The rest of the day was a long goodbye to Misha, who is on his way to Yugoslavia for two years. He seemed sad and said he had waited for this moment for six years, but somehow something didn’t seem right. Everyone at the table was talking politics. Inflation is over 2% a week. People don’t trust Yeltsin. Everything seems to be built on thin air and no one can guess what the future will be. I think I’ve been here too long, because I began an immensely “Russian” conversation with Natasha, about whether in real life good is more interesting than bad, as Simone Weil said. I was saved by her great interest in these kinds of things and the speed with which she forms her own opinions and disagrees.
It was the same crowd I first met in April, but it struck me how unhappy almost everyone looked: husbands and wives ignoring each other and a lot of drink. Natasha has got thin and seemed immensely tired. People seem to be grasping the chance to work or travel, and putting themselves through massive personal and family strains.
Sunday 29 September
The clocks moved back today, and I and everyone else had forgotten. Valya thought there’d been another coup when she switched on the radio and heard more classical music.
When I rang Irina to check on tonight’s play and asked her what she’d been doing since we met, she said, “Thinking.” I will definitely miss all this when I go home.
This weekend I saw a woman on the metro carrying a massive cardboard box, the size of a small cello case. She said it was full of cornflakes (!).
Monday 30 September
Bright fresh weather. I did a mailing to all our seminar participants who said they wanted to know more about Amnesty, and in turn got a nice letter from an Amnesty member who used to be in Donetsk and is now back home. She said that the French Section of Amnesty are wishing me well, which is nice to know.
The afternoon was my first visit to the CSCE human rights conference, and what a pleasant, civilised way it was to spend time. The draft concluding document is ready and there were five contributions about it, the USSR’s bristling with proposals and suggestions. It is very hard to meet delegates without sticking your nose in their top pocket to read their label. I managed to deliver our death penalty materials to six of the USSR republican delegations.
Thence to meet Valya and Tolya to assess the final touches to the office. The tile flooring is just being grouted, but otherwise almost everything has been done. We decided we may have to take a day trip to Estonia to buy light shades. Valya suggested we also go to Parnu, where they sell good mittens. Today she’d met a woman who had a ticket to prove she is No. 503 in the queue for sugar. There have been no eggs around for about a month. Tonight’s news said the firm which produces 90% of the total has no more hen feed. Today I managed to lay hands on my fourth pint of milk since 16 July. I couldn’t get my laundry back because the factory had no hot water and it hadn’t been done. My jeans are catching on the heels of my shoes in a very irritating way, and I realise it’s because I’ve lost weight again.
Tuesday 1 October
We are having gorgeous weather. There’s a warm air blowing on the breeze. Lydia Zapevalova came round in the morning, bringing beautiful roses, grapes and apples, and looking quite beautiful after all the stresses early in the year. When the coup was announced she was on her way back from visiting Andrey in prison. He was terrified his death sentence would be reinstated. Apparently the journal Ogonyok is running pieces about corruption in the Voronezh judicial system – the people who sentenced him to death.
After more meetings I had a very interesting massage with Tanya, who thinks my back is improving. Her adult son had come round yesterday and fallen asleep, then suddenly she had gone down with food poisoning. She threw up and threw up and still he slept. She was in such pain that she started crying, and still he slept. She was too weak to wake him up and barely made it to the kettle, before collapsing – and he slept on.
The way she told it made me laugh out loud.
As she was talking about things, I asked her if it was boring before perestroyka. “Boring?” she said with real feeling. “It was so boring. But it wasn’t boredom. It was despair.”
Wednesday 2 October
I tripped over the telephone wire tonight and yanked it and the computer out of the socket. After an hour of fiddling around, during which I lost the screw in my slipper, I managed to reconnect the phone, but not the electronic mail. Unfortunately instructions from the London office for tomorrow’s CSCE meeting are on it.
Inflation is more than 100% in some places. When I came, the courier cost 30 roubles and this morning it was 360. I didn’t have enough money with me, so paid by credit card. No one could remember how to use the machine, so we waited twenty minutes for the manager and another ten while they discovered today’s exchange rate, which turned out to be a fictional 10 roubles to the dollar. I commented on it and they said, “Well, it’s our rate.” I said, “You mean everyone can invent their own?” They shrugged sympathetically: “It’s the Soviet Union.”
I called in on Irina’s library on my way home. Sitting under a dusty map with a picture of Lenin on the wall, she looked like a photo of the classic Soviet bureaucrat. I was amused that she had been thinking of my yellow towel that disappeared from my flat while I was in Siberia. She’s planning to lend me another one to hang up, so I can watch who looks guilty when they see it. She’s also found out the details of a sailing trip to Uglich for us. I was touched, because I am sure it’s not something she will enjoy, and that this is an indulgence for me planned by her and her mother.
Today I had a visit from Othmar, an Amnesty member from Austria, who wants to volunteer with me. The landlord came hot on his heels and, after listening to five minutes of our conversation, Othmar asked if I was here for Amnesty or with a business. I’m not surprised he was confused. Sasha engaged him in intense conversation about the Austrian schilling, then I stood up and rather firmly showed him out.
The post seems to have speeded up since the coup. Letters from the UK have been reaching me in two weeks instead of four to six.
Had a small triumph at 11.20pm. Finally made contact with Vyacheslav Bakhmin, who handles registration issues at national level, within the Russian Foreign Ministry. He has got ours in hand, is taking it to Yeltsin and expects an answer by the end of October. A nice boost, but the nicest things were his voice and whole attitude. A great weight off my mind.
Thursday 3 October
One of the interpreters at the CSCE conference accidentally leaned on his button and during the US delegate’s speech, everyone heard, “Of course, she hates to be hurt, but all alcoholics do…”
It was a real marathon today, until 8.30 at night. I had an extremely interesting talk with the Latvian delegation, who were finding their first CSCE a talk shop. They were relatively frank about prison problems in Latvia, about the death penalty and about alternative service for conscientious objectors. They said they’d copied European practice in making the length of alternative service punitive. I said a lot of European practice troubled us, and they said they could change it. I also enjoyed talks with the French and the Portuguese.
In the morning I was thinking I could quite enjoy life as a professional conference observer, but by the evening I was crawling the walls. I also had visitations from Soviets in trouble, including one man who was off his rocker, who talked with me for half an hour. I feel I’d be off my rocker if I’d been born and brought up here, and it all seemed alright. Hearing some of the other stories though, I just wanted to run away.