Steve Rosenberg

So when it came to going to university, I thought, well, I want to study Russian.

So I finished university in 1991, got a job in Moscow, teaching English...

Four months later, the Soviet Union fell apart.

That was it.

Within the last hour, President Gorbachev has resigned.

Boris Yeltsin is now in full control.

No more USSR.

It said USSR on my visa.

But there was no country, the USSR.

And obviously, there was lots of news at the time.

And I decided that I wanted to work in broadcasting.

That was my dream.

And I managed to get a job with CBS News.

And my goodness, the 1990s, it was a chaotic decade.

Millions of Russians fell into poverty when the economic reforms began and you had this sort of switch from the state-controlled economy of communism to wild capitalism, basically.

So it was a difficult year for many people.

But on the other hand, the thing I remember most about the 1990s was this sense of hope.

that finally East and West could put behind them the Cold War era confrontation.

Very warmly.

I think it was 1997.