In 1966, the collected thoughts of China's communist leader became an unexpected best-seller around the world. A compendium of pithy advice and political instructions from Mao Zedong, it was soon to be found on student bookshelves everywhere. (Photo: Front cover of Mao's Little Red Book)

In November 1994, the Russian conceptual artist Oleg Kulik posed in front of an art gallery in central Moscow, naked, pretending to be a guard dog and attacking passers by. It was his way of highlighting the fact since the collapse of the USSR three years earlier, Russians had lost their ability to relate to each other, and were reduced to living like animals. Dina Newman speaks to Kulik about his protest performance, which made him famous around the world. Photo: Oleg Kulik impersonating...

After the collapse of the USSR, Vogue Magazine launched in Russia in 1998. But it was a difficult beginning for the glossy fashion publication as the country was in the middle of an economic crisis at the time. Aliona Doletskaya was the first editor in chief, and she told Rebecca Kesby how she wanted to represent the best of Russian design as well as bring the West to Russians. (Photo: Russian top model Natalia Vodianova holds up a T-shirt decorated with her portrait in front of a poster...

One of the most potentially dangerous legacies of the collapse of the Soviet Union was its huge nuclear arsenal and nuclear weapons industry. There were particular concerns about the Soviets' former nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, a vast swathe of contaminated land where there were tunnels with spent plutonium. When the Soviet Union ended, the site was left open to scavengers. Louise Hidalgo has been hearing from the former head of America's nuclear weapons laboratory, Dr...

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991, freedom came at a price for some of the newly independent Soviet states. Georgia found itself on the verge of civil war, while President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was forced into hiding and gunmen took to the streets. In 2010 Tom Esslemont spoke to a survivor of Georgia's crisis. Photo: Former Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia (L) with bodyguards in the bunker underneath the parliament in Tbilisi during Georgia's brief civil war....

In December 1991 the leaders of three Soviet Republics - Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia - signed a treaty dissolving the USSR. They did it without asking the other republics, and against the wishes of the USSR's overall President Mikhail Gorbachev. By the end of the year Gorbachev had resigned and the Soviet Union was no more. Dina Newman has spoken to the former President of Belorussia, Stanislav Shushkevich, and the former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who signed that historic...

The biggest audience in TV history watch NASA's Apollo 8 mission beam back the first pictures from an orbit around the moon at Christmas 1968. The broadcast captured the world's imagination and put the Americans ahead of the Soviet Union in the Cold War battle to put the first men on the moon. Simon Watts talks to Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman. Picture: The Earth as seen from the Moon, photographed by the Apollo 8 crew (NASA)

On December 22nd 1989, the great Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett died. Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot had revolutionised post-war theatre, was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to fellow playwright and film director Israel Horovitz who was Samuel Beckett's friend. Photograph: Writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) (Credit: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images)

A Turkish cargo ship ran aground on a tiny rocky island in the Aegean Sea in December 1995. But a dispute between Turkey and Greece over who owned the island sovereignty almost brought the two nations to war. Agreement still hasn't been reached over the territory called Kardak by the Turks and Imia by the Greeks. Cagil Kasapoglu spoke to the former Turkish diplomat Onur Oymen and the former Greek foreign minister, Theodoros Pangalos, about the crisis. Photo: Turkish journalists prepare a...

The experimental film-maker made his first full-length film in 1976, it was called Sebastiane - and it was in Latin. It was the first openly gay feature film in British cinema. Vincent Dowd has been speaking to Keith Collins who lived with him during his final years, and cared for him when he was dying of AIDS. Photo: Derek Jarman in 1991. Credit: BBC

Giuseppe Pinelli was an Italian anarchist arrested by police in Milan. A few days later he was seen falling out of the police station window. It is still not clear exactly what happened to Pinelli. Right-wing activists were later convicted of carrying out the bombing for which he'd been arrested. His story was turned into a popular play by the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Anna O'Neill has been speaking to Silvia and Claudia Pinelli about their father, and their continued search for the...

Vida Alves starred in Latin America's first soap opera, or telenovela. 'Sua Vida Me Pertence' was broadcast in Brazil in December 1951. It kick-started a TV genre that has spread across the globe and is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Vida speaks to Mike Lanchin about her memories of making TV history. Photo: Vida Alves and Walter Forster in a scene from 'Sua Vida Me Pertence', Brazil 1951 (Museu Pró-TV)

In December 1991 a British government campaign was launched to help prevent the sudden unexpected deaths of apparently healthy babies. The incidences of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), at the time often referred to as 'cot death', had been increasing across the western world for decades. Claire Bowes has been speaking to Professor Peter Fleming, the doctor who found out why. Photo: BBC - A father cradles the feet of his 5 day old baby girl.

