or decades the USSR -- the Soviet UInion -- was a major world power, but it was held together largely through force and intimidation.

Things began to unravel in the late 1980s -- the momentum built after President Ronald Reagan delivered these words at the Berlin Wall: 

The wall did come down two years later, and two years after that, the Soviet Union came to an end.

Watching it all, from a front-row seat, was high-profilpe Soviet journalist and broadcaster Vladimir Pozner, who was also a freqeuent guest on American television, largely because in his youth, he spent a lot of time in tghe U.S. abd vecame fluent in English.