80 years of the BBC Russian Service

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Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

This is the 5th floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around

the world. I'm your host, Farnak Amity.

This week, the BBC's Russian Service marked its 80th year on air. In 8 decades, it has grown

from a shortwave radio service to a multimedia operation reaching upwards of 6 million people per

week, despite ongoing blocking in Russia. BBC Russians, Oleg Boulderov, came into the 5th floor

studio to give us his perspective. I myself came into contact with BBC Russian Service when I was

14. My parents, way of spending their summer holidays, were to pack their tents and go into the woods

for a month. And we have that shortwave transistor radio. And obviously, I had not many pastimes

day apart from fishing, picking berries, reading Tolstoy, and that wears you out on day 3.

And I was fiddling with a shortwave radio, and on came the BBC Russian Service legendary DJ

7 of Garotsif, and I was hooked.

And I was hunting those airways back and forth pretty much anytime of the day.

And out there, and this is probably about 200 miles southwest of Moscow,

this was heard pretty well. Even this tiny shortwave radio gave me a pretty good signal.

The origins of BBC Russian Service are actually a bit murky because BBC has

paradic broadcasts in Russian. After World War II came to Soviet Union. And the very first

broadcast came way before 1946. And this was a translation of Winston Churchill speech

describing to the Britons how Nazi Germany attacks Soviet Union. And then there were a few

occasions in which some Russians came on air in Russian. On some occasions, we're actually

Soviet correspondents and the workers from the Soviet embassy. And this was all sort of the

friendly broadcast because obviously Soviet Russia and Britain were allies in the war.

But the proper broadcasting in earnest became possible in March 1946. And it happened very soon

after the famous Fulton speech by Winston Churchill, the same Winston Churchill who now described

an iron curtain descending over Europe. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states

of Central and Eastern Europe. All these famous cities and the population around them lie

in what I must call the Soviet state. BBC were not inherently anti-Soviet,

but obviously the Soviet Union saw the threat. Stalin government saw the threat. In 1948,

the Soviets came back to the technology of jamming. You put your own transmitter,

a more powerful one than the one your adversary is using. And you start broadcasting on the same

frequency. And essentially because your transmitter is closer to the radio, to the receiver,

the radio gets essentially a mixture of both, but it gets your jamming signal better than

the far away original broadcast. The way they jamed BBC with was very inventive.

It's almost impossible to actually figure this out from the way it sounds because it's a cacophony.

You get this crackling, whistling, original voice. On top of that you may get some scraps of music.

Sometimes they were playing the recordings of human voice backwards.

In this, the Soviet operators of those jamming stations were very inventive. I bet there was some

official who was having great fun and deciding what they were going to use for jamming this week

or that week. And they would turn on the jamming on and off depending on the context.

There were periods of more strict jamming and less strict jamming. And a colleague of mine,

who worked in a BBC from 1985, she recalls that in early 60s and 50s, she could hear quite a lot.

This colleague that Oleg is talking about is Natalia Rubenstein. Keep that name in mind because

we'll hear from her later. She's remembering how she would discuss with colleagues

what had been on the radio the night before and about some of the freer times when people

got a little bored, so much so that she would hear the BBC from every open window on her way home.

Now, and then in the 50s and 60s came this legendary figure of Anatoly Goldberg.

For many years he was the editor-in-chief of the Russian service but he was also a commentator

and he put this human dimension and a Russian dimension into whatever was happening. And then he

became a household name. The breaking moment came with invasion of Soviet Union into Czechoslovakia

in August 1968. That's where millions of Russians who were listening to the BBC were able to get

the hangover was happening obviously very much different from the Soviet reasoning of why

they've sent troops into Czechoslovakia. Obviously the war in Afghanistan in 1979, a Soviet union

invaded Afghanistan and the BBC was covering this extensively and obviously it was put in no

punches and that I remember from my parents because they told me they found out about the invasion

and what was happening way before the first bodies of young Soviet soldiers started to pull

back into Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in 1985 but Gorbachev was not very quick

to accept the Western demands to stop jamming. The Soviets insisted that the Western broadcasts were

out there to undermine Soviet beliefs and ideology but sometime in late 1986 Moscow came to conclusion

that the jamming should stop and so one faithful evening in January 1987 BBC suddenly

discovered that it's broadcasting without any jamming. Natalia Rubinstein is one of the

sort of the pillars and veterans of the BBC Russian service. She worked in the museum for years

in the Soviet Union, museum devoted to Pushkin, the famous poet. This was in Leningrad and she spent nearly

