There is a custom in Rus'…
A Brief History of Soviet Jammers
Author: Sergey Tashevsky
Who would have thought it would become relevant again? In today's world, where even the smallest news item instantly spreads across continents, it's hard to imagine a country closed off to information (unless it's North Korea, of course—and even then, they say, some information gets through). But Russia, as they say, has its own path. And it seems to be a circular path. That's why Roskomnadzor officials are trying to shut down instant messaging apps, restrict the internet to a "whitelist," and generally return us to the past, to the era of jamming. But how effective have they been? And how did it all work, anyway?
…Imagine a building in a quiet neighborhood of any large Soviet regional city. No sign other than the standard "Radio Engineering Communications Center" sign or something equally meaningless. Inside are rows of equipment, operators in civilian clothes (or standard-issue soldier's uniforms), and a constant hum radiating into the airwaves. Outside are antenna masts, which locals have long since grown accustomed to ignoring, just as they learn to ignore water towers. This is the jammer. The official Soviet name is "jammer transmitter." Popularly, since the 50s, it has been called "NKVD Jazz."
The joke is spot on—that roar truly did contain a peculiar kind of Cold War music, played 24/7, and this concert consumed a considerable portion of the USSR's budget. At times, the jammers' work truly took on a mockingly melomaniacal tone, and to drown out the "enemy voices," they would suddenly broadcast classical music—for example, excerpts from Grieg's "Peer Gynt":
"Comrade Goldberg is silent, the BBC cannot be heard, and only Solveig's song thunders throughout Rus'!" (Alexander Galich)
But if you look a little deeper into history, it all really started with jazz.
At the height of World War II, in late February 1942, the United States launched foreign broadcasts in Russian—as a counter to Goebbels' propaganda. The ideological radio war was fierce, with no "no man's land" (the United States broadcast in 24 languages!), and so it's no surprise that among other American radio services, a division emerged to produce broadcasts for the Eastern Ally, the USSR. "The Voice of America," as it was then called (later, of course, "The Voice of America").
"We'll talk about America and the war. The news, good or bad, will be our truth," was the motto at the very beginning of the new station's broadcasts. And it strove to live up to that motto. The intervals between news reports were interspersed with music programs, including jazz, which was a great delight for both Soviet soldiers and those civilians who still had access to radios.
Then the war ended, but the Voice of America remained. And year after year, this radio station, which, as luck would have it, continued to tell the truth, became increasingly inconvenient for Stalin. When the Cold War began after Churchill's famous speech, the BBC Russian Service joined the Voice, and the airwaves clearly became too hot for the Bolsheviks. They even considered banning shortwave receivers in the USSR (the head of the Committee on Radiofication and Broadcasting wrote reports to Suslov stating that "...the most reliable defense against hostile foreign radio propaganda against the USSR is the production of radio receivers without a shortwave range"). Indeed, many receivers (classes 2 and 3 according to Soviet GOST standards) began to be manufactured without shortwave. However, the range was retained in top-of-the-line receivers, because, oh my god, "my native land is vast!" Shortwave radio was essential, because other radio frequency bands wouldn't have allowed Soviet propaganda to reach remote areas of the USSR. And how could they have done without it? So a different solution was needed.
That's when "NKVD Jazz" started playing.
It would be more accurate to say "KGB Jazz," because in 1946 the agency underwent a rebranding, but people thought it sounded better that way. Although formally neither the KGB nor the NKVD had anything to do with jamming; those "who were supposed to" handle it, that is, the USSR Ministry of Communications. It was there, on April 19, 1949, that the state program for jamming "false voices" was approved, and construction workers, military personnel, and engineers (in the USSR, these were sometimes the same people) began installing interference generators in regional centers and large cities. And they did it very quickly. While there were only 350 jammers in 1949, the following year their number increased to 600. The pace was impressive—roughly one station per day. For comparison, during those same years, the country was desperately short of hospitals and schools, yet the jamming industry was funded exemplarily.
