Cold War Experiences

[Adm.Lee]

Neat idea, I'll share. I studied Russian in high school and college (where I found out that I hadn't learned all that much in high school), and our high-school class took a package tour of the Soviet Union in April 1986. I think we flew in from Helsinki, (after dark?) so I didn't get to see anything in the air. I remember we had to fly out through Turku, thanks to an airport strike in Helsinki.

We saw lots of sights in Moscow and Leningrad, taking the night train between the two of them. Hardly any were military, mostly historical. I thought briefly about jumping out of the bus when I saw we were passing the Red Army Artillery Museum in Leningrad. I think I only saw uniforms (other than the street cops and passport-stampers) when we wandered Gorky(?) Park on a Sunday.

I didn't talk to hardly any Russians, as we were sticking to our tour group like glue, and I'm naturally shy. Quite a few hit up one of my pals to buy his blue jeans, but they ignored me. At some museum in Leningrad, we were shown a song & dance by a high school, with some chance to mingle. I couldn't/didn't, as the the music was far too loud and I had to flee the room with a splitting headache.

We saw new buildings and old. We noted that there weren't many pretty girls-- we were 17 or 18, from an all-boys' school, believe me, we were looking for them! Nearly everyone on the street seemed serious and their clothes were drab-colored.

I don't remember seeing any minders, or really looking for them. We did aim some comments at the "sprinkler heads" in our hotel rooms.

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After that, one of my pals (different school, not on that trip) joined the Army, trained in MI, and went to Berlin. My then-fiancee and I visited him and his wife in January 1991. This was after the Wall came down, so we got to wander the East some days. I saw some memorials (the Soviet WW2 memorial, for instance), some ruins, and one last piece of the Wall. It was also during the air half of the Gulf War, so there was a lot of jumpy security and we stayed away from the Berlin Brigade posts. I bought a Soviet-style helmet at an open-air market, as a souvenir.

I guess my big memory there was getting sloshed at Green Week, sort of a European-wide State Fair to display agricultural products. Like beer, beer, more beer, Calvados, wine, schnapps and some orange-based stuff from Israel.