How Freedom came to Russia

The film about how a putsch occurred in the USSR and how Radio Liberty helped in the fight against it

On August 19, 1991, a military coup was made in the USSR. Instead of information programs, the USSR television began to show the Swan Lake.

At night, on the air of Radio Liberty, the students heard an emergency news release: “As you know, we just received a message that the Soviet leadership made a statement that states that the powers of the President of the USSR from Mikhail Gorbachev are moving towards Vice President Yanaev in connection with the impossibility of fulfilling the duties of the country's president Mikhail Gorbachev due to health reasons.”

Three days later, the State Emergency Committee fell, and a few days later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree on accreditation in Moscow by the Radio Liberty Bureau for his role in the coverage of August events.

Just a few years before, it was impossible to imagine the emergence of the official representative office of the radio station in Russia - the Soviet Union for decades drowned out the programs of "Western votes" for decades. Dmitry Volchek, who became the first emergency correspondent in the USSR in November 1988, literally a couple of days after the Soviet authorities turned off the silencers: “People sometimes listened through the muffins, maybe every tenth word was clear. But only because they pronounce some prohibited words, Solzhenitsyn’s names and others, they were already better ... Well, when the stupid stopped, and when the stupor stopped, and when the stupid stopped, and when the stupid stopped, and when the stupid was stopped, Everyone listened to millions of people, and the response for each program was colossal. "

In the days of the putsch, when the GKChP announced the "re -registration" of the media, blocking their work, Radio Liberty correspondents went on a live broadcast from the White House, from the streets of Moscow and from other cities of the USSR. A terrible night on August 21, they reported about approaching the Barricades of the Barricades of the BTRs, tanks and armored personnel carriers: “According to not yet verified information, the figure sounded that two people have already died. And apparently, we should say“ goodbye. ”We will not say goodbye, we will wait, and I think that everything will be somehow for the best, in this country and in this world. Michael. Sokolov, the program "in the country and in the world", Moscow, Krasnopresnenskaya embankment. "

Already after the fall of the GKChP, Boris Yeltsin said in an interview with Radio Liberty: “I have not been allergic to your radio station for a long time, I always respond to your request to give an interview. And during the coup, it was one of the few channels through which it was possible to report around the world and, most importantly, in almost every family. The radio station deserved with its objectivity, we must accredit you. ”

After 2000, Radio Liberty lost all relayers in Russia and radio frequencies in Moscow.