Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC with me Max Pearson and the

Witness History team on the World Service.

This week first-hand accounts from the history of Ukraine to give context to the current

crisis.

We'll go back to the 1930s to hear about the great

famine under Stalin. In our village we saw how there were people walking,

elderly people, children, small children, going from house to house, begging for food.

Also a moving account of surviving the Holocaust in Kiev during the Second World War, and a very

different story from Crimea, how the Arctic holiday camp became a treat for children in the Soviet era.

A stay in Arctic was the highest reward the Soviet kid could get. I loved the sea, I loved all the trees and flowers and

bright sun. Plus at the breakup of the Soviet Union, how the international community negotiated to remove the huge nuclear

arsenal on Ukraine's territory.

Ukraine was then the third largest nuclear power bigger than Britain, France and China combined

at the time.

That's all coming up and we're going to start with the Soviet Union's nuclear legacy.

This though is not about nuclear weapons, but instead the energy generating infrastructure

left over from the Soviet Union days.

The Chernobyl nuclear power station has been in the news recently because parts of the complex

came under Russian attack.

But Chernobyl is now a defunct and contaminated site after the disaster in April

1986 in which a reactor exploded causing the world's worst ever nuclear accident.

At the time Chernobyl was part of Soviet Ukraine. 31 people died in the

...