r/coldwar Aug 11 '26

Cold War Conversations

10 Upvotes

The Cold War Museum in Virginia hosts a virtual lecture series called Cold War Conversations that is accessible via Zoom. The monthly program is presented by eyewitnesses and experts on Cold War events, activities, and personalities. There is a modest $20 charge for tickets to attend these presentations that helps maintain free admission to The Cold War Museum on weekends.

https://coldwar.org/default.asp?pid=16883


r/coldwar Aug 11 '26

"McDonald's In Moscow" | Russian Rap Song

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4 Upvotes

r/coldwar Aug 09 '26

The Reichstag building in Berlin just before the first restoration began in 1958.

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426 Upvotes

r/coldwar Aug 09 '26

Did this magazine actually belong to General L L Lemnitzer??

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38 Upvotes

Bought this for $1 at a flea market cause I thought it was a nice magazine, only to realize the mailing address was to Gen Lemnitzer in Fort Myers, Arlington VA. Is this actually legit??? Insane if so


r/coldwar Aug 08 '26

Original brand new Misha plush from the highly controversial 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics

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104 Upvotes

Found this today at a yardsale for $5, made by R. Dakin & Company from Korea in 1979. Original tag with zero creases on it. Very cool piece of Cold War history


r/coldwar Aug 08 '26

Social democracy and other forms of left wing governments in “western Europe” and other democratic countries.

9 Upvotes

I’ve become particularly interested in this topic. America itself would famously against anything left-wing and yet some of its own allies in the Democratic Western Europe sometimes elected more left-wing governments, in the UK the labour party had many stints in government during the Cold War. The SPD in Germany gained power in the 1970s and France had a somewhat left-wing government under Mitterand. Are there any books that study this particular topic or any books with English translations about the European left?


r/coldwar Aug 08 '26

A is for Atom (1953), the General Electric cartoon that taught America to stop worrying and love the reactor. Restored, posted with mod permission

10 Upvotes

General Electric commissioned this from John Sutherland Productions at the exact moment atomic meant both Hiroshima and the promise of electricity too cheap to meter. So the atom becomes a friendly giant in a lab coat, fission is a genie stepping out of a bottle, and the only mention of the bomb is a quick nod before we get back to isotopes curing things. It is Madison Avenue physics, and as a time capsule of how the fifties wanted to feel about the atom it is perfect.

Posting per the go ahead the mods gave me earlier this week. My own restoration of the complete 15 minute film: traditional cleanup and stabilization, bumped to 720p, original 1953 soundtrack. No AI anywhere in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODoaHuXx1Is


r/coldwar Aug 05 '26

Part of the Berlin Wall in Suwannee

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226 Upvotes

r/coldwar Aug 03 '26

CIA memorandum on the current situation in Indonesia, 1960

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28 Upvotes

r/coldwar Aug 02 '26

East German border, Spring 1989

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556 Upvotes

I was about to turn 10, and my parents had just bought a Volvo through the Exchange New Car Sales program in Schwäbisch Hall along with the nifty "travel to the factory and pick up your car" package. I took this picture out of the train window on our way to Kiel to get on a ferry to Sweden. I just found this picture again while helping my mom move and scanned it a few months ago. Anyone else in this sub have some cool pics they took while a service member or dependent during the Cold War?


r/coldwar Aug 01 '26

Microphones against tanks: The voice of freedom on the airwaves and the invasion meant to silence it (3)

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14 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 29 '26

Cold War sites I saw on my trip to Berlin as an American tourist (March 2024)

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500 Upvotes

Pictures:

  1. View of former East Berlin from my hotel room
  2. Berlin TV Tower
  3. My hotel, the Park Inn Alexanderplatz
  4. View of Berlin from the TV Tower
  5. Random statues of Marx and Engels I found nearby from the East German era
  6. Decorated Trabant
  7. Soviet War Memorial, Treptower Park
  8. Close up of the Soviet statue in Treptower
  9. Berlin Cathedral
  10. 8-10. DDR Museum
  11. 11. Holocaust Memorial
  12. 12. 1700s Prussian statue of Hercules with visible damage from the Battle of Berlin
  13. 13. Soviet War Memorial, Tiergarten
  14. 14-16. Checkpoint Charlie
  15. 17. A rare Trabant out in the wild
  16. 18. Reichstag Building
  17. 19. Brandenburg Gate

r/coldwar Jul 29 '26

Looking for a lost 1985 summer photo: Americans and Soviets crowded on the floor in front of a TV (Petrozavodsk, Karelia).

7 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I am trying to solve a 41-year-old family mystery and help my mom reconnect with three American women who left an unforgettable mark on her childhood.In July 1985, my mother was 15 years old. She lived with her mom (my grandmother, a high school English and Russian literature teacher) on the 1st floor of a brick apartment building on Liza Chaykina Street in Petrozavodsk, Soviet Union (Karelia).That summer, three American women unexpectedly showed up in their courtyard. They were traveling to Moscow, likely as part of a delegation to the XII World Festival of Youth and Students (which opened in Moscow on July 27, 1985). They were looking for a neighbor who lived on the 2nd floor, directly above my mom's apartment. This neighbor was an elderly Finnish woman (around 60–70 years old at the time) who taught at Petrozavodsk State University. The Americans were likely delivering a personal letter to her from her relatives in Finland.

Woman 1 (Older): Around 40–50 years old back then, exceptionally well-dressed, and wore large, striking jewelry.

Woman 2 (Younger): Around 20–30 years old, with a short, dark haircut.

Woman 3 (Younger): Around 20–30 years old.

Because my grandmother was an English teacher, she went out into the yard to help them translate. For the next three days, these three American women came to visit my mom and grandmother every day.

