Pushkin died after a duel with a Frenchman.

Rumours about the other man's relationship with Pushkin's much younger wife had led to the stand-off.

Elaine Feinstein is a Pushkin biographer.

On 9 February 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy began his hunt for communists in the US.

Throughout the Cold War, people on the left of politics came under attack in the US.

They were put on trial, lost their jobs, and some were jailed.

An American communist talks to Witness.

For almost 18 months Irish republicans had refrained from bombing mainland Britain. But on this day 15 years ago, they returned to violence.

Among those fighting against Iraq in 1991 was a British airman John Nichol, who was shot down and captured by Iraqi forces.

He tells Witness about his time in captivity.

After weeks of popular unrest, the dictator known as Baby Doc Duvalier, finally left Haiti on 7 February 1986.

But Haitians did not find the peace and prosperity they had hoped for after the fall of the Duvalier dynasty.

On February 5 1994, an attack on a marketplace in the centre of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, shocked the world. It led to a change in the international attitude towards the war in the former Yugoslavia.

In its aftermath, Nato began air strikes against Serbian forces.

The first week of February 1979 saw a revolution unfolding in Iran.

After the Shah had left, and Ayatollah Khomeini had arrived back in the country, it was only a matter of time before the Islamic revolution in Iran was complete.

Mohsen Sazegara was at the heart of those changes - he talks to Witness.

With his snarl and spikey hair, the Sex Pistols bassist, Sid Vicious, was the embodiment of punk rock.

New York photographer, Eileen Polk, hung out with Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, when they moved to the city.

For Witness, she recalls their final days and Sid Vicious's death in February 1979.

Image: Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, pictured in 1978 (Credit: Press Association)

When a winter storm combined with high tides to breach sea defences in the Netherlands, over 1800 people drowned.

A survivor remembers the once in a lifetime flood.

When Leningrad was cut off from the rest of Russia by German troops during World War Two, one third of its population died.

Some were killed in the fighting, but most died of hunger.

(Photo: Two women collect remains of a dead horse for food, during the siege of Leningrad)