The “Radiofication” of the Soviet Union

Anyone who has ever traveled to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is used to the more or less steadily playing radio in the kitchen. After World War II, radio became the most popular background medium of industrialized countries. Despite radio’s global impact, our knowledge about its history is very uneven from a geographical standpoint. The trajectory of radio historiography after the mid-1990s went from a national focus on radio as a central agent in building national communities to the exploration of the complex transnational interdependencies that not least included questions of Americanization and of “the war of the airwaves” after 1945.¹

In his new book, the British historian Stephen Lovell convincingly tells the history of Soviet radio as a success story in the long run. Although historians and media and communications scholars have already painted a vivid picture of national radios for some West European countries, the United States, and Western foreign broadcasting stations during the Cold War, there are only a few studies on Soviet radio.² Against this background, Stephen Lovell confidently claims to present “the first full history of Soviet radio in English.” The investigations on Western radio cover a variety of topics ranging from radio technology, content analysis, entertainment and news programming, development of genres, and political propaganda to biographies of radio producers, audience research, and consumer practices.³ Hence the adjective “full” raises some expectations that the book does not fulfill in the end, as it would have been too challenging to examine all the different aspects of media history. Still, Lovell’s book sets the benchmark for any study in the field of radio history, as it gives many insights on a bunch of these topics.

The book is based on a broad and thorough archival groundwork from central and local archives. Lovell further refers to oral history interviews, which currently represent one of the best sources to get information about the daily life and listening practices of ordinary citizens. The author analyzes his materials in seven chronologically arranged chapters.

The first three chapters explore the birth of the new technology, how it spread into Soviet society; how people handled the new medium, gathered in front of the receivers; how the early radio producers conceptualized their programs; and how they spoke and addressed the socially and culturally diverse Soviet audience. From the beginning, radio exerted a high degree of fascination. It attracted enthusiasts of technology, the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks and many ordinary listeners. Focusing on these different groups Lovell highlights the considerable extent to which any medium and attitudes toward technology are framed by people and social practices. Early on, the author illustrates that technological progress is always promoted, as well as hampered, by competing perceptions and ideas. He convincingly explains Soviet radio’s development from a perspective of socio-cultural and political interests, as well as economic opportunities.

Language was an important issue, especially in the early years of the new medium, when it was still struggling for its place in the hierarchy of arts, culture, and political communication. In the 1930s, the debates on the appropriate style of speaking and broadcasting became very heated. Many observers requested that the speakers’ delivery should represent the proletarian culture—whatever this meant. These uncertainties left radio announcers working on a shaky foundation, as potential pitfalls were ever-present but unfortunately not always predictable. To render a proletarian style of delivery compatible with the regime’s claims to make high culture accessible to all was as a complicated task as broadcasting ordinary voices by letting workers and farmers speak on the air.

In a manner similar to the later debates about television, many party members ignored, or rather undervalued, the creative capacities radio offered for propaganda and art productions. Although radio producers tried to take their place among the established arts, the official debates in the 1930s about aesthetics limited radio to...