#9
New York Times
October 18, 2001
Wired Radio Offers a Fraying Link to Russia's Past
By MICHAEL WINES
MOSCOW, Oct. 17 — Anyone who still regards this as the land of the balalaika hasn't listened much to its radio stations, where, increasingly, heavy metal competes with Britney Spears and Natalia Oreiro, a singer who gained a cult following from roles in the Argentine soap operas that dominate daytime television here.
Which is one reason Taisiya Klimenko, 83, and her 88-year-old husband Aleksei don't listen to ordinary radios at all. The Klimenkos get their entertainment not from the air, but from a little box with a wire that runs straight from their 10th-floor kitchen to state studios in downtown Moscow — and has, since the 1930's.
The concept, embraced by millions of other Russians, is known as wired radio, a linear descendant of the loudspeakers that Stalin once hung on poles in farms, communal apartment houses and villages throughout the Soviet Union.
In a culture that almost daily seems a bit more Russian-Western than the day before, wired radio plays its share of Spears and Oreiro. But for those willing to stay in range of its tethered plastic boxes, it also offers theater, sports, book readings and a link to a past that, in the big cities at least, is rapidly fading away. "You turn on the TV, and there's nothing but shooting," scoffed Mr. Klimenko.
"We don't make them listen to heavy metal," Grigory Shevelyov, the vice chairman of the Russian government's Mayak radio company, said in a recent interview.
By law, wired radio reaches virtually every building in every city, village and farm in Russia, not to mention much of the former Soviet Union.
In practice, poverty and changing tastes have frayed the government's direct line to the people. More and more, wired radio connections are either ignored in new buildings, plastered over in old ones, or allowed to rust away.
For decades, the only radio available in the Soviet Union aside from a few Eastern European stations on a little-used wavelength was on the single wired channel — an eclectic mix of stupefying ideology and world- class theater, interviews with tractor workers and gripping hockey games.
That began to change under Leonid I. Brezhnev's regime in the late 1960's, when the loudspeakers of old began to be replaced by two-button, then three-button radio boxes. Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a head of the Communist Party Central Committee's propaganda department, hit on the then-revolutionary notion of creating a channel that dispensed news, culture and popular music.
Called Radio Mayak, or Lighthouse, it was an instant hit and, as time went on, a rare window on the outside world. A weekly program devoted to foreign pop music became a cult favorite among Russian teenagers.
"When I began to work here, in '85, the boldest editors had great difficulty taping Madonna for the program," Mr. Shevelyov said, "and they were strongly reprimanded by their bosses if they broadcast more than two or three songs in a program."
Today's wired radio is a three-button, breadbox-size receiver. One button brings forth Radio Mayak; a second Radio Rossiya (Radio Russia), which offers plays and other serious fare, plus the news feed from state television. The third brings up a channel usually controlled by city or regional governments.
If some government tilt persists, the medium today is more akin to Western public radio. There is no shooting on wired radio, except during the news.
That is exactly as many like it. "I once offered to get my parents a real radio, so they could get accustomed to these new things. But they don't want it," said Olga Volgina, 23, who teaches at a state management institute in Moscow. "When we moved to our apartment two years ago, the first thing my parents did was install the electricity and radio outlets."
Despite government ownership and financing, much has changed for Radio Mayak. The most popular of the wired radio channels, the station must compete fiercely for audience and advertising, said Irina A. Gerasimova, Mayak's chairwoman.
She said that it was impossible to estimate its audience accurately; Russia, she said, was simply too varied.
But clearly, the average listener is considerably older than than at most stations — half are over 60, and 42 per cent are pensioners, according to surveys.
Some two years ago, the company began shifting its musical fare toward younger tastes in an attempt to cultivate a new generation of listeners.
"There were many calls from babushkas who were indignant that we didn't air their favorites anymore," Mr. Shevelyov said. "And it was very difficult to tell them that we couldn't broadcast them in the volumes that we used to."
The eventual answer was to create what the station calls "islands" of music, each appealing to a different taste, at regularly scheduled times. If there is still no rap — "we understand fairly well that we're not a station for 15-year-olds," Mr. Shevelyov said — the strategy seems to have brought new listeners.
But there remains that wire, a leash on Mayak's ambitions.
Three-button boxes, while available in a few Moscow outlets for about $15 and up, are getting hard to find in some places, Ms. Gerasimova said. One possible solution, a spot on the FM radio band, seems unlikely: the FM band is saturated with pop and adult contemporary stations.
Of course, the wire doesn't bother some people a whit.
"Summers, we spend at the dacha," Mrs. Klimenko said. "We take a wireless radio, because we don't have wired radio there. We have to move it around; we have to tune it. It's just too much."
She patted the little plastic Mayak 204 box, with its three buttons and volume knob, perched on the shelf in her kitchen. "This," she said, "is quite enough for us."
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