New answers tagged cold-war
1
Here is some anecdotal evidence. A friend of mine travelled to East-Berlin during the late part of the cold war. He's a Swedish citizen and he travelled using a tourist visa. Don't know how hard it was to get, but I think they wanted tourists for currency and propaganda.
He went by train and said that when the train stopped in West-Berlin all the tourists ...
1
Russia offers that resolution in the UN every year 2006-2017.... In general the US position is Russia uses Nazism, an enemy defeated more than eight decades ago, as a pretext to justify threats and at times attacks on it's neighboring countries. The United States further objects to the text of the resolution which "restricts freedom of speech and ...
6
First, there was no real notion of a first strike as it is known today. That's tied to ICBMs and the declared intention of both the US and USSR at the time (and Russia now) to allow an attacker to get a strike in before retaliation, in the very real interest of avoiding launching a counterstrike based on a mistake in the surveillance radars. This would not ...
1
However, it would also be interesting what the reasoning was behind the european abstaining votes.
Based on memory, where a general discussion about this resolution took place, one reason why European countries abstained would probably be because of clause 8(d) was also a part of the resolution that was voted on:
To declare illegal and prohibit ...
8
The Soviets were always extremely paranoid, in no small part because they expected NATO (and specifically the USA) to have the same aggressive attitude towards them as they had towards NATO.
In other words, the Soviets fully expected the USA and its allies to launch a first strike on the USSR at the earliest opportunity when the USA considered it a fight ...
4
Robert Hanssen qualifies.
Hanssen never told the KGB or GRU his identity and refused to meet them personally, with the exception of the abortive 1993 contact in the Russian embassy parking garage. The FBI believes the Russians never knew the name of their source.
2
Q: How did an English person get entry to East Germany during the Cold War?
Just crossing the border, ignoring all East-German border guards!
That may have been as simple that. Really.
Angering all of those East-Germans, to be sure. In Berlin, at crossing Friedrichstraße, Checkpoint Charlie.
On August 2, 1989, the "Berliner Zeitung" newspaper, which ...
2
Independent of political reasons, travel for private persons was greatly restricted until 1949.
Churchill feared, correctly, that politicaly a division was being created by the Soviet Union to separate their area of influence from that of the Western Powers.
Occupied Germany was still (in 1946) under common Allied control, so Germany was excluded by the ...
2
For any visit for staying overnight, a form of package tour had to be organized by the Reisebüro der DDR
unless you were invited by relatives of on business
A visa would then be issued at the border, based on the papers issued by the Travel Agent (on behalf of the Reisebüro der DDR) or by the Volkspolizei for private visits.
Exception: day visits to East-...
14
I visited East Berlin and Dresden in 1978 with my mother and sister ( I was 18 at the time) from the USA. We had to obtain visas many months prior to our visit from a travel agent who specialized in this. When we arrived at each of our destinations we had to register with the city officials (listing where we were staying and for how long). As I recall we ...
-2
Greece was to be overrun by Soviet Shock Troops coming down from the Baltic countries. I was stationed in Athens 84-86 and was privy to possible scenarios. It wasn't going to be pretty by any means...7206 SPS
11
This is a call for solidarity after the building of the Wall in Berlin.
In the 1950's the Bundestag met in Berlin, expressing the political will, that Berlin (West) was a part of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).
After the Khrushchev's Berlin ultimatum of the 27th of November 1958 this was discontinued.
The shown signs Bundestag nach ...
15
That can mean two different things:
A call to relocate the parliament seat from provisional Bonn to the old capital: like it was done after 1990. Small problem with that: The Reichstag was in ruins. So, did they want to build a new house of parliament as well? Likely not in this context. West-Berlin was just a Bundesland, not the capital, and the allies ...
1
Have you tried searching with different transliterations? Bulgarian is written with Cyrillic letters and German-speaking countries do not always use the same transcriptions as English-speaking ones. Transcriptions do also change over time, e.g. from Dimitroff to Schiwkow.
I have found two results on Google. One is a long Polish text that has the same names ...
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