Save for the people who lived it, Ian Sanders might know the Cold War better than anyone. Since 2018, he’s been recording the first-person stories of people who lived through the era for his podcast, Cold War Conversations. “The ultimate aim of the podcast was to record peoples’ stories before they’re lost,” says Sanders, a history obsessive based in Manchester. “I thought I might get a couple of hundred listeners. It’s now reached around 100,000 listeners a month.”
Sanders puts out an episode every week, and the resulting 342-strong archive is an absolute treasure trove of recordings. There’s an interview with the 98-year-old pilot from Idaho who had the idea to drop chocolate bars with handkerchief parachutes during the Berlin Airlift. There’s one with Nikita Khrushchev’s son, who was his father’s confidante during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In another, one British deputy chief of mission confesses that he and his wife went to bed on the night the Wall came down, because nothing much seemed to be happening. One episode features the English soldier who translated for Rudolf Hess during his incarceration in a Spandau prison describing the former deputy Führer’s piercing blue eyes.
The Cold War is so often thought of as blokes with guns, whereas the Cold War experience I’m looking for is as wide and broad as I can make it.”
Just as fascinating, particularly to those who live in the city now, are the accounts of everyday life in divided Berlin: Sabine, who crossed Oberbaumbrücke from East to West as a teenager, recalls how filthy Kreuzberg was and how she was blown away by a kiwi fruit and popcorn; Samy, a West Berliner, remembers the Reichstag as an old ruin on the edge of a park that people played football around.
“It’s just a constant fascination,” says Sanders. “Everybody has a different way of telling their story or their experience. One of the things I’m probably most proud of is that about 20 percent of the episodes are women’s stories. The Cold War is so often thought of as blokes with guns, whereas the Cold War experience I’m looking for is as wide and broad as I can make it.”
He first got hooked on the period during family holidays to Iron Curtain-era Poland and Prague with his “solid Conservative voter” parents. (“They were always really into history. Also, it was a very cheap place to travel in the 1980s.”) A later trip to Berlin to watch REM in concert in June 1989 copper-fastened Sanders’s own Cold War fascination. “I was there just over a week, and I must have travelled to East Berlin four or five times … At one point, I picked up a copy of Neues Deutschland that was sitting on the seat of an S-Bahn and pretended I was an East Berliner. I don’t think I fooled anybody.”
In the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Sanders noted an uptick in listener numbers, which he attributes in part to interest in the Cold War roots of that conflict and in part to a strange kind of nostalgia. “While you had this ever-present threat of nuclear war during the Cold War, you can look back at it, and think it was a simpler, more straightforward time. There was no social media, no internet, and just these two power blocs. The threats were clear, whereas in the last few years, we just seem to lurch from one disaster to the next.”
With emails from Cold War veterans of all stripes hitting his email inbox weekly, total downloads passing the four million mark, and his podcast interviews incorporated into university history modules in Britain, Sanders sees no end in sight for a series he calls “a great journey”.
“One of the things that has surprised me about doing the podcast is how much I’ve been moved by some of the stories. I thought this was going to be history, but I’ve lost count of the amount of people who have said to me in an interview, ‘You know what, I’ve never told my family this story’… Some historians can be a bit sniffy about the accuracy of oral history, but for me it’s all about the emotions and the feelings of what it was like to be there. One of the taglines I use for the podcast is that there’s nothing like hearing history from somebody who was there.”
