> (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 from one system to a TV

> (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 from one system to a TV, and videorecording that with a camera running the other system) Some time ago I watched some documentary about people watching western movies in, IIRC, Romania during the Cold War. There was a flourishing black market industry, some people smuggled VHS tapes in their cars over the border (either hiding the tapes in their car, or then by bribing the border guards), others who knew English (e.g. school teachers) spent their evenings dubbing movies to the local language in somebody's home studio. And then because few people had TV sets and VCR's, people had makeshift movie salons in somebody's apartment. In Estonia, people built TV antennas to receive transmissions from Finland; Finnish and Estonian are fairly close to each other, and in Finland foreign programs are typically subtitled rather than dubbed making it easy to understand. So people in Estonia were fairly familiar with Western TV series like Dallas or Knight Rider. Kid culture behind the Iron Curtain is particularly interesting, since for some reason censorship wasn't as strong there. So you have kids classics like Uspensky's Uncle Fyodor, which, if you read a little between the lines, contains some pretty harsh criticism of the system.