Hello and welcome this is 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 40 years after the Russian Revolution how the Soviets put the first animal in space the unlucky dog like her.

She was a very patient dog, very affectionate. She was easy to train. She was considered very clever.

Plus Saba, the songbird of Lebanon, one of the 20th century's biggest stars in the Middle East,

and the last person to interview the one-time

world's most wanted Osama bin Laden.

The US troops were about to take over Kabul and he told me that the Americans will not be able to capture me alive.

I remember that.

That's all coming up later, but we begin by marking one of the most significant anniversaries of 20th century world history, the Russian Revolution.

On the 7th of November 1917, Bolshevik Revolutionaries overthrew the Provisional Government, which

had been set up earlier that year after the fall of

the Tsar. That act created the world's first communist state, a state that would

become the Soviet Union. Louise Hidalgo has been listening back to eyewitness accounts of that tumultuous time.

At Petrograd's naval base of Kronstadt in October 17, the crews turned against authority and set in motion the 10 days

revolt that shook the world. The days of sunset for the old

Russia.

That October in the old calendar, November the 7th in the new calendar, a revolutionary mob moved through the street to Petrograd, now St. Petersburg, heading for the Winter

Palace, the Tsar's former official residence and symbol of Russia's old autocratic regime.

The Tsar had gone in his place in the palace was the

provisional government that had replaced him and it was now the target of

Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Revolutionaries. Everybody in the palace was tremendously excited.

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