Witness History: Witness Archive 2016 BBC World Service

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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