He’d written a good article from my interview, though if in Irina’s rendering I was uttering lines of Voznessensky’s poetry, in his I was eulogising Herzen and musing on the “democratisation” of Western society in the 1960s. But I suppose it’s horses for courses. Sovetskaya Justitsiya wants to run a regular Amnesty column and also wants to become a collective Amnesty member.
From there I went to the USSR Foreign Ministry to collect my visa extension. I was met by Rumyantsev and Sokolenko, both of them in a giggly mood somehow and leaning against the coat desk like wideboys at a bar. My visa has been extended only until 10 September. A joke! They began to ask intensive questions about our death penalty seminar – who was the Soviet organiser? I said, “I am – if I’m still here”, unable to keep the ice out of my voice. They seemed surprised; I don’t know what they think I do here. Like people at the Foreign Ministry’s Human Rights Division, they seemed bothered that we’ve invited Galina Starovoytova to speak at it.
Dinner with the Portuguese Ambassador, who was very interesting, saying what it was like to be ambassador at the UN when there’s a revolution going on back home. He also talked about the speed of political change in general. In 1955 someone wrote a book about the possibility of giving Zaire independence over thirty years. The critics descended on him. Zaire was independent in four years.
Ian Martin called from London when I got back, and said that if we don’t get Soviet approval for our office by the time of the September human rights conference, we will reconsider the whole thing. I hope our listeners-in took it to heart.
Friday 16 August
I’m just back from a two-day trip to Riga to open an Amnesty exhibition which the local group had put on in the Central Library there. We got on the main Latvian-language TV news programmes at 9.00pm and 10.00pm and I did three press interviews.
Since Tuesday I’ve spent twenty-eight hours on the train and on Wednesday worked a twenty-hour day, starting at 5.00am. I think I do feel age creeping up on me because I wasn’t able to bounce back the way I think I used to.
I left Moscow from Riga station: two tracks in leafy greenness, looking rather like the outer reaches of Southern Region. It was an extraordinary trip. There were nine of us in our small compartment, dominated by Soviet mothers fussing over their fully adult children. There was also an elderly Kazakh lady with no sleeping berth, who’d travelled up from Alma-Ata by train and was going to visit her sick sister in Latvia. When she got to her station she faced a nine-hour wait for her bus and then a two-mile walk with her baggage.
I wondered why everyone went to get their bedding at 4.00pm, but when I went for mine I found out why: there was none left. However, it was an extraordinarily convivial compartment, and two women went and persuaded the conductor to give me his sheets, free. We all shared our food and it was a beautiful ride into a setting sun, through hilly farmland and villages, looking every bit like Cumbria. I fell asleep for an hour and every time I woke up everyone had changed places, like in some Agatha Christie thriller. The old woman sitting next to me suddenly turned and said, “I think God helps you, but sometimes you are a volcano.” Rather a conversation stopper. She was a lift operator in an economic institute and said her parents were wonderful people, “real Bolsheviks”, who worked all day, then came home and studied. She thought perestroyka was all a big mistake.
Riga is small and like a brighter Amsterdam. There were blocks of cement and huge pieces of twisted metal left over from the January barricades dotting the streets like modern sculptures. Officially people talk about “the January events”, but in conversation they call it “the war”. The ice cream kiosks are clean and have little flower arrangements on the counter. You can get coffee and pleasant meals in cafés, and it was like a breath of fresh air to hear a middle-aged woman talking to the shop assistant in Latvian. There were long queues in the street for cigarette rations, but otherwise there was a lot of food in the shops, though more expensive than in Moscow.
I was staying with Alexander and Irina, two Russians who have started the local group. They’ve got a big light flat in the centre of town but no water during the daytime, which is a bugger, because we could only eat at midnight. Irina then stayed up till 4.00am washing clothes. They’re helped by Aleksey, who’s been collecting signatures outside the Roman Catholic cathedral for a Catholic imprisoned in China. He’s spent the last year dossing down at different places and wearing clothes people have given him, but he looks much better than when I first met him in spring in Moscow: tanned, big-boned and with a very sweet smile. He seems to be on some spiritual high and told me about the religious books he is studying. He thinks each religious movement and each phase of the Bible represents a stage in the religious unfoldment of the individual. “For some Christians,” he said, “Christ is not yet crucified.” I wondered about the lonely life he is leading and asked him how old he is. Eighteen.
The exhibition was beautifully laid out in the main library, with great cooperation from the library staff, who presented us with flowers and gave us coffee afterwards. I had to toe a careful line not to seem like the hand of Moscow, and also to treat Latvia as separate from the USSR. As many times before, I found it a great help in interviews to have a Scottish surname.
The journey home was extraordinary too. Just after the doors closed and we started moving, a strained young woman began proclaiming the Bible the length and breadth of the carriage. I found it absolutely outrageous in a confined space with nowhere to go, to have this voice hammering on right through my earphones for over two and a half hours. However, everyone else seemed much more tolerant than this professional human rights person and listened, or ignored her amiably. Only, when she cried, “Satan’s coming!”, someone said, “No, it’s the conductor with the tea”, and got a laugh.
It’s now 2.30am and I’ve had a very social Friday, eating three full meals in the space of four hours, but none of it went amiss, so I must have been hungry. First there was dinner with Misha and his wife, then I went to the Quakers, then on to the birthday party of Father Nikon’s sister, Ira, at 10.30pm. They were all in their cups by the time I got there, so there were some right daft conversations going on. Nikon was sober though and so was Oleg, and in the kitchen he very nicely asked if I would marry him to help him leave the country before the autumn draft. He pointed out that having a Soviet husband would solve my visa problems too. Now that’s something we never thought of!
Saturday 17 August
A call from the local post office at 6.30am. Something heavy had arrived, could I collect it? Later, as I was staggering back across the courtyard with two boxes of documents for the CSCE conference, a woman shouted over to me, “Where did you get it?”, obviously thinking it was a dinner set or something. Spent the day working and in the evening met Mum, Dad and Elspeth for dinner at the Cosmos Hotel.