Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week how one post-communist country collapsed in chaos after its get-rich quick pyramid scheme failed.

It seemed like everybody had guns.

We would spend much of the day going underneath the bed when the gunshots were really, really

close and we could smell the gunpowder.

Plus life and death in the vast Vietnamese tunnel system built to defeat the Americans, and an extraordinary story of

murder and forgiveness from the Amazon in the 1950s as American missionaries tried to spread

Christianity to a remote tribe in Ecuador.

There were two men in particular who were two of the killers who were always making my mother laugh and of course then I would laugh too.

They were very simple.

That's all to come.

But we begin this week in America where Donald Trump is preparing to take the oath of office

to become the 45th President of the United States.

His astonishing rise to power on the crest of a wave of popular... of the Why has the disillusionment with the modern political status quo manifested itself in what appears to be

alert to the right?

Why couldn't Americans who felt excluded from the benefits of a capitalist system have turned instead to the left to socialism or communism?

Well in the past that's exactly what happened, albeit to a limited extent.

In 1919 the American Communist Party was born. It became an

influential force in the US during the 1930s and 40s, but its supporters were

also persecuted in those early years and subsequently during the Cold War.

Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to a friend of two of those early American communists,

...