Eighty years of the BBC Russian Service

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1:35Oleg Boldyrev:Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

1:52floor, Farnak Amidi Sobat.

1:56Oleg Boldyrev:This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world. I'm your host, Farnak Amidi.

2:13Oleg Boldyrev:This week, the BBC's Russian service marked its 80th year on air. In eight decades, It has grown from a shortwave radio service to a multimedia operation reaching upwards of 6 million people per week, despite ongoing blocking in Russia. BBC Russian's Oleg Boldirev came into the Fifth Floor studio to give us his perspective. I myself came into contact with BBC Russian service when I was 14. My parents' way of spending their summer holidays were to pack their tents and go into the woods for a month. And we have that shortwave transistor radio. And obviously I had not many pastimes there, apart from fishing, picking berries, reading Tolstoy, and that wears you out on day three.

3:04And I was fiddling with the shortwave radio, and on came the BBC Russian Service legendary DJ Siewa Novgorodsev. and I was hooked.

3:20And I was hunting those airways back and forth pretty much any time of the day. And out there, and this is probably about 200 miles southwest of Moscow, this was heard pretty well. Even this tiny shortwave radio gave me a pretty good signal. California, in the performance of Eagles, which is on the 9th place in the British list and on the 25th place in the American list.

4:12to the Britons how Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Union. And then there were a few occasions in which some Russians came on air in Russian. On some occasions, it were actually Soviet correspondents and the workers from the Soviet embassy. And this was all sort of the friendly broadcast because obviously Soviet Russia and Britain were allies in the war. But the proper broadcasting in earnest became possible in March 1946. And it happened very soon after the famous Fulton speech by Winston Churchill, the same Winston Churchill, who now described an Iron Curtain descending over Europe. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.

5:00All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere. BBC were not inherently anti-Soviet, but obviously the Soviet Union saw the threat. Stalin government saw the threat. In 1948, the Soviets came back to the technology of jamming. You put your own transmitter, a more powerful one than the one your adversary is using, and you start broadcasting on the same frequency. And essentially because your transmitter is closer to the radio, to the receiver, The radio gets essentially a mixture of both, but it gets your jamming signal better than the faraway original broadcast.

5:50The way they jammed BBC with it was very inventive. It's almost impossible to actually figure this out from the way it sounds because it's a cacophony. You get this crackling, whistling original voice. On top of that, you may get some scraps of music. Sometimes they were playing the recordings of human voice backwards. In this, the Soviet operators of those jamming stations were very inventive. I bet there was some official who was having great fun and deciding what they were going to use for jamming this week or that week. And they would turn on the jamming on and off, depending on the context.

6:35There were periods of more strict jamming and less strict jamming. And a colleague of mine who worked in the BBC from 1985, she recalls that, you know, in the early 60s and the 50s, she could hear quite a lot.

7:05Oleg Boldyrev:This colleague that Oleg is talking about is Natalia Rubenstein. Keep that name in mind because we'll hear from her later. She's remembering how she would discuss with colleagues what had been on the radio the night before and about some of the freer times when people got a little bold, so much so that she would hear the BBC from every open window on her way home. Now, and then in the 50s and the 60s came this legendary figure of Anatoly Goldberg. For many years he was the editor-in-chief of the Russian service, but he were also a commentator. And he put this human dimension and the Russian dimension into whatever was happening.

8:02And then he became a household name. The breaking moment came with invasion of Soviet Union into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. That's where millions of Russians who were listening to the BBC were able to get the hang of what was happening. obviously very much different from the Soviet reasoning of why they've sent troops into Czechoslovakia. Obviously, the war in Afghanistan. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the BBC was covering this extensively and obviously was pulling no punches. And that I remember from my parents, because they told me they found out about the invasion and what was happening way before the first bodies of young Soviet soldiers started to pour back into Soviet Union.

8:57Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in 1985, but Gorbachev was not very quick to accept the Western demands to stop jamming. The Soviets insisted that the Western broadcasts were out there to undermine Soviet beliefs and ideology. But sometime in late 1986, Moscow came to conclusion that the jamming should stop. And so one fateful evening in January 1987, BBC suddenly discovered that it's broadcasting without any jamming. Natalia Rubinstein is one of the pillars and the veterans of the BBC Russian service. She worked in the museum for years in the Soviet Union, museum devoted to Pushkin, the famous poet.

9:44This was in Leningrad. And she spent nearly 25 years broadcasting to Russians. She was a continuity presenter on that day. So she's sitting there. It's close to 10 o 'clock in the evening. And she says, you know, all I want to do is go home. But I need to say, and here is the summary of our broadcast for the day. but first, here's the news. She passes the mic on to the newsreader and the newsreader is doing her job. But she hears from the studio manager in the cans and headphones, look, we just got a call from BBC Monitoring and they tell us that we're clean, there's no jamming. Please pass it on to your listeners.

10:30And she said, you know, this was monumental.

10:39This was, you know, the day she still remembers out of so many days spent in the studio. When I came to work for the BBC Russian service, there was no censorship. You know, the opinions were flowing left and right and center.

10:58Oleg Boldyrev:This is a really lively debate between Vladimir Zhiranovsky and Boris Nemtsov, two Russian politicians. It's quite personal at this point. Nemtsov waves a magazine in Zhiranovsky's face. Zhiranovsky is up out of his chair, shaking his fist. The presenter dings a bell every so often. I'm not sure why. And eventually, Zhirinovsky chocks a glass of orange juice in Nemtsov's face, rips his microphone off, and storms out.

