I am old enough to have traveled extensively behind the so-called Iron Curtain - Soviet-dominated central and eastern Europe. And though it often was not the horror story one expected it did have its hardships and at time laughable aspects.

In this thread, I will relay some of my more memorable experiences and hope others - including locals who lived there - will do the same with theirs!

1- TRANSIT CAMPING!!!

Certainly one of the most laughable ridiculous and sad things that one could not believe locals would put up with was what I saw at Transit Camping, a campground mainly used by travelers from behind the Iron Curtain (who could often only travel behind the Iron Curtain) in suburban Prague.

First of all, registration went so so slow. People were literally standing all day in line just to register. It literally took several hours and we saw the same folks in line late at night. We, illegally perhaps, just registered the next morning when the line had down died but not out. Like I observed all over the East Bloc and USSR when I was there, clerks moved at a snail's pace - once the line was closed when shifts were changing over - the outgoing crew counted every single penny in the till, taking an hour or so to do it and then the incoming crew did the exact same thing!

Totally incredible but folks just patiently waited in line for hours on end. And when they did get to the window things moved incredibly slow - a temporarily closed sign often popped up, etc. Yes incredible but not for the East Bloc back then IME.

2- NEXT THE SLOW SLOW SLOW MOVING LINE FOR WEAK BEER AT THE CAMP STORE!

Topping because I am looking forward to your and other's tales of how things were when travelling behind the curtain. Unfortunately I could not do so in my younger days because of security rules when I was working in the weapons area of the nuclear wonderland. Once I moved on professionally, and out of that spooky arena the invitations to conferences behind the curtain suddenly stopped. I wonder why?

A few. I'll use the old Soviet-era names for places rather than the current ones.

1971. My first visit to the USSR was a short 4- or 5-day stay in Leningrad. We flew to Helsinki and rented a car then drove to the Soviet border, staying the night in a small Finnish beach town just shy of the border. The next morning when we crossed over into the USSR, I was surprised that the only checkpoint was a very small guard station at the border. The soldier checked our visas and passports, wrote down the car's license number, made a phone call (on a crank phone which seemed strange) then waved us on. We drove through several kilometers of dense birch forest before coming to a vast cleared area with a big modern building in the middle and guard towers at various intervals around the perimeter. This, we learned, was "Friendship House," and THIS is where they went through our car and luggage like people possessed. Dogs, mirrors under the vehicle... there was a Swedish family towing a camping trailer in front of us, and they had been forced to completely unpack everything for inspection.

Once cleared, we were dispatched on the road to Leningrad, which passed through the historic town of Vyborg. Every 25 km or so there was a guard barrier across the road. The attendant would write down our license number and consult a list before raising the barrier and letting us pass. It was clear our transit was being timed - too many minutes since the last post and we must have stopped to do something illicit, too few and we were speeding. Paranoia....

So we visited Leningrad, which is/was a splendid city full of contradictions and strange "you're in the Soviet Union now" revelations one after another. Had a great time, fell in love with Russian beer, not in love with kvass, dispensed with a single glass from vending machines.

Anyway, our return to Helsinki was the same deal but in reverse. We were given the third degree at Friendship House (very concerned that we were exporting rubles, as if) then we were dispatched into the forest toward the frontier.

One hundred yards/meters into the woods, and the "check engine" light comes on in the car, and it starts coughing. Oh. My. God. We're going to break down in no-man's-land and be hauled off to the Lubiyanka and questioned by Officer Natasha about our illegal and counter-revolutionary activities deep in the forest near the Finnish border. Adieu, family.

Fortunately the car made it to the border, we were allowed to depart the workers' paradise, and right around the bend from the laid-back Finnish border cops was the world's biggest Shell station, complete with cold cokes and a mechanic who tweaked something under the hood and zoom, off we went. Hail capitalism.

2. 1974. Aeroflot overnight flight, Leningrad to Tashkent, stopping at Kubyshev (now Samara). At the Kubyshev stop they let us off the plane. I had to go into the airport toilet for obvious reasons, and noted that the toilet paper consisted of chopped up pages of Pravda, finally being put to its intended use. On the next part of the flight, they served us an in-flight meal, consisting of a piece of black bread with the consistency of a slate roof tile, a little tub of red goo purporting to be jam, a hard-cooked egg, and an entire cucumber. Comrades, the 5-year cucumber harvest target has been achieved! All praise to the hero farmers!

