The use of Soviet troops against civilians in Baku on January 19-20, 1990 cemented Azerbaijan’s resolve to leave the USSR and reclaim its independence. The crackdown occurred amidst signs that Moscow was losing control of the situation on the ground in Azerbaijan. Tensions were spiraling with neighboring Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region and Azerbaijani protesters wanted officials to resign. Current Time spoke with an eyewitness of these events.
Pictures of Pripyat, the abandoned town near Chernobyl, are world famous -- but Ukraine has another nuclear ghost town. Orbita was built for workers at the Chigirinsky nuclear plant. The workers moved in, but the plant was never finished, and Orbita is now a crumbling ruin with just 100 inhabitants.
Flight To Freedom, a film by Current Time Digital video producer Mykola Nemchenko and RFE/RL multimedia coordinator Kateryna Oliynyk, shares the story of Czechoslovak cycling champion Robert Hutyra, who, in 1983, used a hot air balloon he had built to fly his family out from behind the Iron Curtain and into neighboring Austria.
In September 1983, a Czechoslovak cycling champion made an audacious journey -- fleeing his country in a homemade balloon with his wife and two children across the Iron Curtain.
Peaceful revolutions toppled communist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989, but Romania's uprising was drenched in blood.
The mayor of a Prague district proposed building a monument to a controversial World War II military division made up of Soviet defectors. Russia objected. The mayor wrote to President Vladimir Putin to advise Russia "not to meddle." The affair is just the latest in a series of Czech-Russian disputes over the two countries' approaches to their history.
One man's obsession with the collective farm he ran for more than a quarter of a century led to the creation of a unique open-air museum in a village in southern Russia.
In late November 1989, just over a week after the Berlin Wall's demolition began, a rumor about a student protester killed by police in Prague became a catalyst for Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution But the “dead student” in question appears to have been an employee with the then state security services. Current Time spoke with the ex-officer, Ludvik Zifcak, about his undercover role during the final weeks of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
The upheavals of 1989 that led to the collapse of eastern Europe’s communist governments would prove to be precursors of the USSR’s own collapse, but, at the time, this was far from clear. To find out firsthand how then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev interpreted the destruction of the Berlin Wall and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Current Time spoke with Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s press secretary from August – December 1991.
Thirty years ago, theater professionals in Czechoslovakia used their skills and renown to help rally public opinion against the brutal breakup of a November 17, 1989 anti-government rally in Prague. The demonstrators’ defiance would lead to the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful changeover from communist to democratic rule. Current Time spoke to some of those who took part, and who remember when, for a moment, all of Czechoslovakia was their stage.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, one of its most famous symbols became a piece of graffiti known as The Fraternal Kiss. Completed in June 1990, this mural depicts Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev kissing East German leader Erich Honecker on the lips; a greeting then common among Soviet bloc leaders. For the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demolition, Current Time spoke to the graffiti’s creator, Russian artist Dmitry Vrubel.
Load more
