: Mithra Fernando
: Shindig in Moscow Memoirs of a Foreign Student
: Vivid Publishing
: 9781923078413
: Shindig in Moscow
: 1
: CHF 4.20
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 256
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
From the outside, since the late 1960s, life in Moscow looked like a shindig to a foreign student. In his memoirs, Dr Mithra Fernando shares his experience of living in Moscow from 1972 to 1983 as a foreign scholarship student. He has felt the first winds of the rancid stench of corruption in Moscow. As a foreign student in the USSR, he witnessed and felt the beginning and rapidly approaching collapse of the socialist system, which eventually disintegrated completely, seven years after his departure from Moscow. In his memoirs, 'Shindig in Moscow', Fernando reveals the truth behind the pretentious communist solidarity, emphasizing that it was, in essence, a convenient and easy source for familial and nepotistic benefits. Nothing more than foreign communist leeches sucking the blood out of the Soviet System for the long haul. 'Shindig in Moscow' is about how the truth was systematically suppressed. Fernando goes on to provide details of how the USSR apparatchiks and their agents amongst the foreign students took part in profiling the student community, how they carried out secret and clandestine operations to influence academic decisions by the university, how the high academic standards of the former Peoples' Friendship University named after Patrice Lumumba, were systematically influenced and overrun to meet the interests of foreign student traders, the suppliers of foreign merchandise to the local underground traders in Moscow. These memoirs provide eyewitness accounts and proof that Socialism in the USSR, at least in the decade in which the author happened to live there, was proven to be nothing but an enormous myth.

Mithra Fernando is the author of 'Shindig in Moscow'.

The First-Time Flight.

It was the evening of Sunday, 13 August 1972. The 53-metre-long IL-62 Aeroflot plane with the large letters CCCP painted in red on its fuselage stood majestically 12 metres high on the tarmac of the Katunayake airport, like a gigantic bird with its wings spreading 43 metres.

Having set off from home in an entourage of eight cars full of my family, friends, kith and kin, I was at the airport one hour early. Not knowing the Russian alphabet then, I was wondering what the letters CCCP stood for. I guessed it was perhaps something C…..C … Communist Party? Later I found out that my guess was wrong; the letters CCCP in fact were from the Russian alphabet, which has a different pronunciation, and the Russian acronym CCCP is deciphered as:Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, pronouncedsoyuz sovethskih socialisticheskih repooblik, or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” in English. Then, the USSR was a union of fifteen republics and also called the Soviet Union.

Just about to board the first flight in our life, all 21 of us, the USSR scholarship awardees, were happy, anxious, and excited. I had met some of them in the previous couple of weeks while we were going around Colombo getting our travel papers organised at the Soviet Embassy on Flower Road, Colombo 7, Aeroflot Office in Fort and at the Ministry of Education on Malay Street, Slave Island. Owing to the terrorist political indoctrination and activities in the country, the government had made it mandatory for anyone leaving the country to have an exit permit, endorsed by the local police and stamped by the Head Office of the Criminal Investigation Department.

As ushered by the airport staff, we went through the customs, our flight papers and baggage were checked in and then we walked on the tarmac to the aircraft. There was no PBD (Passenger Boarding Bridge) at that time. After the usual boarding procedures, we put our seat belts on, and the plane started to taxi. From our aircraft portholes I could see the observation gallery full of people waving hands at us; I could not spot my parents or any of my family who came to see me off, but I kept on waving my hand. In 1972, going abroad was a very big deal in Sri Lanka. One of my batchmates came with a full busload of people from his village to see him off. In my family, except for my grandfather who had flown to India on a pilgrimage, no one had stepped out of the country. Almost all the adults in my family circle were engaged in business, and, except one distant uncle, there were no graduates among my close relatives. So, I was the only one that would be graduating with an overseas university degree. It was a substantial family event and a proud moment for the family, which rested a lot of hope on me. I was determined to live up to the family expectations. Being the th