Next parts...

3. Same trip, a few days later. We're in Urgench (rhymes with stench) which was the dormitory town for nearby Khiva, a stunning antique city on the Silk Road, which was then undergoing massive renovations. The power goes out in the whole town. Our hotel (it's August by the way) has thermometers in all the rooms, and ours tops out at 40C. It blows up. Uzbekistan is Muslim, so no beer in the hotel, and the fridges are broken, the tap water is not safe, and all there is to drink is warm apricot juice. We go to the airport for our scheduled flight back to Tashkent, but discover we've been bumped by members of the Uzbek people's assembly or whatever, a bunch of burly gents with cool hats, so we have to spend the night with kebabs and apricot juice in a pitch black hotel, unable to sleep because it's a million degrees.

4. Same trip, another couple of days later. We're loaded onto an IL-62, then the flagship of Aeroflot, for our flight from Tashkent to Moscow. The pilot drives to the end of the runway, then switches off the air conditioning in the plane (3 pm, outside temperature high enough to melt lead) while he tests the four engines, one at a time. (The problem is called "density altitude," meaning high elevation plus high heat makes for thin air, so the plane has to be going, like, really fast to take off.) Minutes pass, and the inside of the plane is now like a sauna. More minutes and the Indian doctor sitting next to me (from Madras, where they know heat) says he's afraid he's going to faint.

Up the aisle, an old Uzbek man in elaborate headgear and dress jumps up and pulls out the decorative (?) curved "Ali Baba" dagger he's wearing and starts howling something, waving the knife around. He's gang-tackled by the attendants (on leave from their shot-putting training) and strapped into his seat with seat belt extenders. He continues to howl. Finally, when the temperature inside the cabin is about to parboil all of us, the pilot is satisfied. He spools up the engines to where I think they're going to send compressor blades through the plane's skin, pops the brakes, and we bolt down the runway like our butts are on fire. We roll and roll and faster and faster and we're still stuck to the ground. Finally the plane rotates just as the runway turns to dead grass, and we s-l-o-w-l-y climb out. The air conditioning is still off.

Once we're clear of the trees, the driver remembers, oh, hell, the a/c. He turns it back on with the setting set to "January in Siberia," and the temperature inside the passenger cabin drops by roughly 80 degrees in roughly two minutes. There so much moisture from perspiration in the air that the dehumidifiers can't handle it, so it condenses out on anything metal in the cabin, then rains on us. Yes, sweat rain inside a Soviet airliner.

We eventually get to Moscow, many of us showing symptoms of god knows what, and are sent to the Hotel Rossiya, right on Red Square, and at the time the biggest hotel in the world. We go to the hotel's restaurant for a late dinner and are informed that all they have for us is bananas and champagne. Really. Bananas and champagne, and Uzbek champagne at that, aka fizzy grape juice plus moonshine. The bananas are from Cuba. Enjoy, comrade travelers!

5. 1975, Prague. We've arrived after an overnight train trip from Poland, where I've been working for a month or two as part of a university partnership program. Throughout our stay in Lodz, "Poland's Manchester" according to the local PR person (really?) we've been pestered nonstop by by shady-looking chaps wanting to exchange money. Right, good luck with that.

However, the Zloty Lady, the person on the train who's supposed to exchange our useless Polish money for equally worthless Czech money, has missed us, so we arrive at dawn's early light in Prague with no spendable money, and our hotel well beyond any reasonable walking distance. I leave my co-worker (an intrepid Scotsman and fellow university prof) with the bags, and I take off to find someplace where I can exchange a Sterling traveler's check for Czech Korunas. I find one and sweet-talk the desk guy to exchange 20 quid or some such (probably ripped me off) then I head back to the train station. We finally get a cab and ask to go to our hotel. The cab driver, however, instead gives us a grand tour of Prague and greater Bohemia, while the cab's meter keeps clicking, and while I am secretly referring to a map of Prague on my lap, noting his extremely roundabout route to our hotel. He finally pulls up to the hotel, turns around and asks, "Change money?" I hold up the map and show his route with my finger moving around the paper.