And yes, of course, the United States and other countries constantly expressed serious concern about Soviet jamming, and the UN General Assembly condemned broadcast jamming in a resolution on December 14, 1950, but the Soviet Union ignored this resolution. This, however, didn't particularly surprise anyone—a country that had just developed an atomic bomb was hardly going to report radio interference to the UN.
By 1958, there were already 1660 jammers in operation, and at the peak of the standoff in the late 70s, there were six thousand. Most were low- and medium-power, built around and within large cities and towns, with a range of up to 40 kilometers. The largest, "long-range" jammers (there were thirteen of them), were located along the perimeter of the USSR: in Yerevan, Minsk, Alma-Ata, and other large cities. Among them were some truly colossal ones, such as the towers of "Object 811" near Lvov (said to be preserved to this day) reaching a height of 260 meters—half the height of the Ostankino TV Tower. These fields of radio masts resembled scenes from science fiction films—that's how science fiction writers once imagined the equipment used to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. However, they weren't looking for intelligence here; they were jamming it.
Fortunately, not always successfully.
Although all these stations broadcast tens of thousands of kilowatts of power and consumed enough electricity to power a medium-sized city, they were only able to jam 40-60% of broadcasts. The remaining 40-60% still reached listeners. In other words, the colossal infrastructure was struggling to cope with even half of its tasks. This was perhaps one of the most costly failures in the history of Soviet bureaucracy—and a top-secret one at that.
Even in large cities, good receivers allowed (with some experience and good fine motor skills) to tune out jammers by carefully turning a knob and still hear enemy transmissions, albeit not very clearly. To achieve this, skilled hands often added special small tuning capacitors, allowing for highly precise frequency adjustments. Receivers were also often modified, simply rewinding the coils and adding a 19-meter band, and in some cases, a 16-meter band. These bands were used by civilian radio broadcasters in Europe and the US, but not in the USSR, so they were considered inaccessible to Soviet citizens (unless they bought a "Grundig receiver," like the character in Vysotsky's famous song about the Bermuda Triangle). Consequently, there were far fewer jammers on those bands.
But even without these technical tricks, jammers proved extremely ineffective—they simply couldn't physically disrupt radio reception across the entire country. No matter how many were built, they were barely enough to cover cities, and they barely reached rural areas.
The author of these lines vividly remembers how, in the early 80s, he traveled in an expedition vehicle from Moscow to Dagestan, stopping many nights in the process, with a Spidola radio. And night after night, as he moved further from the capital, the reception of Radio Liberty and Voice of America became increasingly better. In some places, especially at night, they even sounded clearer than the Soviet Mayak station.
And by the jammers, you could easily determine how far you were from Soviet civilization—because as you approached any large regional or district center, the familiar growl would always appear on the airwaves.
The jammers were located in the most unexpected places, but (despite the secrecy surrounding them) local residents knew exactly where they were. Of course, how could they hide such a thing? In Minsk, for example, they were masts a hundred meters tall—one was located in the courtyards of Independence Avenue near Zolotaya Gorka, another near Gorky Park. Each had an unofficial "exclusion zone" around it—residents were advised not to approach too closely. And in Balashikha, near Moscow, a large facility operated with antennas for several bands, and its masts were also perfectly visible from afar, causing unease among local residents.
True, even if the jammer was visible from the window, it didn't always prevent the reception of the "voices." Firstly, it was Soviet equipment, after all, and therefore it was constantly breaking down. Secondly, precisely adjusting the jammer required true professionalism. But there was a constant shortage of professionals in this field.
While these jamming transmitters were initially operated by real radio engineers and even Ministry of Communications employees, over time, most of the jammers were transferred to the Ministry of Defense. And although the KGB unofficially exercised control over all of this, their operators were recruited from ordinary conscripts with minimal knowledge of radio.
A friend of mine, who later became a rock musician, found himself at one of these jammers (I think it was somewhere near Krasnodar) in the early 1980s. He was simply drafted into the army and sent to this facility. In his opinion, it wasn't the worst possible military service. For example, he had to sit in the radio room 24/7, monitoring enemy radio broadcasts on the 16-meter bands, so he could turn the jammer up to full power during analytical and news broadcasts. Listening to them, of course, was forbidden, but this prohibition didn't apply to music, and within two years of service, he became a true rock 'n' roll expert. Perhaps this predetermined the rest of his life.
