Radio was also intended to play a role in improving the literacy and education of the masses. This was to be achieved by popular lectures and conversation series such as ‘Scientists at the microphone’. In the Moscow stations alone there were over 100 interviews, while talks and readings were broadcast every month, many of them featuring prominent Stakhanovite workers and writers. Music programmes were especially favoured. They amounted to roughly 60 per cent of all output. The Moscow stations alone broadcast between 400 and 500 concerts every month from the studios and concert halls of the capital, featuring the nation’s best performers and taking in operas, symphonic music and national ensembles. Novel forms were introduced, such as the use of amateur musicians, music competitions and quizzes. Literary programmes and broadcasts of theatre productions also featured. The Moscow stations broadcast around 100 literary programmes every month. If we include certain other programmes – for children, for campaigners, early-morning sport and gymnastics – we see that the thirties could be said to have had a broadly based radio culture – and even the beginnings of television. This is confirmed by the lively flow of letters from listeners. The Central Radio Committee alone is said to have received around 200,000 letters from listeners annually. Radio, although still a novel medium, had rapidly become a natural component of everyday life.
Radio as the background noise of the new age
Every age has its own background noise, its own ‘sound’. Great historical events are accompanied by the disruption of the familiar sounds to which one has become accustomed. In obedience to the rhythm of technical innovation, a form of life that is nearing its end disappears along with the acoustic cosmos that has come into being over generations. In a collection of essays and studies entitled The Din of Time, Osip Mandelstam summed up the melancholy of the late Russian tsarist Empire, with its admixture of advertisements and revolutionary slogans; Walter Benjamin, who arrived in Moscow at the end of 1926, was deafened by the silence of the church bells, while the chimes he was accustomed to from the churches in Berlin were still ringing in his ears. Benjamin felt he was ‘surrounded’ by churches, monasteries and bell towers at every corner, but no sound emerged from them, not even a hint of what used to be an everyday event: the gradual spreading out of a carpet of sound, now growing, now fading away, created by thousands of different bells, some huge and powerful, others smaller and striking a brighter note, filling the sky of pre-revolutionary Moscow with a rhythmical ordering of time that had grown up over centuries, an ordering of years and months and days, right down to the actual time of day. The silence of the bells, not as the product of a lengthy secularization process but as a sudden termination and rupture, was unprecedented, even though it has scarcely entered the general consciousness even today. We can understand the nervousness of the Bolsheviks and the performing artists and composers they fostered in their efforts to replace the acoustic vacuum that had arisen with a concert of factory sirens, at least on the most important occasions. But what was a single factory siren concert resonating throughout Moscow on 1 May, compared to the hourly chiming, fine-tuned over centuries, of hundreds and thousands of bells of every size, repeated regularly on the hour, spreading out through the ether and then falling silent? The bells were an integral part of the old Russia, and it was their fate to end up being hauled down in their hundreds of thousands amid the howls of the activists of the anti-God movement, waving their banners and shouting in a way that suggested that they were screwing up their courage to desecrate a place where for centuries people had bowed their heads or made the sign of the cross. The great moment for dismantling the bells and bringing them crashing down to the ground was the First Five-Year Plan; that was when the majority of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples were desecrated, put to different uses or razed to the ground.
