The war in Transnistria

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

With speculation mounting that President Putin might mount an attack on Moldova, Max Pearson hears a first-hand account of the war in the 1990s between the Moldovans and Russian-backed separatists in the disputed region of Transnistria. There's also a chilling story from the Cold War about how a Soviet air defence official prevented a potential catastrophe by realising that a computer warning about a US nuclear attack was a false alarm.

In the second-half of the History Hour, an Egyptian poet remembers how 48 hours of unrest in 1977 forced the government to scrap a huge increase in the cost of bread, and an Icelandic geophysicist recalls how the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano caused disruption all over Europe.

PHOTO: Russian-speaking Transnistrian fighters during the war (Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC with me Max Pearson and the team behind
0:05.2	the Witness History Strand on the World Service, the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:10.9	This week from the 1980s, how one man apparently saved the world from nuclear disaster.
0:16.0	I was an analyst, the deputy head of the combat algorithms department, but on that day I was their operative on duty.
0:24.0	In charge of a team of 100 officers, plus 30 soldiers, the combat detail.
0:28.7	Plus arrested for his poetry during Egypt's 1977 bread riots.
0:33.6	The reason I am arrested is that I agitated six million demonstrators to go to the street.
0:43.0	And China's first faltering steps towards capitalism.
0:46.4	In the 80s, Shenzhen was not a place where people would come because they said,
0:50.2	gee, it's a great city.
0:51.6	It was under construction, was muddy, electricity came and went.
0:56.5	That's all coming up later in the podcast. But first, as so often, events from the past contain
1:01.5	lessons for the present. Right now the Russian military action in Ukraine
1:06.1	is threatening to spill over into neighbouring Moldova. The former Soviet Republic gained its
1:11.2	independence with the collapse of communism at the start of the 1990s.
1:15.5	But there is a pro-Russian breakaway region, Transnistria, which is still host to thousands of Russian troops.
1:22.4	This is a legacy of a brief conflict in which
1:24.4	transnestrian separatists backed by Russia tried to grab their independence.
1:29.2	Matt Pintas joins us now because Matt you've been digging into the early 1990s fighting with
1:34.4	someone who's turned out to be a key player now.
1:37.0	Yes Max I was tasked with finding an English-speaking veteran from the war and it was a bit of a tough
1:43.4	because I quickly realized through my research that not many 70-year-olds from the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.