Voice of America started programming in Russian in 1947 at the start of the Cold War, and from the very beginning the Soviets sought to silence it.
Authorities made elaborate efforts to jam the signals of foreign radio stations like VOA that broadcast news happening both inside and outside the USSR.
In the era of Vladimir Putin, VOA came under attack again. In 2014, Kremlin authorities labeled it a “foreign agent” spreading propaganda aimed at undermining the Russian state. Its correspondents were evicted.
Why We Wrote This
Voice of America, created to counter Nazi propaganda, was rejected by the Soviets and by Vladimir Putin. But some in Moscow wax nostalgic about what the state-funded broadcaster meant for them, especially during the Cold War.
So it’s no surprise that Russians in officialdom met the news that U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund the radio service, along with its more politicized sister Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, with a certain amount of glee.
“This is an awesome decision by Trump!” said Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russia’s state-funded RT network.
But for Russians who came of age alongside the U.S. state media network – before the internet and before the plethora of alternative voices including independent Russian media outlets – the closure evoked poignant memories: of grasping to hear jazz music, of being witness to the global events of the day, of listening to broadcasts and momentarily feeling “a breath of fresh air.”
“It was like being connected to another world,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, an opposition-minded scholar in Russia who went to work as a freelancer for several years at Radio Liberty, which set up a Moscow bureau after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“For me, as a person of liberal views, these radio stations had an almost legendary dimension” as a forbidden realm of ideas that kept intellectual life alive during Soviet years, he says. “Even in childhood, I can remember my father – a devout communist – turning the knob of his shortwave receiver, making his way through the wheezing jammers to hear the Western voices.”
Jamming stations
VOA and similar Western shortwave stations, such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle, which broadcast alternative news and views into the USSR in Russian and other Soviet languages, represented a tiny crack in the wall of Soviet state propaganda and a glimpse of a different and, it was assumed, better life.
These stations also delivered news of the outside world, and sometimes reported events happening inside the USSR that the Kremlin was silent, or lying, about. That included the 1983 shooting down of a Korean airliner with 270 people aboard by a Soviet fighter plane, and the deadly 1986 explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which Soviet authorities denied for several days.
In the 1970s, when Alexander Iskanderyan was a student in Soviet Armenia, it was impossible to get any credible information from the Soviet media. “Its picture of the world had nothing to do with reality. But listening to the VOA introduced us to Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and others. We learned about the Gulag, and other facts that Soviet authorities would prefer to cover up. There were music programs. … It was a breath of fresh air.”
The USSR, a vast country that depended on its own shortwave broadcasting to reach far-flung communities, produced a wide range of shortwave radios and made them available to the population. Some experts claim that Soviet radios were altered to facilitate jamming on certain frequencies, but most Russians seem to recall being able to receive stations like VOA, at least sometimes.
Lev Gudkov, of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent pollster, says that Soviet authorities created a special sociological unit to study the effects of Western propaganda on the population. Its workers routinely inflated the results to scare their bosses.
When pollsters began counting, they learned that only about 3% of the population listened to such stations, mainly among the intelligentsia in big cities. “So the direct influence wasn’t that great, but it was the only source of alternative information,” he says. “And its effect was magnified through word of mouth, people passing it on through personal channels.”
VOA and the USSR
Some Russian analysts argue that stations like VOA contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union by amplifying negative news and feeding distrust of the government. But in reality the impact may have been limited, says Rudolf Pikhoya, an expert with the official Institute of Russian History. There were a lot of internal reasons the Soviet system became increasingly nonviable, including the war in Afghanistan, economic failure, and the rise of nationalism in other Soviet republics, he says.
“Propaganda can only do so much,” he says. “People see what’s going on around them, and that’s what makes them feel dissatisfied or angry. The moment of collapse is determined by those internal causes, not outside influences.”
The objectivity of VOA, which Mr. Trump has called too “radical,” has long been questioned. In the Putin era, growing confrontation with the West led Russia to establish its own foreign-language broadcasters, such as RT and Sputnik. Ironically, some Western countries have moved to ban or curtail those outlets.
Inside Russia, while VOA hasn’t been heard since 2014, its televised successor, Current Time TV, has been broadcasting since then. Today, many alternative news sources are widely available, including independent Russian outlets, many of which have been in exile since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Music is also widely available, as it is everywhere else. But for Maria, a retired Moscow literature teacher who declined to give her last name, there was something special about listening to it on VOA. ”It was the voice of a different world, one where there was freedom. Not just the political kind, but art and music and, well, just in the way of life,” she says. “I would listen to the ‘Jazz Hour’ program, and dream about being in New York, or New Orleans.”
