Roth-Ey,
Kristen. Moscow Prime
Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold
War. New York: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Post WWII- radio starts coming in
"By 1955, the USSR was spending more on jamming than on broadcasting its own programs, and officials at the radio administration were discussing the possibility that, given both the amount of interference they were throwing up and the impossibility of percision jamming, they would soon paralyze the domestic radio network entirely" (Roth-Ey, 131)
132: Soviet Union produced the short wave radios
"The phenomenon of foreign broadcasting to the USSR was also a ringing testament to its modern, technologically advanced society and a backhanded compliment to its international importance. In the period the period 1963 to 1968, the USSR lifted jamming almost completely, even as Soviet media continued to rail against the enemy voices. To some observers it looked as if the Soviet authorities had settled in for a hostile, useful peace." (R-E, 133)
"They had not, because though the ideological category of enemy voices had its uses, to be sure, the reality of foreign radio broadcasting to the USSR did pose genuine, intractable problems. What the authorities objected to on the most basic level was information. Jamming practices varied over time, but by and large the Soviets did not attempt to jam broadcasts with purely musical content, nor did they typically jam programs in foreign languages not native to people in the USSR, such as English. THe programming deemed most offensive had to do with Soviet domestic affairs. This could be news of natural disasters of readings of literature banned inside the USSR; it could be first-person accounts from émigrés about historical events such as collectivization or analyses of Kremlin politics. In 1968, it was news of Czechoslovak heresy of "Socialism with a human face" and the subsequent crackdown the triggered the resumption of full-scale jamming. Foreign broadcasting delivered information that the regime did not want people to have, period, and this made hamming, however ineffective, its natural stance." (R-E, 133)
"Yet arguably it was the very fact of foreign broadcasting inside the USSR, and not the informational content of its programs, that spoke loudest of all. By breaking the Soviet regime's media monopoly, foreign broadcasting shattered the regime's hold on the modes and meanings of cultural consumption in Soviet everyday life." (R-Y, 133-134)
"Radio in the Soviet context was designed to educate , inspire and organize collectives; entertainment always took a backseat to edification, and information was to be provided on a need-to-know basis in life with longer-range political agendas. Broadcasting, in other words, was part of planned cultural economy that had little to do with popular taste or timeliness. By contrast, foreign broadcasters went out of their way to present themselves as the Soviet audience's intimate friend and a champion of its rights to information and satisfaction. Programming on foreign stations often mixed formats (news and music) and cultural registers (high and low, serious and silly) and promoted entertainment for entertainment's sake in a way directly counter to Soviet cultural hierarchies and to the idea of uplift. Finally, foreign radio modeled a very different relationship to that time than what was to be found in Soviet media; it was, in a word, timely, and as it delivered not just news but "breaking news," foreign radio told Soviet listeners that they wanted, needed, and perhaps even had a right to be up-to-date in a modern world." (R-E, 134)
135: party create cheap knock off
135: in 20s and 30s, some freestanding radio sets, "For the most part Soviet radio operated via a ststem of radio diffusion exchanges (radiouzly) that picked up signals (via long-,medium- and short wave broadcasts) and relayed them to wired units (radiotochki)" (R-E, 135)
'41: "7 million radios, nearly 6 million of them wired public amplifiers of one sort or another, and Soviet broadcast signals reached almost every corner of the USSR." (R-E, 135)
136: during the war, radio became part of daily life, it was also PUBLIC
"In 1941, the regime had confiscated all freestanding radios for military use (and also, it seems, for the purpose of walling off the population from foreign broadcasters), and this meant that even more than in the thirties, the locus of the Soviet radio experience was the wired public set. People gathered around these radios to get the latest news, but they also came together to hear Soviet literature's leading lights recite poetry and read the Russian classics..." (R-E, 136)
137: '55 "Soviet industry was pumping out several times more sets per year than had been produced in the entire prewar period." 33 million
'65: "more than double again" 32 radios/100 people
'63: no more wireless
"The shift from wired to wireless radio had far reaching implications that went almost wholly unrecognized at time. For one thing, it meant that that had been a predominantly collective and public activity was now moving into the realm of private experience and was thus far less simple to quantify, monitor, and control-indeed, it was beginning to look less and less like a traditional Soviet phenomenon altogether. ( Groups of listeners gathered to join a radio rally or attend a performance of radio theater were doing something that fit easily into the category of a Soviet activity, whether social cultural, or political. But could the same be said of the solitary listener at home) A second, even more critical issue about the wireless radios--and one that only served to heighten their potential un-Sovietness--was the fact that large numbers of these sets could receive shortwave broadcasts. In fact, according