Nothwithstanding, Tolya and I went round 22 Herzen Street on Thursday, taking measurements and planning wiring and sockets, ready for the builders to start repairs. We were joined by Natasha, an Amnesty sympathiser from the House of Architects, who had some good professional advice. She and Tolya took an immediate dislike to each other. I realise this will be quite an exercise in management.
Some nice personal updates. Irina was round to collect the Brodsky book I had bought her. She said she’d held her last political post when she was ten, when she was made head of her Pioneer brigade. After that she decided something was not quite right with the way things were. As language students in the early 1980s they were always being groomed as potential military interpreters. They had to do one day’s military training a week (!) and were groomed in how to withstand interrogation by the enemy.
Have fitted a mosquito net and had my best sleeps for ages.
Sunday 21 July
More gorgeous weather. At weekends the streets are beautifully quiet in the early mornings, and today there was a smell of kebabs. Tonight someone was playing an accordion in the yard.
Irina and I went to the gymnastics competition at the Luzhniki Stadium and had to stand up nine times for the Ukrainian national anthem as they walked off with the prizes. All these young girls of 9–15 are professionals, constantly being trained at throwing ribbons, sticks and balls during their floor exercises. They were brilliant, but they all left the arena looking totally downhearted and you wondered if it was all worth it.
Irina hadn’t been in the stadium since she worked there as an official interpreter in the Moscow Olympics. They’d been trained in how to handle difficult questions like, “Why is there no shampoo in Moscow?”, but she said all the foreign journalists had been too busy to ask these “Soviet questions”. It was a heatwave, but she was given the task of rooting out people in shorts and telling them they couldn’t come into the stadium. She’s got a big brain and not enough stimulus, so remembers and ruminates on everything, e.g. “Was Margaret Thatcher carrying wild flowers when she met Gorbachev in London?” or “Was Jim Morrison’s father an admiral?”
On the spur of the moment we got the boat back up river into town. The view from the boat was like the East River when you sail round Manhattan. The gymnastics and the river trip cost about 5p altogether. However, Irina earns less than £5 a month.
Monday 22 July
Sixty-three letters were waiting for me when I got back this time, so interest in Amnesty is growing. Today Misha and I went to see the Dean of the Journalism Faculty at Moscow University to ask if Amnesty can use their hall for our seminar. He was elderly and sat surrounded by pillars of books on every table and chair, all of them apparently new. He kissed my hand and agreed before I’d even finished asking. Apparently he was an old friend of Sean MacBride’s and also opposes the death penalty, quite vehemently, as I discovered. So, we’re all set.
I queued for one and three quarter hours to buy a ticket for Leningrad this weekend. In the middle there was a ten-minute “technological break”, after which the woman came back with her mouth full of biscuit. I also waited half an hour at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss my visa, as requested, but the guy didn’t show up.
At night had a great dinner at the Teplitskys’. They all had a flaming row about democracy.
Tuesday 23 July
Today I met a very nice man, Viktor Leontiev, given two years’ correctional tasks in Kazakhstan for defaming Gorbachev. He’d sold a calendar showing Gorbachev swathed like a cherub and listing dates of the Tbilisi massacre, the invasion of Soviet troops in Baku etc. Apparently they’re on sale in other places but no one has been prosecuted.
In the afternoon I tried to make contact with a Mr Larichev in the Moscow Department of Justice, to discuss our premises. The woman who gave me his name yesterday told me today that he doesn’t exist and put the phone down on me. I called again and we carried on talking as though nothing had happened. It’s like tiptoeing through outbreaks of lunacy. At 7.30pm I met Rumyantsev, the young and handsome Second Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to discuss my visa. They’re all working late with Summit fever for next week. Rumyantsev has to handle Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbacheva’s programme.
Saw Pasolini’s The Decameron with Misha, Natasha and Galya, which was lovely. The day ended with very nice Soviet jazz on TV.
Wednesday 24 July
Nina Petrovna, the old lady I liked so much, has had an infarkt and is in intensive care. I was supposed to see her today, but a neighbour rang to tell me.
Today I met Vladimir Alimov, the head of the Fund for the Individual, who’s doing a six-hour TV slot about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Human Rights Day in December and wants Amnesty to take part. He described himself to me over the phone as “rather good-looking”, but I couldn’t make him out at all. His organisation is non-governmental – he says he was a worker for ten years – but he obviously has high support in the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also didn’t seem to want to let me go, so we tramped all over looking for a cup of coffee, without success, and he finally walked me all the way home.
Just in time to meet my landlord, with whom I had the most human conversation I’ve ever had. He was wrecked after a ten-day interpreting trip in the UK and Europe. They’d sailed to London on a big sea in a small boat over five days and the minute they arrived he’d had to translate for MPs, businessmen and the BBC, although he was up to the eyeballs with sea sickness tablets. It was interesting to hear his views on London, where he’d got photographed with Margaret Thatcher’s statue in Madame Tussaud’s but managed to see no other sights. He was aware of being followed in London, in particular by two rockers, who popped up wherever he went. It amused me to think of maybe two Oxford Firsts in Russian donning the gear.
In the evening I went to “Memorial” to a meeting of the local abolitionist group there. I wanted to meet the RSFSR Deputy, Kononov, who’d written a good article on the death penalty. I realise there are two rhetorical styles in Russian meetings. In one you talk loudly and override everyone else until you’ve finished your sentence. In the other you sit silent while everyone burbles and then speak with dramatic quietness, so you sound like the still small voice of God. This used to deceive me, but now I realise it can be just as pompous and silly as what everyone else is saying.
Thursday 25 July
Quite a lot of my mail is apparently going missing, so I met up with yet another person who’d sent stuff back in June which I never got. Then off to Tanya’s to deliver a translation. She was charming company as usual and told me how, when Andropov was a plain old member of the Communist Party Central Committee, she used to see him in the bread shop with his string bag. To my surprise the Journal of Humanitarian Sciences had liked my article on the death penalty, and apparently genuinely so. A lawyer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs wants the right to reply.
As it was heavy rain I took a cab, with a woman driver. She said there were very few of them and they were burying one tomorrow, who got murdered. They work twelve-hour shifts on alternate days.
Near midnight Oleg came round in a flap. He’d lent me the statute of Boris Nazarov’s Information Centre on Human Rights to read, but found out he had to translate it by tomorrow afternoon. The statute is very like ours, and I wonder if that’s significant.