25 years broadcasting to Russians. She was a continuity presenter on that day so she sit in there,

it's close to 10 o'clock in the evening and she says all I want to do is go home but I need to say

and here is the summary of our broadcast for the day but first here's the news. She passes

the mic on to the news reader and the news reader is doing here's her job but she is from the studio

managing in the cans and headphones. Look we just got a call from BBC monitoring and they tell us

that we're clean there's no jamming please pass it on to your listeners and she said you know this

was monumental. This was you know the day she still remembers out of so many days spent in

the studio. When I came to work for the BBC Russian service there was no censorship you know the

opinions were flowing left and right in the centre. This is a really lively debate between Vladimir

Geronovsky and Boris Nemtsov to Russian politicians. It's quite personal at this point.

Nemtsov waves a magazine in Geronovsky's face. Geronovsky is up out of his chair shaking his

fist. The presenter thinks a bell every so often. I'm not sure why and eventually Geronovsky

chucks a glass of orange juice in Nemtsov's face. Rips his microphone off and storms out.

And at some point we at the Russian service started feeling you know we broadcasting in short

you know it takes efforts still to tune in. People are flicking on FM switch and I get plenty of

discussions. So at some point it started feeling that the media environment in Russia was much more

vibrant. The first sign that we you know we still relevant was the the start of the war in Chechnya.

By the end of 90s when Vladimir Putin came it was very evident that he was out there to make

sure media behave and do not cross the lines. And that brought a lot of relevance back to us.

And obviously as the Chechen wars were progressing and Vladimir Putin there was a lot of blowback.

The actions from the Chechen resistance, hostage taking, bombings, things that Russian authorities

were not very keen to get any discussions off. And so the BBC Russian service very often gave

voice to Russian journalists and Russian commentators who were very critical of the war. Anna

Politkovsky was one such journalist and the infamous theater siege in Moscow she went into the theater.

She communicated with the hostage takers. We gave her the platform as well and she could speak through us.

I understand perfectly well the working in Chechnya from 1999 being there every month.

Traveling from finished to village I got the trust of local people.

They know they can open up to me and I will not lie. The situation was extreme and people who

committed that terrorist action they wanted to speak honestly. Even people who committed themselves

to death deserve to be heard. And so we spoke. In 2004 Politkovsky was due to attend the site

of a school siege in Bethlan, North Ossetia. A group of mainly Chechen separatists had taken

over 1,000 children and adults hostage. Politkovsky was prevented from flying there. She believed

she was poisoned and I spoke to her I think a day or so after she was brought back by an ambulance

to Moscow. So that became very important too. Anna Politkovsky was found murdered in the elevator

and the apartment block where she lived just two years later in 2006.

But obviously even by late 90s the thing called internet was happening. This was so massively

exciting. We just opened another way of talking to people and this was relevant and this was very

important. But then in 2006 I quit the radio and I actually went to work in Russia in

in its Moscow bureau as a video journalist, as a self-shooter. And that obviously became a very

different work because that's here you are sort of reporting not from the studio. You know you

out there with the events. I remember I was sent to a protest demo and the site of a riot police.

I think this was 2008 and the way they were pushing and shoving people to the ground.

That brings a lot of relevance to your work but you also get the idea that things are

not going good and you know and these were the not even the very first indications that the

freedom of speech that was so evident in the late 90s were very quickly becoming less and less

off. So Russian authorities next step in censorship obviously came with blocking the internet.

