The Second Russian Revolution - Season 1

The story of how Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the Soviet Union. Victor Grishin, former boss of the Moscow Communist party, talks about how Gorbachev beat him in the 1985 leadership battle and later sacked him. 

In March 1988 Gorbachev left 
Russia for a week. While he was away hardliners moved swiftly to try and undermine his authority. This attempted coup against the President is described by those who were involved. Also how the Kremlin tried to cover-up the Chernobyl disaster. 

How did Boris Yeltsin rise to the top as a Soviet Communist Party official? How did he come to fall out with Mikhail Gorbachev ? In 1987, when Yeltsin was the Moscow Party boss, he got into a bitter struggle with the deputy leader of the Soviet Party, Yegor Ligachev. Gorbachev sided with Ligachev and, in the privacy of the Moscow Party building, together they had Yeltsin laid low. His political career seemed to be at an end. 

In March 1989 the Soviet Union went to the polls, electing the First Congress of People's Deputies. It was Gorbachev's own creation and changed the face of Soviet politics. But with the congress, Gorbachev had unwittingly unleashed a new rebelliousness. Soviet miners soon rose against the Workers' State - and for the first time since Lenin, the State gave in.

The story of how the last of the world's great empires began to break up. At first, Gorbachev and his colleagues encouraged nationalists in Lithuania, 
Armenia and elsewhere. But soon the nationalists were demanding independence. People who were there tell exactly what Gorbachev said to Ceausescu of Romania, to Landsbergis of Lithuania, and others. 

As Mikhail Gorbachev prepares to visit London, to ask top western leaders for aid, they are asking him to move the Soviet Union to an open market economy. This programme tells the story of how Gorbachev's last attempt to move to a market economy ended in failure.