What's up y'all? I'm Renee Montgomery and my podcast Untold Legends Aura is available now.

I'm looking back on the life of one of the most extraordinary black female sport stars of the 20th century,

whose name has been all but forgotten.

Aura Washington.

Stay listening at the end of this podcast to find out more.

Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Today we're bringing you a story about Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union,

who has died age 91. Gorbachev came to power in 1985 at a time when the Soviet economy was on the brink of collapse.

He introduced a radical reform program called Parastroika on the 25th anniversary of the launch of Parastroika.

Louise Hidalgo spoke to three people who remembered those exciting days in Moscow.

It's 1987 and in the Soviet Union a revolution is underway.

Rishaevichy предпосилка успеха этих преобразований.

Mikhail Gorbachev has been the Soviet leader for two years now.

He's from a new generation of communist leaders and he's speaking a new language about Parastroika and Glastnost about reform.

Democratization and Glastnost are the decisive prerequisites for the success of those reforms.

They also provide the guarantee that we shall go a long way

and that the course we are pursuing is irreversible, such as the will of our people.

Mikhail Gorbachev laid out the basic details of his proposed reforms at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Yelena Volkova was a young university professor and she remembers not being much impressed by what she heard.

It sounded rather demagogic to me because it had all those communist parties, clichés, socialist self-government, democracy, with socialism, with human face.

So we heard so many times all those words about the state and the party working for us.

It was the dead language of the Dying Regime, which they tried to persuade us for the millions' time that they are trying to do something and to change the country.

...