The new age had its own background noise. Not just the bands of the agitprop parades or the Red Army of Peasants and Workers, but above all the sounds of the new age of technical civilization. To advance this civilization was one of the most ambitious and prestigious aims of the new regime. The New World was composed of new sounds – and indeed of new images: car engines instead of horses’ hooves and the starting-up of an omnibus instead of the horse-drawn hansom or the silent gliding of a sleigh. In the same way, market stallholders fell silent, as did the voices of rival vendors shouting their wares and the murmur of bazaars; they yielded to the rhetoric of political exhortations, of enlightenment and admonition. The soft sound created by the wooden planks traditionally used to provide a surface for Russian streets now disappeared and was replaced by the hard sound produced by the cobblestones or asphalt of modern streets. New too was the clatter of crockery in the restaurants and the silent meals in the perennially overcrowded factory canteens where everyone brought his own spoon. But just as we can see the advance in the world of images – to the poster and the film – the invention and development of the radio and the loudspeaker enables us to identify a similar leap forward in the world of sound. Contemporaries have duly noted this advance.8
In Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit, the role of radio is not emphasized, but it does form part of the inventory whose role in the new reality is taken for granted. Platonov makes his sarcastic and ironic hero Safronov speak as follows:
‘What do you think, comrades?’ asked Safronov on one occasion. ‘How about installing a wireless so we can get to hear all the latest achievements and directives? There are backward masses round here, and cultural revolution and the odd bit of music would keep them from hoarding gloomy feelings.’9
Elsewhere radio is referred to as the loudspeaker of ludicrous propaganda statements:
Comrade Pashkin had vigilantly furnished the navvies’ quarters with a wireless set so that during their time off each of them could absorb the meaning of class life from the loudspeaker.
‘Comrades, our task now is to mobilize stinging nettles along the Front of Socialist Construction! Foreigners are in dire need of stinging nettles …’
‘Comrades, our task now,’ the loudspeaker incessantly proclaimed its demands, ‘is to cut off every horse’s tail and mane! Every 80,000 horses will provide us with 30 tractors! …’
Safronov listened exultantly, his only regret being that he couldn’t talk back into the loudspeaker, that he couldn’t get it to tell everyone about his own activism, his readiness to clip horses, and the need for happiness. Zhachev and Voshchev, however, both began to feel inexplicably ashamed after hearing these long speeches on the wireless; they had nothing against the man talking or the demands he made, but somehow they both ended up feeling more and more shamed by it all.10
The sphere of feelings
But radio can also make people dance and raise their spirits.
The activist had placed the loudspeaker of the wireless out on the OrgYard porch, and it was broadcasting the march of a great campaign while the entire collective farm, together with the local guests who’d hiked their way over, stomped happily up and down. The peasants from the collective farm all had bright faces, as if they had just washed them, and the emptiness in their souls left them feeling cool, cut off and past caring about anything. When the music changed, Yelisey went out into the middle, banged one foot against the ground, and began to dance, with his body upright and his white eyes staring into space; he was like a ramrod, a solitary moving figure jerkily working his bones and torso while everyone else stood stock still. Gradually the peasants got into the swing of things and began to circle around one another, while the women gaily raised their arms and shuffled their legs beneath their skirts. The guests threw down their bags, called the local girls over to join them and began spiritedly jigging about, making themselves feel at home by kissing their new girl friends from the collective farm.
The music from the wireless heightened the excitement even more; the more passive of the menfolk let out whoops of satisfaction while the progressive ones showed the way by whipping up the festive tempo on all fronts, and even the collectiv
ized horses, hearing the hubbub of people enjoying themselves, filed over one by one to the OrgYard and began to whinny.11
The radio brings us everything – news, interviews and reports. It is no respecter of individual situations; it is a sonic space or creates one for individuals – be they happy or unhappy. Nina Kosterina, a Moscow schoolgirl whose father, an old revolutionary, had been arrested, noted in her diary on 20 April 1938, ‘I have just heard a performance of romance “Whether I love you, I do not know, but it seems that I do”. For some time now I have been in a romantic mood and I have even begun to like the moon. I looked out for it yesterday, but couldn’t see it.’12 On 2 October 1938 she noted, ‘Autumn, rain, mist. Where is Papa? How is he feeling? Someone was playing a mournful and moving melody on the violin over the radio. Life has just begun and yet I wonder whether life is still worth living. Friendships all go to pot.’13
Political events were encapsulated in a world of sound. While Ustrialov, for instance, was writing a programmatic text on the subject of ‘The soviets as a new type of state power: the dialectic of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state’, the radio was relaying the first act of Carmen from the Bolshoi Theatre: ‘What bewitching, magic sounds! They revive strings of the soul that were quite worn out and broken, and make them vibrate.’ However, having returned home to Russia, the émigré wrenched himself free of the memories set in motion by the music and returned to the sphere of the ideological struggles of the present.14
Radio listeners as ‘citizens of the world’
Radio was a link with the world at large and the Soviet environment. This was especially true of foreigners. That was the opinion of the Ruth von Mayenburg, a long-term resident in the Comintern Hotel Lux.
