Different "voices", part 3

Rupor of the revolution

Continuation of the series, start read here .

It would be strange if the young Bolshevik government had not taken advantage of the most important means of propaganda - radio and telegraph. In the saints of Soviet radio engineering, it says that a few days before the October Revolution, the radio station of the Aurora cruiser began to transfer the radiograms of the Military Revolutionary Committee. On November 7 (October 25, according to the old style), she also transferred the appeal “to Russian citizens”, which reported that the Provisional Government was deposited and the authorities passed into the hands of the proletariat represented by the Petrograd Council and the Military Revolutionary Committee.

In the future, Lenin used the radio telegraph more than once to transmit official statements, messages and refutations. At a meeting of the All -Russian Central Executive Committee on November 23 (10), he said:

We have evidence that our radio telegrams reach Europe. So, our radio telegram about the victory over Kerensky was intercepted by the Austrian radio telegraph and transferred. The Germans sent oncoming waves to detain it. We have the opportunity to demolish the radio telegraph with Paris, and when the peace treaty is drawn up, we will be able to inform the French people that it can be signed and that a truce of the French people depends on two hours. We will see what Clemanso will say then.

In February 1918, at the most intense moment of peaceful negotiations with Germany, a wire telegraph communication between Moscow and Brest-Litovsk was interrupted, and Lenin directs a radiogram addressed to "all. The peace delegation in Brest-Litovsk." It began with the phrase: "We are also extremely excited by the lack of wire, which the Germans seem to be to blame."
A day later, he sends a radiogram "to everyone, everyone, everyone":

A number of foreign newspapers are informed of false information about horrors and chaos in Petrograd, etc. All this information is absolutely wrong. In Petrograd and Moscow, complete calm. No arrests of the socialists were made ... with food in Petrograd improvement ... Trotsky telegraphes to Petrograd from Brest-Litovsk that the Germans are delaying negotiations. The German bourgeois press, clearly found, spreads false information about Russia, intimidating the audience.

This radiogram can be considered the first case of counter -propaganda on the radio.

Having evaluated the effectiveness of radio communications, Lenin began leadership. On July 21, 1918, he signed the decree "On the Centralization of Radio Engineering". All radio stations were transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs, in which the Radio Engineering Council was established. In Nizhny Novgorod over the creation of a radiotelephone station "with a radius of 2000 miles", as stated in the resolution of the socialist government, the radio laboratory worked under the leadership of an outstanding radio engineering, the former headquarters captain of the tsarist army, and later the corresponding of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich. On February 27, 1919, its employees managed to conduct the first experimental radiotelephone program. At 10 hours 2 minutes in the morning, the operator of the Moscow radio station heard a human voice in the headphones instead of the usual Morzyanka, who said: "Hello, hello, two, three."

In February 1920, Bonch-Bruevich turned to Lenin with a request for help in resolving a number of issues. It was, in particular, the arrest of the Nizhny Novgorod Extraordinary Commission of the leading employee of the laboratory, an outstanding inventor Alexander Shorin. He was accused of "speculation with firewood." Even before the revolution, Shorin earned the title of "Russian Edison." Lenin sent an urgent telegram to Nizhny and a copy of Dzerzhinsky:

Due to the hasty and especially important works of the radio laboratory, immediately free Shorin on the bail of her collegium and the committee.

When the text of the telegram reprinted on the typewriter filed him for signature, Ilyich thought, put the comma and attributed:

... Without stopping the investigation in the case of Shorin.

Bonch-Bruevich Ilyich answered with a letter:

I take the opportunity to express you deeply gratitude and sympathy about the great work of the radio insurance that you do. A newspaper without paper and "without distances" that you create will be a great thing. I promise to provide you with this and similar work and similar works.

M.A. Bonch-Bruevich at the transmitter he developed. April 1923 (nauchebe.net)

“This is the historical letter of V. I. Lenin,” says one of the works on the history of Soviet broadcasting, ”inspired M. A. Bonch-Bruevich to overcome further difficulties, and most importantly, revealed to him the importance of the matter that he is engaged in.”