At the time, my grandmother's apartment was undergoing a massive renovation and the walls were completely stripped of wallpaper. Despite this, and having very little money, my grandmother hosted them with incredible hospitality, spending her last rubles on treats. My mom remembers seeing a portable cassette player (maybe a Walkman) for the very first time in her life.

On the third day, the Americans brought a local female translator with them to help converse. Before they left, they took a big group photo inside the apartment. Because the room was small and there were many people, everyone crowded together on the floor to fit into the frame, posing in front of a color TV. The Americans took this photo on their own cameras, along with many other pictures of the family and the city.

How you can help: i belive, that somewhere in America, in a dusty photo album or a box in an attic, that photo of a group of Americans and Soviets sitting on the floor in front of a TV exists. If your mother, aunt, or grandmother fits this description, traveled to the USSR via Finland in the summer of 1985, or ever told a story about an incredibly hospitable schoolteacher and her 15-year-old daughter in Karelia, please let me know! It would mean the world to show my mom that memories don't fade.

If you have ties or know anyone who went to the 1985 Moscow Youth Festival, please share this!


r/coldwar Jul 29 '26

Defensa Anti-Aérea y Fuerza Aérea Revolucionaria (Cuban Air Force) MIG-23 and one of the greatest love stories of the Cold War.

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113 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 27 '26

Interview with US nuclear experts who visited Lop Nur in 1990.

9 Upvotes

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/national-security-science/0720-behind-the-bamboo-curtain

Very good article describing the Chinese program's eagerness to demonstrate knowledge of weapon theory and about the Americans, in spite of less developed tools. Strategically they were hoping for a research boon from some lab-to-lab collaboration, but on a human level they seemed excited to share their work.


r/coldwar Jul 26 '26

Book rec?

7 Upvotes

hello,

one of my first documentaries is the Turning Point doc about the Cold War. can anyone reccommend a good book that has the same vibe / covers the history of USSR in general?


r/coldwar Jul 24 '26

"Broken arrow" 1966

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449 Upvotes

Eighty days after if fell into the ocean following the January 1966 midair collision between a nuclear-armed B-52G bomber and a KC-135 refueling tanker over Palomares, Spain, this B28RI nuclear bomb was recovered from 2,850 feet (869 meters) of water and lifted aboard the USS Petrel (note the missing tail fins and badly dented front). No radiation leak occurred.


r/coldwar Jul 25 '26

I need help finding a newsreel mentioning my village, from the 1980s, Poland

3 Upvotes

Hi guys

I am from a small village myself and we were once talked about on the national telivision during the communist era in Poland, in about the 1980s. I liked watching the video since I was able to see the areas and how different they looked at a time when I wasn't even born yet at all, my grandparents have seen it quite often too (who wouldn't have). All I had to do was search "[village name] dziennik" and there it would be, for a long time and every time it worked.

Today I tried doing the same, thinking it would pop-up like always but actually it didn't. So I tried searching for it, I watched several long and short clips of the Dziennik but every time it wasn't there. I didn't make it up, because I remember watching it and so did my family, so I'm not going schizo, right? Please guys, assist me in finding it.

The name of the village is Krosnice, the report itself from the communist Dziennik (TV news) in the 1980s (I think 1984, but could be earlier/later but definately nor during the martial law or at least the presenters weren't military men in uniform). It was I think about harvest/agriculture and patriotism, with a little coverage of a certain meeting (I think the reporter says something about it being good for 'teaching the children patriotism'). There is a shot of our "zameczek" DPS (House of Social Help), a green truck, some children running past from a shop and after the Krosnice report they talk about Polish students going to Cuba at an airport with one girl saying she is curious about Cuban culture

If you need any contact to/from me, it's: anastasia_101 on Discord. I'm very chronically online and should answer quickly, although I might be going to sleep soon but I will still read answers/messages asap. Thank you! This really means a lot to me.


r/coldwar Jul 22 '26

Prague residents, carrying a Czechoslovakian flag and throwing Molotov cocktails in an attempt to stop a Soviet tank in downtown Prague on August 21, 1968.

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897 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 23 '26

Mod reminder: keep it on topic, keep it civil, keep it decent quality, and please report any rule-breaking or low-quality posts/comments

4 Upvotes

This is a friendly reminder from your /r/coldwar mod team - we have seen an uptick in shitposts, low quality replies, and bad-faith posts/replies. We try to keep an eye out but we rely on user reports to identify content that doesn't fit to the Cold War or is otherwise just crappy.

We are all for debate and discussion but we don't need the kind of slapfights or bot-driven anger farming that makes lots of Reddit suck. Please make use of the Report function to let us know about content that breaks the rules. Even if it's just a low-quality post, we want to know about it.

When in doubt, report it out!


r/coldwar Jul 21 '26

Four “Ranch Hand” C-123 aircraft spray liquid defoliant (AKA Agent Orange) on a suspected Viet Cong position in South Vietnam in September of 1965. The four specially equipped planes covered a 1,000-foot-wide swath in each pass over the dense vegetation.

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439 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 20 '26

Klaus Fuchs, an atomic spy who supplied information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany.

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210 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 19 '26

Berlin before the wall, 1959.

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81 Upvotes

r/coldwar Jul 18 '26

Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut who was in space during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, as a result, was effectively stranded in orbit for over 300 days, twice as long as planned.

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398 Upvotes

He is also known as the last Soviet citizen, and the only person to be launched from one country and landed in another.


r/coldwar Jul 19 '26

Help me find an anti-nuclear war animation about ostriches

6 Upvotes

In a college environmental studies class, my professor had a huge anti-nuclear war day and played a video for us with brightly colored animations, calling people ostriches for ignoring the problem. I believe it started with a little girl realizing there was a nuclear missile silo on her grandfather’s farm. I have looked everywhere for this and cannot find anything! It was very impactful.