The Unpardonable Sin of Maud Allen had been replaced by Edward Albee, so Irina and I came back here for a chat. She was wearing everything she’d made herself, and at six foot looked immensely stylish, a characteristic she shares with her mother.
Saturday 21 September
I’m dying for a break, but no chance just yet. I met Alexander Kalinin’s wife in the metro. A local city deputy, he’s just finished his nineteen-day hunger strike over appointments that Moscow City Soviet is making. Then I had lunch at Yugo-Zapadnaya with Yelena’s aunt and uncle, he’s a retired army man. An office block is going up opposite them and there were handwritten posters saying the Turkish workers were on strike. A division of tanks had been stationed by them during the coup, and they could see and hear this deafening procession setting off for the centre of town.
I then met Tolya and in the pouring rain we went to the Moskvoretsky flea market to buy an electric cooker for the office: £50, new. We negotiated with a man with an army van to take it to Herzen Street and it was all in place by six o’clock. At 7.00pm I took a visiting Danish Amnesty member out for dinner, and then he collected three boxes of materials from my flat. He’s here to follow the CSCE human rights conference.
Sunday 22 September
The view from the window this morning was like a tarot card. Three birds were sitting in the tree with their faces into the breeze and yellow leaves streaming away behind them. Autumn is really here. I had a lovely morning in bed, reading.
In the afternoon I went to Tolya’s for dinner. He’d made a lovely borshch, casserole and salad, and an apple pie. We listened to his son playing his own very good piano compositions. He can’t write words in English, so had made settings of old folk songs like Carrickfergus. They sounded strange and quite wonderful. Valya arrived, as usual dynamic and full of schemes and interesting ideas. We’d just watched an hour of Walt Disney and then a US gospel group started up. The breathy lead singer said how wonderful Soviet people are: “Why, they are just like Americans!” Valya said, “Gee, thanks for the compliment.” She is boycotting the cinema because she can never see any good Soviet films – there are so many bad US ones.
I had a lovely stroll along Vavilov Street, not hurrying anywhere. At night a phone call from home telling me I’ve got a court summons from Lambeth about my poll tax.
Tuesday 24 September
I feel we are making real progress. This morning I took our China news release to the Soviet World Service, and Oleg Solovyov volunteered any help he could give us, through contacts or publicity. Tonight the editor of Izvestiya rang, having got my note, and wanting all our press releases in future.
I had an interesting meeting today: new people are turning to Amnesty, and some funny ones at that. I had to speak with two nice women from the Gagauz minority whose husbands were arrested in Moldova straight after the coup. They are sponsored here, however, by Russian nationalists and were accompanied by a woman from the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, who couldn’t hide her hostility to Amnesty, and looked at me as though I was offering her dog dirt when I shook her hand. However, I cheerily included her in the interview, gave her Amnesty’s advert, and asked if she would like our new report on the USA. When she was bemoaning the injustice inflicted on these women’s husbands, I wondered if any sense of irony or conscience flickered behind those impassive features, but very much doubted it.
Got chilled to the bone with all this sitting on benches and so popped into McDonald’s for the first time, for a cup of tea. Unlike other Soviet shops, the customer area is a sea of tranquillity, while people are going frantic behind the counter. It looked and sounded like the floor of the Stock Exchange. US division of labour driving them to an early grave.
Wednesday 25 September
Today Le Monde casually ascribed a 30% reduction in Moldovan production to “a group of overexcited Ukrainian and Russian women, blocking the trains”. What a world we live in. Will they ever ascribe the First World War to a group of overexcited men?
I seem to have an internal body clock here, and although things are alright I’m suddenly ready to go home. I’m sick of speaking Russian, and really tired. I spent the day catching up on letters to enquirers and also trying to arrange the beginnings of a medical support network. Sleeping really badly and woke exhausted again.
Thursday 26 September
Suddenly an Indian summer. Despite all our efforts, none of today’s papers carried our China report. I met Tolya to pay the next instalment of the builders’ money and gave an interview to Hungarian radio. Four big boxes of computer bits arrived from the Customs Depot at Butovo for Pavlo Kampov, to add to the lousy mess of fifteen boxes already in my room. Very depressing to live with. I fell asleep again, then went round for tea with a friend at the British Council.
Her flat smelt of Flash; we drank tea with milk, and had Sainsbury’s lime marmalade. The Britishness felt like a brief respite. She had just won a one-woman strike to prevent Moscow University moving three unknown men into her flat on 1 October. She had a funny story about Margaret Thatcher’s visit to MGIMO in May. An adoring student asked how she had managed to be a wife and mother and to run the country? Brushing aside Denis’s millions and the staff of twenty, she said, “There are no queues in Britain”! Would that these remarks got home.
From there I hitched a lift to Yelena’s place with a pleasant man from the defence industry. He’s worried that the Russian government is not doing enough to fill the shops and that soon the situation will be ripe for a second coup. At Yelena’s place we were saying goodbye to Ruslan, about to start his big adventure in the US, with only a shoulder bag and not a word of English. Since my holiday with Yelena I feel I’ve reached a new level of warmth with her mother, which is very nice indeed. She had never met Ruslan’s friend Andrey, but I was interested to see the way the conversation developed. None of this: “What do you do, where do you live and isn’t the Northern Line terrible?” He suddenly said he thought execution was preferable to loss of freedom, and she said she thought people needed constraints in order to be happy. He said that was the happiness of an animal, but she said no, if you’ve ever lived with an animal you see that their happiness is far greater than a human’s. And so the evening progressed in a leisurely way, and underneath, quite sad. I kissed Ruslan goodbye and he was so startled and shy, I had the impression it was the first time anyone had kissed him for a long time.
I was tried in absentia today in Lambeth about my poll tax. They’ve never accepted that I left the country in January.
Friday 27 September
More lovely weather, and I’m beginning to catch up on my sleep. After a massage I went shopping and bought a beret for 75p. Spend, spend, spend all the way. Viktor rang, about to take his first trip abroad, to Finland, and asking what I would like as a present. Very nice! I said cheese.
Saturday 28 September
Professor Boris Nazarov from the Information Centre on Human Rights rang up, offering to help Amnesty with its registration. It seems we really are being nudged towards him. Perhaps it is because I am here on my own, but I do find the push of these unseen forces threatening and quite depressing.