Rows of Soviets in woolly hats with petitions in their hands sat in the foyer downstairs, while we floated up to deal with “human rights”. I arranged to meet one woman tomorrow and she said uncomplainingly, “They let me in today, but if they don’t tomorrow, will you please come out onto the street?” There seems to have been some intensive filtering going on: the French delegate said they’d only met ex-prisoners from camps or psychiatric hospitals – no conscientious objectors, or eviction cases, or national minorities. Vladimir Babenkov, the Foreign Ministry man responsible for access to the conference, came up to me and other non-governmental people, exuding relief at the end of the conference and wreathed in smiles: “Hello dear friends! Dear colleagues!…”
Moscow’s a small place. Yesterday I bumped into Vladimir Alimov for the fourth time, and today saw a London University student I know, with a ring in his nose, crouching in an underpass with a man selling drums. Not to pass up an opportunity, I gave him some Amnesty leaflets to take to Armenia with him.
Friday 4 October
At the CSCE conference today a peasant woman was sitting on the balcony, under a chandelier, with a headset on under her headscarf and walking stick close at hand, listening to governments interpreting what they meant by “migrant workers”. I wonder what she was thinking.
The meeting finished at 2.00pm then I went to renew my visa. I got a lift in a new car from a man who didn’t seem to be able to drive. He forced it along in second, then changed up to third and immediately slowed down. We went the wrong way down a one-way street, then he reversed out into three lanes of traffic. There was a huge crowd at the Visa and Registration Department and I stood in a tight, hot queue for forty minutes, with the man behind poking his book into my back. I was ready to whap him.
I did so little today, but got back exhausted and went to bed at 6.00pm. Irina rang later. The boats to Uglich have great names: one’s the Felix Dzerzhinsky, named after the first Bolshevik head of the secret police, and the other’s the Ivan Susanin, named after the bloke who led some Poles to their deaths in the seventeenth century.
Saturday 5 October
Had a very interesting and social day. Irina and I went to the travel agency to suss out Uglich. No glossy brochures here, just some handwritten notices about “two rooms available in such-and-such a pensionat, between such-and-such dates”, and a barking woman behind a glass screen. We had to fill out forms giving our professions etc. I wrote, “Colleague of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, as it says on my visa, but as the moths have had a field day with my gloves and I looked like Albert Steptoe as I handed the form over, this probably looked like a bald and unconvincing narrative. We queued at two windows for pieces of paper, although we were the only people in the place, and came out with our “putyovka” – travel authorisation – for 14 October.
Then we went to look round the Andrey Rublev museum, the first time it’s been open in the four years I’ve tried to visit it. Irina told me about their Marxism-Leninism classes at university. One of the ‘best’ students became a priest straight afterwards and another, rather vacant, girl got top marks because the lecturer said she was “a Bolshevik by nature”. “And you, Irina”, he said, “say one thing and think another.” I do like her – she has her own opinions and is one of the few people who never asks me for anything.
I had lunch at Tanya’s. During the coup she’d spent the time talking to the tank drivers in the street, then gone home, cut up a blue suit and red skirt, and sewn Russian flags, which later departed from Moscow on some tanks.
I then met Natalya Vysotskaya and another lawyer who works on capital cases. Because it was cold, we sat in the foyer of Izvestiya and chatted. Natalya invited me home and when we got to the tube, she turned round to survey the people behind us and see if we were being followed. That some ordinary professional woman should do this so naturally really struck home. It has got to me, and I don’t like this part of living here.
I then had several hours getting to know the riddle that is she. She took me home via the church which she hopes to expand into a rehabilitation centre for ex-convicts. It was until recently a warehouse and tonight a service was going on in amongst the scaffolding, and there was an immensely good atmosphere. People had also brought bedding etc. for her ex-prisoners. She’s totally dedicated to her project, an immensely good lobbyist, and immensely hard working. When we got home she put on old blues numbers and told me about her life before she became religious.
Izvestiya says an amnesty is being prepared for army deserters.
Sunday 6 October
The lovely weather continues. Today was the day of unhappy families.
I took corrections to the Peru translation down to the Teplitskys. There was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife: all three of them sitting in separate rooms, the tension brought on by Lena’s Turgenev homework. Natasha says she’ll give it two more weeks then is going to do something about it. Poor Lena was fed up to death and fighting tears because she couldn’t do her essay.
I think Soviet newsreaders are going through a reaction to the coup and the mechanical way the readers behaved then. They’re full of comments and asides about the world at large and the news they are reading. One woman interviewer was so full of tragedy and sighing when she introduced the subject of deaths in the army that I think the guests were quite reluctant to say anything in case they intruded upon her grief. It got worse when it turned out the actress she was featuring next had been widowed that day.
Monday 7 October
The oddest public holiday today: to celebrate Brezhnev’s Constitution. I suppose there isn’t a Constitution at the moment so they can’t celebrate that.
By midday I saw a guy with a shopping bag trying to negotiate the corner of a building like a vaudeville drunk. He had even more trouble with a puddle. The other night I saw a drunk trying to pee up against a wall, holding his shopping bag in front of him.
I managed to shake myself out of the lethargy which has been threatening. In the remaining weeks while our registration is on ice, I think I should systematise our death penalty mailing lists and also introduce Amnesty at all the republican embassies in Moscow.
A Japanese student at Moscow Law Faculty came round to visit in the morning and immediately arranged ways to promote Amnesty at the university. She’d been at our death penalty seminar but unfortunately leaves on 26 October. She said she was only sorry we hadn’t met earlier. Me too.
Another person at the seminar wrote me the nicest letter, giving the phone numbers of about twenty people who were in the now-defunct Society to Abolish the Death Penalty. I began to ring them up for their addresses, and despite my odd introduction – “Hello, I’m ringing about the death penalty” – the reaction was universally interested and warm.
Tuesday 8 October
Delightful weather continues. I spent the morning trying to find the official in the Russian government who could give Amnesty the list of death sentences commuted in September. I thought, Why not try the intimidating woman at the Statistics Department in the USSR Ministry of Justice?, and sure enough, her defences were down and she was quite maternal to me. Got some numbers from her and short shrift from the people at the other end of them.
Tanya gave me another good massage. I wonder what the neighbours think: she speaks at the top of her voice, there’s slapping and the occasional shout from me. She’s an immense sensualist and takes a childlike pleasure in anything that looks, sounds, or smells nice: a bar of soap, flowers, the sound of church bells.