I took eggs to Irina and her mother in the evening, but someone slammed a metro door on them and they broke. Natalya Ivanovna said that previously they had not wanted to take part in the hurly-burly of the outside world, but now they had no idea how to. I have never seen her so depressed – no longer the statuesque, animated woman of previous meetings. They must be on a combined income of about 360 roubles (under £10). Their favourite sausage which was 11 roubles in January is now 150. On my way home an old man in the metro began criticising my boots and said they were fit for an eighty-year-old. He was a cobbler and wanted to see how my zips worked. I said they worked perfectly fine, thank you very much.
There is a very noticeable change even in the two and a half weeks I’ve been away. The inflation is disturbing and I would say the atmosphere is suppressed panic. I now wonder if Amnesty can develop here. It seems too much to expect of people.
Terry Waite was freed today, and Shevardnadze is once again USSR Foreign Minister.
Wednesday 20 November
I swept up the corpses of cockroaches and flies which are succumbing to my poisonous vapours, then spent the day answering letters. Nikolay was round and says his mum is still mixing with Marxist groups and is in the committee to keep Lenin in his tomb. To a Westerner it sounds like a mix-up of generations. She sent me some bread.
I collected my luggage from British Airways. Learned in the evening that Yelena had a daughter last night, so far anonymous, but bang on time.
Thursday 21 November
I’ve been hiding from the phone in case it was my landlord, but today he caught up with me and came round. To my very great surprise, however, I seem to have won that round, because he will let me stay until the end of January at the old rent and also started to mend my door lock. In fact, I feel so shocked by the prices now that I was on the point of offering him a much higher rent. He is not a bad man, but terribly intimidated by the West and I think that’s why he acts so tough. I personally think he is mean though.
In the evening I walked down to the hard currency shop to buy light bulbs for the office. In an underpass that was almost pitch black a small brass ensemble were playing Latin American numbers, and an appreciative crowd was listening. The band were in their cloth caps and working togs, with big chapped hands, but they had obviously practised their routines and were extremely good. It was like a scene from the Weimar Republic. I felt that wrench of emotions: I love the place and it also frightens me.
I woke up in the small hours with a brilliant light shining in my face. It was the moon, looking like a stadium spotlight for some reason. I lay and watched night turn into day, and thought I had a sudden illumination about Shevardnadze. It could really be that he has been acting in agreement with Gorbachev all along. When he resigned in December it was possibly because both of them anticipated a rightward lurch, and Shevardnadze would be a free agent ready to attract all the perestroyka forces if anything happened to Gorbachev. Now he’s back in the USSR Foreign Ministry I think it’s because the “Gorbachev line” is best served within the system now and not outside it. I don’t see it as a manoeuvre against Yeltsin so much as a clear line of communication to the outside world – that outside world including Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other republics.
Friday 22 November
The landlord’s father-in-law, Arseny Panteleevich, came round to mend the lock but got his key stuck in the inside of it and went away again. He seemed nice – an ex-fireman.
In the afternoon I stood in a queue for four hours and twenty minutes to get a plane ticket for Kazakhstan in December. It absolutely did me in. Had dinner with someone from the UK I was meeting for the first time, who is out here looking for jobs. I have increasing difficulty being lightly sociable and I could see the bubble going out of her as she got down to my level. Being here is playing up my serious side no end.
There is now a cross where Sverdlov’s statue stood, dedicated to the “Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists and others who died in 1917 fighting against Bolshevism”.
Last night’s Fifth Wheel was an excellent tour of US Midwest towns, seeing “how ordinary Americans live”. It was all white and all Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but the team had been quite thorough, looking at farming, commerce, the family, the Sunday etc. The Americans were all very at ease with the camera, laughed a lot, and to some extent were in their element, showing off their microwaves and furnishings, and talking about their “job skills”. A lot of them said the Union flag makes them cry. It occurred to me that if the Soviet crew asked them why they worked so fantastically hard, spent so long on the phone, were divorced etc. they would possibly have been equally in their element saying how rotten their lives were.
The TV showed all the goods without comment and the implication was that they were there to be admired and envied – but I wonder if either the crew or the viewers had such an uncomplicated reaction. The only time the interviewer sparked into life was when she spoke to an old man who trained horses, played the organ, and said love was the most important thing in his life. She asked him, “Why do we exist?”, and he said, “I don’t know”, after some thought and with a laugh.
I don’t think Russia will attain a free market economy and at some crucial level, I don’t think it will want to. Those Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Anarchists are all too recent and real.
Saturday 23 November
Irina had bought us tickets to hear Mikhail Pletnyov play and conduct Mozart piano concertos in the afternoon. A lovely concert. She had fallen down a hole running for the tram on Thursday and must have hit the ground at 100mph, because one leather glove was shredded, her right knee was gashed and she had to have her left leg x-rayed and it was all bandaged up.
There was a strange woman at the concert with her head all in a bandage like a helmet, sitting with her feet on a bag of rope and writing copiously the minute the music started. We decided she was either the music correspondent for Soviet Culture, or writing to Amnesty and that I’d get the letter in a couple of days.
There were 150 people in the queue outside the milk shop today.
Sunday 24 November
I met Simon Cosgrove for lunch and liked him immensely. He’s here researching the journal Nash Sovremennik and has just spent three years teaching in Zimbabwe. We had very similar views on Britain and it made it more interesting to discuss the USSR.
I also looked round a new two-roomed flat at Gagarin Square and decided I’ll take it after January, if I’m still here. It had a big main room and was all wooden – no wild wallpapers. They are also keen to give me bed linen and an iron, and the fridge works. All for £110 a month. It belongs to Tolya’s ex-wife and her new husband, both of them in ballet. I asked if they thought Russians want a free market economy and they said no. She later said, “I don’t like Russian people.” After we’d talked politics for two hours she said she didn’t think women should be involved in politics because it gives them wrinkles, looking at me. These childlike personal remarks are quite funny, because they’re so thinly veiled, you’d have to be an idiot not to get the point.
Then it was the Quaker meeting, with a Soviet feminist present and visiting US Quakers on their first trip to the USSR, but nevertheless giving advice on how to handle a second coup d’état. We spent a long time talking about all the compromises people made in order to succeed in Soviet society, when almost everything we said could have applied to the UK or the US, where a cocoon of untruth and self-deception also seems to prevail to my mind. One of them said, “A lot of forgiveness is needed now”, which I discovered later that Nikolay agreed with. But I thought, How do you “forgive” someone for having a car, nice flat and trips abroad when they’ve still got them and you still haven’t? I think a lot of justice is also needed.