Because it happened during the frenetic final throes of the Cold War, the 1983 abduction of 66 Czechoslovaks by Angolan rebels didn’t get much coverage on these shores. Were a similar event to occur today, though, it would receive immense attention, primarily because of the kidnappers’ rough tactics: In addition to taking children as well […]
Tags:Angola·Cold War·Czech Republic·Jonas Savimbi·kidnapping
The common narrative about the end of the Cold War is that the Soviet Union’s decline began to inevitably steepen on the day that Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency. His peanut-farming predecessor, the conventional wisdom goes, was too soft to strike fear into the heart of the Kremlin, as evidenced by the Soviets willingness to […]
Tags:Cold War·Jimmy Carter·nuclear weapons·Ronald Reagan·Soviet Union
Our eternal gratitude to whoever posted the full text of What to Do When the Russians Come, one of great artifacts of Cold War literature. The book assumes that the Wolverines did not, in fact, fend off the Soviet invasion, and so us poor subjugated Americans are left to make the best of a dreadful […]
Tags:1980s·books·Cold War·Communism·Soviet Union·What to Do When the Russians Come
Quite some time ago, I posted about classic Soviet animation that hilariously stereotyped America as a Darwinian nightmare. As someone who grew up thinking that life in Moscow was accurately portrayed by that Wendy’s fashion show commercial, I was strangely pleased to learn that my Soviet peers were similarly duped into thinking that human happiness […]
Thanks a million for your patience while I was up in Maine, hacking away at the book and knocking back a whole mess of these. Catching up on a zillion different things today, then back tomorrow with a post about Somali immigrant remittances.
Tags:beer·Cold War·Maine·propaganda
On the road for much of today, so start your week off right with a little vintage King Kobra, the rare hair-metal band willing to sacrifice its hair for a worthy cause—in this case, the destruction of Commies. Louis Gossett Jr. kills it in this video, too.
I am regrettably a few days late in noting the untimely passing of Vasily Alexeev, the famed Soviet athlete who dominated the sport of weightlifting for most of the 1970s. Alexeev was an object of great fascination in the West, for he seemed to embody our deepest fears about the world behind the Iron Curtain: […]
Tags:Cold War·food·mythology·Soviet Union·sports·Vasily Alexeev·weightlifting
Pesky facts keep getting in the way of my book’s smooth narrative. Take the lovely paragraph I crafted yesterday, in which I argued that no one in the West believed that Cold War refugees could possibly flow toward the Soviet Bloc. An earlier experiment with such migration had ended tragically, after all, and that was […]
Tags:Charles Lucas·Cold War·Communism·defectors·East Germany
Greetings from a rather random corner of Southern California, where I find myself pursuing the heart-and-soul of my next book. While I’m busy interviewing an eyewitness to historic events that the bulk of Americans have long forgotten, please take a moment to delve into the University of Nebraska’s rich trove of government-issued comics. Given Microkhan’s […]
Writing about the hammer throw has got me thinking a lot about Soviet Bloc athletics, and in turn one of the phenomena that fascinated me during my youth: East-to-West defectors. I was always drawn to tales of sportsmen from the other side of the Iron Curtain who decided to chuck it all and start anew […]
Tags:Cold War·discus·East Germany·Soviet Union·sports·Sports Illustrated·Wolfgang Schmidt
Today’s expedited spy swap in Vienna brought to mind an even more dramatic trade: the 1962 exchange that brought downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers back home, and sent “Rudolf Abel” back to Moscow to live out his days as a KGB trainer. Yet there was a third person involved in that sensational Berlin swap: […]
Tags:Cold War·East Germany·espionage·Francis Gary Powers·Frederic L. Pryor·intelligence·Soviet Union
While researching the economic feasibility of a Bering Strait tunnel, we came across this recent dispatch from the Edmonton Journal. In addition to alerting us to the manner in which the residents of Little Diomede were used as Cold War pawns, the article made us aware of the callow manner in which the Russian coal […]
Tags:Alaska·coal·Cold War·labor·Little Diomede·Pyramiden·Russia·Soviet Union
One of the most interesting things about Ug99, the fungus that is currently threatening the world’s wheat supply, is how it managed to sneak up on us. For nearly four decades, the disease that the Puccinis graminis pathogen causes, known as stem rust, was little seen in the wild, and certainly no great peril to […]
In 1953, America dispatched Vice-President Richard Nixon to the island nation of Ceylon (still nearly two decades away from being rechristened Sri Lanka). The Eisenhower Administration was mighty worried about reports that Ceylon was shipping strategic materials to newly Communist China, a sign that the former colony might be contemplating an even more dramatic leftward […]
Now a somewhat secretive Eritrean military base, Kagnew Station was one of America’s key listening posts for much of the Cold War. Radios located here are able to pick up clear signals from thousands of miles away; local AM stations in Asmara have reported hearing Finnish broadcasters on occasion. Altitude plays a big role in […]
