Echo of Moscow

» see echo.msk.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A radio station broadcasting in a language I do not read is a hard thing to have an opinion about. What reached me was the shape of it, and the shape is legible from any distance. For twenty-one years the most critical voice on Russian radio was two thirds owned by the gas company that answers to the state, and everybody involved knew that and carried on anyway.

Ekho Moskvy first went on air on 22 August 1990, put together by journalists working around the Moscow city soviet and the journalism faculty at Moscow State University. A year later, almost to the day, tanks were on the streets for the August coup. The station stayed on air through it, closed and back more than once across those three days. That was the founding story and it never stopped being the thing the station was measured against.

In 2001 Gazprom-Media absorbed it along with the rest of Vladimir Gusinsky's media holdings, and from then on the majority shareholder was a company the Kremlin controls. Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief from 1998 and holding eighteen percent himself, kept the editorial line where it had always been. That arrangement held for two decades. Nobody outside Russia was ever able to explain it cleanly, and the usual guess was that a licensed critic is useful to have on the dial.

On 1 March 2022 Roskomnadzor cut the broadcast, citing deliberately false information about the actions of Russian military personnel, which was the phrase doing all the work that year. Dozhd went the same day. Two days later the board voted to liquidate both the radio station and the website. Venediktov said the vote took about fifteen minutes and that he had not been invited to the meeting.

~ the dossier ~

~ owned by the thing it criticized ~

The station's independence was never a right. It was a permission, held at the pleasure of a majority shareholder, renewable in the way that permissions are. For twenty-one years the permission was granted, and in that time Ekho ran interviews and phone-ins that no state channel would have carried, which is why the arrangement was worth something to both sides.

The cost of that structure only shows up once. Everything that made the station famous was produced under a condition that could be withdrawn without a court, without a hearing and without anyone having to write down a reason. When the withdrawal came it took less time than one of its own programs.

~ fifteen minutes ~

The detail worth keeping is that Ekho was not shut by a judge. Venediktov pointed out afterward that the Prosecutor General's filing did not actually demand closure, only that the violations be addressed, with discontinuation of broadcasting as the ceiling of the penalty rather than the instruction. The board went to the ceiling on its own.

That is the corporate route, and it is faster than the legal one. A regulator cuts the signal, the owner reads the room and votes the company out of existence, and there is no proceeding left for anyone to appeal. The station had survived thirty-one years of the other kind of pressure. It did not survive its own shareholders' meeting.

~ what 91.2 became ~

From 9 March the frequencies in five cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg among them, carried Radio Sputnik instead. A dial position is the one asset that cannot be taken abroad, and it was reassigned within a week to a state outlet aimed at foreign audiences.

The people scattered and kept working. Most of the staff started a YouTube channel called Zhivoy Gvozd, and in October 2022 Echo came back as an online operation run out of Berlin, on an app and a new domain. In August 2023 a Russian state media company applied to register the old name as a trademark. What was left of the station by then was a signal you have to go looking for, which is the exact opposite of what a radio frequency is.

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