The Voice of America
In the Soviet era, the Kremlin blocked the Russian-language service of the Voice of America with heavy static. People still found a way to get it on shortwave radio. When Mikhail Gorbachev ended the jamming, the change was celebrated as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s social transformation.
Years before, when I was a correspondent in Moscow in the mid-1970s, a Russian (who turned out to be a KGB informant on dissidents) gave me an official report from the Ministry of Meat and Milk Production showing how the content of sausages was being degraded with fillers. This was a ploy to maintain my interest in him, but the document was genuine.
I wrote a story that ran deep inside the Washington Post. As so many of my pieces were, it was played back on the Russian language service of VOA.
The next morning our housekeeper, Irina, a stalwart for Post correspondents and their families, asked my wife, Susan, “Can it really be our sausages are so bad?”
This was the only time she revealed that she listened to VOA, but sausage content was clearly an exceptionally serious matter for her.
Playbacks of stories from American newspapers and magazines on VOA — and its counterparts across the Soviet bloc, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — were a welcome glimpse of the free press, which of course the Kremlin media was not.
In our three years in the USSR, I often encountered exclamations when in introducing myself to Russians as Osnos of the Post. “You’re Osnos? I thought you would be older.”
After all, that was fifty years ago. The radio had made me, in a way, well known.
Now Donald Trump has done what the Soviet Union could not: shut down VOA.
Brilliant, Peter ... What is most dismaying from this old East European hand is the end of RFE/RL (tho hopefully with a new life from enlightened Europeans). When I covered the 'satellite' countries for the NYT back in the 1970s, RFE research was the gold standard. The problem? When traveling to any of them, I had to cut off the header & footer of EVERY PAGE to get them through customs without a huge problem....I never could persuade them to pub this on plain paper....still better than the nothing-at-all we may now be facing!
Would imagine your lived experience and work in Soviet Russia is still of immense value in rebuilding new relationships today. The old school take on things and the skill of forging new paths in times of tension is an indispensable and extremely rare quality these days.