Cold War Experiences

[RN7]

Has anybody ever had any real Cold War experiences, either through the military or by travelling across the Iron Curtain?

My only claim to one was when I travelled as part of my highschool on a ten day trip to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980's. We travelled from Shannon Airport in Ireland to Leningrad, then down to the Crimean Peninsula and back up to Moscow over those ten days. It was an amazing experience for a 17 year old, and I saw all the best and worst of the Soviets when I was there.

Saw all the major attractions and met some genuinely nice Russians, as well as the dodgy ones who wanted to sell you booze or buy your clothes or any western gizmos you had on the street or in the hotel. Seen plenty of military parades and men in uniform, even black African soldiers on training seminars. I saw tanks, fighter jets and bombers lined up by the dozen at airports and in the air bases that we passed over in our airplane. I seen the ballet, food queues, propaganda posters, minders who were paid to follow westerners around, and women window cleaners ten stories up in the middle of winter. I saw very friendly looking young soldiers who didn't seem to want to be in the army, and nasty customs officials who liked to throw their weight around to both western and east block tourists to the USSR. I also found out very quickly that the Russian Rouble was worthless to the Russians who wanted Dollars, Deutchmarks or Sterling for everything you bought, and that the Russians were fundamentally very un-communist.

Two experiences really unnerved me however. The first was on the Aeroflot airliner that we boarded in Ireland which had come from Cuba and had to refuel at the time in Ireland as their airliners hadn't the range to fly trans-Atlantic at the time. As we flew to Leningrad we kept flying over NATO airbases. The first was over the east coast of England were we flew over an RAF base, and shortly afterwards over the North Sea an RAF Tornado buzzed us so closely that I could see the pilot and missiles on its wings before it tailed off at high speed. We flew over another air base in Germany or Denmark and the same thing happed as we began to cross the Baltic, although the fighter jet didn't come as close as the RAF Tornado had so I wasn't sure if it was German, Danish or American.

The second experience was when we landed in Moscow towards the end of our trip. As we disembarked we saw that our aircraft was surrounded by hundreds of armed and ferocious looking soldiers lined up on the tarmac. I think they were paratroops and I could see transport aircraft nearbye and I suppose they were on their way to Afghanistan. It was fairly intimidating and sort of put our easy life in the west into perspective.