Russia, what a century you’ve had—Lenin and Stalin, the gulag and the Great Purge, 20+ million dead in WWII, the seventy-year Soviet Union experiment, Cold War, and now, your current megalomaniac-in-chief, evil Vlad Putin. Should we title it 100 Years of Sadness and Depravity?

“Depravity” resonates when remembering that Stalin orchestrated the starving of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. And also the little-known story today’s guest, Timothy Phillips, tells about an East Berlin checkpoint during the Cold War that featured an x-ray machine capable of scanning whole automobiles. Cool, right? Except for the part about forcing persona non grata travelers to wait for hours in the machine, and thus be subjected to massive, deadly amounts of radiation. Think about that the next time your dentist drapes a lead vest over you.

Tim’s Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War is described as “a love letter to human kindness and a plea for decency in the face of indecent, inhumane government oppression,” by Eileen Gonzalez in her review for Foreword’s March/April issue. With Russia’s current genocidal aggression against Ukraine constantly on our minds, we didn’t hesitate at all to set Tim and Eileen to talking.

You talk a bit in the preface about your motivations for making this trip, but could you elaborate on your reasons? Why travel the entire length of the border? And why choose this particular border out of all the borders that exist and have existed in the world?

Before I made the journey for this book, I had already devoted a large part of my life to studying the USSR and its successor states, as well as to learning the Russian language. I had long been fascinated by the differences between Eastern and Western Europe, including those caused by the Cold War. And I had always wanted to make a study of the bits of the Iron Curtain that get forgotten. Everyone knows about Berlin, and people often cite Churchill’s famous quote about the Iron Curtain running from the Baltic Sea to Trieste. I knew that the real Iron Curtain ran far to the north of the Baltic coast and far to the south of Trieste. I decided to explore the experiences of people along the full length of the divide—what did they have in common? what was unique to specific places?

You also mention in the preface that many of the people you met were “wanting to talk” about their experiences living so close to the Iron Curtain. Why do you think they were so willing to share their stories?

I think most people are pleased when they find someone who wants to listen to their stories. It helped, of course, that I really was interested in pretty much anything they wanted to tell me: their childhood memories, their thoughts on current politics, the directions they wanted to give me to a particularly good Cold War ruin.

I was careful only to begin probing with specific questions once I felt I had a certain connection or some trust with the people I met. As I say in the book, there were some types of people who did not want to speak to me at all. I hunted in vain, for instance, for a former Stasi informant who would share their experiences with me, even anonymously.

Several points on your journey are very haunting: your discussion with a young Albanian man about the utter lack of opportunity in his country, and your visit to an Azerbaijani city that was emptied of its people and turned into a shrine to its rulers, both stand out for that reason. Was there any one moment that struck you as a particularly sharp example of the way the Cold War and the Iron Curtain impacted people’s lives?

Yes, you’re right to say there is much to be concerned about in present-day Albania and in Nakhchivan, the part of Azerbaijan I visited.

But when I think about the Iron Curtain in the period of the Cold War itself, one particularly terrible place was the huge East German border checkpoint at Marienborn. That was where people travelling by car between East and West Germany were checked and often searched and interrogated.

Many of the measures East German officials introduced at the checkpoint were intended to disrupt and intimidate travellers, as well as to deter people who wanted to escape the GDR.

But for many years the checkpoint also had powerful X-ray machines which some cars were placed in front of with their passengers still inside. Even people exposed to these machines for a short time got large doses of radiation. But there is good reason to believe that dissidents and other people whom the regime disliked were made to park up, unwittingly, in front of the machines for hours at a time. These machines have subsequently been linked to numerous deadly cancers. If, as is thought, this was done deliberately, it is very clearly a type of state terrorism.

You recount several stories of incredible, high-risk escapes from East to West, such as the story of the Czech engineer who sped a train across the border with over one hundred (very surprised) passengers aboard. Even granting that such escapes were so rare, do you think they say anything about human nature, or about how countries could manage their borders in a more humane way?

Trying to escape physically from the Eastern Bloc was something that all kinds of people did during the Cold War. However, by far the commonest type of escapee was young men. They seem to have been more likely to have the requisite excess of energy and absence of caution. When whole families escaped, it was often the father who had been the mastermind.

But many people I met also talked to me about other methods of escape; what is sometimes referred to as “internal escape.” Increasingly in the late 1970s and 1980s, people switched off from the propaganda and petty curbs on their daily lives and instead chose to lose themselves in friends, family, and hobbies.

Absolute borders like the one that separated East and West Germany are designed to make all movement controllable. Consequently, what they guarantee is violence. People still want to move and, hence, they need to be stopped—by guns, by landmines, by guard dogs. It is a recipe for great inhumanity.

As you yourself noted, Cold War memories and divisions have taken on a whole new dimension in light of Russia’s reinvasion of Ukraine in 2022. You talked with a Russian couple in Latvia who look back on the Soviet era with rose-tinted glasses while viewing their present, diminished circumstances as entirely the West’s fault. How much of an influence do you think this kind of attitude had on Russia’s decision to reinvade Ukraine?

In one sense, Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine is unthinkable without one man, Vladimir Putin. But in another sense it was made possible by views about Russia’s place in the world that are widely held among ordinary Russians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and every other communist country in Eastern Europe removed Moscow’s role as an imperial capital. Hundreds of millions of Europeans were delighted by that, including some Russians. But, mostly, Russians felt they had been robbed of power and prestige.

Even many opposition politicians in Russia were largely silent when Putin invaded South Ossetia in 2008, and when he illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. The latter action was probably the single most popular act of his entire time in power.

In the end, I don’t think we will see a different Russia—a Russia that is a better neighbour to the countries round about it—until ordinary Russians start to recognise that they no longer have any right to an empire. It would be good if they also began to reckon with the crimes that being an empire has caused them to commit.

One big takeaway is that the Iron Curtain and Cold War hostilities did not present the same way in all places. At the Russian-Norwegian border, for instance, people from both sides got along well enough and certainly did not view each other as mortal enemies. Clearly, each side’s propaganda (about the “Red Menace,” etc.) did not reflect the full reality of the situation. Does this give you any hope for the future of European relations, even now when that future seems dark?

There are reasons for hope. Most importantly, just as bad things can happen very suddenly (an invasion, a devastating earthquake), so too can good things. The GDR was celebrating its 40th anniversary and looking forward to 40 more years of its toxic regime just weeks before the Berlin Wall unexpectedly collapsed.

Leaders can make a huge difference. On my journey, I was surprised to learn that it was Khrushchev who masterminded the handing back to Finland of a piece of occupied territory in the 1950s, and Khrushchev again who led efforts to reunify Austria and pull foreign troops out. That would have been unthinkable under Stalin, and it was brave of Khrushchev to do it.

But hope provides no template. Well-intentioned initiatives can end up having bad unintended consequences. There are examples in my book of reconciliation attempts that backfired and actually helped to burnish the reputations of dictators.

Probably the most important single thing that prevented a Third World War erupting during the Cold War was the memory of the terrible conflict that raged between 1939 and 1945. Politicians of widely different ideologies could mostly agree, and agree strongly, that actual fighting on the continent of Europe must be avoided.

The memory of the Second World War is fading and the taboo of conflict in Europe has been spectacularly breached by Russia in Ukraine. We now need to find ways urgently to reassert those important norms—initially through resistance and deterrence, and, at the appropriate time, also through dialogue.

Eileen Gonzalez
March 31, 2023

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