I watched a film set near Torgau, in Eastern Germany, in 1980. I remembered that in 1977, in Easter week, in a frozen Copenhagen I went to the Soviet embassy to a ask for a visa. I remember what it looked like, and the guards’ regalia, going in, but I do not remember the rest. Traveling, going to an embassy, asking for a visa, it was a routine bureaucratic act, then. Now, it seems momentuous.
I must have had to show my passport. I remember receiving the already expired visa months later, sheaf upon sheaf of paper decorated in flamboyant red and yellow ink.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Incredible how unaware we were of all this, living in Southern Germany and Switzerland at that time. East Germany and Eastern Europe, from our perspective, might not have existed.
They were the forbidden lands/dark continent.
I used to go from Barcelona and also Paris to Jutland. Either way one ended up changing in Cologne, because if one stayed on the same train it went on to Berlin and Moscow. I would stand on the tracks to look at the Soviet train coming in.