In September 1995, millions of Hindus around the world were gripped by reports of their God, Ganesha, 'drinking' milk. Rachael Gillman hears from Hindu priest Radha Krishna Bharadwaj about first seeing the apparent 'miracle' at the Shree Durga Vishno temple in New Delhi. Photo Credit: MUFTY MUNIR/AFP/Getty Images

During World War Two, a young Jewish woman, Sara Ginaite, escaped from the Kaunas Ghetto in Lithuania to fight the Nazis, With her husband Misha, she joined a detachment of communist-led partisans in the Rudnicki forest . They took part in the liberation of Vilnius, where she was famously photographed by a Soviet officer. Now in her 90s, Sara speaks to Witness. Photo: Sara Ginaite, a Jewish Lithuanian partisan , during the liberation of Vilnius, 1944. (USHMM)

In the 1970s, Maria Dolores Gonzalez Katarain, known as Yoyes, became the first woman to reach the leadership of the Basque separatist group, ETA, who were fighting a violent campaign for independence from Spain. Yoyes eventually decided to leave and start a new life, but she was considered a traitor. In September 1986, ETA killed her in a crime that shocked even its own supporters. Simon Watts speaks to Yoyes' friend, Elixabete Garmendia.

In the 1990s Sizani Ngubane began the Rural Women's Movement to fight for the rights of one of the most marginal groups in South Africa. It's estimated that across the whole of Africa between 70 and 85 per cent of all food is grown by women, but less than 2 per cent of the land is owned or even controlled by women. Helping women with farming tips and business ideas and supporting women evicted from their land, Sizani's movement has grown over the years, and now has more than 50,000 members...

In 2005 British scientist Elizabeth Fisher and a colleague successfully transplanted a human chromosome into a mouse for the first time. It transformed medical research into the genetic condition Down Syndrome that affects millions of people worldwide. Professor Fisher tells Louise Hidalgo about the challenges researchers faced and their thirteen-year struggle to create the first Down Syndrome mouse. Photo: Science Photo Library

In 2004, Kenyan Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was an environmentalist and human rights activist who founded the Green Belt Movement in the 1970s. She focused on the planting of trees, conservation, and women's rights but repeatedly clashed with the government while trying to protect Kenya's forest and parks. She was arrested and beaten on several occasions. Witness speaks to her daughter, Wanjira Mathai. Photo: Kenya's Wangari Maathai (L)...

Yelena Malyutina was a Soviet female bomber pilot who fought in WW2 and was wounded in action in 1944. She was in one of the three Soviet women's flying regiments which fought on the front line. Before her death in 2014, she was interviewed by Lyuba Vinogradova, author of 'Defending the Motherland: Soviet Women' who fought Hitler's Aces. Dina Newman reports. Photo:Yelena Malyutina and Lyuba Vinogradova (credit: private archive)

In 1976, Colombian archaeologists found the ruins of a huge indigenous settlement hidden in a remote mountain range near the Caribbean coast. Known to local tribes as Teyuna, the site is one of the biggest and oldest of its kind in Latin America. It later became known as the Lost City. Simon Watts talks to lead archaeologist, Alvaro Soto-Holguin. (Photo: The Lost City)

In the early 1980s Mercedes Doretti, a student of anthropology in Buenos Aires, began helping in the search for some of the victims of Argentina's military rule. She went on to form the prestigious Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which has carried out exhumations in more than 30 countries. Her work gathering evidence of some of the worst atrocities of our times, has taken her to Bosnia, South Africa, El Salvador and Mexico. Mercedes spoke to Mike Lanchin about the challenges of her...

In December 1976 unidentified gunmen tried to kill Bob Marley at his home in Kingston, Jamaica. The legendary reggae singer miraculously survived with just light injuries. Mike Lanchin has been hearing from Nancy Burke, one of Marley's friends and neighbours, who was trapped inside the house as the gunmen stormed in, guns blazing. Photo: Bob Marley, 1970s (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

After India's traumatic Partition Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru persuaded the maverick Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, to help reinvent a newly independent India by building a new capital city for the province of Punjab. Le Corbusier had revolutionised architecture and urban planning in the first half of the twentieth century. He was loved and hated in equal measure for his modernist approach, favouring flat roofs, glass walls and concrete. Nehru said this new city would be...