I felt too down in the dumps to go to Hella and Siffra’s party, but they told me on the phone that Gorbachev has left the Communist Party and disbanded it, and the Baltics and Ukraine have declared independence. Suddenly things look interesting again, so I went to the party – all journalists and Dutch Embassy people – and we discussed the situation to death.
In the moonlight Sverdlov’s massive statue came down, nose first, before an exultant crowd.
Sunday 25 August
I visited Yelena and Stanislav. I was once again struck by how remarkable Yelena is; in her personal relations she is nothing short of saintly, and at the same time immensely strong. All her inner workings seem to move in the same direction; I suppose that’s what integrity means. She has no doubt Gorbachev was involved, and alone of anyone I know, was always convinced it would be over quickly. She also said immediately she would oppose the death penalty for the plotters. No one else was so sure. They’d all been on the barricades, like her.
The Quaker meeting was seven Russians and two Brits. Afterwards we had quite a bitter argument about law versus diktat and the prospects under Yeltsin – probably a sign of all the conflict that’s still to come in the larger scene. Tatyana was marvellous as usual. She said when she saw Sverdlov’s statue come down and the Party building sealed, she felt at one level a sense of glee and revenge. At another level she feels the only hope for the future is to avoid that.
On the metro a young man gave a lovely smile to a little girl opposite and she smiled back. Her mother yanked her closer and shot him a pre-coup scowl. I’m certainly seeing a lot more Russian teeth these days; more smiles on buses and the metro, and this morning shopping was positively pleasant.
Well, what do you know: last thing at night it was reported that Belorussia of all places has also declared independence. Tonight I found a mouse sitting right inside my fridge.
Monday 26 August
My next task is to find 200 cups and 200 headsets for the seminar, and a toilet and water heater for the office.
I met Natalya Vysotskaya at the USSR Ministry of Justice, and with a fascinating mixture of charm and aggression, she got them to clarify in writing that we are not eligible to register as a public organisation. She suggests we do the same about registering as a commercial enterprise. I think the coup last week has brought more tension than relief. She said all the lawyers at her consultancy had supported it, except her, and they told her she was dishonouring the calling of an advocate. She got annoyed with me and said that if I lived here for a month as a Soviet, I would hang myself. She can’t bear the strain of going to bed at night and not knowing what will happen tomorrow.
She wanted to pop into the Baptist headquarters nearby and I wanted to start my search for the toilet. I was just getting tired of waiting for her, when I was invited in to eat with them all. It turned into a very interesting day. Their centre is an imposing old private house, totally wrecked inside. They were busy with many visitors. Everyone looked rather poor and the young people were the sort you might expect to see at a youth club in Britain. We ate a very nice home-cooked meal at small clean tables, and after some painful small talk we had a very interesting discussion about the coup. Vera, a middle-aged Baptist, had also been at the barricades. She couldn’t understand why the KGB, who are so adept at planning and forestalling coups abroad, couldn’t pull it off here. She also thought the attempts to resurrect the Union Treaty are a “Bolshevisation of thought”. Republics will have their sovereignty or independence, then cooperate without it.
We went to meet the head of the Soviet Baptists, Bychkov, and here the tensions re-emerged. He got angry about the role of the Russian Orthodox Church now and right back in 1917, because he said it had bolstered the state so significantly and enabled the revolution. However, I was struck that Baptists obviously do good prison work. He was very positive about Amnesty and about Quakers.
The amazing thing was that I left the Baptists with a toilet! I got talking to some of the nice ordinary staff, who then produced the toilet free of charge and got someone to drive it and me round to the office. I wondered what I would find as I was arriving unannounced, but the lights were on and three men were busily working. They were very pleased with the toilet and all said goodbye, smiling nicely.
Natalya’s the first person to tell me she’s at risk by having contact with me. In the evening I went round to people who don’t feel that. Irina and her mother gave me a lovely dinner, including my first fish outside a restaurant. It was their first fish too. It’s interesting watching them together. Natalya Ivanovna is another of these redoubtable Soviet mothers, e.g. she has done a translation of Keats’ sonnet ‘To Sleep’ in her spare time, and is basically terribly intelligent and philosophical in her style. They both seemed worried about me and about my future.
Natalya Ivanovna had a funny story about visiting Czechoslovakia in 1977 and the terrible hostility she felt, which was hard to bear as she also opposed the invasion. The taps in her bathroom didn’t work, so she eventually asked if she could change rooms. The woman at the desk said, “You work to a five-year plan and so do we. Your request will go into the next one.”
Gorbachev’s secretary has been telling how she smuggled a tape out of Foros in her knickers. She didn’t seem to be able to get over it, because she mentioned it three times, with giggles. Later the interviewer held up a tape and she said, “That’s the one I smuggled out in my knickers!” “No it isn’t, it’s another one,” he said crossly.
Tuesday 27 August
It’s cold and wet again, but my hot water came back on again for the first time in six weeks. A day of writing letters and phoning round about headsets, water heaters and the costs of typesetting and printing Amnesty materials here. Later finished off by doing my accounts for July and August. I’ve got an embarrassment of toilets: Todd Weinberger has come up trumps with one for me.
A French Amnesty member came round with her Norwegian friend. They had been on the trans-Siberian railway when the coup started and felt vulnerable in a moving train somewhere outside Omsk. Yelena and Stanislav have bought me tickets for a week in Tomsk with them. Marvellous!
Wednesday 28 August
I managed another trip to the steam baths at midday, but otherwise the day was a great race against time to catch the night train to Siberia. More phoning and trading in the morning, then an afternoon spent delivering things.
When I met Svetlana Polubinskaya to give her the interim report of the World Psychiatric Association Review Committee, I was having trouble with my ice cream. She very nicely held a polythene bag underneath to catch the drips. She’d been at her dacha all through the coup and said, “Things are far from over.”
Called on the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies to apply for advance passes for Amnesty to observe the human rights conference in September. Not possible, apparently. The whole event sounds like an exercise in damage control by the USSR Foreign Ministry. In a way that made my blood run cold, Zaitsev said, with some satisfaction, “I hear you’re having trouble with premises for your seminar.” “Not as far as I know,” said I. Apparently the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs had rung him to say there would be complete redecoration at Moscow University’s Faculty of Journalism, so they wouldn’t be able to host Amnesty. It half-crossed my mind to ask if the Ministry of Internal Affairs was always so involved with redecoration plans, but I decided not to react – although I’m sure my face gave me away.
I came away feeling really threatened. They’ve blocked our office registration, they’ve blocked my visa, and now they’re trying to disrupt our seminar. At least it does show that the seminar is in a good place and they are taking it seriously.