Sunday 20 October
A marvellous conversation with Boris Sudaryshkin, who seemed to be thirsting for religious talk. Then Tatyana and I parted company and I went for a sauna with Lyuda. We took the metro to the north, crossed the main road, and were suddenly out in the country amongst dachas. The sauna was in a hut by a lake, and as it was moonlight we all raced out and leapt into the freezing lake. The secret is to cover your head with water so that your body is all one temperature, and that way you don’t feel cold. Walking back to the sauna you feel high and terrific.
Monday 21 October
Anne-Marie was in St Petersburg today, finishing her tour of pollution hotspots. She’d been in Kiev when the Chernobyl reactor caught fire, so had just closed the window and pulled the blanket over her head. Sounds like British civil defence. I had lunch with her Soviet mother-in-law, then we all took Anne-Marie to the airport.
In the afternoon I was to speak to Lyuda’s Faculty of English teachers, about forty of them. I must have overdone the bit about “fighting for your rights”, because when I left they voted to go on strike if their hours are not cut – Lyuda too. There was a surprising amount of interest in Amnesty, especially from the teachers in the Law Department, and they asked me to come and speak to their students.
The overnight train to Moscow was lovely – much warmer than my flat. Two women next to me were talking quietly in Georgian and I could hear Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love for You’ floating in and out over the sound of the wheels. The woman on the top bunk seemed to be some kind of an athlete, and bounded up to her bunk in one graceful movement. Lovely sleep.
Tuesday 22 October
I spent the day working at home. It is now very cold and the heating still has not come on in the flat. I had to queue for twenty minutes out in the street for bread. The temperature was +8 degrees and by night-time I was feeling ill. I heard later there was a demonstration for bread in the Manezh Square at night.
I spent the evening translating Tatyana’s article about the “Three Dimensions of Russia”, rather a philosophical piece, then went to Aleksey at No. 36, to help him with some English. His mother-in-law was going to bed early because she knew she would have to get up to queue for sugar next day. He was translating The Desperate Donnegans and it was full of things like, “He’s the best yellow-leg ever to have forked a McCall.” We were both sitting poring over an American dictionary, but it didn’t really help much.
Today Andrey called, worried that I might not be able to renew my visa, and so inviting me to talk about it with Sergey Grigoryants, the head of Glasnost journal, who would be prepared to kick up a fuss if necessary. He very nicely said, “We are not indifferent to who represents Amnesty.” Praise indeed.
Wednesday 23 October
I had a lunch appointment with the TV programme, The Law and Us, and was scared stiff all morning. However, it turned out to be a chat over coffee with Sasha Senatorov, the long-haired interviewer. I interested them in doing a programme for Human Rights Day on 10 December. In the afternoon I started my rounds of visiting the various republican embassies in Moscow, beginning with the embassy of Kyrgyzstan. At first the guy couldn’t seem to understand why I was there, and it did seem to be a bit of a liberty, but I showed him our correspondence with the President and we got talking about the death penalty for fifty minutes, and I think a quite good first contact was made. I wonder if one day Amnesty will simply be a natural part of the horizon there.
In the evening Irina and I went to a concert of choral music at the Stanislavsky Museum. It was very esoteric – fourteenth-century Greek Orthodox songs – but well done and very beautiful. Everyone there was in glasses, so I suppose it was the Moscow intelligentsia at play, “smelling of onions”, as Irina pointed out. However, the audience all started bickering about whether to have the window open or not and this argument smouldered right through the fourteenth-century songs. Snow today.
Thursday 24 October
A cold wet day, which I spent working at home. I had a visit from Igor of the Krasnodar abolitionist group, who asked if I would speak to them about the death penalty. They sound a very mystical and rather interesting group.
I gave my second English class to Anna Bochko, getting her to choose five items out of twenty and explain why she would take them to a desert island. We then had an official phone conversation about trying to buy a flat, and I was very amused that after five minutes she tried to bribe me. She was most put out to find that wasn’t “normal” practice. I asked her about registering Amnesty, and she immediately called a professor at Moscow University, who specialises in registration law, to help me. What struck me most was her tone of voice on the phone. It was the same cheerful, wheedling and slightly flirtatious tone that I’ve heard Ludmilla and Natalya Vysotskaya use. Obviously what you need “to get on” as a woman here.
Friday 25 October
The heating is on. I’m still fighting some bug and feel peculiar. The TV crew came round and filmed me in my kitchen. It’s very difficult to convey the complexities of Amnesty’s position and conquer all the complexities of the Russian language at the same time, and to outsiders it must seem that I’m wrestling with some invisible angel.
Saturday 26 October
I’ve been holding the boxes of material for the Moscow Amnesty group in my flat for one month and ten days. Nikolay was supposed to organise a taxi to collect them today, but was “unable to get a taxi”, so was proposing to collect just two boxes with a friend. I went out and got a taxi, and loaded the whole lot to await his arrival. He took the whole lot to another group member, who then rang to complain that the material was not suitable for their exhibition. If they’d collected the whole lot a month ago when they first said they would, they would have known in good time.
In the evening I went to Vitaly and Gaby’s spectacular wedding feast. I think I’m a bit of a “wedding general” here as Amnesty’s representative; everyone’s pleased to have me on their guest list. From there I went to a jazz concert with Irina, at the Children’s Cinema at Paveletsky Station. It was packed with devotees and after some indifferent Soviet jazz guitar we were suddenly addressed by the brother of Irina’s stepfather, wearing a snazzy jacket, and showing rare clips of US jazz. Marvellous rare film of Thelonius Monk and Billie Holliday.
In the morning I trudged off in the snow to Anna Bochko’s legal consultancy to meet Professor Gamlet Avetisyan and to hear the horrible truth about the registration steps we must go through. It looks like it will take forever.
Sunday 27 October
I had a visit from a stringer from the San Francisco Chronicle, here to investigate the gay scene. In the afternoon I began to feel as though I’ve been here too long. I finished translating an article and got increasingly irritated by the profusion of adjectives and accumulation of clauses, like Russian’s growing all over you. There seems to be graphomania and wordomania here and it would be lovely to have some peace and quiet.
In the evening the feeling was accentuated at the Quakers, when someone started laying down the law after the meeting about, of all things, life after death. I went and cleaned my boots, as I’d stood in eighteen inches of muck on the way there. I’m writing this by candlelight as my kitchen bulb’s gone.