11:35And at some point, we at the Russian service started feeling, you know, we're broadcasting on shortwave. You know, it takes effort still to tune in. People are flicking on the FM switch and I get plenty of discussions. So at some point, it started feeling that the media environment in Russia was much more vibrant. The first sign that was still relevant was the start of the war in Chechnya. By the end of the 90s, when Vladimir Putin came, it was very evident that he was out there to make sure media behave and do not cross the lines. and that brought a lot of relevance back to us. And obviously as the Chechen wars were progressing under Vladimir Putin, there was a lot of blowback.

12:26The actions from the Chechen resistance, hostage taking, bombings, things that Russian authorities were not very keen to get any discussions of. And so the BBC Russian service very often gave voice to Russian journalists and Russian commentators who were very critical of the war. Anna Politkovskaya was one such journalist and the infamous theater siege in Moscow, she went into the theater, she communicated with the hostage-takers. We gave her the platform as well, and she could speak through us. I can only tell you about this, but we did not talk about it.

13:15I understand perfectly well that working in Chechnya from 1999, being there every month, traveling from village to village, I got the trust of local people. They know they can open up to me and that I will not lie. The situation was extreme, and people who committed that terrorist action, they wanted to speak honestly. Even people who committed themselves to death deserve to be heard.

13:43Oleg Boldyrev:And so we spoke. In 2004, Politkovskaya was due to attend the site of a school siege in Beslan, North Ossetia. A group of mainly Chechen separatists had taken over 1 ,000 children and adults hostage. Politkovskaya was prevented from flying there. She believed she was poisoned. And I spoke to her, I think, a day or so after she was brought back by an ambulance to Moscow. So that became very important, too. Anna Politkovskaya was found murdered in the elevator in the apartment block where she lived just two years later in 2006. But obviously, even by late 90s, the thing called Internet was happening.

14:31This was so massively exciting. We just opened another way of talking to people. And this was relevant. And this was very modern. But then in 2006, you know, I quit radio. And I actually went to work in Russia, in its Moscow bureau, as a video journalist, as a self-shooter. And that obviously became a very different work. Because that's here you are sort of reporting, not from the studio. You know, you're out there with the events. I remember I was sent to a protest demo. and the site of riot police, I think this was 2008, and the way they were pushing and shoving people to the ground, that brings a lot of relevance to your work, but you also get the idea that things are not going good.

15:18And, you know, and these were not even the very first indications that the freedom of speech that was so evident in the late 90s were very quickly becoming less and less of.

15:36So Russian authorities' next step in censorship obviously came with blocking the Internet. That started in 2016-2017. The BBC was free of that until the fateful moment the Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022. So a week after, BBC, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and the host of independent Russian media were blocked, just like that. I think it was an hour or two where sort of you could read BBC and then you could not, but the next morning, that was it. That was curtains. People were not prepared, I mean listeners or readers, but very quick the technology of VPN came into full use in Russia.

16:32The polls show that at least one-third of Russians know what VPN is and are actively using it. Russian authorities know this and they are attacking VPNs. they're blocking VPNs, they figure out how to see what exactly is the traffic that goes via VPN. So at the moment, there is this very shaky state of things where internet, where it works in Russia and in many cities, Moscow included, mobile internet is not guaranteed at all. The news providers are looking at ways in which they could still circumvent that. But yeah, this is the classic sort of shield and dagger situation where, you know, there's a competition.

17:22So at the moment, this cat and mouse game continues, but very often we feel that, you know, there may be a very large blow to our internet audiences in Russia.

17:36Oleg Boldyrev:Thanks to Oleg Bolderov from BBC Russian.

17:50Oleg Boldyrev:If you're a regular listener to The Fifth Floor, it's great to have you back. If you're just catching the program for the first time, I should let you know that The Fifth Floor is at the heart of global storytelling on the BBC World Service, bringing you the best stories from BBC journalists from all over the world. Before, everyone just believed what they got from the authorities. But to see us actually speaking to these leaders, holding them to account, a lot of people understood that the authorities are actually saying different things. And in most cases, they actually also don't even have the facts.

18:26Oleg Boldyrev:Journalists from the BBC's 43 language services are here to help you make sense of the world. He's caught in a tug of war between uncompromising demands of his Islamist constituency and demands of governing a diverse society. So he's torn between those two tendencies. To excite your curiosity. You know that in Venezuela, we kept in the central bank one of the swords that Bolivar received, for example, from Peru. This sword is made with silver, but also gold, and has a lot of jewels. And even when I was a kid, I was like, this is weird, because if he had this, why he died poor? and to get to grips with the facts behind the headlines.

19:22Of course, internet was very, very bright and exciting than 30 years ago, 30-some years ago. It was going to be the perfect vehicle of democracy, perfect vehicle of pluralism, where it's decentralized by design, by design. Nobody can control it. But of course, the governments always find a way, especially with massive resources they have, there are still promises and hopes for the future that there will be less capabilities for governments to restrict people in Iran and any other countries.

20:03Oleg Boldyrev:That last voice you heard was my colleague Hadi Neely of BBC Persian. And right now, I would like to remind you about the work of Hadi and all his colleagues at BBC Persian, which is the Persian language service of the BBC News. And it's used by 24 million people around the world, the majority of them in Iran, despite being blocked and routinely jammed by Iranian authorities.

20:30Oleg Boldyrev:You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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22:33So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

22:46Oleg Boldyrev:This is the Fifth Floor and I'm Farah Nakamidi.