Question for people who were alive during the last full decade of the cold war. What did you think of the Soviet Union? Were you scared of a nuclear war occuring? Were you surprised when the Soviet Union began to collapse?

I didn't really have much of an understanding of it, given that I was a kid then. But I do remember the early 90's collapse of it.

I was born in late 1981 so I didn't have that much of an understanding about the whole thing. I visited the German Democratic Republic a few times as my family has had relatives there close behind the boarder (West Germans could travel to the GDR once per year to visit relatives if both parties didn't live farther than 50km / 30miles from the boarder). While not directly the Soviet Union it was under full Soviet control and I noticed a big difference in living styles (especially their cars sucked  :D and a lot of people still used coal for heating). Apart from that I didn't think much of it and I don't think I really understood the whole situation anyway. Nowadays it's funny that on a clear day I only have to walk like 50 meters from my house and can see what used to be a Soviet listening post on the Brocken (tallest mountain of the Harz mountains)... That's how close the cold war was for me and I didn't even realized it at the time. ::)

I was born in late 1981 so I didn't have that much of an understanding about the whole thing. I visited the German Democratic Republic a few times as my family has had relatives there close behind the boarder (West Germans could travel to the GDR once per year to visit relatives if both parties didn't live farther than 50km / 30miles from the boarder). While not directly the Soviet Union it was under full Soviet control and I noticed a big difference in living styles (especially their cars sucked  :D and a lot of people still used coal for heating). Apart from that I didn't think much of it and I don't think I really understood the whole situation anyway. Nowadays it's funny that on a clear day I only have to walk like 50 meters from my house and can see what used to be a Soviet listening post on the Brocken (tallest mountain of the Harz mountains)... That's how close the cold war was for me and I didn't even realized it at the time. ::)

You were 8 years old when the Berlin Wall started to come down. Did you get to see East German shows on tv?

You were 8 years old when the Berlin Wall started to come down. Did you get to see East German shows on tv?
Yes, we frequently watched the GDR version of the Sandman (unser Sandmännchen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandm%C3%A4nnchen.
It was a non political children's show. There was one other children's show called Brummkreisel (humming top) but I don't remember much of it (and it doesn't have an English Wikipedia entry). I also remember one other show we've watched at least once and that was called "Ein Kessel Buntes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Kessel_Buntes
But apart from that I don't remember much about GDR television.

Yes, we frequently watched the GDR version of the Sandman (unser Sandmännchen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandm%C3%A4nnchen.
It was a non political children's show. There was one other children's show called Brummkreisel (humming top) but I don't remember much of it (and it doesn't have an English Wikipedia entry). I also remember one other show we've watched at least once and that was called "Ein Kessel Buntes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Kessel_Buntes
But apart from that I don't remember much about GDR television.

What was it like going to school with the former East German children? What was it like being friends with them?

What was it like going to school with the former East German children? What was it like being friends with them?
I never went to school with East Germans so I can't comment on that. By the time I befriended some East Germans I was in college and they were just like the West Germans...with funny dialects though. :D

I was almost 20 when the 80's began.  Yes, I was afraid - in fact, there were times I was downright petrified about the Soviet Union and their intentions for us.  When I first heard Sting's 1985 song, Russians, it was actually comforting to me, as I think his sentiment expressed the ill-at-ease feeling many of us had: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sting/russians.html

I don't remember "duck & cover" but I do remember movies like The Day After & Threads-which did scared me. Also, I was in the military during the '80s and we were "taught" that the Soviets were the "enemy."

I remember going to a briefing once where we were shown slides of a meeting. There were two men in a car-one was an American spy & the other was a Soviet spy. You could see another Soviet operative on the other side of the car taking pics-just like the American operative taking the pics that we were seeing. The Soviets knew that Americans were taking pics of the conversation just like the Americans knew the Soviets were taking pics of it. It was like "Spy vs Spy" and I just laughed at the absurdity of it.

I was actually in Europe in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. I wasn't really aware that it had happened until I got back to the States. Why? I didn't have access to too much news there. We did get Armed Forces Radio which we might have gotten a bit of news and we had Stars & Stripes newspaper which was weekly. Of course we didn't have the internet and our t.v. was 2 channels-both had its programing from a VCR. One was (old) t.v. shows & the other was movies. The VCR that worked the one for the t.v. shows broke down so we ended up with only one channel of movies. Someone picked out 12 movies for us to watch for a month-that was it! (But many people had their own VCRs/movies.) But news? What was that? 



Cat

^That's odd. I had thought that an event like the collapse of the Berlin Wall would set most military installations to a higher alert as there was not telling what could possibly happen. ???

In our Army we had something called "political education" which didn't happen often but whenever there was a major event going on in the world the whole platoon would be briefed about it.
Also after 9/11 our unit's alert status was raised a lot, guards and patrols were doubled, sandbag bunkers at the entrances were erected and we had our protective vests in our office (I worked in our company's office). I had expected a similar reaction to the collapse of the GDR and the Berlin Wall. ???

I was 14 when the 80's started, but i never feared the Russians. In fact, I was so sure there would not be a WWIII with them, I joined the Army reserves in 1986. Nuclear deterrence was just that, unfortunate, but a necessity at the time. Watching the wall come down was exhilarating, because by that time, with Gorby instituting new policies in the Soviet Union, we knew we were watching the end of the cold war. Funny how, when I was activated for military duty in Desert Storm, that was something we never seen coming.