Russia had always been an enigma for me, right from the earliest days of my childhood. In those magical days at primary school, I would take down the school atlas and then the very essence of my day would change, as I followed the path of the Trans-Siberian Express across this great country from Moscow to Vladivostok on the coast. It was then that anything I imagined could happen, as my finger traced the snaking route from Minsk to Tomsk, and the train whistle blew in short steady blasts, telling me it was arriving at a station in a place so far away. Images of snowy Siberian landscapes, of setting red suns that cast long shadows along the carriages filled my boyhood imagination and by the time the train reached Irkutsk, it was usually time to leave the Atlas aside for another day. As the days passed and I grew wiser, the winds slowly began to change and they carried tales to me about this faraway land that left it even more cloaked in mystery. The first person to make me descend at a station platform and hence spoil my boyhood adventure was probably that missionary priest. I still remember, how his eyes almost glazed over, as he stood before the class and told us how the pagan Russian people had no religion, and were all destined to go to hell. I think it was my own mother who later told me that the great unbounded landscapes that carried the trains of my dreams, were patchworked with prison camps and the people were detained behind a great concrete curtain. The leaves changed colour, the full moons waxed and waned, and the years went by, and thankfully I discovered the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky to help celebrate the loss of innocence. Gradually, as the clouds of time parted, more blue skies appeared and it became more apparent that the native melodies of Moussorgsky and Shostakovitch or the works of Chekhov and Pasternak could tell the whole story of Mother Russia more eloquently than any human voice I knew.

With the passing of time, I eventually reached Moscow, the romantic city that lay at the start of my train journey, so many years before. A faint voice, like the echo of my childhood memories still lingered in my mind as I  stood by the banks of the Moskva River, and listened for the sound of people now gone and lost forever. Across the river, I could see the featureless apartment blocks rising to the skylines, which housed the silent workers of an experiment that was now collapsing from within. I walked back in silence until I reached the sloping cobblestones of Krasnaya Ploshchad, Red Square and the gilded onion-domes of the cathedrals that lay behind the red bricked walls of the Kremlin. This was the seat of government, the heartbeat of the old Soviet regime, the fortified stronghold that was once burned to the ground by invading Mongols and the place that the poet Mayakovsy had called the central point of all the earth. In 1367, Prince Dmitri replaced the wooden walls with limestone, but a few years later the Mongols returned, razing everything and killed half the population of the city. In the Middle Ages, the whole area had been a thriving marketplace, and it had remained so until in 1893, when the traders moved under cover into the giant three storey GUM department store, which they built along the northeastern side of the square. The snow was falling softly as I approached St. Basil’s Cathedral, a surrealistic building of seven different churches, erected at the top of the square in 1561, by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the annexation of the Mongol states of Kazan and Astrakhan. According to legend, Ivan had the two architects, Posnik and Barma, blinded so they could never again create such a remarkable church. The Cathedral was built in classic Russian style, its interior filled with icons and frescoes, its ceilings painted in red, yellow and turquoise flower patterns. It is said that when Napoleon visited the city, he got his troops to stable their horses there and he was deterred from blowing up the building when the townspeople extinguished the burning fuses during his retreat. The irony of being surrounded by gilded cupolas, elaborate frescoes and all the iconology of a supposedly pagan people did not go unnoticed, as I listened once more to the voices of the past. I then looked across the square at the black labradorite mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, where a few people were gathering together in small groups. For more than seventy years, the Soviet people had stood in a long line that stretched along the length of the square, hoping to enter the sarcophagus and view the revolutionary leader. At every hour the Kremlin clock would chime and two armed sentries would march towards the entrance of the shrine to relieve their colleagues. Now, as the wheels of history locked the cult of Lenin and the Soviet state together in a binding embrace, they both spiralled downward, leaving the revered mausoleum an unwanted reminder of a great people's misplaced devotion. As more drops of snows began falling, I looked out again across the city again and wondered whether some small child in a classroom was taking another cherished atlas down from a shelf. And maybe, as the snow fell outside their windows, their cold fingers might draw an imaginary line between the strange sounding names of Dublin and Ballinamore. And maybe, they would forget about their hunger for a while and dream that they might be fortunate enough to visit these places oneday, when they grew older.