Mark Brayne studied in Moscow 71-72, travelling the country with fellow UK students and spending silly amounts of time in the bathhouses with salted fish and very poor quality beer. He returned in 1974-75 as Reuters trainee journalist where he became very close to Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a Soviet-era dissident.
East Berlin was his first solo posting for Reuters, where he and his wife Jutta both sang in the East Berlin Cathedral choir for four years, including two as BBC Berlin, with the honorary status of Lieut Colonel.
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Back to today’s episode, part one of three episodes with Mark and I’m sure you will find his story as equally interesting as I did…
We welcome Mark to our Cold War conversation…
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