Witness History: Witness Archive 2016

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Witness History: Witness Archive 2016

History as told by the people who were there. All the programmes from 2016.

  1. 10/02/2020

    Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

    In 1966, the collected thoughts of China's communist leader became an unexpected best-seller around the world. A compendium of pithy advice and political instructions from Mao Zedong, it was soon to be found on student bookshelves everywhere. (Photo: Front cover of Mao's Little Red Book)

    9 min

  2. 30/12/2016

    Russia's 'Dog Man'

    In November 1994, the Russian conceptual artist Oleg Kulik posed in front of an art gallery in central Moscow, naked, pretending to be a guard dog and attacking passers by. It was his way of highlighting the fact since the collapse of the USSR three years earlier, Russians had lost their ability to relate to each other, and were reduced to living like animals. Dina Newman speaks to Kulik about his protest performance, which made him famous around the world. Photo: Oleg Kulik impersonating a Mad Dog, 25th Nov 1994, Moscow. Credit: private archive

    9 min

  3. 29/12/2016

    The Launch of Vogue Russia

    After the collapse of the USSR, Vogue Magazine launched in Russia in 1998. But it was a difficult beginning for the glossy fashion publication as the country was in the middle of an economic crisis at the time. Aliona Doletskaya was the first editor in chief, and she told Rebecca Kesby how she wanted to represent the best of Russian design as well as bring the West to Russians. (Photo: Russian top model Natalia Vodianova holds up a T-shirt decorated with her portrait in front of a poster of her at the Vogue Fashion's Night Out in Moscow. Credit: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA)

    9 min

  4. 28/12/2016

    The Nuclear Legacy

    One of the most potentially dangerous legacies of the collapse of the Soviet Union was its huge nuclear arsenal and nuclear weapons industry. There were particular concerns about the Soviets' former nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, a vast swathe of contaminated land where there were tunnels with spent plutonium. When the Soviet Union ended, the site was left open to scavengers. Louise Hidalgo has been hearing from the former head of America's nuclear weapons laboratory, Dr Siegfried Hecker, about the long secret operation by Russian and American scientists to make the site safe in what's been called the greatest nuclear non-proliferation story never told. Photo: the first historic visit by American nuclear scientists to the secret Soviet city of Sarov where Moscow developed nuclear weapons, February 1992. First on the left is the great Russian physicist, Alexander Pavlovsky. Next, looking down, is Yuli Khariton, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb. Opposite, with a white turtle-neck jumper, is Dr Siegfreid Hecker, then director of Los Alamos Laboratory where America developed the world's first nuclear bomb (Credit: Dr Siegfreid Hecker)

    9 min

  5. 27/12/2016

    Georgia In Crisis

    After the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991, freedom came at a price for some of the newly independent Soviet states. Georgia found itself on the verge of civil war, while President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was forced into hiding and gunmen took to the streets. In 2010 Tom Esslemont spoke to a survivor of Georgia's crisis. Photo: Former Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia (L) with bodyguards in the bunker underneath the parliament in Tbilisi during Georgia's brief civil war. (Photo IGOR ZAREMBO/AFP/Getty Images)

    9 min

  6. 26/12/2016

    The Break-Up of the Soviet Union

    In December 1991 the leaders of three Soviet Republics - Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia - signed a treaty dissolving the USSR. They did it without asking the other republics, and against the wishes of the USSR's overall President Mikhail Gorbachev. By the end of the year Gorbachev had resigned and the Soviet Union was no more. Dina Newman has spoken to the former President of Belorussia, Stanislav Shushkevich, and the former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who signed that historic document alongside Boris Yeltsin. Photo: the leader of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, the leader of Belorussia, Stanislav Shushkevich and the leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin at the signing ceremony. Credit: AP

    9 min

  7. 23/12/2016

    Apollo 8

    The biggest audience in TV history watch NASA's Apollo 8 mission beam back the first pictures from an orbit around the moon at Christmas 1968. The broadcast captured the world's imagination and put the Americans ahead of the Soviet Union in the Cold War battle to put the first men on the moon. Simon Watts talks to Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman. Picture: The Earth as seen from the Moon, photographed by the Apollo 8 crew (NASA)

    9 min

  8. 22/12/2016

    Samuel Beckett

    On December 22nd 1989, the great Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett died. Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot had revolutionised post-war theatre, was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to fellow playwright and film director Israel Horovitz who was Samuel Beckett's friend. Photograph: Writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) (Credit: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images)

    9 min
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History as told by the people who were there. All the programmes from 2016.

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