Abstract
Reviewed by: Simon Huxtable, Loughborough University, UK
In Russia in the Microphone Age, Stephen Lovell shows clearly and insightfully how the story of Soviet radio’s emergence as a mass medium is also a history of Soviet society and culture. Drawing on research from 13 archives across Russia and Estonia, as well as a range of other primary sources, the book narrates the history of Soviet radio, from the technological experiments of the nineteenth century until the start of the 1970s. In contrast to the existing Russian-language histories of Soviet radio, which predominantly focus on political controls and censorship, Lovell offers readers a socio-cultural history that shows how the technological, political, aesthetic and social aspects of broadcasting intertwined. In narrating this history, Lovell illustrates how, despite a range of conflicts in its early decades, radio came to play a vital role in Soviet public life, as exemplified by images of wartime listeners gathering around wired sets to hear the voice of Moscow, or of Russian pensioners listening to transistor radios in a Soviet village.
To use Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor, Lovell’s book is a fox, rather than a hedgehog: rather than one grand thesis, it contains a number of far-reaching ideas. But, if we were to condense the book to a single question it would be this: how did Soviet radio become Soviet radio? In his introduction Lovell reminds us, via Rick Altman, that ‘new technologies are always born nameless’, but the book suggests that they are actually born with a surfeit of names, such as the ‘radio telephone’, before the more familiar term ‘radio broadcasting’ stuck. The creation of a radio network, Lovell suggests, requires its protagonists to form a mental picture of the new medium’s capabilities. These media imaginaries rely heavily both on existing media and predominant norms of communication. Some professionals viewed their craft in dialogue with cinema and theatre, while Lenin imagined radio as a ‘newspaper without paper and without distances’ (71). But, as Lovell shows, the shape of this imaginary changed dramatically, from a vision of radio as a top-down disseminator of information during World War II to a ‘friendly’ source of educational and entertainment programming for diverse listeners by 1970.
Gauging exactly how Soviet radio changed over time is rendered more difficult by the loss of much of Soviet radio’s programming – either because of the strategic destruction of archival material during World War II, or because a lack of resources led to the erasure of recordings. Despite this setback, Lovell’s book brings to the forefront many of the pressing questions faced by radio professionals. What should radio’s aesthetic be? Was it ‘formalist’ to use sound effects? Who had the right to speak and how? Professionals soon learned that the voice of the agitator translated badly to the airwaves, and that a more intimate mode of speaking was required. Yet the authorities’ desire for control trumped professionals’ desire to make effective radio. Stalinist radio often offered up a performance of spontaneity, where seemingly off-the-cuff on-air presentations were checked and double-checked, rehearsed and re-rehearsed. In its first decades, Soviet radio did become a ‘newspaper without distances’, with the problem that this radio-newspaper sounded stilted and bureaucratic to many listeners. Thanks both to development of mobile recording technology after World War II, and to the relaxation of political controls after Stalin’s death, post-war listeners heard a different voice. Presenters, reporters and interviewees were expected to speak spontaneously on air in the belief that, to quote a 1960 article, it was important to ‘speak more calmly, straightforwardly and emotionally on the radio’ (191). Post-war Soviet radio became to many listeners a kind of ‘media friend’ (to use Joshua Meyrowitz’s term): a source of one-way ‘parasocial’ relationships which fostered individual and group identities. In this way, Soviet post-war broadcasting contributed to the development of an emotional public sphere in which shared affective experiences became a means of building community.
Following in the footsteps of other key monographs on Soviet media, including Kristin Roth-Ey’s examination of post-war media culture, and Christine Evans’s work on Central Television, Russia in the Microphone Age is a hugely impressive work, drawing on extensive research and including a wide range of voices. The book raises important questions for the growing number of researchers examining the history of socialist mass media and, at the same time, shows why the story of socialist media is so vital to our understanding of the Soviet project as a whole. Not only does Lovell’s monograph touch on many of the perennial questions of Soviet history, from the nature of its modernity to the relationship of centre to periphery, but it also shows clearly how Soviet radio shaped that history by becoming the unmistakable voice of the country’s public culture.