He harumphs, flings our bags onto the pavement in front of the hotel, barks, "Gratis!"

I say, "Wait!" and he pauses. I fish out a 50 Zloty note (worth, roughly, nothing) and hand it to him. He stares at the noble Polish farmer whose picture is on the bill, and looks at me. I smile, he makes a face and and speeds off in his Skoda, in search of the next set of marks. So it turns out my quest for cash was unnecessary.

I still have the old Zloty notes.

Really enjoying these!

Nukesafe, did you work with Rickover?

Gardyloo, that was gold! Thanks for the entertaining stories.

Yes, indeedy - Gardyloo that's precious - ah travels and travails - that was the old Iron Curtain - wish I could remember as detailed as yours - riveting reading. Thanks a whole lot.

And again this was meant to be an open forum or thread to here anyone's experiences in the East Bloc and USSR so if you have experiences please tell. I especially would like to hear from the few Fodorites were actually lived in say behind the Iron Cutain = like our cherished Fodorite from Dresden, etc.

Gardyloo -- a real thriller!
Even though I grew up just 100kms from the Iron Curtain - but West, not East of it, I never had any interest in exploring the East until 1990.
In hindsight a bit sad...

My turn:

In 1963 I took the overnight train to Berlin. Stop at the East German border for passport control and whatever else the East Germans want to check. A man walks through the car offering reading materials. I decline, saying in German that I can’t read German—my German accent and phrasing is decent in a limited way. A while later the border control walks in with the same man in tow. Asks for may passport and stiffens as if someone had shoved a ramrod up his a$$ when he sees the American green passport. At which point the first man says that I speak German (not really) and everyone relaxes.

My next border control is on the same trip. I take the U-Bahn to its only stop in East Berlin, the Friedrichstraße station. I am smoking, cigarette hanging out of my mouth as I fish out my passport, which presumably was allowed in the hallways of the U-Bahn. When I present my passport at the check point, the man barks out military style in German: Who told you that you are allowed to smoke in front of a DDR official?

That year I left Berlin by means of a Mitfahrdienst (a ride sharing program) to go to Switzerland. I do not recall what happened at the border.

In 1967 I flew with a charter (remember them?) to London, met my traveling companion and continued to Ostende via rail and ferry. Took the night train with a change at some ungodly hour in Köln to Wolfsburg, picked up a brand new VW 1600 and drove off to Berlin. I was jet lagged and did not sleep well during the train ride (no couchettes, we were saving money). I discovered at the East German border that I had to pay for an East German license plate whose holes did not fit the western format, nor did I have a screwdriver to take off the western plates. I cursed a lot and somehow must have found some wire to attach the license plate to the car. The authorities were unhelpful. Driving out of Berlin was easier since I was prepared for the change in license plates.

We had no problems with officials in Yugoslavia (road conditions were something else) except in the Kotor tourist office. I always ask immediately if the desk clerk speaks English, le français, oder Deutsch, to which he replied “bonjour monsieur, bonjour madame”. We showed our separate passports to obtain a room in a private residence. As we left, the clerk said “au revoir monsieur” and “madame” no longer existed.

In 1975 we spent three weeks in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, driving a Honda Civic with Danish plates. We stood out. At the border they went through all our luggage and confiscated some French magazines I had hoped to take back to the States. But we had no problem with money as we had to purchase X Korunas per day of our visa stay right at the border, which is why I am puzzled by Gardyloo’s comments.

In Prague I changed lanes in an intersection, was flagged down by a cop who accepted $10US for an illegal maneuver in lieu of going to the police station; I did not initiate the exchange.

It took a couple of hours to leave Czechoslovakia because the border guards checked everything, including our address books and a tourist map where I had marked Xs indicating the presence of Ruthenian churches—the Michelin map of that area now show their location with a church symbol. It was difficult to explain the Xs on the map as they spoke none of my languages and I speak no Czech. The Hungarian guard who processed our entry into Hungary offered to start the processing while we waited in NoMan’s Land between the two countries. Goulash Communism was loosening up controls in Hungary while Czechoslovakia was still in the process of tightening controls and outside influences.

