In1991, the Communist Party lost control of the Soviet Union, the culmination of a process that had started in 1980 in the Polish shipyards: Ten million eventually joined Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement and signaled the beginning of the end for Soviet-style communism.

In People Power, eyewitnesses tell the story of how the Communist system that dominated post-war Eastern Europe collapsed as they remember the extraordinary weeks that preceded and followed the fall of the Berlin Wall; Poland's fight for solidarity; Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution;" the struggle for power in the Soviet Union, and more.

The people remember: 1980 Gdansk, the role of the Church, Solidarity movement, martial law in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Berlin Wall, Romania, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.