Aug 23

BlackBerry phones and Spot the dog

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Jacquie McNish, author and former Senior Correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.We start with the former co-CEO of BlackBerry, who recounts the company's remarkab ... Show More

59m 7s

Aug 15

Indonesian history

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.Our guest is Dr Anne-Lot Hoek, a research fellow at the International Institution of Social History in Amsterdam.This week, we’re looking at key moments in Indonesian history, as ... Show More

50m 20s

Aug 9

Nagasaki bomb and Brazil’s biggest bank heist

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Simone Turchetti, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, at The University of Manchester in the UK. It's 80 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on ... Show More

50m 52s

Mar 2022

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster

In April 1986 a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, in the USSR, causing the worst nuclear accident ever. Sergii Mirnyi was in charge of a monitoring unit which measured radiation levels in the 30 km exclusion zone around the plant.(Photo: The Cherno ... Show More

9m 8s

Nov 2023

94. The Bloody History of Russia & Ukraine

The history of Russia and Ukraine has been irrevocably entwined for centuries. When the Bolsheviks took over and Civil War erupted across the Russian Empire, Ukraine was one of the bloodiest centres of the conflict. Antisemitic pogroms and wanton violence destroyed whole communit ... Show More

51m 45s

Mar 2022

Ukraine's Dangerous Independence

Months before Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, he published an essay on the Kremlin website called "On The Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine." In it, he suggested that Ukrainians don't really have their own identity — and that they never hav ... Show More

43m 40s

Nov 2023

95. The History of Putin's War

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, but how did we get to this point? After the brutality of the Second World War, Ukraine was completely under the control of Moscow. Then in the 1980s, with Chernobyl as the catalyst, the Ukrainian nationalist movement regained ... Show More

53m 37s

Mar 2022

Holodomor

“Holodomor” is a name that was coined in the 1980s to describe a famine that struck Ukraine in the early 1930s. There were food shortages taking place in other parts of the Soviet Union at the same time, but Soviet policies toward Ukraine specifically made the situation there muc ... Show More

35m 40s

Mar 2022

The Budapest Memorandum

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the Soviet-era atomic weapons on its soil and became - for a few years - the world's third biggest nuclear power. After months of tense diplomacy, the newly independent Ukraine agreed to give up the weapons in return f ... Show More

9m 9s

Ukrainian history special