Yeltsin commuted twenty-one death sentences tonight.
Sunday 15 September
I spent thirteen hours crouching by the twenty-five boxes, collating and stapling materials for our death penalty seminar, helped by two good folk from Amnesty in London and Germany. Finally finished at 1.00am. I’m very worried that I can’t make contact with Galina Starovoytova. Irina thinks she saw her speaking from Paris yesterday.
The USSR Ministry of Justice rang again (!) urging us to try registering with Moscow City Soviet’s Justice Department.
Monday 16 September
Our seminar and a beautiful crisp day. Oleg arrived at 8.30am to take me and materials to the hall, and as we passed the Communist Party’s hotel on Dimitrov Street I asked if he thought Honecker was hiding out there. He said no, there were mansions outside Moscow for people “of that calibre”.
Had mixed feelings about the seminar: the sound system, the interpretation and buffet were very good, as were Larry Cox and Roger Hood, the two guest speakers. The audience was very serious and we collected some money, but there was not a huge turnout and it was a big lack that our Soviet speaker did not turn up. The woman from the Statistics Department of the USSR Ministry of Justice came, commandeered the microphone, and declaimed from the podium. One interesting point though: she said, “Of course the death penalty is not a deterrent.” She’s changed her tune since we met in March. Larry and Roger visited the GUM department store and were appalled. I think they got their first insight into life here.
Tuesday 17 September
I was absolutely knackered and spent the day being late. Everyone else seemed to be in the same state. I couldn’t get a bus to the Justice Department so eventually flagged down a car. The driver was a very interesting man from a foreign relations institute, specialising in Ethiopia and Somalia, and said what an impact Amnesty had had on President Siad Barre. However, he still had the lurking suspicion that we are always sticking our noses where we’re not invited. I said that in a sense that was true, because very few governments invite you to look at the way they treat political prisoners. Eventually he refused to take any money from me, parked the car, and escorted me to the Justice Department so I arrived on time.
Here Natalya Vysotskaya and I met a very different animal from the people at the USSR Ministry of Justice. Mr Kostanov has got our death penalty report, would like to have it autographed and thinks Amnesty could really help their efforts to humanise the prison system. He recommended that we apply for a “mini-embassy” status attached to the Moscow City Soviet or to the Ministry of Justice, and promised to push our case within the week. Natalya and I fell silent.
From there I made my way to the Russian TV Centre to discuss our Human Rights Day programme on 10 December. I stopped off in a park for a breather, and who should be there but the “rather good-looking” Vladimir Alimov again, also drawing breath before our meeting. He was looking utterly exhausted and ghastly.
Saw off the London gang at lunchtime, then bumped into Lev Yelin from New Times, who said he’d done a piece on Amnesty’s report about China and got an official complaint from the Chinese government. Good sign. I also bumped into Oleg Malginov, the First Secretary at the Humanitarian Affairs Division of the USSR Foreign Ministry. He asked, “How are your relatives?” Apparently he had heard at the UN in Geneva that Mum, Dad and Elspeth were here during the coup.
Komsomolskaya Pravda published my interview today – half a page spread over five columns.
Wednesday 18 September
I met people from the Krasnodar group against the death penalty. As we chatted on the park bench the woman next to us butted in and said we were a threat to society. We began to talk with her, and suddenly the young man next to her butted in. Eventually there were five of us all discussing the death penalty, and I must say that Olga from Krasnodar was excellent.
In the afternoon I did an English-language interview with the Soviet World Service, with a very nice elderly China specialist, Oleg Solovyov. He threw in a gift question about China, and ended by announcing to the world that he hoped Amnesty would soon get official registration. He drove me home in time to meet the landlord, lo and behold with his wife in tow – the first time she’s seen the flat since I moved in, and there it was looking wrecked with twenty-five cardboard boxes. However, they were very excited by the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda and seemed to be treating me with a new respect. Yulia had brought me apples and Sasha had a sort of man-to-man talk with me about world affairs. Interestingly, he said he was against a death sentence for the coup plotters. That also represents a change since the beginning of the year. The poor guy is still trying to get his cheque out of the bank; it’s been three months now. He’d spent one and a half days in one queue, only to find it was the wrong one. Great basis for doing business, this banking system.
Thursday 19 September
A beautiful cold autumn day, and it was my day for meeting prisoners. First Valery Yanin, released from Camp 35 in Perm last week after sixteen years, and still suffering from broken ribs after the pulverising he’d got before his release. He’d spent seven years in solitary confinement. He was thin, white and very revved up. I wonder what it will be like for him when he hits the ground.
In the afternoon I met a conscientious objector from Ukraine, who is probably about twenty, but very withdrawn and rather “tough”. Every time I asked a question, like “How are your parents?”, he said, “Meaning?” He wants to join Amnesty.
In between I had a nice hour with Ruslan, who’s at long last got his foreign passport. I’ll miss him when he leaves on 29 September. He’d brought apples because it was too cold for beer, and as usual had a lot of silly anecdotes and interesting observations about human nature. He really seems to be over his imprisonment.
A strange thing today in the metro: the sexy woman’s voice that normally advertises job vacancies for plumbers etc. announced that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s books were on sale at the Sports (?) Bookshop. Everyone silently pricked up their ears and when I looked round the escalator the man behind me was trying to memorise the phone number.
Lada from the Moscow Amnesty group came round and collected four boxes of materials from my flat, to my great relief.
Friday 20 September
A letter in Izvestiya today was like a short story. It was from a man who felt guilty that he had not prevented a suicide. He’d seen a guy standing on a ledge on the fifth floor of the Hotel Vostok, but as he stood there wondering what to do he was suddenly afraid he would be dragged through the courts as a witness. He wondered if he should get the hotel concierge, but then thought they might frighten the man into jumping, and so become accomplices to murder. So he went to the bathhouse and had a shave. When he came out the guy was on the tarmac, dead. He learned later that the concierge had rung the police, an ambulance, the district Soviet etc., but had also gone nowhere near the man on the ledge.
I spent five hours today at the Customs Department in Butovo, trying to retrieve the computer which a Swedish Amnesty group had sent to the ex-prisoner, Pavlo Kampov, back in February. The depot is way beyond the forest south of Moscow and I took a metro, a bus, and had a long walk through seas of mud to get there. Butovo itself looked like some Solzhenitsyn village by a railway line: ugly, brutish and small. I had to liaise with a woman in the main building and a man in the warehouse, and one or the other of them kept disappearing for an hour at a time. “Well, it’s Friday,” someone smiled, as though that explained it all. “It’s my Friday too,” I said acidly, and for some reason this seemed to cut some ice, probably because I’m foreign. Eventually it got sorted out.