A memorable encounter: While looking for the Ruthenian churches we noticed three different populations: The traditional Slovak peasant population, the segregated Romany population, and the visiting urban population (it was summer time) noticeable by the teen-agers walking around in bikinis. When we stopped in one village looking for the church which usually was off on a hillside, often shielded by trees, a stereotypically looking man, stocky with a big handle bar mustache, came up to us. He looked to be about 60 but it turned out he was born with the century. He spoke some English. In the 1920s he had immigrated to Canada legally and then went to the U.S. illegally. Someone eventually turned him in and he was sent back to Canada. But he could not prove that he had entered the country legally, so he was deported to Europe. Throughout the 1930s he tried to get back to Canada and/or the States with no success. During W.W.II he was drafted in the Slovak/German army and spent the war years in Paris. After the war he returned to his village and was living there ever since. He unlocked the church for us and managed to explain, or I extrapolated excessively, that depending on the political climate, the church was Orthodox or Eastern Rite Catholic.

This was the church:

Wow, I am appreciating all of these stories, as I have Czech roots. Some of my aunts went back to the old country in the 70s. Those of us who are into genealogy and history have been looking for the letters and connections to those faraway cousins. We have had no success as yet.

I enjoyed the stories about Berlin in All Tomorrow's Parties by Rob Spillman. Note that the book is a memoir, so a good chunk of it occurs in the USA and elsewhere.

Yes certainly some well written very detailed extremely interesting to me accounts of the travails and travels behind the Iron Curtain. Please anybody who has anything to say about their trips behind the Iron Curtain PLEASE do!

5alive - I am half Czech too (or Bohemian as my grandparents called themselves - 'Bohunks' as the kids like my mum were called by Anglo-Saxons in the community; in school my mum said others would chant "Bohunks go home"!) and one of my future posts will be about when I took my American-born but also Czech-speaking mom over to see the Old Country and town where her Czech-born father hailed from. My Czech grandma however was born in Vienna in the then large Czech community there when it was all part of the Austro-Hungary Empire with Vienna as its capital.

So while I was taking them, after my 14 months circling the globe in 1976, on a wide-ranging camper van camping tour of Europe we of course, with with somerather great trepitude on my parents' parts, spent a week in what was then Czechoslavakia and is now the Czech Republic. Trebon was my grandfathers' home town or nearest town to his serf-like farming existence- and though I never hear anyone here ever mention Trebon, even then it was a real surprise with a huge central market square surrounded by porticos - of course it somewhat in dissaray during Commie days but today I bet it shines - perhaps being that proverbial 'off-the-beaten-path' gem of an old town.

My parents endured Czechosovakia and were so so SO relieved when we exited the country back into a super modern West Germany. And though my mom was looking forward to speaking Czech with someone besides her siblings and in-laws, everytime she tried it here, no one could understand her! Seems that the peasant-like late 1800s Czech were parents spoke was now to 1970s Czechs unintelligible or so they claimed.

And the Czech folks we met were mainly in the tourist business - Cedok staffers and camp managers, border guards, etc. and one came right out and said, after my mom told her about her Czech roots and parents being born there, flatly said something like:

"There is no love lost between those who fled our country for self-betterment from those who stayed."

Well that's one reason my Czech mum was so deflated about her hoped to be fun Czech experience!

Sorry, Macross, for being so late answering your question. I did reply, but the new system did not process it. I'm still learning. Here is what I wrote.

No, Macross, I did not work on Naval propulsion programs with Rickover. I worked on the safety aspects of weapons research/design for a National Laboratory, and then with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). That was in the 60's and early 70's. They were very restrictive in giving travel authorization, for anyone who knew anything secret, going behind the curtain. If you were allowed to go you had to have briefings from the CIA, and be counseled on what not to say in technical discussions. Now,, of course, you can easily Google almost all of the details. As soon as I left the weapons program those invitations to conferences in the East stopped coming. Wonder why that was?

