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

This week a special edition looking at Russia under Vladimir Putin, how, for example, he succeeded

Yeltsin as president 22 years ago.

Yeltsin spends the whole of his second presidency looking for one thing,

the man who will guarantee him and his

Wider-Plideer-Plagmire, he produces Vladimir Putin and many people said,

Vladimir who?

Vladimir who has been in power ever since, cracking down on opposition and shutting down critical

media.

Russian President genuinely believed that journalists do not have their own beliefs, their own values, who are just puppets.

And with today's Ukraine in mind, we look at Putin's past military campaigns.

It was absolutely common when the person would go out from house and won't come back.

Or at night Russian troops will come and take some young man and this young man will disappear.

That's all coming up later in the podcast.

Now no one can quite know what Putin will do next in Ukraine but perhaps we can learn from the history of what he's done in the

past and how he got to his current position of preeminent power.

And help guide us, I'll be joined by a friend of the programme, Award-winning reporter Lucy Ash, who's long been a specialist

on Russia and Eastern Europe for the BBC.

But first, to understand Vladimir Putin's rise, you need to know a bit about Russia in the

1990s, that turbulent decade after the

collapse of communism. Boris Yeltsin was the Russian president during this period

and it was he who hand-picked Vladimir Putin, a relative unknown at the time, to be his Prime Minister and

...