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, a Russia which disappeared forever captured in rare color photos.

At that time you have to realize that the only photograph in color were taking indoor, in labs.

And it was probably the first to do a lot of work outside.

Also the man who was wrongly identified as the patient zero of AIDS.

Every weekend was party time and your sole objective was to get laid, hopefully by someone

different.

If you weren't doing that, you weren't living up to your responsibilities as a partying gay

person.

And a first-hand account of the Kinder transports as Jews escaped Nazi-occupied Prague.

And I can still see in my mind's eye, my mother's standing there, looking anxiously on the platform and I was in the window of a carriage and a German soldier with a swastika on his arm standing nearby.

That's all to come. But we're going to begin this week in Russia where this year marks the centenary of events which truly did change the world.

Claims like that can all too often be overblown, but in this case it's just a fact.

1917 saw a series of upheaval's which resulted in the rise of communism and the birth of the Soviet Union

that in turn divided the world into two blocks leading to wars in many countries as rival ideologies clashed.

But the germ of all that can be traced back to rising civil unrest in Zarist Russia, which led in March 1917 to the abdication of

Zar Nicholas II at the height of the first Russian revolution of that year.

Alex Last has been gathering eyewitness accounts from the BBC Archives. The Russian Revolution came as a thief in the night. We felt it was coming but had no idea when.

Suddenly it was there. In March 1917, violence and

protest erupted in the Russian capital Petrograd, now called St. Petersburg.

After the centuries of autocratic rule,

...