vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #154 / Special reports / Reading article...

It was once a broadcast Big Brother, the voice of the state chattering in every household. But now wire radio may be crowded out by hard times and the newer stations that fill the airwaves.

Danila Vityuk lives in an old Soviet-style apartment, a simple two-room unit with painted plywood floors and rugs on the walls. In a kitchen cluttered with evidence of a widower’s lifestyle – dirty dishes in the sink, onions on a counter, pots and pans on the table – is a ubiquitous fixture of a Russian household: a cheap plastic radio, attached to the wall.

There is no on-off button, just a volume control that turns the sound higher, or down to an inaudible level. There is never a satisfying click as the noise goes off. It is a wire radio, receiving its programming not over the air, but through cables. And the medium is dying out in Primorye.

“In the ’30s we used to listen to news about the development of heavy industry,” Vityuk said. “Trotsky was against the plan. Stalin would tell us that we were surrounded by enemies and we would have to develop our arms industry.”

Since 1930s, wire radio has been a means first of propaganda and then news and family entertainment. Now, wire radio is dying in the rural areas where the lines aren’t maintained. And its days may be numbered in Vladivostok itself as people tune in to the hipper rock and pop stations that dominate the airwaves.

In 1996, there were 492,150 wire radios in Primorye. That number fell by 38,700 in the first half of this year, and is continuing to decline rapidly. “The system of money-raising is pretty much destroyed,” said Yevgeny Belozyorov, chief engineer of Electrosvyaz, which maintains the lines. Many people don’t pay wire radio bills – after all, the box on the wall will keep chattering anyway – and this denies broadcasters the capital to operate.

A further trouble is the strange division of responsibilities for repair work. Lines and posts are owned by two separate joint-stock companies. (A third company creates the shows.) If a line goes down, the two argue over who is at fault and who should do the repair, said Georgy Klimov, director of Vladivostok Broadcasting Company, which produces wire radio in Primorye.

Wire radio once served as a means of controlling the information people got, said Klimov, who spent his career in print journalism until 1992. As broadcasting spread in the 1920s and 1930s, the communists used wire radio to make sure people across the vast country received the right message.

“At the start, loudspeakers used to be installed in small villages out in the country,” Klimov said. “They used to be next to the offices of the local soviets. Local programs ran for an hour or a half hour a day. For that hour, all the people in the village used to huddle around the wire radio.”

Wire radio was boosted along the way by the government’s nervousness about foreign information on the air. In the 1940s, the government confiscated non-wire radios, fearing the people might be influenced by German propaganda. During the Cold War era, wire radio became a means of spreading the Leninist faith as the West beamed its own broadcasts into Russia.

Soviet-era wire radio lacked the edge of today’s scoop-oriented media. Sometimes a listener’s comprehension of the programming was a matter of intuition and experience. When a Communist Party general secretary died, the announcement was delayed for hours while wire radio played Chaikovsky and Mozart funeral music.

“Music was transmitted for several hours because they in Moscow had not yet decided what to tell the people,” Klimov said. “The Central Committee of the Communist Party was still meeting.”

In the 1940s and early 1950s, programs must have kept listeners glued to their radio sets for hours: “Socialist Emulation” would host competitions between, say, groups of builders, over who could construct the most apartment blocks. Collective farms would battle over whose milkmaids could extract the most milk (doubtless leaving herds of exhausted cows by the end of the competition). But during Khruschev’s thaw, wire radio dared to broadcast contrary opinions, though the conclusions always came down firmly along the Party line.

In the field of literature, wire radio had its golden moments. Producers recorded radio adaptations of Russian, Soviet and foreign playwrights and authors – Gorky, Chekhov, Shaw, Dickens, Twain. (An American investor caused a scandal a few years ago by trying to buy up the entire collection.) Wire radio broadcast even children’s programs and classical music.

Nowadays there are three wire radio channels, though most sets still only receive one. And radio programs have attempted to cover politics and a wider range of news, despite what Klimov says is pressure to present the krai administration in a positive light.

The Vladivostok Broadcasting Company offers news, interviews, music and a non-wire broadcasts for sailors at sea. One program offers live messages to sailors from their families back home. Locals still recall one famous show when a little boy told his father, “I’m all grown up, and I’m not afraid any more, so I sleep all by myself. But Mommy’s afraid, so she sleeps with Uncle Borya.”

Recently in the studio, the news announcements topped the hour. At 1 p.m. a red light clicked on, and in a soundproof booth on the other side of a window, two announcers alternated speaking. It was the best place around to get a rundown of which streets wouldn’t have hot water that week.

Announcer Svetlana Volkova said, “Dalenergo reports that consumers on the following streets will be cut off of hot water from today until October 16: Borodinskaya, Bagrationa, Russkaya, Kutuzova, Davydova.”

Klimov said his company is preparing to broadcast only over the airwaves, even as it hopes wire radio can be saved. “We don’t know for sure that wire radio will fall apart entirely,” he said. “But just in case, we are insuring ourselves.”