The photo was taken by a foreign correspondent on patrol with the RAF. (I was at university with his son, which is how I got to see it.) The RAF planes were shadowing a Soviet Bear – a heavy bomber with a nuclear payload – which had deliberately strayed into British airspace as they often did. Their mission, to provoke. My friend’s father was in line with the rear gunner. He raised his camera and, obligingly, the rear gunner struck a pose: he flicked the bird to the photographer with one hand whilst holding a can of coke with the other hand, all with his feet stretched out full length and resting on the perspex wall of his machine gun filled cocoon. It is a truly iconic photo. It is also a brilliant metaphor for the state of relations between the super powers in my childhood: impolite, irreverent, threateningly jokey. If only the world could be like that now.
The world was so much less complicated when I was born. There were goodies – us, the Free World – and there were baddies: ‘them’, the sinister Soviets over the Berlin Wall, just waiting for their chance to invade the imperialist west and impose repressive communist hegemony on the world. Easy.
Or so it seemed. Now I am married to a woman who was born in the Soviet Union and who believed at the time that she was the luckiest girl alive because she lived in the greatest country on Earth. Maybe she did. Certainly, her childhood was common to all Soviet citizens, be they present day oligarch or road sweeper, they all started in the same place. It was a childhood that she – and all her friends – remember with great fondness. A veneration for education, the Young Pioneers, summer camps, Olympiads, enough food to not go hungry, schools where the brightest were catered for, outdoorsy life summer and winter, cross country skiing, ice skating on the frozen rivers, the seasons all in marked contrast to each other, full employment for both men and women (no full time housewives allowed), being part of a fair and just system of life which wanted peace and to get on with growing up. Music, campfires, boats, long summer nights on the river Volga, celebratory holidays, solemn respect to the dead and veterans who found in WWII and liberated half of Europe from Nazi tyranny. What’s not to like?
Life in the west in the 1960s and 1970s was pockmarked by constant reminders of the Cold War state that existed between the two Super Power blocks. Vulcan bombers traced their thunderous path through the sky only two thousand feet above my home on a flight corridor. Their job, to be ever ready to strike back in case of nuclear attack by the Warsaw Pact, which, as we all knew, could come at any moment. Menwith Hill, a USA Airforce base just outside Harrogate in Yorkshire, with its sinister golf ball shaped early warning radar, loomed ominously on trips out to the Dales. I once went there for a party. It wasn’t a cheery venue and you had to have ID and go through multiple checks with your name pre-assigned on a list. Scary stuff. The infrastructure of war was all around us as children.
Rosa Klebb – every westerner’s archetype of a Soviet woman 
Bond – the Cold War was fought by professionals. One man to save the free world…
Volatile and unstable – he had to go 
Brezhnev – far cleverer adversary. The face of Sovietism. Implacable. Ruthless. Avuncular.
But the real Cold War was fought on our television screens, in our cinemas and in novels. Rosa Klebb, James Bond’s renegade Soviet nemesis came to symbolise for a whole generation the archetypal Russian woman. Boot faced, deadly, cold and ruthless. The image was borne out by the female shot putters of East Germany, who dominated the Olympic Games every four years – saturated with steroids and consequently built like tanks. Until, in 1972, all that changed, with one girl: Olga Korbut. In Munich, she captivated the world wide audience with a graceful, charming, perfect performance in the team competition and suddenly we started to see a different side to the enemy. But for every Korbut, there was an Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For every Bolshoi ballerina, there was a defector to the west. The Cold War raged on icily. Proxy wars dominated our news: Vietnam in particular, but Angola, the Cuban standoff, Rhodesia, even the IRA, on our own doorstep acted as stages for the super powers to play their deadly game.
Eventually, with the years of Soviet stagnation and detente under Brezhnev, after the much more fiery and volatile years of Nikita Khrushchev’s leadership, the imminent threat of nuclear mutually assured destruction faded in to the background. The confrontations of the early 60s dissipated to be replaced by aggression on other continents and a standoff in Europe. The Soviet response to the Prague Spring showed that the regime was just as resolved in its determination to maintain control over Eastern European satellites as ever. The era of inscrutable old men standing on the Lenin mausoleum, in absolute command of their domain, was upon us and is the defining image of my notion of the Soviet Union. It is, I suspect, the image that has atrophied in the minds of all my British contemporaries. Certainly, almost all of my family and friends have an image of Russia which is based on that image. It hasn’t moved with the times. They all think they know Russia, when, in fact, what they know is a 40 year old western narrative about a regime and a political state that no longer exists. But, to a man and woman, this image is held with absolute certainty of its rightness.
In the West, we like to believe we do not have propaganda. We like our illusions. We stick to the Camelot notion of JFK’s idealistic “ich bin ein Berliner” rhetoric, where we live freely in pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We vilify the naked torrent of bias, government backed news narrative in Russia and hold up the BBC as a paragon of virtue whilst in fact we are victims of government narrative, media bias and huge curtailments on our personal freedoms. And always have been.
The apparatus of war is still with us. There are still far too many nuclear missiles in existence. And there are likely to be more not less as new nuclear countries come on stream: North Korea and Iran in particular. In addition, we now have the jihadists, bent on the annihilation of western society and past masters as a-symmetric war. Were we really better off in the Cold War? It feels like we were because although the Cold War was often fought in the shadows between spies and like a game of deadly chess, at least you could see your enemy and they had territorial jurisdiction. Everything now is so much more fluid. Your neighbour could turn around and stab you. The randomness seems much more present in today’s world. It seems more complicated and more a war of civilians. Whereas the Cold War was an enterprise for the professionals and therefore much more limited. The one thing then and now both have in common is that, ultimately, all the citizens could end up being obliterated. The nuclear threat has not gone away, it’s just we feel it less keenly because the headlines are dominated by the smaller scale a-symmetric attacks.
Do I want the Cold War back? No. I am glad the walls have come down because I have been a direct beneficiary of the opening up of the Eastern Bloc. My blood is co-mingled with Russian blood. And I am all for the co-mingling of blood because we are all one under the skin anyway and creating new humans who combine both sides helps walls come down even further. The nasty truth is, however, that the Cold War has never gone away. The vogue now is to talk of the ‘Hot Peace’ that exists between the USA and the new Super Power on the block: China. Now we have a 70 year old cold war between the west and Russia and poor relations with China and the legacy of fuck up after fuck up in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Maybe the best thing is just to stand still and do nothing. Because every time our politicians interfere, every time they pontificate or accuse or blame, every time they intervene or invade or meddle in other people’s lives, they just make life for the rest of us, caught in the crossfire, even worse.
