Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, history as told by the people who were there.

Today from the 1950s how the Soviet Union struggled to feed its people and made drastic mistakes.

These were new lands. No one lived there and there was a shortage of people to harvest the crops.

Plus the King David Hotel bombing in Germany. there was a shortage of people to harvest the crops.

Plus the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in 1946,

a London IRA bomb in the 1980s that killed horses and men,

and the birth of the nuclear age with attempts at

nuclear restraint.

The first test of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico Desert, the shattering overture

to a new era in man's history.

We'll have more on that later in the podcast, but we begin in Russia with another of those stories which had dramatic

repercussions in the early Soviet years. We're going back to July the 17th,

1918 and the murder of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs. There had been

Tsars ruling Russia since the 16th century. The last Emperor Tsar Nicholas II

assumed the title in 1894. But following the February Revolution in 1917, Nicholas was forced

to abdicate. He and his family were then killed in the town of

Yekaterinenburg. Oga Smyrnova has been speaking to Oga Romanov, the last Tsar's great niece about her family's fate.

My grandmother, Kaseania, was Nicholas II's sister and my father was Nicholas the second's eldest nephew.

Olga Romanov is the great niece of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II.

She has lived in England all her life,

after her father, along with the other relatives,

escaped Russia during the Communist Revolution.

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