March
In the morning I visited Komsomolskaya Pravda. As I was sitting in the waiting room the door to the Sovetskaya Rossiya office swung open, as if on cue, to reveal the administrator receiving a bottle in tissue paper and putting it in his drawer. Svetlana Orlyuk was interested in all our material and also in doing an article about our office. Oddly enough, on her desk she had a copy of Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son. I explained about the forehead and the light, but it didn’t do much for her. She gave me Komsomolskaya Pravda’s latest on the death penalty. Komsomolskaya Pravda is on a street with a number of establishment newspapers, including the CPSU paper, Pravda. I popped into their local Gastronom and was impressed by the mounds of sausage, the smetana, eggs and packets of dried milk on sale. They don’t have them in our area.
In the afternoon I went to Krasnopresnensky District Soviet to see the lean, charming and rangy Mr Zhukov about possible premises. He said they had promised us an office in November and had set space aside. His deputy came in, rifled through a list of Executive Committee resolutions from 19 November 1990 and came up with our address: 20 Malaya Bronnaya. I asked about rent and Zhukov said, “We know who to soak. We don’t want anything from you.” I was knocked back by their efficiency as much as their goodwill. They said it was local self-government taking over. We should “put our faith in the municipalities, and not in Gorbachev”.
On winged feet I went to see Taxi Blues and a documentary film on Chernobyl, both made for export, and subtitled by John Crowfoot. The saxophonist from Zvuki Moo was in Taxi Blues; his face is alternately saintly, and totally deadbeat. Great music, good film.
The computer team rang from London and I got an idea of how hard people are working on my behalf. They can’t yet find me a printer which will produce Cyrillic. One of the consultants they asked about it had said, “Cyril who?”
Both Latvia and Estonia voted for independence yesterday in their local referenda. I’m sure all these signals – the demonstrations last weekend, the end of the Gulf War, the referenda – are mutually reinforcing. Another wedge is knocked in, I think. My admiration for Muscovites grows. It is very undermining living in this uncertainty, but they are patient and astonishingly good humoured about it – then when they get a chance, they go for change.
Tuesday 5 March
I had a vivid dream which made me wake up with a sense of tragedy.
In the morning I went to the Russian Supreme Soviet to meet people at the Inter-Fax agency. If Gorbachev has changed in the last two years, Pyotr Vasiliev has changed in the opposite direction. He looks lighter and freer. They immediately agreed to take our news releases on the aftermath of the Gulf War and on the women’s publication. They have 170 subscribers in the USSR, so not bad. They are a small group of about seven people with a few computers, but very busy and apparently motivated.
From there I walked along the Krasnopresnensky Embankment up to the Military Commissariat of Krasnopresnensky District to register our office premises. In the wrong door, into total dilapidation, smelling of semen. Someone had scribbled “No to War” in English on a window. An old woman told me to go to the next entrance. This led to a clean, bare room with a lot of plants in the window. There was an old lady there, a man and me, and I spent an hour there in what seemed like slow motion. I thought the old lady was weeping with her head on the desk when I came in, but she was just extremely short-sighted and poring over the form she was filling in. She then must have asked the woman at the desk at least twelve times if she should leave the form there or bring it back next day. I was beginning to imagine what it will be like running our own office here, and was also looking round the room, admiring it. As we’ve been offered 30 square metres, I leaned over and asked the man how big he thought this room was. He suddenly whipped out a tape measure and began to measure all its dimensions, over and behind my head etc. It was 40 square metres. Only after all this did two very polite official women tell me the office was only open to the public on Mondays and Thursdays. So in fact we’d spent over an hour in an office that was shut.
I came home via our office space at Malaya Bronnaya No. 20. It is next to a shoe repair shop in a pedestrian area in old Moscow. Things are being rebuilt and it reminds me of Covent Garden before it was tarted up. The actual office is a small, dark shop with a picture window – but that may be good for an information bureau. It needs work.
The afternoon was a cycle of fruitless phone calls. What a joke Sokolenko is at the Foreign Ministry. I told him I am actually going home in two weeks’ time, so he said he would “put a full stop to the question of my accreditation” on Monday. I wonder if he has done anything at all these last two months.
I beetled off to another Mikhail Khoklov concert, but I couldn’t find it. I wandered round the Music School attached to the Conservatory and was drawn to piano music thundering out from the fourth floor. I found two adults listening to a seven-year-old oriental child playing without music.
The London office sent me a wonderful tape of Stan Getz playing Jazz Samba. Definitely music to seduce, and be seduced by.
Wednesday 6 March
I had an enjoyable day working quite hard on a mailing to press in Moscow, Ukraine, Leningrad, Uzbekistan. Dr Savenko popped by and I realised how much more fluent my Russian has become since last time. A surprise box of food arrived from London – wonderful! Heather is in town, arranging meetings with all Amnesty’s new members, and we had dinner at the Ordynka – very indifferent – then tort and tea at my kitchen table. It felt nice to have another Amnesty person here in the land of the Soviets – both of us grappling with the enormity of our jobs.