* A number of sections within this Part One have been edited out for copyright reasons. Sorry viewer. Mostly from a documentary about Chernobyl.

At the start of the 1990s the Soviet Union - one the largest empires in the world - imploded.

It was not a slow collapse like the British Empire, but one that collapsed suddenly - in just a few months.

In the west we didn’t really see or understand what then happened because we were blinded by victory in the cold war. In reality what the Russian people experienced was a profound disaster which left behind it deep scars and a furious anger - that led to what is happening in Russia now and in Ukraine.

This series of films is a record of what it felt like to live through that catastrophe.

It is also the story how a society of millions of people stopped believing in all politics. Not just communism, but democracy too. Something that no-one else has experienced in the modern world. Yet.