Thirty years ago, on January 27, 1990, the first McDonald's opened in Moscow. It had taken 14 years of negotiations, vodka shots, and handouts of Ronald McDonald wristwatches to get this icon of Western capitalism into the Soviet Union. Current Time Digital’s Anna Shamanska explains how the challenge ultimately paid off.
Even in his 90s, Ukrainian Yakov Lomaka remembers the German for his ID number from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration-extermination camp. He has reason to. Those camp inmates who could not remember their ID numbers in German were denied food and hit, he says. Current Time spoke with Lomaka about his memories of Auschwitz ahead of the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation on January 27, 1945.
Seventy-five years ago today, the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration-extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.1 million people had died there by the war’s end. For Soviet tank crewman David Dushman, the condition of the camp’s “unfortunate” inmates was a shock. Many of those prisoners, like Vera Kriegal Grossman, see their survival as a victory in itself.
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.
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