Shindig in Moscow

Mithra Fernando

Memoirs of a Foreign Student

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.