The weather was gorgeous and the forest was light and peaceful, but for seven months of the year the temperature is -40 degrees, and the snowdrifts so deep you can’t get down the street. I don’t know how Yelena did it. In the evening we visited neighbours who had a phone, so I could call the USSR Foreign Ministry about my visa. They lived in a bare, neat cottage, and although it was in deepest Siberia, it seemed suburban somehow. The wife was in a nice housecoat, with two children hanging around in the background, and she seemed to be waiting for something. All the locals had been warned against Yelena when she was in exile, so I wondered how they would react to her now. I think everyone liked her very much, but her political remarks are so acute, I noticed everyone would laugh and agree with her, then shoot her a disconcerted glance. On the way home we stopped by an eighty-year-old woman and her daughter, both still farming, and got a jar of fresh milk. The eighty-year-old looked at me and said, “Who’s this you’ve got with you?” She bemoaned the political situation and said, “I’m for Soviet power.”
A friend of Yelena and Stanislav was also staying at the hut with her son. I realise I’m a useless guest, because she immediately began washing the floors and digging potatoes, while I sat there in a dream. We then had rather a strange evening in this silent, starry Siberian night, with enough emotion in the hut to drive a battleship. Ira, the friend, had a desperately unhappy face. I was the first foreigner she’d ever met in her life, and it seemed to have a peculiar effect on her, as though she felt compelled to account for herself and tell me everything. Stanislav lit a bonfire and sang some songs, and every so often the other two would rise up out of the circle of light and stand in the dark by the gate, or in the garden, sighing.
We ate inside by candlelight and so the effect was repeated: Ira’s face opposite me, unburdening everything, while the other two moved about the room in the dark, listening. At one point Ira moved out of the light and in moved Yelena, to ask me if I knew an English poem with the words, “Our hands have touched, but not our hearts, and they shall never touch again”. Apparently it’s the only non-jolly poem they learned at school and so she’d remembered it.
Just time to negotiate the outdoor toilet with a dynamo torch that you have to continually pump, then bed. In the middle of the night the dog went mad catching a mouse in the dark. Frightened me to death.
Tuesday 3 September
Had a lovely breakfast with Yelena. For some unspoken reason she very much wanted me to see the hut, and I very much wanted to see it.
It was interesting watching what Yelena and Stanislav decided I needed to have with me on my journey back home, and a bit funny. In the end they gave me a jar of jam, a bag of raw potatoes, some dried mint and a candle. Scenes like that make me feel very fond of humanity at large.
I remember on the train to Tomsk we were dipping into a bag of sweets. Yelena noticed I liked the flat ones, so she looked out the last three for me, and that one gesture opened up the whole gap between a Russian background and a Scottish Presbyterian one. Here, life is seen as hard and nothing is nicer than to indulge someone and give them a treat. There, the fact you like something is no particular reason to have it: “You needn’t think life’s always going to be so easy.” Somehow the child in me really responded to those three sweets.
I’ve been thinking about what is so appealing about so many of the people I know here who, despite difficulties or imprisonment, try to build the life they want and be what they want to be. It seems to be connected with a real intelligence; an urge to make sense of their surroundings and of themselves, which is in no way connected to an Oxbridge education and smart remarks. Nor is it connected with all the recognisable trappings of the Soviet intelligentsia.
Yelena walked us to the crossroads, then Stanislav and I went on over the bridge, past the rows of huts with their geese, dogs and chickens, and up to the bus station next to the cinema, which shows Rambo and Indian melodramas. We then bussed to Tomsk, passing fields of sunflowers and Siberian cowboys rounding up their cattle on horseback. Intensively farmed, however, it definitely is not. The trees and the fields were gorgeous and more natural and beautiful than an autumn in Massachusetts.
We spent the day in Tomsk before my evening train. Called in on Tomsk City Soviet, which now occupies the imposing Communist Party building on a main street. There I re-met the nice Vladimir Kryukov, whom I first met briefly in Leningrad last year. He’s bought his plane ticket to come to our death penalty seminar in Moscow. Apparently Tomsk City Soviet was one of the first to come out against the coup; they did it by Monday midday. There was a movement for autonomy here in the nineteenth century and it is now reviving, along more rational lines. They no longer want to be a dumping ground for prisoners and exiles, nor to have their natural resources sucked away.
I took the train down the branch line to Tayga Junction. As we rounded the corner out of Tomsk we came bang slap onto what was recognisably a corrective labour colony: the big sliding gate, watchtowers, a soldier with an Alsation, and a flat-capped commandant standing about, looking at his watch. I spent an uncomfortable hour in the dark at Tayga Junction, trying to hear the loudspeaker announcement for the Vladivostok train to Moscow.
Wednesday 4 September
What a journey home! Until Tyumen I shared the coupe with a couple who were deeply suspicious of this foreigner who had stepped onto the train at Tayga Junction. Then, in a very Russian style, the woman suddenly burst out laughing at me and said I looked like a rabbit when I was eating.
Their place was taken by three young gas workers on their way to Moscow for a holiday and dying to get drunk. They were sharply dressed and had a bag of US chicken legs – altogether very chic. I left them to it and they eventually had a fist fight over a shirt in the corridor. The good woman conductor broke it up and one of the boys came to me and very nicely apologised, looking up at me with short hair, big ears and earnest blue eyes. He said he was reading Seneca and Nietzsche and trying to “discover himself for himself”. I asked him what he did and he said, “Nothing. I’m a criminal.” I was half amused, and half thought, Oh blimey.
One of them passed out and snored from 4.00pm to 7.00 the following morning. At Sverdlovsk we were joined by a portly oil prospector, who also snored. The oil man and the gas workers instantly disliked the look of each other, but by the end of the next fifteen hours I came to the conclusion that more united them than divided them. They were all pro-Yeltsin; all felt that capitalism is not for Russia, although new economic forms are needed; all had a mystical faith in “the people” – “narod”; and all felt there is no racism in the USSR and couldn’t understand what all the fuss with national minorities is about. By this time they were all sitting in a chummy row on the opposite seat. I asked if any of them spoke any USSR language apart from Russian and none did. They felt this was unwelcome provocation on my part and drew closer together. All of them hated blacks.
The oil man had some interesting and original points of view, but every time he mentioned “power” he made a gesture with his fist, as though he was squeezing someone’s testicles, hard.
Friday 6 September
I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. Wrote thirty letters and took Amnesty’s paper on the USA to the Institute of Systems Analysis, where some moonlighters are prepared to print it on the side. Began the stations of the cross with the USSR Foreign Ministry to get my visa renewed.