Theatre siege in Moscow

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

In September 1991, two German hikers found a dead body while walking through Europe’s Ötzal Alps. It turned out to be a perfectly preserved 5,000-year-old mummy. The archaeologist Konrad Spindler inspected the body along with the assemblage of items recovered from the gravesite. ...  Show more

Starting in late 2011, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets to try to stop what they saw as a power grab by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The movement was not successful, but analysts say it worried the Russian leader so much that he launched a crackdown on dis ...

Most Russians are getting a distorted picture of what Vladimir Putin calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine. Even the use of the words “war” or “invasion” is prohibited and state controlled TV does not acknowledge that Russian troops are attacking civilians. Yet news is ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a compilation of this week's Witness History programmes from the BBC World Service.

You'll hear the story of how a protest led by the punk band Pussy Riot in one of Moscow's main cathedrals led to a trial which made the news inside Russia and around ...

Tens of thousands of Polish officers were secretly executed in the USSR during World War 2. The German occupying forces reported the first mass grave, in the village of Katyn in 1943, but Moscow only admitted to the killings in 1990. Dina Newman speaks to the son of one of the mu ...  Show more