It was the writer Eilís Dillon who decided she wanted to send me and Séamas Mac Annaidh, the Irish-language novelist, to Moscow. I can’t remember why she thought this was a good idea, but we went. It was deepest winter, 1992, Russia was in chaos, the rouble had been sucked into a black hole. The following year Yeltsin would march on the Russian White House. I’m absolutely sure I had no clear idea about all this. I was barely abreast of my own Irish history. Moreover, I had just learned that my wife, Ali, was pregnant with twins, and maybe I was thinking of that.

In the market on our first day, a woman was begging. When I tried to give her roubles, she threw them to the ground and screamed at me: “Dollars, dollars, dollars!”

We were there supposedly to lecture to the Gorky Institute, which sounded grand enough in theory. It turned out to have all the character of a secondary school, but we blindly said our few words; whether we added a jot or tittle to the great store of Russian culture is debatable.

The first thing in our way was the snow everywhere, snow that had been trodden into long, icy slides. I don’t know if we had the wrong shoes, but we fell hard and lengthways a good few times. We stabbed along then as daintily as we could. Utter foreigners. The Moscovites didn’t seem to have any trouble at all, at least with walking. Otherwise, when we went into a supermarket, there was literally nothing there. In all the yards and yards of aisles, nothing; only, on one 10ft shelf, a solitary dried-out loaf. Yet the people walked up and down, as if shopping for invisible items.

People queue on an icy Moscow street to buy bread in 1991. Photograph: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis via Getty Images

In a restaurant we were taken to by our hosts, which we were told was mafia-run, we ordered chicken. But it was chicken that seemed to our puzzled eyes to have been run over some weeks back, left in the rain to marinate, then fried to blackness and darkness. All around us, however, this food was being eaten, gratefully. We were physically there, in Moscow but I knew that in truth it would take years to arrive, fully. To live in that tragic Moscow with proper Moscow eyes.

That evening, at a literary party, the editor of a magazine listened to me for a while, stared at me another while, and declared that we in the west were all children and just didn’t understand real history, real catastrophe. And I knew in my shaken heart she was right.

Snow, snow, snow. Icicles in great 10-foot lengths on the buildings. The great mercy of the communist power-station, at least, sending warmth to every house through knackered pipes. The neglected churches everywhere with their fading blues and golds.

It was deemed a good idea to bring us out of Moscow, me and Séamas, into the forests for a night, into the cold realm of ultimate snow. And it was very beautiful, and very delightful, and Séamas was the wittiest man in all Russia, and the rivers ran actual silver through the Tolstoyan fields (pollution, we were told, gave them this colour).

We reached our little lodge, astray, as it were, in all of Russian history and geography, and ventured out in our Irish shoes again to see where we were. Long avenues of snow between snowy trees. Not too far off, the crash of branches, or was that the boar, or was that the wolves? It occurred to me that not only was I blind to Russia, but I was also blind to Séamas, not being able to read Irish. In double blindness, I stumbled on. We heard the cracking glassy noises. The snow so white it flung the light back into our faces, burning them like sunlight. Séamas laughing now at the glorious ridiculousness of our journey. Lecturing at the Gorky Institute in the great communality, the great melting communism of snow.

• Sebastian Barry’s most recent book is Days Without End (Faber & Faber)