A bomb whose creation would tip the scales of global power.

A nuclear physicist who sought to redress the balance.

The bomb, a podcast from the BBC World Service.

These are two available now.

Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

With me, Ben Henderson.

As Ukraine continues to fight the Russian invasion, I'm taking you back to Kiev in 1990.

When Ukrainian students went on a hunger strike that helped bring down the Soviet regime.

At the height of the protest, the Communist Party encourages factory workers to crush the students' resistance.

They were sending their organizers on the plants and factories to beat these students.

And all of a sudden, the effect was just the opposite.

All the plants and factories announced that they join students' strike.

I still have chills over my body when I remember this.

Oksana Subushko, an award-winning Ukrainian author.

She was involved in the protest in 1990 when she was a recent university graduate.

In the Ukraine, tens of thousands of students and workers have marched through the capital Kiev.

Such scenes will have been of little comfort to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Open protest like this was unheard of in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

Oksana grew up in this repressive atmosphere. She found it unbearable.

In the early 80s, people in my students' years were getting on the KGB black list,

just for the attempts to get together in the students dormitory to discuss Lenin.

The years of my teens were the years of total frozen reality.

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