For me everyday life in the Lux seemed monotonous – but it wasn’t in reality. If the network connection in the rooms was not switched off, Moscow Radio subjected the entire building to music, long-winded talks, announcements of every kind, often with the volume turned up, especially when the population was to be informed of anything that was particularly important. In that sense, the inhabitants of the Lux formed part of the Russian population, while normally the island of foreigners with controlled access was cut off from everything that formed part of ordinary Russian life.15
Comintern members, in particular, who thought of themselves as belonging to the staff of a worldwide revolutionary movement in a fortress under siege, regarded the radio as a means of keeping in touch – but also as a conduit for (coded) instructions emanating from one of the most powerful transmitters in the world.16 Georgi Dimitrov, the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, also kept abreast of events in Germany through the radio. ‘Listened to Goebbels’ speech at the Nuremberg Party Rally (of the National Socialist Party) on my car radio. Monstrous inflammatory speech!’17
But, as Andrei Arzhilovskii noted in his diary, even ordinary citizens who had the means and the leisure to listen to the radio ‘found life really had become better and more cheerful. The radio booms in your ears and every day you can discover what has been going on in the world.’18
Figure 14.2 M. Poliakov, Stalin’s Speech on the Constitution (1937)
‘Stalin is just about to speak!’
Nikolai Ustrialov, the former émigré, became a regular, systematic listener. He would listen to the radio for hours during the night: direct broadcasts, reports, political analyses; he noted down in detail in his diary what he had heard, providing himself, as it were, with a written record. Even when he was outside Moscow, he tried to form a picture of future developments with the aid of information gleaned from the radio:
Just heard Spain, after that Goebbels and Hitler in Berlin; then, at 7.30, political news from Paris. Even in Lozhkinka one does not descend into provincialism! This magic box which can be opened so easily transforms us all into citizens of the world.
In Madrid – a meeting and a concert in honour of the Soviet Union. The workers’ leader Alvarez del Vayo; our envoy Rosenberg. The exciting combination of ideas that transcend time and space. The ether breathes history.
The roar in the Sports Palace in Berlin. The rabid Goebbels bawls out his speech in honour of the tenth anniversary of the Berlin Nazi organization. A cannonade. The entire speech revolves around this cannon, a hysterical improvisation that drives the listeners into a frenzy. No doubt, a great speaker.
Then, singing, music – and suddenly the shouts of Sieg Heil! Music, the thunder of artillery, stamping, screeching, sighing – and der Führer spricht. A hubbub breaks out again; then a moment of silence – and once again the ether resonates with history in the form of a fast-talking, hoarse baritone voice. Ideas and passions, ideas and forces fly about, but the measured voice of the announcer on Radio Paris adds a few comments: while fine words were being spoken in the Calderon Hall, blood was flowing in the nearby streets – blood shed by Franco’s bombs. That is what is known as the Feast of the Gods.19
Stalin: the original soundtrack: the direction of the historical moment
Even such an independent spirit as the scholar Vladimir I. Vernadskii recorded his impressions in his diary when he heard Stalin’s voice for the first time on the radio: ‘Astonishing that it is possible to have such success with such poor qualifications – his voice and accent are both uneducated.’20
Ustrialov, a skilled and experienced journalist, followed the radio broadcasts of the sessions of the Eighth Soviet Congress at which the new ‘Stalinist constitution’ was approved. He made a record of his own reactions. Although merely a listener to the radio, he seems almost to have been present at the Congress, so powerful was the impression he received:
Listening to the radio. I hear the inviting sounds of the ‘Internationale’, but in such an extraordinary, unique performance: the Eighth Congress of the Soviets is joined in song.
Kalinin has already given his introductory speech. Stalin is just about to speak!
