Radio in the Soviet Union

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Yuri Levitan became the voice of the Soviet government during World War II, when he read the most important news on radio.

Radio broadcasting in the Soviet Union, like all other media, was owned by the state and was under its tight control and censorship.

The governing body in the late Soviet Union was "USSR State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting", or USSR Gosteleradio (Государственный комитет по телевидению и радиовещанию СССР, Гостелерадио СССР), which was in charge both of Soviet TV and Soviet radio.

There were many cultural and scientific programs broadcasted daily. Besides other aims and tasks, like other party-controlled media in the late 1980s, radio broadcasts attempted to instill in the population a sense of duty and loyalty to the Communist Party and Soviet state. Every day the government broadcast an estimated 1,400 hours of radio programming to all parts of the country, often in as many as 70 languages. The main programming emanated from Moscow, where eight radio channels broadcast 180 hours daily to audiences throughout the country.

Government domination of radio broadcasts was, however, not complete. Since the onset of the post-World War II Cold War, government programs have competed with broadcasts originating in the West, which have been aimed across the country's borders with the intention of providing their propaganda to the population, particularly on topics that censors desperately tried to ban. The government, until 1988, routinely jammed radio broadcasts by American-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Deutsche Welle, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) Ministry of the Interior broadcast. An estimated 2 to 3 million citizens regularly listened to these foreign broadcasts when the authorities were not jamming them.