We had a running joke in my family that entering the Soviet Union was a bit like smuggling in somebody else’s nose. Every school holiday, as I presented my passport to the granite-faced Soviet border guard at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport, my photograph would be scrutinised at length to make sure it matched my face. Sometimes more senior guards would be summoned in an agonising ritual that left Western visitors in little doubt they were entering hostile territory. Our apartment was bugged. We were followed. Russians were not allowed to visit our flat without permission. Those who challenged the regime — the tiny group of courageous dissidents — were inevitably broken by the system.
For a child of the Cold War, raised both in Washington and Moscow, there was only one certainty in the superpower game that consumed the world for nearly 50 years.
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