Over the next six years, she helped oversee the prompt translation and publication of the Chronicle, and made sure that key "missing issues" from 1976 to 1977, which documented the emergence of the Helsinki Groups,[4] and their treatment by the Soviet authorities, also appeared in English, even if at some delay, in January 1979.
In May 1988 there was a meeting in Paris with Fedor Burlatsky, head of the official Public Commission for International Cooperation on Humanitarian Affairs and Human Rights set up by Gorbachev's Politburo.
Shevardnadze's Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin came to London in January 1989 and during his stay paid what he called "a symbolic visit" to Amnesty's International Secretariat.
[8] During these numerous preliminary meetings Marjorie secured agreement to the first official publication by Amnesty International in Russian: When the State Kills, a book about capital punishment, appeared in 1989.
She promoted the notion of human rights in the press, radio and TV; she built up a wide range of contacts in Moscow, provincial Russia and the other Soviet republics.
During the last five months of that visit, from November 1991 onwards, Marjorie wrote and broadcast a weekly programme about human rights on the national Radio Rossiya and organized Russia's first ever conference on the death penalty.
[1] Halfway through this intense period came the attempted August coup d'état and the Soviet Union itself came to an end four months before Marjorie left Moscow.
From 1993 to 1994, Marjorie worked as a Field Advisor to Mr Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Special Rapporteur on ex-Yugoslavia for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
[2] She was responsible for providing speeches and documents monitoring the human rights situation based on research in the field (Sarajevo, Kiseljak, Bihac and Zagreb) and liaising with the inter-governmental community.
Between 1994 and 1996, Marjorie returned to Moscow as European Community & UK Charities Aid Foundation Director of the TACIS NGO Support Unit.
The programme liaised closely with the political organs of the Council of Europe — the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers — and with its judicial arm, the European Court of Human Rights.
[22] Marjorie's work at that time, combined with her acute perception and entertaining style of writing, make this a very interesting account: it brings together insights into the politics of human rights and observations of the unusually wide range of people she then encountered.