Marjorie Farquharson - Moscow Diary

I came home via Pushkin Square where I picked up documentation from some HIV sufferers. After dinner I went out to Yelena’s place to return the saucepans I borrowed from them over a year ago. Yelena’s mother is being made redundant on 5 April. Their neighbour is going to all the right-wing demonstrations. Yelena gave me spare cardboard boxes for packing up my things and going back to London. So the crates which brought relief from the Solzhenitsyn Fund will be carrying out things for the Amnesty rep.

Everyone looked very tired, but it was a leisurely family evening as usual, with Yelena’s mother listening to the radio in the kitchen, and the baby asleep. Yelena and I played the piano to each other, using the music she had copied out by hand in exile. It was a very vivid picture: Yelena with her long dark hair and face slightly strained with the effort, baby’s bath on top of the china cabinet, and the room strewn with boxes of things for prisoners. Late twentieth-century woman, who has been exiled in her own country. I wonder what her daughter’s friends will remember about her in future years.

I had a new postman today: someone from the USA who is doing research into nuclear policy. He took Amnesty’s article to the Journal of Asian and African Studies .

Tuesday 3 March

Nice weather continues, with the streets like the seashore, continually running with little ripples of water.

Every time I try to buy something in the street, or flag down a car, some good-hearted woman leaps to my elbow and tells me not to because it’s too expensive, or tells me where I can get it cheaper round the corner. I don’t usually have time go round the corner, but feel inhibited to carry on buying there in the street. So I’m not getting very much at the moment.

Wednesday 4 March

Prepared this week’s courier and also got myself ready for an interview on China tomorrow at the Russian World Service. Took the afternoon off and went with Irina to see an exhibition at 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya, the place where they held underground art shows during Brezhnev’s times. From there we walked up to Chekhov’s museum at the house where he used to practise medicine, now on the Garden Ring. Whichever museum you go into, you always find Shalyapin and Gorky gracing the photos, like something out of Jennifer’s Diary .

In the evening Simon Cosgrove came round to take away my cups and glasses. I’m starting the pruning for moving.

Thursday 5 March

Since I’ve read about Buddhist “mindfulness” I’ve left my handbag overnight at the Sannikovas’, and this morning I locked myself out of the flat. Obviously being too “mindful”.

I had an early morning appointment with Nikita at the Moscow City Justice Department, to ask his advice about how we register with the Russian authorities. I’m afraid we are straddling two horses, going along simultaneously as a “charity” with the Moscow Mayordom, and as a “foreign business” with the Russian government. He thinks so too. He gave me an hour of his time, looking up decrees and phoning contacts. At one point he sat with a phone at each ear, discussing decrees down one, and some bargain food down the other.

Afterwards I did an interview with Kirill Mikhailov at the World Service and he took me for lunch. His questions were all very general about human rights, but very interesting. The interview will be broadcast to China, North Korea, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Friday 6 March

I’ve just had Andrey round for dinner. With a face deadpan with embarrassment he brought me a present for Women’s Day. He said when he first started practising “mindfulness” he almost fell under a bus. He’s an immensely attractive man.

The cost of mailing stuff to London has gone up to 900 roubles (!) from 30 last January. Othmar and I were hard pushed to assemble the cash. In the afternoon I visited the Trans-National Radical Party to share Amnesty’s material on the death penalty. Although they have a pleasantly anarchic philosophy, they are also down to business and I like talking to them. I also got an appointment with the Electricity Board to survey our office.

Saturday 7 March

Irina and I continued our tour of Moscow graveyards. Today we walked down to Novodevichy monastery. Although it was only zero degrees and there was no wind, it was deadly cold for some reason. A chill seemed to rise up between the graves. There were nice modest graves for Chekhov and Bulgakov and then as you approach the 1970s section, there are more and more giant heads of nobodies on big pillars. Ex-President Gromyko is lying next to ex-Chief Ideologist Suslov. How ghastly to be buried together. They probably hated each other in real life.

We then went on a search for bread for me, stopping en route in a grocery store on Kropotkin Street, which had a nice display of fish, cheese, jams, booze, butter and meat. Even though the prices are stupendous, there is definitely more around, and it is a relief to the eye.

Irina came back for soup and beer, and we listened to my Philip Glass tape: minimalist electronic music called Life Out of Balance . When you listen to that and look at Yury Gagarin’s statue outside the window, like some insistent silver boy, it seems a perfect match.

After she left I caught up with Izvestiya . Shevardnadze has gone back to Georgia and Mutalibov has resigned in Azerbaidzhan. The situation seems wide open in both countries.

Sunday 8 March: Women’s Day

Today is also Forgiveness Sunday in the Russian Orthodox Calendar and the day before the Lenten fast begins, so it was pancakes, pancakes all the way.

I took my vacuum cleaner to give to Misha’s wife, and we had a fine time with wine over lunch. She told me that the father of Yegor Gaidar, the Finance Minister, was a national hero in the Second World War, and at school they used to sing a song about him called ‘Gaidar in the Frontline’! Now people are sending in ironic letters to the radio about the young Gaidar and his economic reforms, saying he should be in the frontline too.

The Quaker meeting was very fine today. Afterwards I talked with Marina, who’s a psychologist devising recommendations for reconciliation in ethnic conflicts. The trouble is, they have no one to send their recommendations to. I told her how I’d learned that losing my temper seems to work in office here, but I don’t know how to square it with other things I believe in. She said, “You have to shout, because it’s the only thing they understand”, and then we both laughed, because she doesn’t know how to square it either.

Felt surrounded by great warmth and affection. Misha Roshchin had brought me an inscribed book; Sergey the electrician had brought me a tulip and a book. I was kissed by the elder in the Russian Orthodox Church who handles the key.

Monday 9 March

I’ve three weeks left and in that time I have to pack and ship my things; do interviews with Izvestiya , Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Sovetskaya Justitsiya ; and tie up the rent agreement for the office. Hit the road with renewed energy.

The electricity inspectors were round at the office in the early morning. It turns out that the Moscow Electricity Board has no meters (!) and so we have to find and install our own. Tolya is working on getting us a phone, and said that to get it quickly we need to give the secretaries a “present”. I went to a hard currency shop and bought a big tin of foreign biscuits. We also need to chivvy up the Health and Safety people, and I actually contemplated giving the inspector the flowers I had bought – but decided against starting on this path. However, when I saw her sitting in her bleak room, I offered her a carnation to cheer it up and we exchanged a complicated sort of look. I then went back to the Bureau of Technical Administration to pick up our replacement ground plan for the office. They hadn’t done it – but something seems to have changed there. The doors are open, people are busy and they were full of pleasant apologies for keeping me waiting.