It was a lovely spring evening and I ended the day at the Conservatoire with Bill Millinship of The Observer, listening to last year’s Tchaikovsky Prize Winner, Boris Berezovsky, play Mozart, Schubert and Chopin. We discussed whether or not things are more relaxed. He thinks they are and it’s because Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Lukyanov and Pavlov are all away. He’d been in the Kremlin a few weeks ago, in the part where Gorbachev works, and bumped into Alexander Yakovlev wearing a cardigan, as though he lived there.
Friday 19 April
Another varied day. This has been a very interesting and quite productive week. My blues have gone.
A very cagey voice rang and said, “It’s Vladimir, we met yesterday.” I cast my mind back over the demonstration, assuming it was someone from there, but realised it was the ex-Vice Rector of the USSR Diplomatic Academy. He offered to help Amnesty with our accreditation here, so I should call him if need be.
I gave an interview in the morning to Nikolay’s journalist friend Kostya and was OK until I got self-conscious about my Russian. Then I went off to meet Misha, who has agreed to be my private coach. He is a linguist and teacher at Moscow University. I like the way he speaks and the way he explains derivations. He gave me lunch at his place near the Yasenovo woods. From seeming rather depressed and withdrawn at Natasha’s dinner party last week, he was immensely relaxed and easy to talk to today. He’s refusing to take any money from me, which may be kindness and may also be that he doesn’t want any financial link with Amnesty. It’s an odd feeling to arouse suspicion in people so regularly. Talking to him it occurred to me that the Russian language is a bit like a Russian plug. All the bits inside the sentence are constantly moving and declining, and if you stick in a negative suddenly the whole lot shifts around again.
I spent three hours at the women’s art gallery in the afternoon with our campaign material about women on display. They’ve rehung some pictures since I was last there and there seemed to be a bad atmosphere between two of the women, so it was rather a demoralised little troupe. However, their tactics with people dropping in were awful – totally offhand, like Soviet shop assistants. I made a point of at least smiling at people and going up to exchange a few words with them, and it made a hell of a difference to the atmosphere. However, I only got rid of four leaflets. Maria Esmont, the exhibition organiser, is a natural live wire. She immediately came up with the idea of a poster competition for Amnesty and donating pictures to use as postcards. Her collective listened with scepticism and apathy. The most sceptical is the one who smiles at me most. I notice she never touches any of the Amnesty material Maria hands round.
Krasnopresnensky District Soviet are now offering us 80 square metres at a different address, which they say is also in the centre of town. Details to follow next week. Blow me down, I’d decided to have an evening without politics, when suddenly the main TV news carried our report on Kuwait – with no commentary and no other sources cited! The tide really is turning.
Saturday 20 April
It was very warm and sweaty outdoors today, but chilly inside. In the evening it rained very heavily, then there was a beautiful sunset, which reflected in the puddles. I worked my way through the electronic mail handbook. My computer really is a fantastic machine, able to switch between electronic mail, fax and telex with one command, and send messages out from Moscow via San Francisco to my electronic mailbox in Finsbury Park. I feel my messages are falling from the heavens through various gateways to London EC1. The plug on my printer blew.
Sunday 21 April
I cleaned and tidied in the morning. As the weather has got warmer a really horrible smell has started hanging round the stairway, as though something is lying dead somewhere. I went for lunch at the Teplitskys’. It was so nice to have her open the door in jeans, wave me in, and dash back to the kitchen, where she was trying to make me some Yorkshire puddings. It was another fantastic meal, with fish stew cooked with laurel leaves – apparently a common spice here – smetana cake, and homemade cherry wine. I feel very much at home with them. Yasha arrived back from the train station with vegetables his parents had sent them from Odessa. This putting of things on trains has largely replaced the ordinary post. What a trachle.
I went from there to the Quakes. A Lithuanian was there who brought us cheese with cumin in it. He was from Kaunas but had happened to be at the TV tower in Vilnius in January when the Soviet troops had tried to storm it.
I’m in a dreadfully emotional state. Any kindness makes me feel like crying and any lack of kindness makes me feel the same way. I feel very much thrown onto my own resources and they feel very slight. I keep thinking of Paul Auster and Moon Palace. The character there is gripped by the idea that travellers in olden times only knew where they were by figuring out the stars. They had to know what was where up there before they knew where they were down here. Experiences far away from home certainly do define you very sharply. I suppose the stars are the same everywhere, but you only look at them when you’re travelling, i.e. actually going somewhere, so maybe there’s comfort in that.
There are red flags on my building again, for Lenin’s birthday. At night I watched the good Sunday arts programme, this time on wartime musicals. Very like British ones, except that the heroine sang a damn sight better than Gracie Fields.
Monday 22 April
I worked at home in the morning then went to see Yelena in the afternoon. She is a lovely person – when she smiles to greet you the smile stays on her face while she is hanging up your coat and afterwards. She had a dog with her – Kara – who lived with her for three years in exile. She invited me to have my summer holiday with her in the hut where she was exiled at Krivosheyno on the River Ob. Rather an unusual summer holiday, but I would like to. I had brought macaroons and she walloped through them as though she hadn’t eaten for a week. I asked if she was hungry and she said, “No, they just taste very nice.” She was just back from her first trip abroad, to France and Germany. In her mild way she said she’d never noticed before how dusty Moscow is. She agreed to publish our advert in the journal she produces about prisoners.
After paying more visits to other people, I met Kate at the Kropotkin metro in the evening to hear an amateur concert at the House of Scholars. It was a nice place with good buffets and excellent amateur paintings on display. The smell of the toilets, however, haunted me throughout the concert, in the buffet, and even now as I write this. The conductor was pretty dire and reduced everything to the same speed. Came home in the heavy rain.
One of the women in the post office is terribly sour, but I realised today what a ridiculous job she has. It was she who handled my phone bill, then she wrapped my book and registered it, then she sold me some stamps and envelopes – all the time, being pestered for poste restante mail and trying to wrap up newspapers people had subscribed to.
Tuesday 23 April
Snow! Today’s leitmotif was vodka. I went to take my bottles back to the glass recycling shop and got mobbed by people who needed bottles to buy booze at the shop next door. They had their hands in my carrier bag and were stuffing money in and taking it out of my purse. It quite pissed me off. There’s a great shortage of glassware.
Then I made the trek to see my Bashkir invalid. His neighbour popped by, bringing him his vodka rations for March and April. Today seemed to be the ration day, because there were all sorts of men tottering across the road drunkenly by lunchtime. I found it quite unpleasant today, after my experience in the bottle bank. Vanzetti has been passing blood for 10–15 days now, but is convinced that he is being irradiated through the wall. It is not unusual for people here to sense a threat from one source and interpret it as a political threat from another source. I find I start to do it myself. In this society I think it’s not surprising, when no one thinks anything happens by chance.