Voice of Russia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Radio Moscow made its first foreign-language broadcast on 29 October 1929, in German, and spent the next sixty years as the largest international broadcaster in the world. At its height it went out in more than seventy languages from transmitter sites across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with a relay in Cuba pointed at the Americas. If you owned a shortwave receiver anywhere between Lisbon and Jakarta, you could find it, usually without trying. That was the design. Reach was the product and the budget was not a constraint.

Boris Yeltsin's decree of 22 December 1993 reorganized the whole thing under a new name, Voice of Russia, and the new version ran on a much smaller budget with a much smaller signal. By 2013 it was down to 38 languages, with the audience it still had moving to satellite and the web. Then on 9 December 2013 Vladimir Putin signed the decree that dissolved RIA Novosti and Voice of Russia into a new state media holding called Rossiya Segodnya, run by Dmitry Kiselyov.

The dismantling took eleven months. Shortwave and European mediumwave transmissions ended on 1 April 2014, which for a station whose entire identity had been shortwave was the real death. The name survived until 9 November 2014, when Voice of Russia was closed and Sputnik launched the following day as a multilingual website with local FM partners and a radio brand attached. Eighty-five years of continuous international broadcasting ended on that date.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shortwave end ~

Shortwave dying was not unique to Russia. The BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle cut their transmitter hours through the 2000s as well, because a website reaches more people per dollar than a 500 kilowatt transmitter and a rented antenna field. What made this closure land differently among listeners was the scale of what stopped. Radio Moscow was the reference signal of the shortwave band, the thing you tuned past on the way to everything else, and the amateur radio press covered the April 2014 silence as news in its own right.

~ moskova radyosu ~

In Turkey the station had a local name and a local reputation. Moskova Radyosu ran Turkish-language broadcasts from the war years onward, and through the Cold War it was one of the foreign voices that came in over shortwave with a version of events that the domestic radio was not going to give you. That was a whole listening culture and it belonged to the generation before mine. I got online in 1998 on a dial-up modem, which is a different way of pulling in signals from elsewhere and roughly the moment when shortwave stopped being how anyone under thirty did it.

The odd coda is that Voice of Russia's Turkish service outlived its shortwave transmitters and moved closer. From 2011 it broadcast in Turkish out of an Istanbul studio, carried on a local FM frequency instead of arriving from Moscow over shortwave. Three years later the name was gone anyway.

~ what took the frequencies ~

Sputnik inherited the languages and a large part of the staff, and it was built for a different distribution problem: search results and social feeds rather than the ionosphere. It has since been blocked or delisted across most of the European Union, which is a fate shortwave never had, because nobody can block a frequency you have already tuned into.

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