Moscow 1987 and 1991
Sadly no photos from this country. I arrived in Moscow for just one night while travelling home after two years of backpacking, flying back from Singapore with a stopover in a very austere hotel. It was a few years before the Berlin Wall came down, and the city was still very much in the Soviet era. We were given a tour of Red Square and glimpsed some very sad-looking shops with empty shelves, all under the watchful eye of at least four “guides”.
However, this was not my strangest experience involving Moscow. In 1981, while travelling to Nepal, I booked the cheapest flight available, which turned out to be Afghan Air, with plane changes in Bucharest and Kabul. A few hours after leaving Bucharest, we began our descent. Expecting to see the Afghan countryside, I looked out of the window—only to see what looked remarkably like Moscow airport. We stopped for a few hours, during which about ten senior Russian generals boarded the plane and were flown on to Afghanistan. This was during the period of Russian assistance there.