While some were building and maintaining jammers, others were methodically overcoming them. Popular ingenuity knew no bounds in this matter. They listened outside the city, where interference was weaker. They listened early in the morning or at night—when the peculiarities of radio wave propagation through the atmosphere made distant radio "voices" slightly more audible (hence, incidentally, the well-known saying: "There's a custom in Rus' of listening to the BBC at night"). As already mentioned, radios were modernized, converted to other bands. Or, as they say, other know-how was used. For example, a standard Latvian-made Sakta radio, if you simultaneously pressed the "KVI" and "KVII" keys, switched to the 16-meter band without any modifications. And there were rumors that Riga craftsmen had deliberately hidden this small sabotage inside an innocuous Soviet household appliance.
However, on occasion, it almost reached the point of actual sabotage. In 1962, Minsk dissident Sergei Khanzhenkov planned to blow up a local jammer—the very same one located on Zolotaya Gorka. He claimed it was supposed to be a "purely demonstrative act" that would not harm a single person—"thousands of people would simply turn on their radios one evening, and the airwaves would be clear." The operation never took place, and Khanzhenkov was arrested and sent to the notorious Dubravlag. But the very idea of blowing up a radio transmitter for the sake of clear airwaves speaks to the degree of irritation the jammers provoked.
And not just among dissidents and dissent. After all, the noise generators, among other things, jammed Soviet broadcasts, especially in remote regions. This outraged even loyal citizens. They would probably be even more outraged if they knew the enormous sums being spent on this "white noise" on the airwaves. Literally, it was wasted. Of course, comparing the expenses of the planned Soviet economy with the market economy of the West is a rather dubious matter, but it is still believed that the expenditure on this vast transmitter network significantly exceeded the funds allocated by America and European countries for international broadcasting (according to various estimates, over $400 million per year). A huge sum of money at that time!
It's therefore unsurprising that the jammers were turned off from time to time. Not permanently and not everywhere. But they fluctuated, as they say, with the party line. Radio jamming increased and decreased, becoming a kind of litmus test of the Union's relations with the West. In 1963, at the end of Khrushchev's thaw, jamming was temporarily lifted from Voice of America and the BBC. In 1968, after the events in Czechoslovakia, it was turned back on. In 1975, during the Helsinki Conference, it was eased again. In 1979, with the introduction of troops into Afghanistan, it was increased to its maximum. But, for example, jamming of Radio Liberty, a more established and hostile station, was never lifted from March 1953 to November 1988. Almost thirty-six years of continuous hum is a kind of record for etheric stubbornness.
And yet, if jammers achieved anything, it was to prove their complete ineffectiveness. By the late 1970s, despite their extensive infrastructure, the audience of Western radio stations in the USSR exceeded thirty million people—approximately 15% of the country's population. And in August 1991, this audience was joined by Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, who had been isolated in his residence in Foros during the coup. He learned about what was happening in Moscow only from broadcasts from Western stations, to which he had finally granted clear airtime just a year earlier. In those days, this proved a lifesaver.
Since then, some jammers have been gradually dismantled, while others have never been addressed, standing as man-made monuments to Soviet idiocy. But this idiocy is stronger than the steel from which their radio masts are made. Because no common sense can explain why the Russian state today, in restricting the internet, is so maniacally seeking to repeat literally every mistake made by party officials in the USSR. It spends enormous amounts of money on this, purchases expensive equipment, and ultimately achieves exactly the same result. No, a far worse one. The current version of "NKVD Jazz" on the internet irritates literally everyone, interferes with life at every turn, and its effectiveness is zero. People will find a way to find out the truth.
Because no matter how hard propaganda and Roskomnadzor try, no matter how much they report on their victories, there is no escaping this: there is a custom in Rus' – to listen to the BBC at night.