to a 1949 report to the party's Central Committee from the radio administration, nearly all of the freestanding radios being produced by Soviet industry had shortwave broadcasts. And as A. Puzin, the head of the radio administration of Glavradio, pointed out, this meant they were "designed for receiving not just the Soviet, but also foreign radio programs" devoted, in his words, to "the foulest slander of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies. " Puzin recommended curtailing shortwave production almost completely. Nine years later, in 1958, the CC did its own investigation and found that production had not only continued but flourished: the USSR had produced more radios with shortwave capacity since 1949 than all 20 million radios in the USSR ready and able to tune in to foreign slander. At the time Puzin raised his alarm, there had been a mere half a million." (R-E, 138)
Why-WWII, also
"Wiring the vast expanses of Soviet territory for broadcasting, however, was an immense undertaking, even if the goal was to connect diffusion centers to loudspeakers and not individual homes. Radiofikatsiia using the wired system required three things in chronic short supply in the Soviet countryside: equipment, expertise, and perhaps most important of all, electricity." (R-E, 139)
-villages
139: consumer demand
140: "By the late fifties, as many as sixty different foreign stations were broadcasting to the USSR at certain times of the day. Jamming was worse than futile." (R-Y, 140)
high cost
"Nonetheless, the enemy voices could be heard with little trouble in more areas outside the centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities. Worse still, jamming operations made tuning in to republic and all-Union radio impossible in many areas: the Soviets were jamming themselves. With enemy radio the only thing to listen to, some klokhozniki were reportedly choosing to run the VOA and the BBC on their local wired networks. (R-Y, 140)
141: tuning wasn't illegal
143: Estonian study in '66 "up to 70% of radio listeners" listened to Finnish and other foreign stations
Lithuania '67 35%
'68 Central Radio: 50% at least occasionally
numbers inflated to make KGB mission look significant
"In closed-door meetings and in public settings, including in mass media, Soviet authorities regularly attacked foreign radio for corrupting listeners. The official list of corrupting influences from abroad grew long in the post- Stalinist era...But arguably, enemy radio had a place of honor in the official imagination. There were multiple divisions in the bureaucracy for transcribing and analyzing foreign broadcasts, and their reports, sometimes quite sophisticated, went to the in-bosex of party elites on a regular basis. Jamming although no longer a matter for public discussion by 1960 (it was on Glavit's, the main censorship agency, list of taboo subjects), was no secret, and people in radio and the party-state administration were well aware of how ineffective and injurious it was."
Radio Moscow 148-154
"Radio listening acquired its own disturbing undertones as of the late 1940s because of its association with foreign broadcasting. Radio was already moving in the direction of private consumption in the postwar USSR. Foreign radio, the enemy voice, pushed the point anc ould make all private listening seem more intimate and illicit."
158: details what was on Soviet broadcasts, it was boring
162: Soviet radio was "attitude to the fact" "The reality was that calibrating attitudes was a politicians' game, not a journalistic one."
170: Soviets couldn't go all night-censor
172:
"A 1968 survey by radio and TV's reseach bureau founf that 47 percent of people identified themselves as listeners to foreign radio (openly, the researchers notes); just under 10 percent described themselves as "regular listeners," while another 15 percent said they did not tune in themselves but heard about foreign radio broadcasts secondhand. The study was limited to urban regions, but inlike the Maiak survey, it covered multiple republics, it also gathered some interesting information on the tastes of listeners and their social profiles. The largest group of self-reported listeners was in the sixteen-to-thirty-year-old category; more men listened than women (52 percent to 41 percent), and most people listened at night. However there was no clear-cut correlation between educational levels and listening practices: aside from those in the lowest level (who had markedly lower rates), people of varying background reported listening to the foreign voices in rather similar numbers. Interestingly, when asked what they listened to on foreign radio, they split into two roughly equal camps. About 45 percent said they tuned in only for music and about the same number said they listened only to the news; 10 percent described themselves tuning in for both." (R-E, 172-173)
"Soviet researchers drew a direct connection between the inadequacy of domestic radio and the success of the enemy voices. 'The sluggishness and narrowness of the programs on Soviet radio, including on the First STation and Maiak, lead to a situation where a part of the audience is switching over to listen to foreign stations on either a regular or an episodic basis.' Listeners reported that they tuned in to foreign radio not only for what was unavailable from Soviet media sources but also for its timeliness. Here the researchers referred to an earlier study of Maiak to demonstrate just jow far off the mark the station was: fewer than 1 percent of the news segments covered events that had happened within the previous few hours, almost none were live, on-the-scene reports (o.5 percent of the total); about 25 percent of the airtime was given over to discussion of events or ideas with no clear time reference at all."
