Letter to the Kremlin

I graduated from Hopeless Street in 1954, when I was nine years old, and started in O’Connell School (O.C.S.). It consisted of a primary and secondary school catering for 9 to 18 year olds. It was situated at the other end of the North Circular Road about 3 miles away. It was run by a branch of the Waffen SS, and the School Principal was an SS Obergruppenfuehrer from the 1st SS-Panzer-Division Leibstandarte 'Adolf Hitler'. It was very right wing and tended to produce pupils that were either on the far right or the far left. A breeding ground for extremists and fundamentalists. I didn’t take it seriously and it made me anti Irish and anti Catholic at that time.
By the age of eight I had stopped going to church and had written to Moscow, expressing an interest in their system. They replied to my letter and sent me two books, one of which was The USSR today, which gave comprehensive geographical detail as well as information on over forty ethnic groups who populated the vast area, which covers twelve time zones. The sheer scale of the area and the temperature spans, especially in parts of Siberia, where the difference between the coldest and hottest temperatures can sometimes exceeds 100 Celsius degrees.
The second book had a red cover with a photo of Lenin. There were many pictures of the Soviet life style, portraying the advantages of communism. I wasn’t impressed, as it appeared to be a rather grey place with too much sameness and uniformity. The lack of a class system made it seem dull and drab – with no sparkle, no spontaneity, no sense of fun, and no magic. The conformity of the grey buildings in the different cities looked depressingly dead.
It didn’t light up my world and I decided to pass on this one.
My father went ballistic, as he was ferociously opposed to Stalin and didn’t want any literature on him. He had been born before the Russian revolution and Stalin and Hitler were not his icons. It didn’t bother my mother, as she was focused on her own world and had no interest in events outside of her domain.©