Abstract
This article interrogates the well‐known phenomenon of western broadcasting to the Soviet Union from the little‐known vantage point of the audience's sonic experience and expression. I use the example of the BBC's main popular music program in the late USSR, Rok posevy, with its remarkable presenter, Seva Novgorodsev, to explore fundamental questions about the who, how, and why of listening to the so‐called “enemy voices.” The popularity of Novgorodsev's show, I argue, is best understood in the context of the Soviet soundscape and, in particular, of longstanding Soviet media practices, including radio jamming and Soviet ideologies of the voice. Novgorodsev's Rok posevy presented listeners with a powerful alternative sociocultural space, one that promoted models of authority and community very different from Soviet norms and, indeed, antithetical to Soviet norms.
Highlights
Why did people in the late Soviet Union listen to Western radio broadcasts, and what, if anything, is important about the fact that they did? Conventional wisdom will answer these questions in straightforward fashion: Western broadcasters told people truths that the Soviet regime hid from them; people listened because they were hungry for those truths; and truthtelling eroded faith in the Soviet system
For comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank the anonymous readers for The Russian Review as well as Elena Razlogova, and respondents at presentations held at University College Dublin, Cambridge University, the University of Konstanz, and the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies
We have some sociological data to give us a sense for audience size and composition—some collected at the time by Soviet researchers, and some collected by U.S.-funded Radio Liberty from Soviet travelers abroad. (By the 1980s, the estimates are that 50 percent of the urban population listened to Western broadcasts occasionally, 25 percent regularly.3) Perhaps we may conclude in the end that “Western broadcasts kept hope alive” and “contributed to fostering democratic change,” to quote the editors of Cold War Broadcasting, an important recent collection.[4]
Summary
To begin investigating Seva and his audience, I propose that we step back first to consider listening and sound—listening as practices, sound as experience. Writing about radio in the Second World War, Frances Gray argued that for British people, listening to illicit foreign broadcasting was a territorial claim of sorts, an assertion that “even if the air could be co-opted to serve particular military or industrial ends, the soundscape may not be precisely equated with occupied geographical territory.”[34] While Soviet jamming was always a speech act, establishing and confirming the presence of the Soviet authorities in the air, Soviet listening around jamming spoke, too: “listening out” established and confirmed an alternative territory, a soundscape with its own relation to time, space, and experience, owned and controlled by an alternative community of listeners. For all that, for all of jamming’s tremendous power in shaping the “Rok-posevy” experience, I would not want to argue that jamming itself precipitated listening, that Soviet people tuned in to the show purely because of the interference.
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