Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

telly we share what we've been watching

Cladie Aide.

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service.

In the light of events in Ukraine we're looking all this week at Russia under President

Vladimir Putin.

He first came on to the political scene in 1999 after the decade of chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Seven years earlier a new Russian government had turned the country's economy

from state-controlled socialism to free market capitalism virtually overnight.

This led to widespread hardship and the emergence of a new class of oligarchs.

In 2018, Dina Neumann spoke to Andrei Chayev, the architect of this

shock therapy.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 25th, 1991, when the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gervachov resigned from his post.

Due to the situation, which has evolved as a result of the

information of the Commonwealth of Independent States,

I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the USSR.

Mikhail Gurbachov was replaced by Boris Yeltsin as Russia's President.

Yeltsin appointed the government of young and ambitious academics

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