Full Circles

I am a baby boomer. The generation of the Cold War. On command, we elementary school kids would drop and curl up under our wooden desks, wanting to believe that this act would protect us from the dreaded atomic bomb that Russia – the Soviet Union – might drop on us at any moment. 

As a child, the words Russia, Reds, Iron Curtain, Soviet Union swirled around me like a nightmare you can only feel but not describe. I wanted my life to go back to a time when I didn’t know about bombs.

Russia remained the enemy until the Iron Curtain started coming down in 1989. By then I was living and teaching in Israel and I was excited to welcome the new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of whom became my high school students.

Two years later, Israel was attacked with Scud missiles during the Gulf War. Now I was running drills for my own students on how to use their gas masks. As in the 50s, I’m sure my students knew deep down that this would not protect them. 

With such positive connections to the new Russia, even I came out from under my protective wooden school desk to visit the country of my former sworn enemy. In 2009, my husband and I attended an exclusive wedding in a restaurant in the capital of the former Soviet Union. I remember the euphoria, the inner joy I felt as we were able to roam around Red Square in the country I had so feared. The people were free, and we were free to go where we wanted, to speak Hebrew or English without fear of secret police. This was one of those moments that validates hope for better times.

Instead of monsters, I found haute couture, nightclubs, couples and families shopping in stores I couldn’t afford, children playing in parks, everyone photographing themselves with the Kremlin in the background. 

True, the Iron Curtain had come down over twenty years before, but for me to be casually strolling the streets of Moscow, this was a miracle. Those drop drills had instilled in me an irrational fear of Mother Russia.  I could never have imagined a world where I’d be touring the den of my nightmares. Instead of monsters, I found haute couture, nightclubs, couples and families shopping in stores I couldn’t afford, children playing in parks, everyone photographing themselves with the Kremlin in the background. The heavy gray and drab uniform styles we had seen in movies had been replaced by three-inch spike heels, tight dresses and short skirts. There was laughter. And American franchises like McDonald’s. 

I never patronize McDonald’s in any country. But on this trip, I was desperate for some cool air and a rest room. It was Moscow’s hottest summer in a century and wildfires were burning around the city adding to the heat and feelings of suffocation. There is little air conditioning in Russia because there is usually no need for it. I ignored my aversion to McDonald’s and followed my husband through the door and found relief and French fries. 

Here we are today, 2022. The Cold War of my childhood has become a real war. The atomic bomb we feared has become the threat of nuclear weapons. Neither drop drills nor gas mask training can help the people of the Ukraine or the next victims of Russian aggression. The Russia we applauded when the walls came down and borders opened has now tragically returned to its terrifying, bullying ways under Vladimir Putin. 

Russia is closed to outgoing and incoming flights. McDonald’s is closed “temporarily” according to a Google map of Moscow. It leaves out the reason, but we know it is the sanctions imposed by international companies aimed at punishing Putin for his brutal war against the Ukraine. I wish it were so easy to stop a war. 

The frightening memories of my childhood are sharpened as the free world circles back to fearing Russia and Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons to achieve his goals. It’s a vicious circle that I hope will end one day soon, but only on the upswing.

Galia Miller Sprung, who moved to Israel in 1970 to become a pioneer farmer, is a retired high school teacher, writer and editor.