Echo in the Dark.(Echo of Moscow )(Company overview)

In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell's dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in print--in the commanding editorials of Iskra and Pravda, in the frenzied leaflets passed around in St. Petersburg meeting halls and later reprinted in "Ten Days That Shook the World"--but the leading instrument of enculturation and inundation under Joseph Stalin was a broadcast technology called radio-tochka, literally "radio point," a primitive receiver with no dial and no choice. These cheap wood-framed devices were installed in apartments and hallways, on factory floors, in train stations and bus depots; they played in hospitals, nursing homes, and military barracks; they were nailed to poles in the fields of collective farms and blared along the beaches from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk.

The radio day commenced at 6 A.M.

First, the Soviet anthem, then "Govorit Moskva . . ." ("Moscow speaking").

If someone in a communal apartment shut off the radio, he was considered suspect, defiant, a potential "enemy of the people." The broadcasts issued the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, announced the details of the Five-Year Plan, declared the latest triumph of the Soviet Army and the perfidies of the capitalist West. In addition to the news, there was classical music and readings of classical Russian literature, along with "radio meetings" of village workers and soldiers' mothers. The Soviet people rarely heard Stalin's actual voice--halting, dry, with a thick Georgian accent--but through the radio they absorbed his pronouncements, his view of culture and the world, his implicit message of paternalism and threat. It is hard to imagine now the totality of the instrument and the perverse imagination required to conceive it, but radio-tochka existed for decades, as present as water and electricity and twice as reliable. It was such a successful tool of propaganda that when, in 1942, Hitler visited occupied Ukraine he expressed his admiration for Stalin's methodology and bemoaned the fact that the German people were still listening to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC.

With Stalin's death, in 1953, and the liberalizing thaw under Khrushchev, the Soviet radio dial eventually expanded to include Radio Mayak (Lighthouse) and Radio Yunost (Youth). Mayak's and Yunost's programming was slightly less rigid in tone and more open to popular music, though the ideology was no less reflective of the Kremlin line. For the next three decades, the Soviet regime took great care to jam the Russian-language broadcasts of the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle. Jamming was an ongoing battle between state and subject. Especially in the sixties and seventies, urban intellectuals typically committed their first anti-Soviet act by purchasing a decent radio--either a Soviet Latvian-made Spidola or, if possible, a German-made Grundig--and attempting to listen to the "foreign voices." They would try anything to catch an aural glimpse of the world beyond, turning the radio sideways or upside down to get a signal or sticking the antennas out the window; better yet, they escaped from the big cities to the surrounding dacha communities, where the jamming was less effective. The fortunate listener caught some foreign news on Deutsche Welle, the Beatles on the BBC, Willis Conover's famous jazz broadcasts on VOA.

"We would even listen to Vatican radio, which would give you a good report on what was happening in the Soviet Union, and you didn't care that the announcer would then add 'God bless you,' " the historian Sergei Ivanov said.

When the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, Soviet vacationers listened to news of the events on the beaches of the Baltic sea. The political analyst Masha Lipman, who is married to Ivanov, was in Lithuania at the time, and she recalled, "That summer on the beach, antennas were shooting up all over the place. And, in our circles, when you said that you heard about it 'on the radio' it meant only one thing--that you'd heard it on the Russian-language broadcasts of the VOA, the BBC, or Deutsche Welle." In those circles, there was also a popular rhyme: "Est' obychai na Rusi--noch'iu slishat' Bi-bi-si." ("There's a custom in Russia--at night we listen to the BBC.") At a meeting of the Central Committee's presidium in 1963, Khrushchev pleaded, "Let's . . . figure out a solution so that we ...