My Wife, however, before we were married, did go behind the curtain when she traveled alone in Russia and Estonia. Her parents were from Estonia, and she wanted to visit her relatives. The relatives were not allowed to visit her in Tallinn. The only way she could visit was to hire a car and driver and, with a "minder" riding along, drive several hours to their town. She was not allowed to visit the home, but could only see them in a restaurant and in a park. She was not allowed to stay the night, but had to return to Tallinn. We did visit the relatives two years ago, and what lovely people they are, and what a delightful country! There are still problems with the many ethnic Russians who still live in Estonia and do not want to assimilate, and every Estonian is warily conscious of the Russian bear that could take the place back in a day or two.

In 1983 we flew from Copenhagen to Helsinki and then to Leningrad. It was September when the Korean airliner had been shot down over the Pacific. To see anything we had to have an Intourist "guide." Parroting of the party line was annoying. However, on the few occasions we were alone with the guide in open spaces he wanted to know the "real news." The food was abysmal. (Czech beer saved the
day.) When we got home my husband's favorite question was: " Do you know how the Soviets kill their chickens? They starve them to death." We returned to St. Petersburg in 2001 to an entirely different experience.

In September 1989 a friend in Munich lent us her car so we could visit Prague and Budapest. The atmosphere was very much like that in Leningrad in 1983. (Well... I do remember pastries in Budapest.) Boy... did we time that trip wrong ! My husband offered to pay a restaurant bill in dollars in Prague.... and I thought the waiter was going to kiss him. We had been warned about trying to do any currency exchanges
"off the books".. . so I don't know how that worked out. But it was a very fancy "tourist" restaurant right by the Charles Bridge.

Another thing I remember about the '89 trip. My friend who lent us her car was married to a Hamburg native. One day we visited Neuschwanstein. We happened to share a carriage to the castle with an older couple from East Germany who were on some sort of
sanctioned tour. My friend's husband was able to converse with them. He said that when we got out of the carriage he slipped them some money... since they were only allowed to travel with limited currency. (I trust that caused no problems for anyone.) He also told us that as
US citizens we were not totally informed on the number of people who were being killed trying to escape over the wall. He worked for an American company and divided time between the two countries... so was well aware of our news coverage. Today, with the internet I'd hope we wouldn't be so ignorant. (Tho...it doesn't seem to have helped the Rohingya.....)

Thank you Nukesafe, this is a very interesting thread.

Talk about shooting folks trying to escape in the Berlin Wall area - I was camping at Wannsee on edge of West Berlin - the border between East and West went thru the lake- we heard sporadic shots all night long coming from the lake. Ws it just constant warnings or were they shooting folks trying to escape?

Sobering for sure. Returning years later to Wannsee it is now a lovely recreational lake with lots of tourists - how things hae changed in just a few decades.

Just as a reminder, the Berlin Wall wasn't just a wall - it had various profiles across its length. Here's a picture taken from the train as we crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin en route to Warsaw. In places the "no man's land" near the wall was daunting.

On escaping before 'the Wall':
My Dad was unsuccessful in his first attempt to escape East Germany. It was 1955 and because of the mass exodus of young people (many via west Berlin), the entry into east Berlin was tightly controlled, so the train was stopped, all young East Germans either taken into custody for not having an acceptable reason for entry, or in his case, jailed for 42 hours (presumably to act as a warning, they held him "to check for criminal history").
He remembers a neighbour 'disappearing' for 6 months after making some anti government comment, no one asked or talked about his reappearance.
He made it, 18 months later, with a forged document and 'pass' and a (unused!) return ticket.
His friend escaped by a West German family member paying a farmer at a border crossing to hide and cross at night (patrolled by armed border guards then, no dogs- they would have been discovered if the guards had dogs).

We visited family over the years, had to inform at local police station all those we would be in contact with and we would take much appreciated goods like coffee and chocolate, and denim clothes for the teenagers. Always a curious rigamarole to get approval to enter, checks (no magazines or newspapers allowed) on the train, register at police, exchange a certain amount of foreign currency per day.

Something a family friend told me, I think it was in Leipzig... buildings were crumbling, no restoration, everything looking shabby and derelict, people hungry, queueing for whenever they saw a line, not even knowing what the queue was for.

Anyway, a high ranking official was due for a visit, so a street got a makeover, buildings repaired and painted, shops filled with goods, happy people in the street waving to the passing motorcade. A succesful workers paradise