In the morning, oddly enough, I bumped into the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov, and he said, “The ways of God are unfathomable.”
Thursday 1 August
I’m just back from Desert Hearts with Nikolay. As we rode the empty trolley bus home I waved at someone standing out on his balcony enjoying the night air. Nikolay said, “Goodness, he might have had a rifle!” Unduly pessimistic, even for him.
Friday 2 August
This has been a fantastic week. I’ve had a marvellous time since I got back from London, and more fun these two weeks than in the last three months put together.
The week began with a long weekend in Leningrad with Lyuda and Viktor. More lazy breakfasts with the cognac bottle. They took me up to the dacha to see Lyuda’s intimidating mum and dad, and we swam in the lake, I gathered mushrooms for the first time, at long last, and we had a whacking great meal.
Lyuda and I also walked around Leningrad, which is now looking quite a bit more prosperous. People are better dressed than in Moscow and we passed a row of six nice clean cooperative cafés, all doing good business. Viktor also took me to a joint venture publishing firm – very impressive desktop publishing – who might take on our newsletter.
We also looked round the waxwork exhibit at the Museum of the Revolution, called “Reform or Terror?” It was basically a gruesome catalogue of every political figure who’s been killed or bumped off since 1800, but the commentary was interesting and very definitely in favour of reform over revolution. Stolypin was the hero of the hour; Lenin had an ugly snarl. In the room of Influential Thinkers they had Sakharov next to Marx, Plekhanov and Dostoyevsky. Someone had laid flowers at Sakharov’s feet.
On Saturday night Lyuda and I saw Genet’s The Maids, all played by men from Konstantin Raykin’s Moscow Company. It was beautifully done – very erotic and anguished – and it was hard to believe these were Soviet performers in front of a, very appreciative, Leningrad audience. There’s something peculiar in the way that mainstream audiences flock to gay art, even when they can’t tolerate gay life. There was a gay film festival in Moscow later this week and Vitaly Yerenkov of Stolitsa made the same point to me. He said it was the equivalent of holding a Mafia festival in the centre of Moscow.
On Tuesday night Irina took me to a chamber music concert at the stately home near her flat. Fantastic sunset over the lake and parkland as we walked home. She showed me her sweetpeas and lobelia and as we couldn’t find a torch we used candles.
On the work front, Tolya has got the workmen starting on Monday. I went to the USSR Foreign Ministry to brief them on all our endeavours for the CSCE human rights conference in September, and revisited the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to put them in the picture. The documents have also arrived from London for me to start the process of registering Amnesty.
Saturday 3 August
A sweltering hot day. I saw a new leafy part of Moscow when I went to DHL to pick up a parcel. They work from a small basement, all nicely plastered and whitewashed, the way I would like our office to be. Later I popped to Father Nikon’s. He was excited about an article he was writing about “paganism”, which was actually very interesting. We sat in his kitchen as the light faded, drinking balsam in our tea, and I translated the John Lennon tape I’d brought him. He was weepy listening to ‘Imagine’ and so was I. The balsam tea brought us both out in a sweat.
I’ve been having some curious dreams lately. Last Tuesday I dreamt of a constellation of three stars on the top left of a screen – the Leo constellation – but I knew there was something beyond them to the top right. In the morning I switched on the radio and heard that scientists had discovered a new constellation.
Sunday 4 August
In the morning I met Alexander from the Latvian Amnesty group. The two friends with him were Moscow journalists specialising in rock music, which they say has gone underground again in the USSR. The sound of the hour is reggae and the best reggae groups are in Kaliningrad, oddly enough, where they play reggae with Baltic and German motifs. Hard to imagine. Alexander said it was “reggae with beer glasses”. As I left them I bumped into the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov again. The ways of God seem to be getting more unfathomable by the hour.
After a domestic day Hella and Siffra took me to a satirical cabaret at the “Sovremennik” by the Spartakovsky company. It was very lively and entertaining and, unlike British equivalents, it seemed unforced and had no reference to TV, or to TV personalities, themes or adverts. The whole company stood in the dark, wearing white gloves under purple luminous lighting, and slowly performed Japanese martial arts to the sound of disco music. There was no point to it, but it was inventive and it worked.
We had dinner and they told me that the USA-USSR Summit had been a totally US event. Journalists were invited to briefings with footage from CNN, free Coke, and all in English. Soviet journalists were desperate. Bush seemed reluctant to promise another summit, presumably because he doesn’t know who his counterpart will be, they said.
Monday 5 August
Knocked myself out today racing all over Moscow. Had a morning interview with Sergey Maslov at Komsomolskaya Pravda (circulation: 17 million), which lasted three hours and delved into all sorts of philosophical points like: Is it possible to speculate on conscience? Doesn’t free exit jeopardise the economic wealth of a country and people’s social and economic rights in it? etc. All very interesting, but exhausting, especially in Russian.
From there I dashed to the International Post Office to drop off translations – the equivalent of riding from Finchley to Morden – then up to Krasnye Vorota to meet Misha and get the invitations to Amnesty’s September seminar photocopied. One hundred for 30 roubles, i.e. about 75p. From there to Irina’s to take her Bhagwati’s speech on the death penalty to translate – the equivalent of trekking from Leytonstone to Guildford. I sat in a heap for about three hours, but we had an interesting talk. It was a boiling hot day, but she had just finished knitting a thick woollen jumper, so was wearing it.
Tuesday 6 August
The day ended with a massive minor chord – my first since I’ve been back this time. I went up to Natalya’s legal consultancy, where I thought we would just draft an application form to register with Moscow City Justice Department. However, she knows the law on registration much better than I do and pointed out that we are ineligible to register with the city as long as we have “International” in our title. Unless we have ten official representatives over here – and we don’t – we are also ineligible to register with the Russian or the USSR authorities. We called the Non-Government Organisations’ Section of the USSR Foreign Ministry to check, and learned that, contrary to their earlier friendly noises, they have made no arrangements to support our application, nor are they planning to.
I began to have very dark thoughts about official motives in the whole of this experiment and to despair of finding a way out. Although lots of my mail is going missing, a disturbing anonymous letter still managed to get through, wishing me dead.
Ivan Polozkov resigned from the leadership of the Russian Communist Party today. They said he’d let morale slide.
Wednesday 7 August
A very chaotic morning. A visit from Penal Reform International, then Tolya came to report on the building works: the workers are stripping the plaster and have taken out the old door frames. As he was talking two men suddenly came to the door wearing hats made out of newspaper and said they were plumbers. Something in my flat is leaking down into the neighbours’ below. They removed the kitchen tap and heaved all sorts of garbage out of the bathroom cupboard onto the hall floor, then said they would come back tomorrow. I couldn’t get over it! For some chivalrous reason Tolya said he would come back tomorrow and supervise them. I now have no hot water or toilet.