I would recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in the Berlin Corridor activities by the western powers during the Cold War.

Manchester's twin city was Leningrad, so every couple of years a TU104 would pitch up on an exchange visit.

Eventually Moscow / Leningrad became city break tourist destinations with regular summer charters on Aeroflot 154s on behalf of Thomson

There were regular LOT flights using IL-18 and TU-134 and sometimes IL-62 with a mix of tourists and visiting friends and relatives. Not to mention Tarom IL-18/TU154 and IL-62 and Balkan TU-134/154 on package holidays.

Gave the savvy people of the north an opportunity to fly direct without all the hassle of having to go over London

That 748F (VQ-BRH) arrived from HKG fully loaded before being dispatched to LEJ. There’s usually no load change involved in DME, so being a fuel stop only.
But how does this match to the „truth“ that VQ-BRH was bound for Cincinnati..?? Doesn’t make sense, right…
Was it possibly a simple mistake of the dispatchers/fuelers mixing up aircraft’s..??

A good account of Manchester's Soviet-Bloc air traffic.

My question was perhaps with the period between the 1950's and 1980's in mind, so to say before the Balkan Holidays et el commenced in the 80's. The twinning of Manchester and Leningrad was no doubt an irritation to the Mandarins of Whitehall, but great for spotters!

Happily, Manchester still appears to be an irritation to Whitehall. :O

I'm sure nothing sinister, but I have noticed that Air Bridge 747-8s almost always arrive in EMA from Krasnoyarsk crossing the Yorkshire coast then heading across Sheffield and then approaching EMA from the north. I assumed that this is just logical based on great circle routings. But then yesterday Volga Dnepr AN124 RA-82074 was inbound from Leipzig and took a similar routing, which for flights between LEJ and EMA did appear very odd, since the very regular DHL and Kallita flights on this route pretty well always approach from the southeast or east. I'd had thought that if there was some operational or economic reason to make landfall to the north of EMA then all the carriers would look to use that routing.

In these troubled times one does wonder, but equally one wonders what they'd expect to be looking for if there was anything untoward going on - and if the UK did have anything to hide why they'd allow such routing from (potentially) hostile nations commercial aircraft.

We'll never know and it could be as you say, something untoward. Either they are allowed, or guided to 'see' whatever as a ruse, or there's nothing to see in general terms. If the resolution of spy satellites are as good as is purported, then 'they' know everything already :-)

If I wanted to do something sinister with a Russian airliner, I would not necessarily start with an airline that has a large number of foreign pilots, including British and U.S., and flies regularly to both these countries. ABC has hubs in Atlanta and Chicago.

It was the Volga Dnepr that really spiked my interest rather than the Air Bridge because the direct routing from Leipzig is not normally the one they took. it occurred to me yesterday (after posting) that it is conceivable that the UK directed the Volga Dnepr northwards so it wasn't flying over East Anglia. Who knows? Some might say who cares!!

Good thinking. I've commented here previously about some of the very illogical routings of the various Antonovs that tramp around Europe (One routing something like East Mids to Gothenburg routed over Newcastle I seem to recall) but it never occurred to me that it might actually be UK ATC directing them away from things rather than the crew directing them towards things!

How naive to think that these transport aircraft would simply be allowed to route wherever they wanted to. I think some of you watch too many Hollywood movies ;)

If it was Mon-Friday, the D323 complex in the North Sea may have been active and as such, a direct route across towards Gothenburg wouldn't have been available. Options would be to route out over East Anglia and a sharp left turn up towards Copenhagen, or over Newcastle and then NE towards Gothenburg.

Fair point. I can't remember the exact details but it did look a very strange routing, even taking into account D323. That was just one example though; there were some other strange bendy routes taken by other flights over continental Europe.