The boys from Naija/5

So we were headed for Moscow. The immediate images this city conjured up in my mind were of the Red Square, St Basil’s Cathedral and of the Kremlin. And of the bald headed moustachioed man with a goatee, whom they called Vladimir Ilych Lenin. There were also images of unsmiling fat elderly men and women wearing thick black winter coats walking about in a place, which was overhung by dark grey clouds, and where nobody could own anything, except for those things, which they were permitted to own by the government. And for some reason, all the images would always be in black and white, except for the red flags, which had a hammer and chisel engraved in them as symbols of Lenin's revolution. There was also the KGB, shrouded in so much mystery and evoking so much fear...

In order to get more factual information about the place, I had gone to the Owerri Central Library immediately after i was informed of the scholarship. This library, which was relatively well-resourced...but with very outdated books...was located at a trekkable distance from where we lived at Ikenegbu layout. Unfortunately, there had been very little information about Russia and the little that i was able to lay my hands on had been hidden away between the pages of very voluminous and tedious to read books.

I gathered that Moscow is an ancient city that gets its name from a similar named river, the river Moskva, on the banks of which it is located. This city has been the capital of Russia since Vladimir Ilych Lenin and the Bolsheviks ousted power from the Tsar and the bourgeoisie class in the bloody revolution of 1917. The capital of Russia before the revolution was St Petersburg, which was later renamed Leningrad; the city of Lenin.

According to history, Lenin died in 1924 and Josef Stalin took over the reigns of power and ushered in a regime, which was notorious for its use of widespread arrests, tortures and executions to brutally crack down on people opposed to the system of beliefs. The state apparatus used for maintaining this status quo was the secret police or the Kommitiet Gasudastveniey Bezapastnost better known as the KGB. After the Second World War the area of influence of Stalinist Russia is said to have expanded into the Baltic and neighbouring East European Countries, while an impenetrable geo-political enclave was created that was cut off from the West by an ideological wall, better known as the "Iron Curtain".

We boarded the half empty aeroplane and as I stepped into the cabin I noticed that the front rows seemed to have been completely taken up by the Russians and other Caucasians, while most of the Nigerians sat towards the back. I saw the pimple faced youth, who earlier on his mother had called by the name Ugo, sitting alone in one of the window seats near the back. Since i also wanted a window seat and being that I didn’t really feel like talking to anybody at that moment, I had taken up the empty window seat just two rows in front of him.

We tightened our seat belts and after several minutes the plane gradually picked up speed on the runway and then lifted into the sky, climbing higher and higher into the African night. Out of my window I could see the buildings in the crowded city of Lagos below get smaller and smaller until they became like little dots of light in an otherwise large sea of darkness.

As the Aeroflot plane continued to climb higher, I reclined on the seat and closed my eyes. I was wondering what my life was going to become in this land behind that ominous Iron curtain where I was about to call home for the next 7 years. It was starting to dawn on me as the dots of light from the city of Lagos below had gradually faded into a dark blur, that I was not only leaving behind my family with all its contradictions, but I was also leaving behind my childhood and about to start on a new chapter of life in which my gradual transition into a man would be finally completed…