You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

This is a story of Anna Kmatova, one of Russia's greatest 20th century poets.

She lived through some of the darkest chapters of Russian history.

The regime repeatedly tried to silence her, but she never stopped writing poetry. In 2022, Tatiana McShevish spoke to art historian Eric Corov

brother who knew her in her final years.

I'm a socialist in year. years.

What is it to us that everything is turning to ashes I have sung over so many

abysses and lived in so many mirrors.

Achmatova reading from her poem, First Warning.

At the heart of St. Petersburg, there is the museum of Anna

Mahatova in Fountain House, where the poet lived for nearly three decades.

There I met Ere Correbaver, an art historian who knew Ahmadine in her final years.

Ere first heard about her at school in the late 1940s.

I was

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