4.4 • 879 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
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The former President of the Soviet Union's reforms in 1987, known as Perestroika, and the release of the dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya in 1986.
Plus a survivor of the Marikana Massacre in South Africa, the Native American nicknamed 'the Last Indian' and Princess Diana's dance with John Travolta at the White House.
(Photo: Mikhail Gorbachev (centre right) meets with the Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers' Committee in Moscow in 1987. Credit: AFP / Getty Images)
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0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, |
0:04.7 | the past brought to life by those who were there. |
0:07.6 | This week we'll mark ten years since the Maricana massacre in South Africa when police opened |
0:12.4 | fire on striking miners. |
0:14.0 | I was shot nine times. |
0:18.0 | I am lucky to be alive, but because of my injuries, I can never have children. |
0:25.0 | We'll also be dancing with Princess Diana at the White House and remembering the Native American who came to be known as the last Indian. |
0:33.2 | She was very thin, but he wasn't starving. |
0:36.2 | He had some small food items with him in a little leather pouch. |
0:40.3 | But he only had a shirt covering top of his body. |
0:42.8 | We don't know why he came out at that time. |
0:44.8 | That's all coming up later in the podcast. |
0:46.8 | But of course we must start with the death of Mikhail Golbachev, |
0:50.4 | the last president of the Soviet Union, died this week at the age of 91. |
0:54.0 | World leaders have been paying tribute to the man who was credited with ending the Cold War |
0:59.0 | by ushering in dramatic change in what was then the USSR, change which ultimately led to the collapse of |
1:04.9 | communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. |
1:07.9 | Gobachov became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, effectively |
1:12.0 | the country's leader, 1985. After just two years in the post, |
1:16.1 | he instigated the reform process known as Perestroika. It was accompanied by Glassnost or Openness, |
1:22.1 | which meant, for example, that classics of Russian literature could be published. |
1:26.0 | In 2012, Louis Sidalgoe took to three people who remembered those exciting days in Moscow even though many greeted the initial policy |
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