"They had not, because though the ideological category of enemy voices had its uses, to be sure, the reality of foreign radio broadcasting to the USSR did pose genuine, intractable problems. What the authorities objected to on the most basic level was information. Jamming practices varied over time, but by and large the Soviets did not attempt to jam broadcasts with purely musical content, nor did they typically jam programs in foreign languages not native to people in the USSR, such as English. THe programming deemed most offensive had to do with Soviet domestic affairs. This could be news of natural disasters of readings of literature banned inside the USSR; it could be first-person accounts from émigrés about historical events such as collectivization or analyses of Kremlin politics. In 1968, it was news of Czechoslovak heresy of "Socialism with a human face" and the subsequent crackdown the triggered the resumption of full-scale jamming. Foreign broadcasting delivered information that the regime did not want people to have, period, and this made hamming, however ineffective, its natural stance." (R-E, 133)
"Yet arguably it was the very fact of foreign broadcasting inside the USSR, and not the informational content of its programs, that spoke loudest of all. By breaking the Soviet regime's media monopoly, foreign broadcasting shattered the regime's hold on the modes and meanings of cultural consumption in Soviet everyday life." (R-Y, 133-134)
"Radio in the Soviet context was designed to educate , inspire and organize collectives; entertainment always took a backseat to edification, and information was to be provided on a need-to-know basis in life with longer-range political agendas. Broadcasting, in other words, was part of planned cultural economy that had little to do with popular taste or timeliness. By contrast, foreign broadcasters went out of their way to present themselves as the Soviet audience's intimate friend and a champion of its rights to information and satisfaction. Programming on foreign stations often mixed formats (news and music) and cultural registers (high and low, serious and silly) and promoted entertainment for entertainment's sake in a way directly counter to Soviet cultural hierarchies and to the idea of uplift. Finally, foreign radio modeled a very different relationship to that time than what was to be found in Soviet media; it was, in a word, timely, and as it delivered not just news but "breaking news," foreign radio told Soviet listeners that they wanted, needed, and perhaps even had a right to be up-to-date in a modern world." (R-E, 134)
135: party create cheap knock off
135: in 20s and 30s, some freestanding radio sets, "For the most part Soviet radio operated via a ststem of radio diffusion exchanges (radiouzly) that picked up signals (via long-,medium- and short wave broadcasts) and relayed them to wired units (radiotochki)" (R-E, 135)
'41: "7 million radios, nearly 6 million of them wired public amplifiers of one sort or another, and Soviet broadcast signals reached almost every corner of the USSR." (R-E, 135)
136: during the war, radio became part of daily life, it was also PUBLIC
"In 1941, the regime had confiscated all freestanding radios for military use (and also, it seems, for the purpose of walling off the population from foreign broadcasters), and this meant that even more than in the thirties, the locus of the Soviet radio experience was the wired public set. People gathered around these radios to get the latest news, but they also came together to hear Soviet literature's leading lights recite poetry and read the Russian classics..." (R-E, 136)
137: '55 "Soviet industry was pumping out several times more sets per year than had been produced in the entire prewar period." 33 million
'65: "more than double again" 32 radios/100 people
'63: no more wireless
"The shift from wired to wireless radio had far reaching implications that went almost wholly unrecognized at time. For one thing, it meant that that had been a predominantly collective and public activity was now moving into the realm of private experience and was thus far less simple to quantify, monitor, and control-indeed, it was beginning to look less and less like a traditional Soviet phenomenon altogether. ( Groups of listeners gathered to join a radio rally or attend a performance of radio theater were doing something that fit easily into the category of a Soviet activity, whether social cultural, or political. But could the same be said of the solitary listener at home) A second, even more critical issue about the wireless radios--and one that only served to heighten their potential un-Sovietness--was the fact that large numbers of these sets could receive shortwave broadcasts. In fact, according to a 1949 report to the party's Central Committee from the radio administration, nearly all of the freestanding radios being produced by Soviet industry had shortwave broadcasts. And as A. Puzin, the head of the radio administration of Glavradio, pointed out, this meant they were "designed for receiving not just the Soviet, but also foreign radio programs" devoted, in his words, to "the foulest slander of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies. " Puzin recommended curtailing shortwave production almost completely. Nine years later, in 1958, the CC did its own investigation and found that production had not only continued but flourished: the USSR had produced more radios with shortwave capacity since 1949 than all 20 million radios in the USSR ready and able to tune in to foreign slander. At the time Puzin raised his alarm, there had been a mere half a million." (R-E, 138)
