Watching the Soviet Union Collapse Firsthand

Nestled along the North Sea, Norway forms a long narrow strip of land along the Scandinavian Peninsula. In the East the country borders Sweden and Finland, and in the extreme North West, Norway shares a border with Russia. While anyone can freely cross the Swedish and Finish borders, the Norwegian-Russian border is strictly enforced.

Every inch of the 100 mile long border is paroled several times a day. Tourists and locals that approach the border are turned away, reaching or even spitting across the border is grounds for arrest. The enforcement of the border falls on one infantry regiment in the Norwegian army. Consisting of 150 conscripted soldiers, they receive special training and police authority. The border patrol on the Russian border is one of very few units in the Norwegian police force, and in the armed forces in general that are constantly armed with live ammunition.

Two thirds of the border follows the Pasvik river through a narrow valley. This far north, there are no trees but the Pasvik valley, shielded from the worst onslaught of the winter, is unusually lush in the short summer months. Basking in the midnight sun, the little valley can be down right pleasant on a warm summer night.

In the winter, when the temperature falls under -40 and the valley is lost in a three month long arctic night, nothing lives here. The few animals that are not dormant are invisible in the deep deep darkness, and even the air stands still when the cold takes proper hold.

Growing up in Norway in the 1980s the threat of the Soviet Union was always implied. As the Cold War escalated into a nuclear arms race, it was impossible not to feel the overwhelming might of the Soviet military machine. For a small country like Norway, the shared border with the Soviet Union was a constant reminder of how vulnerable the country would be if the Cold War should ever turn hot.

As a 19 year old boy, I served my term in the Norwegian army as a border patrol solider on the Soviet border. The responsibility of representing the law and the understanding that at any time I would have to be ready to arrest anyone trying to breach the border, if necessary using my weapon was ever present. The knowledge that a division of the feared Red Army was stationed not a mile to the east, outnumbering us 10-1 was equally a fact of life.

When I was serving my term in the summer of 1991, The Soviet Union had already started showing signs of breaking apart. Under Gorbachev, the attempts to streamline the old communist party ways had created internal turmoil. As the economy collapsed, the old power structures were clearly breaking apart. The decay and collapse was clearly visible for us on the border. Buildings were falling into disrepair, the soldiers were ill equipped in the winter, but worst of all was seeing the civilians. Under the new program of openness, Perestroika, a few people were allowed to cross the border to visit family on the other side. These delegations from the Soviet Union would bring everything they owned, which was very little, trying desperately to sell whatever personal items they could on the streets of Kirkenes. It was truly heart wrenching to see starved, broken people trying to sell their family photos and heirlooms on the street. In the end, the only thing they could sell was their own home made vodka that would knock many a young man off his feet in those days.

Life on the border was pretty routine, between our own routines and observing the routines of the Soviets, every day passed pretty much like the one before, and with the sun never setting, the same was true for every night as well. Many times we would wish for something more dramatic to happen, maybe catch a glimpse of a Hind combat helicopter, or maybe a T-72 tank on maneuver. The most exciting thing to happen was when the cow they kept for milk on the other side escaped. In the end, that turned out to be pretty routine too.

August 19^th, 1991 was a beautiful summer day in Pasvik. The weather was so warm we had been allowed to roll up the sleeves of our uniforms. The sun had not set since sometime in May and was baking on the walls of my observation tower. I had just started my shift and was following the activity on the other side of the border. Meticulously taking down every detail I could see through my over-sized binoculars. Sitting directly across the river from a small military camp on the Soviet side, after a few hundred hours of guard duty I knew every routine and schedule in their camp. I would make sure to take down the time when a car passed, making sure to include the make and model and color. I would make a little reference in my log when they took their patrol boat down the river. In short, I would take down any little detail that I could see and mark it in a log, later to be sent to the military intelligence headquarters for analysis.

Shortly into my shift this day, just in time for the guard change at the opposing camp I directed my attention to their observation tower. As expected, right on time a figure climbed the long stairs leading up to the booth. I followed the soldier's way up to his post for amusement. Seeing if I could make out what uniform he was wearing and if I could determine what model his AK-47 was. Marking the time I waited for the solider that had just been relieved to come climbing back down. After waiting a few minutes and nothing happening, I figured he had gone off duty early and I had missed him and went back to observing the road for a while.

That is when I realized that something was definitely out of the ordinary. As I routinely followed the road to where it turns behind a hill I happened to see a solider on his way up the ladder of another and long abandoned observation tower. The tower had never before been in use, and it was in fact pointed out in our training that it was no longer operative. Still, the tower was now undoubtedly being manned. On an instinct I swung back to the observation tower in the camp, and sure enough, there was a reason why I hadn't seen the solider leaving his post. He was still there. With double guard posts and the manning of the unused tower it was obvious that the border station had been put on high alert. As I watched pairs of soldiers leave the camp to take up positions in the woods around the camp I knew that something was definitely going on.

I knew what I had to do, this was too extraordinary to just mark down in the log an bury it there. This was the kind of thing that had to be radioed in to the station. As I reached for the encryption device used for sending important messages over the radio I knew that this kind of observation would travel up the reporting chain faster than wild fire. I had seen that happen once before, with an event a lot less important. I finished encrypting my brief message and predictably, not 10 seconds after I had sent it the phone rang in my tower. The officer in charge at the station asked me to verify my observations.

At the time, I did not know what was happening. I could only make assumptions based on what everybody knew about the situation in the Soviet Union at that time. The crumbling super power did not seem like it would strike outward, the Russian bear was collapsing on itself. Far more likely, but almost as chilling, was the possibility of a military coup or another great Russian revolution. As I watched the lazy camp across the river sprawl with life I knew that if they were on alert in response to a military response to the ongoing demonstrations in Moscow, we all had to prepare for the possibility of mass defections across the border. If that was to be the case, there was no telling how the Soviet army would respond.

As it turned out, the alert was in response to an attempted coup in Moscow. On August 19^th a group of most of the high ranking politicians and KGB officers in the Soviet Union put Gorbachev under house arrest and attempted to reverse the Perestroika policies that had accelerated the breakup of the Union. Banning newspapers and enforcing strict political censorship the group was hoping to gain popular support for their attempt to restore the strength of the Soviet Union. This would not be the case, and instead Boris Yeltsin was quick to rally the people against the coup makers, playing on the growing nationalist feelings of Russian supremacy. In the first confusing hours of the coup, Soviet special forces surrounded the "White House" in Moscow, but they refused to attack the structure, foiling the attempt to arrest Yeltsin. The coup did not get the support from the military and collapsed soon after.

Thousands of miles away, in a tiny shack on the Norwegian-Soviet border I was watching the Soviet Border Guards react to the confusion. The sudden raised alert level was followed by frenzied activity, but as fast and unexpected as it had broken out, it ended. Near the end of my watch, the double watch was relieved, the forgotten watch tower was abandoned once again, and life fell back into it's usual routine.

It was not until later when news of the events in Moscow became public that I realized the importance of what I had just witnessed. As the alert level was lowered across the border it was clear that the army would not support a coup and the breakup of the Soviet Union would only accelerate. In reality I was watching the death of the mighty superpower as orders went out to the Red Army to return to normal routine.

The Soviet Union would fall apart over the next 4 months and as I was dismissed from the army to return home just in time for Christmas, the Soviet Union was formally declared extinct. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, and I return home as part of the last company to have patrolled the Norwegian-Soviet border.