Shadows

SHADOWS:
Behind the Iron Curtain

TONY SCOTLAND

Utterly absorbing and thrilling … unputdownable (Michael Bloch)

A Cold War memoir from the Spring of 1989. As Gorbachev’s reforms shook the Soviet empire, broadcaster Tony Scotland took a month’s leave from BBC Radio Three to travel behind the Iron Curtain on a personal quest for glasnost. In this evocative and exciting account of a journey inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s legendary adventures through pre-war Eastern Europe, he captures a snapshot of a post-war world about to disintegrate – and the spirit that survives oppression. There’s a Bach Passion in Leipzig, electric with political resistance; a confrontation with hard-liners in a sauna in Karlovy Vary; a soirée with dissidents in a tower block in Prague; and in Budapest, a Requiem Mass for the last Queen of Hungary. In Transylvania he’s carried off by a runaway Saxon soldier, and at the heart of the book is a terrifying chase around Ceaușescu’s secret palace in Bucharest. By the end of the year Ceaușescu had been executed, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War was over. A decade later Scotland returned to a democratic Eastern Europe – and, in an Epilogue, he reveals an unexpected mission that changed his life.

Tony Scotland at Andělská Hora in Czechoslovakia, March 1989.
Tony’s travelling companion for part of the journey, Adam Bager.
A map of Central and Eastern Europe showing the line of the Iron Curtain as it was in
1989, and the author’s route through the Eastern Bloc.

Left: a Soviet-era badge bearing the head of the leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who introduced the reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost. Right: the 5-kopek stamp released by USSR Post, 5 May 1988, to mark Perestroika (‘a reliance on the creativity of the masses’).

The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife, Elena, bear-hunting in the Carpathian Mountains in 1976 (Romanian Online Communism Photo Collection).

To buy Shadows please click on the ORDER NOW tab