On my only trip to the USSR in 1974, we were advised on the plane from Luton to Moscow that no newspaper other than the Morning Star should be attempted to take into Russia, as tensions in the Cold War were at a height (unknown to us until we returned to Britain, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from his motherland the same day as we arrived.) When we got to Moscow, we were divested of our hand luggage which was all placed in a communal area within sight of the officials waiting to 'welcome' you into their country. Being bloody-minded, and as I hadn't finished reading one of the three newspapers I'd bought for the plane ride, I'd stuffed that newspaper back into the top of my bag, which I thought I'd zipped up. I can't tell you how much I regretted it when we were required to identify our luggage, and there sticking out of the top of my bag was the 'Daily Telegraph', not even a paper I generally read! How I managed to retrieve the bag and walk with it to the immigration officials (almost certainly associated with the KGB if not in direct employ) I still don't know, and I can honestly say I've never regretted any of my life actions so much as I did that one.The fact they let me in so readily was almost worse, because I didn't know what fate (if any) would befall me. My first action on getting to the hotel was to find the loo and spend the next hour or so tearing that paper into tiny pieces and flushing it down.
Off topic perhaps, but not if you consider the Welsh government's 'advice' to be on a par with that of one of the most authoritarian governments of recent memory, as Brezhnev and co most certainly were.