A bell. The election of the Congress presidium. Motion: 29 names are put forward. They are listed … Voroshilov: ovations. The Aleksandr Palace exudes enthusiasm today. Zhdanov, Kalinin (applause) … Kaganovich (ovations). Then Liubchenko, then Molotov … A large amount of time is taken up with greetings – that’s probably how it has to be. Comrades Ordzhonikidze, Petrovskii, Postyshev, Rudzutak. Comrade Stalin? A renewed storm of applause, shouts, outbursts of enthusiasm, cheering, never-ending ovations.
One would like to think and live amid such a din, such excitement. One would even like to join in the shouting. ‘Sulimov, Khrushchev, Cherniakov – comrades, comrades, I beseech you to be quiet’, the Chairman pleads. And then the final name: Comrade Litvinov …
The vetting commission. The chairman: Comrade Iakovlev. Another 22 people to be elected. Agreed. Agenda. Agreed. Standing orders. Akulto lists the items to be discussed. Ritual as usual. Stalin. I shall listen.21
Ustrialov gives a detailed account of the principal points of Stalin’s speech: his definition of the new classes and the socio-political roots of the principles of the constitution. He also spent the Day of the Constitution, 6 December 1936, listening to the radio. At 2 a.m. he wrote up his diary entry: ‘Holiday in honour of the constitution. Throughout the day the radio overflowed with patriotic enthusiasm and socialist triumph. One mass rally after the other right across the nation. A demonstration of solidarity and fraternity throughout the land.’ Ustrialov agrees with the French constitutional lawyer who had maintained that Russia had no national consciousness, and that not until this moment had the time come for the country to become aware of its identity as a whole.
The art of power. How it has been mastered by our leadership, our party! And in such an age! And in a situation where it has to confront the entire bourgeois world – in other words, all the nations of the contemporary world! A gigantic challenge. A superhuman task! What incomparable courage! But it is succeeding. Just see how ‘straightforwardly’ it’s all going. Smoothly, absolutely ‘naturally’. At first, you do not even n
otice the remarkable mastery that is required. Dairy women just turn up, as does Makar Masai [a top operative in a steel smelter]; an Aleksei Stakhanov is invited to join the editorial board to produce the final version of the texts of the constitution; such people emerge from everywhere in the country in order to make their contribution.
‘Every cook should be able to govern the country.’ The common cause. ‘There is a Field Marshal’s baton in every soldier’s knapsack.’ Makar Masai – he’s magnificent; he is ‘representative’, as Keyserling, Ortega and tutti quanti would all say. Mass man [In German in the original].
And, at the same time, Stalin is the concrete symbol of willpower, the personification of the state, the personification of socialism, the embodiment of the new plan for everyday life and of consciousness.
This organizing, hypnotic name – the name is both a slogan and a person – was sent by Fate – logically, historically and socially. The successful revolution – the great revolution! – calls for a clear, conscious, concrete leadership, especially in a country such as ours, a country of many peoples, peoples who are wont to think concretely. And, fortunately, we have been granted such leadership! Its very success stands out in its features. This fact may dismay one or other of the Old Bolsheviks who have dialectically turned into counterrevolutionaries; it may even infuriate them. But even if it elicits the usual grimace from our eternally impotent and failed intelligentsia, this does not change the fact that all this is indispensable and indeed of crucial significance for the future. Our country is not a House of Science in Mertvyi pereulok, but the machinery of state of a Eurasian power at a critical juncture in world history. It is not led by an old-style expert in English constitutional law. We need a talisman; we need STALIN [underlined in the original, and a picture of Stalin in profile has been glued into the diary at this point] to set the steam pistons, the valves and cogwheels in motion, these systems of systems made by men for men and which are essential to rescue our state, to reconstruct it, to make it great and to secure the victory of socialism, to consolidate it and to extend its influence! The countless millions, Makar Masai and the unique, incomparable and beloved Stalin – all these concepts are intertwined. They are intertwined, not only organizationally, but also historically and politically. Anyone incapable of understanding this or unable to ‘accept’ it has no place in the realm of contemporary reality and, moreover, has no true love of his country.
Moscow, 1937 Page 33