I never knew much about the USSR as a kid. We grew up in fear of MAD, but the iron curtain meant that we didn't know, for instance, what kids TV shows were like on the other side, or what their music videos were like, or that they also liked Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins, the Three Musketeers ... or played with hula hoops and skateboards.

(even getting TV shows from the UK, a western country, was hard, because they were on PAL. people used to "camera copy", running a VCR to a TV on one system, and videorecording that with a camera running the other system)

So anyway, lately I've been taking full advantage of web standards to see what I had only been guessing about during the Cold War.

(the kids shows are still useful; I've had enough greek that I already knew a good portion of cyrillic, but learned the rest from Khryusha, Stepashka, and Philya)

Full props to all the ex-Warsaw Pact countries who changed their basic political systems without much violence. молодец!