Interviewed Three People I Chose

¶ … interviewed three people I chose to have different backgrounds. One is my mother that was had hands on experience as she lived through the period of the Cold War and in particular since the late 60s. My second subject for the interview is a graduate student of political sciences, and my third subject is a former East European student from Romania, now living in the United States for more than a decade who, in turn, experienced the Cold War on the other side of the Atlantic.

The views expressed in the interviews were quite different and the information acquired was different given the perspectives of the three.

At the first question on what comes to mind when thinking of the Cold War, all three answered similarly in the sense that all mentioned the Russian and U.S. espionage, the two military blocks NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the arms race and the nuclear threat. However, the perspective my mother who lived in those times included more information on, for instance, the U.S. espionage and the relations the U.S. had with the UK MI 6 division or the Israeli Mossad. The third subject form Easter Europe also mentioned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the U.S.S.R. forces in 1968 and the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

At the second question on the study of the Cold War in schools, the answers were mixed. In my mother's case, the answer was no; this was especially given the fact that the Cold War was an ongoing event and was not comprised in history books. The second subject answered a definite yes, as she studied international relations as a core subject in undergraduate school. The third subject however, although older than the second, answered that he did not study in school in Romania because during the undergraduate studies, the communist means of education included socialist approaches and not a western perspective. Yet, from Free Europe radio station, a lot of news on the tensions between the Americans and the Russians were known.

At the third question, on the parties of the Cold War, all answered the same, the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. The second subject added also the countries of the non-aligned block. To this answer, he suggested an important book on the Cold War, Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy." Indeed, the book reveals the importance of the non-aligned countries especially the ones in Africa or Latin America for the creation of the spheres of influence and the equilibrium of the time (Kissinger, 1995).