The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
What Cold War travel was really like…
With a new Iron Curtain descending, Nick Trend recalls journeys through the old Eastern Bloc – where an orange was the perfect ice-breaker
As a child of the 1960s I grew up with the bleak realities of Europe divided by the Iron Curtain. To those of us in the West, the Eastern Bloc seemed, from afar, an alternative Orwellian universe: grey, depressing and repressive. Obviously, the day-to-day reality of the Cold War was nothing like as terrifyingly grim as it is for Ukraine now, but the sense of confrontation and fundamental alienation across the ideological divide was so deeply entrenched, it created a psychological as well as a physical barrier.
The idea of crossing that line was slightly scary and few saw it as a holiday opportunity. For me, however, it was also motivating: it created a reason to travel. I wanted to draw back the curtain, see the world from the other side and try to understand the differences. Though it was sometimes chilling, I actually found it more exciting and more rewarding than travelling in the West. I didn’t mind the bad food and the soulless hotels, the bureaucracy of visas, or the nagging paranoia that someone might actually be watching or even following you.
In those last years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR, I visited East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, as well as Moscow, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and several other Soviet cities. And far from feeling alienated, I found myself noticing the things that connected our histories and cultures: the Italian art in the Hermitage; the British engineers who helped build the Moscow metro in the 1930s; the classical music in Prague. And, perhaps surprisingly, I found it easy to make friends and communicate, despite the language barriers.
My longest visit was in 1986 when I set out on a three-month journey by train from London to China, via East Germany, Poland, Russia and Siberia. I especially remember early in the trip leaving Berlin on the train for Warsaw. It was dawn and we rumbled slowly over the River Spree into a blood-red sunrise and under the grimy iron canopy of Friedrichstrasse station. We didn’t stop. The platforms were deserted apart from a long line of border guards in military uniform. It felt as though we had travelled back into the 1930s.
My compartment, empty at first, filled up at another station and after a while, without thinking, I took an orange out of my bag and started to peel it. The other passengers stared in amazement. This was to them, I suddenly realised, a rare delicacy. I had three or four, so I ended up giving them away. They were squirrelled into pockets to be savoured later. It was a moment of sudden, telling insight into how much we took for granted in the West.
Here are some other memories of travelling behind the curtain.
RUSSIA
It was never difficult to visit the USSR. True, you needed a visa (as you do now) and you had to make and pay for all your internal travel arrangements, such as rail tickets and hotels, in advance through the State Travel Department, Intourist. There were some schemes allowing family stays, but the vast majority of tourists had to book into a state-run hotel. In the bigger ones, like the Kosmos in Moscow or the Europeyskaya in Leningrad, there was a babushka (sometimes two) stationed outside the lift on each floor who held your room key and could monitor all comings and goings. But, especially after a few vodkas, it was always easy to get talking to locals. Some were hungry to know about the West, others were deeply patriotic, but always friendly.
I made two particular friends in
Irkutsk – Nadia and Oksana – who were both members of the Young Communist Party and were on holiday from Omsk. We explored the city and visited Lake Baikal together and afterwards even exchanged a few letters. But this was long before email or Instagram and, sadly, we lost touch many years ago.
EAST GERMANY
This was the most hardcore of the Eastern Bloc states I visited – an impression enhanced by the fearsome fortifications along the western border and around the Berlin Wall. The first time I went to Berlin was by coach on what – I think – was the only motorway in the country. There was little traffic, just a few of the ubiquitous two-cylinder Trabant cars struggling to get to top speed. To prevent stowaways slipping into the West, we weren’t allowed to stop until we had reached the city. Most tourism was through day trips from West Berlin, crossing either at street level through Checkpoint Charlie, or the Friedrichstrasse U Bahn (underground) station.
The West German U-Bahn ran through several abandoned stations in the east and then stopped at this one. You had to change a minimum amount of money per day into East German marks, and it was very hard to spend it all – even when eating out at the most expensive (although not very impressive) restaurants.
POLAND
In the West it seemed that the Poles were among the most energised in their resistance to the Soviet system. Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement was a constant thorn in the Warsaw government’s side through the late 1970s and 1980s. For the traveller, there was a warm welcome but plenty of terrible food and some, perhaps understandable, roguery too. I remember one waiter, who had just served me a “fillet” steak so tough I think it should have gone into a stew, asking if I had any dollars or pounds and offering me three times the official rate in local currency. I obliged, but learned later that the standard black market rate was more than double that.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Prague was probably the last place you would go for a stag do in the 1980s. Tourism involved a genteel trickle of culture lovers. When I visited in 1988, the cafés, museums and even Old Town Square itself were largely free of visitors. I made one friend, Petr, on Charles Bridge, who approached me because he was fascinated by my (in my mind very ordinary) camera. He had an old pre-war one of his own and was still taking photographs in black and white. We stayed in touch for a while and he sent me the black-andwhite snaps he took on the bridge.
HUNGARY
Travel between Budapest and nearby Vienna was always relatively easy, so Budapest saw a strong flow of tourists, and – of all the Iron Curtain capitals – had the most Western and prosperous feel to it. The quality of the food and the standard of living was probably the highest of all the Eastern Bloc. If you wanted goulash with a glass of Bull’s Blood wine, followed by pancakes and Tokaji, you could get it, no problem.
YUGOSLAVIA
After the war, Yugoslavia had a Communist government dominated by Tito but an ambivalent relationship both with Moscow and with the West, and by 1961 it had become a non-aligned state. So it wasn’t technically behind the Iron Curtain, but it was the closest most western holidaymakers got to experiencing life under socialism. And tourists came here in their millions – a big chunk of Yugoslavia’s economy was underpinned by cheap sun-and-sand package holidays along the coast of what is now Croatia and Montenegro. It was especially popular with the British and Germans – as well as the hundreds of thousands of naturists who were welcomed to its many specialist nudist resorts.