In February 1919, the inventor M. A. Bonch-Bruevich was
picked up in Moscow as he uttered the famous phrase “Hello, this is the
Nizhnii Novgorod Radio Laboratory speaking”: here was the first occasion in
Russian history that the human voice had been transmitted over the airwaves.
In June 1921, loudspeakers were set up in Moscow to broadcast a “spoken
newspaper.” In September 1922 came the first radio concert, and in the fall of
1924 the start of regular programming under the auspices of a newly created
broadcasting company that was soon renamed Radioperedacha. On the
eighth anniversary of the revolution, in November 1925, came Russia’s first
ever outside broadcast—suitably enough, from Red Square.5
Used by Bolsheviks:
In theory, radio was a boon to the Bolsheviks on several grounds. First,
it made possible the almost instantaneous dissemination of politicized
information over huge distances. Second, it held out huge promise as a
collective organizer: even the most charismatic and resonant orator could
not hope to reach more than a few thousand people at once, but radio had
every prospect of creating an audience of several million. Third, radio was the
epitome of modernity: it would accelerate progress from darkness to light,
from ignorance to enlightenment. The bearded muzhik in headphones was
one of the iconic images of the 1920s. (592)
Yet, while all societies were feeling their way into the new medium, they
varied greatly in the speed with which they adopted broadcasting. Soviet
Russia, as a poor country recovering from the devastation of civil war, was
bound to fall behind. Before long, the Party was nervously commissioning
reports on the progress of broadcasting technology in the bourgeois world
and on the construction of new radio stations in sensitive areas such as Poland
and eastern Germany.1 (595)
hese young, working-class radio enthusiasts were also regularly portrayed
as enthusiastic participants in cultural construction. It was thanks to the efforts
of radioliubiteli that even the most benighted villages might discover the magic
of the speakerless voice and lose their attachment to the priest or the bottle. In
one characteristic story, a priest from the Chuvash Republic was fined 250 rubles
for agitating against the radio and opposing the attaching of an antenna to his
belltower.32 Radio formed the auditory component of the campaign against old
peasant ways (Figure 2).33 (599)
How many radios;
From 1925
diffusion exchanges, which received programs from Moscow or one of the
other broadcasting centers and then sent them over a system of wires to
dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of networked speakers. By November
1928, the Nizhnii Novgorod Agitprop Department was noting the spread
of wired transmission through the city and the advantages of this method
for turning radio into a mass phenomenon. By that time, 7.2 kilometers of
cable had been laid, 5 loudspeakers had been set up on the streets, and about
40 in the “Red corners” of clubs and workplaces. As of 1 October 1928,
the city of Nizhnii Novgorod and its surrounding worker settlements had
eight relay networks with a total of 343 receiver points (tochki ). By contrast,
the total number of receivers for personal use was 4,667. Yet the proportion
would soon be altered by the First Five-Year Plan. The number of tochki in
Nizhnii Novgorod region was reported to have risen almost ten times between
October 1929 and October 1931 (from just over 4,500 to nearly 44,000),
and the number of wired relay networks from 32 to 115 over the same period.
On average there was 1 tochka for every 35 families across the region (even
Republic, the average was 1 for every 79 families).44 (601-602)
collective:
he Soviet case was very different. In the prewar USSR, listening was
above all a collective activity. It took place in village reading rooms, in workers’
clubs, in army barracks, or on city streets and squares. In its early days, radio
can best be understood as a technologically extended branch of agitation.
That, in large part, was how it was seen by the Bolsheviks themselves.(602)
Nowhere did this broadcasting extravaganza mean more than in Moscow
itself. The still-novel technologies of sound transmission and amplification
meant above all that these events could be immediate and meaningful to the
vast majority of Muscovites who were not in earshot. For those very close to
events, eight large loudspeakers ensured that the speeches could be heard all
over Red Square. Loudspeakers were also set up in some squares and a few
large residential buildings. The other important listening places were worker
clubs. (For the ambience of such venues, see Figure 3.) The Moscow trade
unions claimed that more than 30,000 workers had been brought together
in these venues to listen to a revolutionary program that included the operas
Carmen and Rusalka, a speech by Kamenev, a trade union concert, and formal
greetings from Red Square. As many as 5,000 workers might assemble in
and around the larger central clubs to listen. An observer noted that listeners
fulfilled Kamenev’s request to respect the memory of the victims of the 1905
revolution by getting to their feet when the Internationale was played.50
The main Bolshevik festivals—May Day and Revolution Day—became
fixed points in the radio calendar in the interwar period. From 1 May 1928,
the radio team had its own special box on Red Square so that it could provide
live commentary.51 The atmosphere of such occasions is well captured by Dziga
Vertov’s Entuziazm (Enthusiasm [1930]), which shows the continuing close
link between broadcasting and face-to-face agitation by constantly switching
the camera between the two, and by the surviving sound recordings of holiday
broadcasts in the 1930s, where the presenters’ high-flown commentary is
At less ceremonial times, listening facilities were valued by the authorities
as a symbol of public order. A trade union report of June 1927 noted that
the Danilov market urgently needed loudspeakers to counter its accordions,
dancing, bazaar, and general squalidness.53 Loudspeakers in public spaces
warned listeners to beware of pickpockets.54 (604)
Between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, radio enjoyed a golden
age. Its importance was recognized by the establishment of an annual Radio
Day (7 May) that was first celebrated in 1945—only two days before Victory
Day itself. The Party launched a radiofication drive as part of the postwar
reconstruction campaign, and the results were impressive. Perhaps most
important of all, broadcasters gained a crucial new technology: mobile and
relatively user-friendly recording technology. This meant that radio lost most
of its “live” quality and became a much safer medium for the regime. On
the one hand, of course, the reliance on recorded programming meant that
ideological orthodoxy could be pursued with even greater rigor. But on the
other hand, it allowed broadcasters in less politicized fields to pursue program
making without fearing so constantly for their careers or their lives; after all,
they had never been free from the demands of ideological orthodoxy—it is just
that those demands had been more arbitrary and inscrutable in the 1930s. In
the late 1940s, Soviet broadcasting settled into a routine of expertly produced
literary and children’s programs, abundant music, opera and theater, and
relentless “good news” journalism featuring the ordinary man. (614)
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