Reading photographer Bryan Oller’s piece last week on growing up a Cold War kid brought forth a flood of memories of my own. Like Bryan, I lived in West Germany in the late ‘80s and have had a few encounters with the Evil Empire. Indirectly, for example, legend has it that my great-great-grandparents on my dad’s side were from Kyiv. My dad took one of those over-the-counter genetic tests and it came back 99 percent Eastern European Jew, so it’s no mystery why my family fled to the United States with their 4-year-old son Joseph in the early 20th  century, the Russians making their way west. But, like Bryan, I also got to experience the Cold War up close and personal. My parents, who served in the U.S. Air Force, and I took a couple peeks behind the Iron Curtain — once in 1987 when we traveled to the other side of the Berlin Wall for a few days, and again in 1988, when my family took a field trip to Moscow before catching an overnight train to what was then Leningrad around the Thanksgiving holiday. I remember, in East Germany, the paterfamilias of the family with which we frequently traveled whispering into a restaurant’s flower vase that “the coffee tastes like shit,” just in case the table was bugged. I remember walking back to our brand-new baby blue Chrysler minivan, which was surrounded by Soviet sailors, gawking like it was a golden calf of capitalism in a field of Scotch-taped Trabants. In Moscow, I remember checking in at the Rossiya Hotel and the band in the lobby was playing (and pretty well, I might add) Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” I remember the service staff selling rubles under the table for a much better exchange rate than the banks, even though our guides warned us against playing around in the black market. I remember the little bodega attached to the hotel that specialized in Western wares, but only in exchange for hard currency. Russian money wasn’t allowed. I’d buy a can of Coke and get currency back from around the world. Nobody, including the clerk I’m sure, knew if the change was exact or not. These are fun memories. But I also remember being briefed before we drove the corridor to the Berlin Wall, traveling through checkpoints Alpha and Bravo before reaching the world-famous Checkpoint Charlie. Before the trip, the U.S. military handed us binders with laminated pages in Cyrillic. If you were pulled over by Soviet police, you were supposed to lock your doors, roll up your windows and hold up the binder to show them you were an American citizen and that they needed to leave you be. There were pairs of East German police on many corners. I was told there were always two, and they all had families. A man with a wife and children at home was far less likely to abandon his post and flee. I saw an iconic photo in a museum just outside the Berlin Wall taken in the early ‘60s of a desperate soldier jumping razor wire to get away. I saw a car riddled with bullet holes, the evidence left from an attempt to smuggle East Germans to freedom. In Moscow and Leningrad, I remember bread lines. I saw two old (like, old) women get into a physical fight over the last shirt at a department store. I remember the broad white stroke of paint outside Checkpoint Charlie, maybe a foot thick. The allied soldiers manning the checkpoint weren’t allowed to assist anyone trying to escape the East until they touched that white line. People had been shot and killed, just short of freedom, and nothing could be done. These memories are haunting. I saw firsthand the empire Russian President Vladimir Putin wishes to recreate; so much of it was soul-crushingly evil. And consider our current affairs against the backdrop of this article published by Freedom House, titled “The global decline in democracy has accelerated” and Putin’s war in Ukraine grows even more bleak. Oller wrote last week, “… there’s nothing ‘genius’ or ‘savvy’ about what we’re witnessing [in Ukraine]. It’s only sad. So, so very sad.” Bryan is right. It is very sad. But I’ll raise you one, Oller. From what I’ve seen, it’s also scary as hell.

— Staff notes originally run in our daily email newsletter, Indy Now, along with news updates, photos of the day, a weekly poll and more. Sign up below.

Bryan Grossman is a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has been editor-in-chief of the Colorado Springs Indy since 2019.

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