BoomerZoo Almanac for August 19-25, 2007: Hot month for the Cold War
Mid-August is generally known for its dog days, but that heat must occasionally cause a synapse or two in the brain to go haywire, leading to either a blown fuse or a power surge. That certainly appeared to occur more than once on the Eastern side of the Boomer Half-Century’s Cold War. Every time, it surely did manage to piss off the Western side, even if it was a result of their own prodding.
In August 1953, the Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
In August 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 spy plane, capturing U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers, and then sentencing him to 10 years in prison.
In August 1968, The Soviet Union noticed that the Prague Spring had stretched pretty far into the summer, so sent 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks to Czechoslovakia to set the calendar straight.
In August 1979, Soviet dancer Aleksandr Godunov defected to United States. Six years later, i.e., August 1985, in an odd sort of tit for tat, Hans Tiedge, a top counter-spy working out of West Germany, defected to East Germany.
By August 1990, the whole Eastern Team of the Cold War was approaching retirement. Tiedge the Spy was probably none too pleased—after risking his life to cross the border—to find that East and West Germany planned to banish that same border. At the same time, Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union.
You wouldn’t think a snowball would have much chance in the northern hemisphere in August, but only a year later, in August 1991, that ball really began to pick up snow. When Gorbachev went on vacation that month a coup was attempted in Moscow, and he was placed under house arrest. That didn’t last long—within a day more than 100,000 Soviet citizens showed up outside the parliament building to protest the coup attempt, Gorbachev was released from house arrest, and by the 23rd of the month, he was back in Moscow giving his Cabinet a thorough cleaning. Not that it mattered – remember the snowball? It was really on a roll…two days later, Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union.
