Gorbachev - The Final Hours (December 26, 1991)

ABC News sent Ted Koppel to cover the end of the Soviet Union, coinciding with Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation and replacement by Boris Yeltsin as President of the Russian Republic. This was a special edition of PrimeTime Live, hosted by Sam Donaldson.

The event represented the full collapse of the Soviet Union, and the repudiation of communism as a viable political system (attested to directly by Gorbachev in this video). It's notable that even in the title ABC News chose to focus on Gorbachev as a personality rather than the failure of what Reagan termed "The Evil Empire."

As the USA now teeters on the brink of destruction by injecting radical Leftism and identity politics into our Democratic Republic, it can be instructive to see what happened to the biggest experiment in Marxism.

My VCR was malfunctioning, so this entire show is in black-and-white. The commercials are included, and it's fascinating to see the difference in products and prices in just a few decades.