The Break-Up of the Soviet Union

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2016

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

December 1991 saw the end of 70 years of communist rule and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We hear from two of the key signatories of the dissolution treaty, a witness to the ensuing crisis in one of the newly independent states, and from an American nuclear expert who helped clean-up the former USSR. Also, the performance artist protesting about the growing divide between rich and poor, and the first editor of Vogue magazine in Russia.

Photo: The leaders of Ukraine and Belorussia, alongside Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, at the ceremony formally dissolving the USSR in December 1991, Credit: AP

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:05.0	the past brought to life by those who were there. Today we have a special edition looking back
0:10.0	at the momentous events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, events that truly shaped our world.
0:18.0	We'll hear from some of the key protagonists from the time,
0:21.0	The USSR as a geopolitical reality and as a subject of international law
0:26.0	has ceased to exist and I was the first to say that I would sign up for this.
0:32.0	Also we'll examine the chaos created in some of the newly independent states.
0:37.0	Plus, we've got one of the American experts who helped to clean up a highly toxic nuclear dump in the former Soviet territories.
0:44.0	There were lots of folks on that test site that were trying to scavenge whatever metal was
0:50.6	left behind anything that could be sold and my concern was that those copper cables that they were digging out in order to sell
0:59.0	what was at the end of some of those copper cables.
1:02.0	Also how some in the art world responded to the extremes of rich and poor in post-Soviet
1:07.8	Russia.
1:08.8	I imagine how everyone would stand around in their fur coats laughing and I would be there naked.
1:16.7	That's all to come and with us for the whole of this podcast will be our Moscow correspondent
1:20.7	Steve Rosenberg.
1:22.3	So Steve Rosenberg. So Steve, 1991, 25 years ago, where were you?
1:27.0	Well I graduated from university in the UK in 91 and I got a job in Moscow than the capital
1:32.1	of the USSR. I was teaching English at the
1:35.2	Moscow Machine Tool Construction Institute. So at the end of August 91, a week after the failed
1:42.2	communist coup, I came to Moscow, lived in the hostel of the Institute.
1:47.0	It was a very difficult time, I remember, because the economy was in a mess.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.