Why-WWII, also
"Wiring the vast expanses of Soviet territory for broadcasting, however, was an immense undertaking, even if the goal was to connect diffusion centers to loudspeakers and not individual homes. Radiofikatsiia using the wired system required three things in chronic short supply in the Soviet countryside: equipment, expertise, and perhaps most important of all, electricity." (R-E, 139)
-villages
139: consumer demand
140: "By the late fifties, as many as sixty different foreign stations were broadcasting to the USSR at certain times of the day. Jamming was worse than futile." (R-Y, 140)
high cost
"Nonetheless, the enemy voices could be heard with little trouble in more areas outside the centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities. Worse still, jamming operations made tuning in to republic and all-Union radio impossible in many areas: the Soviets were jamming themselves. With enemy radio the only thing to listen to, some klokhozniki were reportedly choosing to run the VOA and the BBC on their local wired networks. (R-Y, 140)
141: tuning wasn't illegal
143: Estonian study in '66 "up to 70% of radio listeners" listened to Finnish and other foreign stations
Lithuania '67 35%
'68 Central Radio: 50% at least occasionally
numbers inflated to make KGB mission look significant
"In closed-door meetings and in public settings, including in mass media, Soviet authorities regularly attacked foreign radio for corrupting listeners. The official list of corrupting influences from abroad grew long in the post- Stalinist era...But arguably, enemy radio had a place of honor in the official imagination. There were multiple divisions in the bureaucracy for transcribing and analyzing foreign broadcasts, and their reports, sometimes quite sophisticated, went to the in-bosex of party elites on a regular basis. Jamming although no longer a matter for public discussion by 1960 (it was on Glavit's, the main censorship agency, list of taboo subjects), was no secret, and people in radio and the party-state administration were well aware of how ineffective and injurious it was."
Radio Moscow 148-154
"Radio listening acquired its own disturbing undertones as of the late 1940s because of its association with foreign broadcasting. Radio was already moving in the direction of private consumption in the postwar USSR. Foreign radio, the enemy voice, pushed the point anc ould make all private listening seem more intimate and illicit."
158: details what was on Soviet broadcasts, it was boring
162: Soviet radio was "attitude to the fact" "The reality was that calibrating attitudes was a politicians' game, not a journalistic one."
170: Soviets couldn't go all night-censor
172:
"A 1968 survey by radio and TV's reseach bureau founf that 47 percent of people identified themselves as listeners to foreign radio (openly, the researchers notes); just under 10 percent described themselves as "regular listeners," while another 15 percent said they did not tune in themselves but heard about foreign radio broadcasts secondhand. The study was limited to urban regions, but inlike the Maiak survey, it covered multiple republics, it also gathered some interesting information on the tastes of listeners and their social profiles. The largest group of self-reported listeners was in the sixteen-to-thirty-year-old category; more men listened than women (52 percent to 41 percent), and most people listened at night. However there was no clear-cut correlation between educational levels and listening practices: aside from those in the lowest level (who had markedly lower rates), people of varying background reported listening to the foreign voices in rather similar numbers. Interestingly, when asked what they listened to on foreign radio, they split into two roughly equal camps. About 45 percent said they tuned in only for music and about the same number said they listened only to the news; 10 percent described themselves tuning in for both." (R-E, 172-173)
"Soviet researchers drew a direct connection between the inadequacy of domestic radio and the success of the enemy voices. 'The sluggishness and narrowness of the programs on Soviet radio, including on the First STation and Maiak, lead to a situation where a part of the audience is switching over to listen to foreign stations on either a regular or an episodic basis.' Listeners reported that they tuned in to foreign radio not only for what was unavailable from Soviet media sources but also for its timeliness. Here the researchers referred to an earlier study of Maiak to demonstrate just jow far off the mark the station was: fewer than 1 percent of the news segments covered events that had happened within the previous few hours, almost none were live, on-the-scene reports (o.5 percent of the total); about 25 percent of the airtime was given over to discussion of events or ideas with no clear time reference at all."
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