Listen to the BBC at night

Russian authorities continue to block Telegram, while simultaneously limiting propaganda opportunities. Soviet officials also struggled with radio

For Russian citizens, Telegram has long been more than just a messenger. This is a full-fledged mass media, one of the main platforms for receiving news, discussing public events and exchanging opinions. The motives of the state trying to block the platform are clear: at a minimum, to transfer users to the controlled Max application, and in the future to bring Russian society under total information control.

It is clear that such measures will inevitably worsen the quality of life of Russians. At the same time, they will almost certainly interfere with Russian propaganda itself, since many pro-state media and channels actively use Telegram as the main platform for disseminating their messages. Not to mention the fact that SVO participants often use Telegram for communication.

In this sense, the current situation is in many ways reminiscent of the blocking of Western radio stations during the Soviet era. Then the Soviet leadership, on the one hand, sought to limit the penetration of Western information and culture, and on the other, weakened its own broadcasting and propaganda system.

Already in the first post-war decade, a massive radio campaign began in the USSR. In 1955, the total number of radios in the country reached 33 million, and ten years later this figure had doubled. These were no longer street loudspeakers, but stand-alone wireless receivers.

Thus, if previously listening to the radio was a collective practice (for example, on the street), now it has become an individual activity, much more difficult to account for, monitor and control.

Moreover, these receivers had a serious “disadvantage” - they could receive shortwave transmissions. This meant, as the head of Glavradio A. Puzin complained, that with their help it was possible to listen to not only Soviet, but also foreign programs with “vile slander against the Soviet Union.” But the production of radios with shortwave potential still continued, because such receivers were the fastest way to bring radio to the people, especially in villages where there was often no electricity and the necessary infrastructure. And the shortwave receiver could work in such conditions.

In 1958, the Central Committee conducted an investigation: it turned out that up to 85 percent of shortwave receivers were in the European part of the USSR, where, as officials noted, “there was nothing to listen to except enemy radio.” Moreover, by the end of the 1950s, about sixty foreign radio stations could be heard on the territory of the USSR. The Soviet leadership had to use a “jamming” system. The costs of “jamming” were colossal—“hundreds of millions of rubles,” according to Central Committee officials. This amount exceeded the USSR's spending on domestic and international broadcasting combined.

But despite the entire jamming system, in many places outside of Moscow and Leningrad, “enemy voices” could be heard without any problems. Moreover, due to jamming, the republican and all-Union radio did not work in many places - it turned out that the system was limiting itself. As a result, “enemy radio” essentially remained the only one available, and sometimes collective farmers listened to the Voice of America and the BBC in their villages.

In 1953, the Council of Ministers announced the accelerated construction of radio jamming stations. In response, the US, UK and other foreign broadcasters developed effective ways to bypass the blocking - for example, they broadcast on waves as close as possible to Soviet ones. The USSR built even more blocking stations. But by the mid-1950s, the Soviet side was clearly losing in this war.

One Soviet official admitted that even with “unlimited resources” it was impossible to isolate the USSR from foreign radio broadcasts, and jamming threatened to paralyze the Soviet radio network itself.

Many Soviet citizens themselves tried to connect to foreign radio. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Soviet citizens bought high-quality radios - the Latvian Spidola or, if possible, the German Grundig. People turned the receiver on its side or upside down, stuck the antennas out the window; and even left big cities for dachas, where jamming was less effective.

“We even listened to Vatican radio, which gave a good overview of what was happening in the Soviet Union, and we were not embarrassed that the announcer added at the end, “God bless you,” historian Sergei Ivanov recalled about his experience.

When the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, holidaymakers listened to the news on the beaches of the Baltic Sea. Political scientist Masha Lipman, who was then in Lithuania, recalled: “That summer, antennas were rising everywhere on the beach. And in our circles, if they said that they heard about it “on the radio,” it meant only one thing—on Russian-language programs of the Voice of America, BBC, or Deutsche Welle.”

Listening to foreign radio in itself was not a crime. It all depended on who was listening to what. Estonians, for example, listened to Finnish radio, residents of the Republic of Tajikistan listened to religious broadcasts from Iran, and Siberians learned about the cultural revolution in Beijing.

In 1957, a young Ukrainian plumber was arrested under Article 58 for reciting anti-Soviet poems to workers on foreign radio broadcasts since the summer of 1956. At the same time, in 1968, one man, while on an Estonian beach, accidentally broadcast a Voice of America report to the entire beach - his receiver turned out to be connected to the public address system. But he managed to avoid punishment.

The Soviet authorities did not know exactly what percentage of citizens listened to foreign broadcasts. In the mid-1970s, the KGB cited a study by the USSR Academy of Sciences, according to which 80% of Moscow students listened to foreign radio stations. Some students hung texts they had copied from BBC programs on the walls of their institutes.

Others openly asked officials when they visited universities: “What is shameful about a person listening to the BBC? Who is interfering with radio broadcasts from abroad and why?”

In 1958, Soviet industry stopped producing short-wave receivers with high-frequency ranges. Then listeners began to use the low-frequency “evening ranges.” It is not for nothing that a well-known rhyming saying appeared in those days: “There is a custom in Rus' to listen to the BBC at night.”

The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and the policy of glasnost brought an end to the jamming of foreign radio stations.

Adapted from : Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).