All-Union Radio (Russian:Всесоюзное радио, Vsesoyuznoye radio) was the radio broadcasting organisation for the USSR from 1924 until the dissolution of the USSR. The organization was based in Moscow.

History

Beginning

The first All-Union Radio station, under the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, was opened upon Lenin's initiative (for a "newspaper without a paper" as the best mean of public information) in November 1924. On November 23, 1924 the first regular broadcast was produced in Moscow on the Comintern radio station. In 1925, the Radio Commission of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) was organized for overall supervision of radio broadcasting.

On 30 October 1930, from Tiraspol, MASSR, started broadcasting in Romanian language a Soviet station of 4 kW whose main purpose was the anti-Romanian propaganda to Bessarabia between Prut and Dniester.^[1] In the context in which a new radio mast, M. Gorky, built in 1936 in Tiraspol, allowed a greater coverage of the territory of Moldova, the Romanian state broadcaster started in 1937 to build Radio Basarabia, to counter Soviet propaganda.^[2]

When the Cold War started, Americans launched the station Radio Free Europe while Western broadcasts were launched in the Eastern bloc.

Radio jamming

After the start of the Cold War, the USSR began a programme to attempt to prevent its citizens from listening to broadcasts from Radio Free Europe and the western VOA. The Komsomol, the official youth movement in the USSR, started a campaign to encourage young people to remove or turn away aerials suspected of carrying these broadcasts..

The USSR also instituted a programme of jamming other foreign signals such as the BBC. A network of jamming stations was built near suspected transmitters.

Nevertheless, people continued (or attempted) to listen to Western broadcasts. In fact, there was even no jamming of these signals (excluding Radio Free Europe) at all, from 1963-1968, and from 1973-1980. In 1963, a further attempt was made to draw USSR radio listeners from western broadcasts by launching a radio station favouring Moscow city and oblast. The jamming stopped in 1988 (Radio Free Europe was, however, unblocked in August 1991).

Collapse of the USSR

As the USSR began to fall in the 1980s, the radio organisation of the USSR began to shut down as private services were introduced and the USSR's stations were relaunched and refocused.

Stations

Domestic

• All Union First Programme -the national network of the USSR, focusing on the political and economic life of the Soviet Union.
• Radio Mayak - music and speech based entertainment.
• Radio Yunost - the station for young people.
• Radio Orfey - culture, education, classical music.

International

• Radio Moscow - the foreign-language service.

See also

• Eastern Bloc information dissemination
• Radio jamming
• Censorship in the Soviet Union
• Propaganda in the Soviet Union

External links

• Gosteleradio at the Internet Movie Database
• Russian Museum of Radio and TV website (Russian)

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Radio in the Soviet Union

• Soviet Union
• [1] (Russian)