On the eve of the Moscow Olympics, the Observer Magazine (5 July 1980) visited ‘the city Margaret Thatcher doesn’t want our athletes to see’ to discover what Moscow life was really like. ‘It is easy to conclude that all Russians going impassively about their business must be some sort of automatons,’ the dossier mused. ‘The clues to the hearts of these disciplined and watched-over people are rare, and consequently startling and precious when one discovers them.’ Writers peered behind that facade through reports, interviews and chance encounters, accompanied by ‘endless toasts to greater understanding’. Fresh from a seven-encore recital, the Bolshoi’s star bass Yevgeni Nesterenko held court in his riverfront pad, offering vodka, snacks and anecdotes. A trip accompanying a local reporter to a bread plant that had exceeded its target production quota expanded into an exploration of the workings and editorial policy of the Moscow press. Shortages were almost a character in their own right: ‘The word niet soon becomes depressingly familiar.’ On the streets, ‘the average housewife queues for two hours a day,’ reportedly, while in the journalists’ hotel ‘we survived to some extent on bread and whisky’. No telephone directory – paper shortages – seemed particularly shocking and cars had no windscreen wipers: ‘Prudent drivers keep them in the glove compartment so they don’t get pinched.’ Despite that, there’s a thoughtful appreciation of the city’s beauty and strangeness and of the hospitality and resilience of its inhabitants. The last Soviet citizens the Observer met were tourists, competition winners from Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, admiring ‘the greatness of our country’. If that name seems familiar, the city is home to one of the nuclear power plants Putin shelled with such menace in late November.