I revised the translation of our Peru document, then composed a letter to Pink Floyd for Vladimir Alimov. All in a day’s work.
Wednesday 9 October
It was touch and go how this complicated day would work out, but it did. In the morning I managed to fix an appointment with the President of the Russian Clemency Commission. He said they don’t give out lists of people who have been pardoned. I said we just wanted to spare him from being bombarded by superfluous appeals. He laughed and said, “Well, OK.”
Nina Petrovna Lisovskaya came round with Pavlo Kampov, bearing flowers and fruit from Ukraine and here to collect his long-suffering computer. It was very satisfying to see the immense pleasure it gave him, to bring the whole saga to an end – and to have four fewer boxes in the room.
I then dashed to Megapolis Express to do an interview with a very nice, un-Russian sort of woman. She looked as though she might be called Pauline or Christine. Five women worked in the room and one man, but the walls were plastered with pin-ups.
Got back half an hour late to meet Vera Millinship and take her walking round the Kolomenskoye monastery, but I needn’t have worried; it had taken her two hours to travel the equivalent of four tube stops, because she couldn’t find petrol for the car. It’s a funny thing this being late. I find I’m doing it all the time here, perhaps because you always have to walk further than you think.
To crown it all I got the wrong bus at night, so arrived panting for the piano concert at the Stanislavsky museum with Yelena’s mother. She excused me because she remembered I’m “always late”. It happened to be the seventh anniversary of Yelena’s trial. Her mother remembered she’d got a surprise call from the KGB saying Yelena wanted a blue dress for her court appearance.
Yelena’s mother really is the unsung heroine of all this. She supports Yelena down to the ground and takes in all her waifs and strays, some of whom live with her for two months at a time. She said of one woman, “It would have been alright if she didn’t talk.” She told me people from the House of Architects want to make a sign for our office and also a “symbolic” arrangement of dried flowers. These nice gestures are the most satisfying thing about this job.
At 10.00pm I met Anne-Marie, visiting pollution hot spots in her new ecology job. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other in a year and we stayed up late, drinking and smoking.
Thursday 10 October
“Svyatye mesta pustye ne byvayut”, as they say here, and the place of Oleg and Ruslan seems to have been taken by the very nice Andrey. He brought me some lovely wooden spoons, then we stayed on chatting and had an ice cream. Another reasonable and low-key man living on the fringes.
In the afternoon I went to the Democratic Russia Party to see if their bookshop would be interested in carrying our death penalty report. I think they were, but suspected I’d stolen the books. They’ll decide tomorrow. I also met up with Natalya Vysotskaya, who’d just addressed a congress of businessmen, hoping some would help to sponsor her prisoner fund, but hit a brick wall. All her frustration boiled down to the fact that they were sloppy, there was dirt everywhere, and “they all had things sticking out of their pockets”. She despairs if they are the only challenge to the old order.
At 6.00pm I had my appointment with Nikolay Vedernikov, the head of the Russian Clemency Commission. The Parliament building looks nice inside, and the offices and signs look businesslike, rather than pompous. Downstairs they had an exhibition of children’s art, depicting Lithuania in January and Moscow in August. There does seem to be life in the place.
Vedernikov is a criminology professor from Tomsk University, but if Tomsk has been a closed city, he seems quite an open man. On his recent trip to the USA he especially asked to meet Amnesty people in Washington; he has just ushered through the first large group of commutations on capital cases; and he gave me the unpublished list of their names on trust. However, the Clemency Commission itself seems to leave a lot to be desired: its members are picked at random, have no criteria to work by, and someone who works on it told me most members don’t read the case material. They just listen to the presentations and vote on the nod.
Friday 11 October
Had an interesting evening watching TV. There was Come Dancing from St Petersburg, with a line of adverts for carpenters and plumbers continually running across the bottom of it. One advert was for a computer firm called “Arse”.
Then there was a TV doctor answering readers’ letters – absolutely amazing letters and amazing replies. After a crop of questions from people with bad legs and backs, he read out letters from insomniacs and they were terrifying: one woman was so afraid of a famine she couldn’t sleep. Another had seen a war invalid attacked in a queue because he was taking time over choosing a small piece of meat, and now she was too frightened to go shopping and also couldn’t sleep. The doctor explained it as “situational neurosis” and got himself more and more worked up as he described the political scene, ending with quotations from non-democratic politicians, which he happened to have brought with him. After reading out something by Zhirinovsky, he said, “I’d make him have psychiatric tests if it was up to me.” So, cold comfort for the people who couldn’t sleep.
I, however, could hardly stay awake all day and went to bed at 4.00pm. I wonder if it’s massage that brings it on. Tanya walked me to the tube, slapping me to make me straighten my back. I had a very interesting lunch with one of the people I had phoned about the death penalty. He turned out to be in the navy and a young judge on a military tribunal, training other judges. He was very intelligent and very interested in Amnesty. He’s also pretty brave. When the coup was announced, his institute decided on loyalty to the coup committee, but to give institute employees the opportunity to resign. He had collected Yeltsin’s statement from the Russian Parliament and was suddenly hit by terror as he began to distribute it at the institute. He heard the underground radio’s call for all able-bodied men to defend the White House and went there on the Tuesday night. When the firing started he and his wife kissed each other goodbye. He laughed at it all in hindsight, but the terror must have been real.
A very nice phone call from Andrey today, offering to give me a blanket, as the heating hasn’t come on in my flat. Theirs has been on since the end of August (!). According to Mr Kostanov at Moscow Soviet Justice Department, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister has given his blessing to register Amnesty. Various papers are supposed to be trundling back and forth in the post.
Managed to buy myself a pair of felt boots for winter today, for less than £1.
Saturday 12 October
Deep fog. Up by six and out of the house by 8.00am to buy tickets for Leningrad next weekend, which I managed to do in ten minutes, beating the queue. There were eggs in the peasants’ market! Fifteen roubles for ten – not bad. As I nursed them home on a crowded bus, several people asked me where I got them from. Given the continuing general dearth, that really does seem to be “the market” working.
The fog cleared and it was a lovely day, which I spent sleeping and working in the evening. I made the chilling discovery that a thief has been in my flat. A bowl I kept on a high shelf with some donations in it was empty. Bad feeling.
Sunday 13 October
There was a great dividing-up of cabbages today from the back of a lorry in the middle of our courtyard. I don’t know how people knew about it, but they were all there, loading them into the back of their cars.