Then and Now

When, in the summer of 1980, Soviet Russia bade a tearful goodbye to its giant Misha mascot, which drifted away from Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium with a bunch of balloons, organizers must have breathed a sigh of relief.

The 1980 Olympic Games, the first ever held in the Communist bloc, were finally over. The thousands of foreign guests who had demanded unprecedented security in the capital city could now go home.

KGB operatives at the Moscow Olympics had to pose as cleaning personnel at hotels, foreigners were searched at the border, and postal employees did not let any parcels out of Moscow without examining their contents.