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The History Hour
The Break-Up of the Soviet Union
The History Hour
Dec 31, 2016

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

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Next, when Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park.

In 1997, scientists travelled to Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898.

Plus, we hear how Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that left more than 1,200 people dead.

And the heartwarming story of the friendship between a baby hippo and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.

Finally for our Sporting Witness story, we head to the first Ultimate Frisbee World Championship in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1983.

Contributors: Caroline Elkins - Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Muthoni Kirima - Field Marshall in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Frank Gillard - BBC correspondent. Thomas Gnoske - Scientist. Alan Patterson - British Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson's grandson. Maina Kiai - Chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in 2008. Maini Schildt - Swedish Ultimate Frisbee player.

(Photo: Mau Mau suspects are rounded up by police outside the camp in Manyani, Kenya, 1955. Credit: Getty Images/Authenticated News)


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The Break-Up of the Soviet Union

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