Guzei.com

» see guzei.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Igor Guzey worked at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1995, which got him a staff account and a directory on a university server. He put a page in it. The first section was a list of Moscow's radio stations. He kept adding to that page for the next twenty nine years and it turned into a reference work for an entire industry, which is the sort of thing that used to happen and does not happen anymore.

The domain came three years later, and his own account of why it was a .com is a small time capsule of 1998 pricing. A .com cost twenty five dollars. A .ru cost a hundred and twenty and would only be sold to a registered legal entity, which he was not. So a Russian radio site about Russian radio, run by a Russian, lived at guzei.com from 11 December 1998 onward. I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey that year and those two numbers land exactly right: a hundred and twenty dollars was not a domain price in 1998, it was a decision.

He wrote all of it. His about page states it flatly, as of July 2022: the code on the site is one hundred percent original, engines were never used. Twenty nine years of a hand-maintained site with a profile system, a photo gallery with per-report view counters and several ranking tables, none of it built on anything you could name. Rossiyskaya Gazeta was covering him as the web radio directory in 2005, and he ended up judging a student media competition and speaking at industry events as the man who had the numbers. The footer read 1995 to 2024 at the end, and both ends of that are correct, which is why the Russian Wikipedia infobox saying 1998 is dating the domain rather than the page.

~ the dossier ~

~ thirty thousand photographs ~

From 2002 the site grew a second wing that eventually overshadowed the directory. Guzey photographed radio industry events and published each one as a dated gallery: the Nashestvie festival, the Golden Gramophone and Chanson of the Year award shows, RU.TV's Golden Samovar, station anniversaries like Avtoradio at twenty five, the Radio Monte Carlo regatta. You could sort the archive by date, by alphabet, by event, by photographer or by view count.

By March 2023 the index read more than 490 reports and more than thirty thousand photographs, covering 2002 to 2022. The most viewed of them was the 2011 Golden Samovar at 196,746 views, with Nashestvie 2009 second at 97,275. The largest single gallery was the 2022 Golden Samovar at 3,019 photographs from one night. The directory side held 6,298 stations and 8,811 streams. SimilarWeb put the whole thing at roughly 140,000 visits a month in May 2023, which for a personal site with no company behind it and no social feed to speak of is a genuinely large number.

There were rating tables too, including a photo ranking of the kind that every site with a gallery and a login eventually builds, and the person pages carried numbered profiles, so the archive quietly answered who had been at which event going back two decades.

~ the year the player went quiet ~

The stations and the streams were the original product and they were the first thing to go. Through 2022 the Google advertising revenue that funded the site collapsed to nothing under sanctions, and without it the royalties owed to the Russian Authors' Society on the audio could not be paid. On 1 January 2023 every player came off the site. The station pages were left carrying a line explaining that until 2023 you could have heard this station's stream on this page.

The photographs had already stopped. The last report he ever published was the Radio Monte Carlo regatta on 13 August 2022, 1,089 frames, and the Telegram channel stops on that same post. After January 2023 what remained was an archive: twenty years of galleries and a station database with the audio amputated out of it. It stayed up in that condition for another twenty one months and kept drawing its hundred and forty thousand visits.

~ fifteen bytes ~

The last complete capture of the homepage is 1 October 2024, 2,785 bytes, everything in place. The next capture, on 6 October, is fifteen bytes long and reads No connect DB: , with the trailing space where the error message should have been. That is the whole page. Anonymous editors turned up on the Russian Wikipedia article later that month to note that it had stopped working.

Nothing ever changed. Every capture between October 2024 and the final one on 1 April 2026 is that same fifteen byte string, eighteen months of a MySQL server that nobody restarted. The origin is unreachable behind Cloudflare now, though the domain is paid through December 2028, so the registration will outlive the site by four years. A radio journalist wrote the obituary on radio90s.ru in November 2025, more than a year late, because there was no announcement to report and nobody had noticed the exact week.

Guzey never said anything publicly about it. The only statement the site ever made about its own decline was that impersonal note about the removed player. The detail that finishes this one is in his last few articles, which were technical posts about his own infrastructure: how to solve MySQL 8 connection problems from PHP, what to do when the server sends a charset the client does not know. He was documenting the fight he was losing, and then the connection he had been writing about went down for good.

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