Pawlikowski never dwells on the social or political points: the aunt is a compromised Stalinist lawyer; Poland is in the grip of cold-war communism; and Ida herself is forced into existential self-doubt.
The 20- to 40-year-olds protesting today are the first generation to be fully free of the grip of the Cold War's totalitarian heritage.
One plausible reason as to why the Hazell case stalled in 1989 was the lack of trust between British military intelligence and their West German equivalent when Europe was still in the grip of the Cold War.
The eastern US remained in the grip of fierce cold on Saturday, as forecasters warned of yet another winter storm amid the ongoing effects of the polar vortex and the almost equally sinisterly named "Siberian Express".
At the museum, and again when he lunched in Senator Kennedy's Capitol hideaway on Wednesday, he praised the senator's brother, John F. Kennedy, as the first American president to seek to break the grip of the cold war.
The reason for the boycott back then was the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan the previous year, which drew ferocious condemnation from the west, still in the grip of the cold war.
The immediate reaction, though, reflected the dark concerns of a world in the grip of the cold war, a time of fear and division in which the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, stared each other down with the menace of mass destruction.
In 1961, in the grip of the Cold War, Eisenhower called to Americans to hold science in respect but to beware the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite".
