# 1997 VHS • The End of Soviet-Style Communism 60 FPS

People Power is the 1989 episode of People's Century, a 26-part documentary series co-produced by the BBC and WGBH Boston and funded in part by Conseco and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The episode traces the collapse of Communist rule across Eastern Europe through firsthand accounts from people who lived it: an East German border guard who opened the checkpoint on November 9 1989, a Polish streetcar driver who halted traffic in support of the Gdansk shipyard strike, and a Romanian man whose wife was shot by Ceausescu's security forces in Timisoara. The documentary opens with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then moves backward to explain the conditions that made 1989 possible: the Soviet system's economic failures in the 1970s, the rise of Solidarity under Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost reforms, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. It carries the story through the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending with the Russian national flag raised over the Kremlin for the first time in 70 years.

- Kind: Film
- Year: 1997
- By: The Vista Group®
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/TheVistaGroup-TheEndofSovietStyleCommunism1997)
- Licence or status: none stated by the archive
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/TheVistaGroup-TheEndofSovietStyleCommunism1997?play=1)