Inspiration, and had to work in extremely difficult conditions. A military engineer, in the past, the second lieutenant of the tsarist army, Petr Ostryakov, who was engaged in the construction of a radio laboratory in the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory, writes about these days in his memoirs :

These were difficult times for work. Outside the window of the radio laboratory, a frozen, somewhere in the south cut by Kolchak Volga, stretched. At night, the city plunged into impenetrable darkness, there was not only molybdenum or tantalus, there was not enough bread and fuel. Bonch-Bruevich sat in a coat and in a hat in the laboratory, again and again returning to the thought of the task set by Vladimir Ilyich. After all, just think: Lenin himself, with his exceptional load, constant employment with urgent issues, found time to write to him, Bonch-Bruevich! Lenin himself spoke about the radiotelephone! Lenin himself thinks about it! This means - the task is on a par with those that Lenin thinks. The will of the leader must be fulfilled at all costs. And again, Bonch-Bruevich’s thoughts are spinning around the missing tantalus and complications arising from here.

The first trial sound radio broadcasts made a stunning effect on contemporaries. Bonch-Bruevich recalled that the radio telegraph operator at a distant station behind the Arctic Circle, having heard human speech in the headphones instead of the alphabet Morse, fled from the workplace in horror.

In the fall of 1920, when the radius of the reception of the radio signal was brought, as the party and the government demanded, up to two thousand versts, the transmitter was installed in Moscow at the Khodynsky radio station. It was decided to hold a communication session with Berlin. At the appointed time, a receiver was included in the radio center of the Telefunkin joint -stock company. This event is told by the old Bolshevik Akim Nikolaev, in those years - a member of the collegium of the Owl of Posts and Telegraph, the chairman of the radio committee. He was then in Berlin.

In a few seconds up to 6 hours, we all endowed up the headphones. The appointed watches come when we must hear on Radio Moscow. It takes 5-6-10 seconds. There is silence in the reception room ... I only hear how my heart beats ... The deadline has passed, but there is no conversation. I catch the mocking views of engineers. A few seconds of hidden silence, seeming to me eternity, pass. I am burning with shame. Will the experience not be able to succeed? Are they really scared? Finally, at 6 o’clock, a clear, distinct voice of the head of the radio station is heard with a minute: "Hello, Hello! Says the Moscow Radio Telephone Station." Then they spoke German ... I did not remember myself from joy. Someone presses my hand ... Congratulations on success. The voices of the speakers were so clear that I called the names of comrades speaking on the radiotelephone from Moscow.

The connection turned out to be one-sided: at Telefunin something deteriorated in the transmitter.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, an intense pace is built according to the project of engineer Vladimir Shukhov Radio Bashn at Shabolovka 150 meters high.

It was from here that with the help of equipment transported from Nizhny, on September 17, 1922, the first radio concert was transferred. His program was exclusively Russian music. At first, Boris Yevlakhov sang, as said in the newspaper Izvestia, who published the concert program for two days, aria from the opera of Borodin “Prince Igor”. Unfortunately, there were no records from the outstanding tenor, the soloist of the Bolshoi Theater of Boris Evlakhov.

Then the violinist Boris Sibor played the romance of the Major Glier. Mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Obukhova performed the romance of Polina from the "peak lady".

The singer R.P. Vengerova sang the aria of Martha from the "royal bride" of Rimsky-Korsakov. And finally, performed by the flutist A. I. Larin, the Russian folk song "Red Sarafan" sounded. The concert "International" began and completed.

Naturally, all numbers were transmitted live, without recording. In the book of V. I. Shamshur "The first years of Soviet radio engineering and amateur radio" (M., 1954) this event is described as follows:

This historical radio concert was held in the courtyard of the radio station, right under its antenna.

The fact is that, as it turned out during preliminary experiments, the "studio", which was a small and completely naked room, gave significant reflection of the sound from the walls. It was decided to overtake the studio with soft matter, but this work was not done by the first concert.

I had to take the piano into the yard, attach a microphone nearby and start a concert.

Especially for listening to the concert at theater, Elokhov and Serpukhov squares, reproductors were installed - “loud -speaking phones”, as they were then called. A truck with the same loud -speaking telephone and a reception of Antenna drove along the streets of Moscow. Workers of Prokhorovskaya (Trekhgorenaya) manufactories listened to a concert in the factory dining room. Messages came from various cities, including Tashkent, Obdorsk, Chita, Berlin and the Ugorsky Shar, where they also heard a musical program from Moscow.

For this outstanding achievement, the Nizhny Novgorod radio laboratory was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.

In December 1922, a new technical miracle occurred: heavily painful Lenin was in the hills, his speech function was disturbed, and his voice recorded on a gramplast sounds on the radio. It was specifically for the plate written by Lenin's speech "What is Soviet power?"

Continuation read here .