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 from the 1990s, how allegations of sexual abuse nearly scuppered a Supreme Court nomination in the US.

Her goal was not to keep him off the court.

Her goal was to tell the truth because she was asked and neither of us anticipated it would turn into the

fiasco that it did. Plus, kidnapped by the Contra rebels in Nicaragua during the

1980s. Somebody was at the door saying that the foreigners the and I remember them in the early 80s when people first started having them and just being amazed by how small it was.

That's the birth of the Sony Walkman coming up later in the podcast. But we're going to start in... the an end. For four years the hardline advocates of a pure interpretation of communism had brutalized

Cambodians with forced labor camps and class genocide. Rebecca Kessby has been speaking to a survivor of what became known as the killing fields.

The Cambodian people are the victims of a hideous experiment in communism that failed.

The Khmer Rouge, the fanatical communist guerrillas, finally triumphed in the spring of 1975.

The man who emerged as leader of the new Cambodia was Paul Pot.

The Khmer Rouge, they are like monsters.

All you would say is worse than living hell.

Because you live in fear.

It worse than living hell.

It worse than that because you could not imagine no one could imagine.

This is Sockpoldin. He was 16 when the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror

and he's one of the few members of his family to survive it.

They came to power in the spring of 1975,

but their extreme form of communism meant turning back the clock hundreds of years. They despised

modernity, development, even knowledge. They wanted to raise Cambodia to the

...