That started in 2016-2017. The BBC was free of that until the faithful moment the Russian

troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022. So a week after BBC Radio Liberty, Voice of America,

Deutscheweile and the host of independent Russian media were blocked just like that. I think it was

an hour or two where sort of you could read BBC and then you could not but the next morning

that was it that was curtains. People were not prepared I mean listeners or readers but very

quick the technology of VPN came into full use in Russia. The polls show that at least one third

of Russians know what VPN is and are actively using it. Russian authorities know this and they

are attacking VPNs. The blocking VPNs they figure out how to see what exactly is the traffic that

goes via VPN. So at the moment there is this very shaky state of things where internet where it works

in Russia and in many cities most go included. Mobile internet is not guaranteed at all. The

news providers are looking at ways in which they could still circumvent that but yeah this is the

classic sort of shield and dagger situation where you know there's a competition. So at the moment

this cat and mouse game continues but very often we feel that you know there may be there may be

a very large blow to our internet audiences in Russia. Thanks to Oleg Bolderov from BBC Russian.

If you're a regular listener to the fifth floor it's great to have you back. If you're just

cashing the program for the first time I shall let you know that the fifth floor is at the heart

of global storytelling on the BBC World Service bringing you the best stories from BBC journalists

from all over the world. Before everyone just believed what they got from the authorities

but to see us actually speaking to these leaders holding them to account a lot of people understood

that the authorities actually saying different things and in most cases they actually also don't

even have the facts. Journalists from the BBC's 43 language services are here to help you make

sense of the world. His quote in a tug of war between uncompromising demands of his

Islamist constituency and demands of governing a diverse society. So his tone between those

two tendencies to excite your curiosity. You know that being Venezuela we kept in the central

bank one of the sorts that Bolivar receives for example from Peru. This sort is made with silver

but also gold and has a lot of jewels and even when I was a kid I was like this is weird because

if you have this why he died poor. And to get to grips with the facts behind the headlines.

Of course internet was very very bright and exciting then 30 years ago 30 some years ago

it was going to be the perfect vehicle of democracy, perfect vehicle of pluralism where it's

decentralized by design, by design nobody can control it but of course the governments always find

a way especially with massive resources they have. There are still promises and hopes for the future

that there will be less capabilities for governments to restrict people in Iran and any other countries.

That last voice you heard was my colleague Hadini Li of BBC Persian and right now I would like

to remind you about the work of Haddi and all his colleagues at BBC Persian which is the Persian

language service of the BBC News and it's used by 24 million people around the world the majority

of them in Iran despite being blocked and routinely jammed by Iranian authorities.

You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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Indonesia's Makasar straight is one of the world's busiest shipping routes with 36,000 ships

passing between the islands of Sulawesi and Kalimantan annually beneath the service the area was

once home to thriving corals but by the early 2000s the ecosystem was under threat of dying out

completely as a result of coral damage caused by ship collisions anchors and fishing practices

now a group of young predominantly female divers is setting out to restore the coral

hello my name is Lestia and I'm a multimedia senior journalist from BBC Indonesia

so the story is begin in Makasar straight is a straight between Sulawesi island and Borneo island in

Indonesia Makasar straight is one of the busiest straight in Indonesia it's also the main transportation

routes with 36,000 ships coming along every year in the straight so there's a lot of corals there

it's really beautiful 20 years ago people say it's one of the most beautiful coral reefs

but because of the massive transportation happened there it's damaging the corals

there's a lot of collision between corals and the ship and it's damaging the corals

also when the ship's throwing anchors and it hits the coral underneath it's destroyed them

many fish lives among the corals when the corals destroyed the fish is also disappeared

so because the main livelihood there are fishermen and there's no fish so people have to find

the other means of work and they turn to tourism the damage of the coral has been known from the

early years of 2000s but it's getting more and more and by the year of 2008 people

realized that we need to do something about the corals so a few years ago there's this professor

his name is Safyudin Yusuf and he's from Hassanudin University in Makasar and he has this big idea

of restoring the damaged corals and he asked the locals to involve in this because they know best

of their their environment and he ditched them how to restore the corals by doing transplantation

in a simple way you put a little fragment of the healthy corals into a structure that

they call reef star structure and they planted on the seabed and this will grow into a new collar

reefs in the next few years so the one who did the transplantation is a new wave of

conservationists in Makasar straight and they are the female young divers and they call themselves

underwater gardener they come from various backgrounds but they have one thing in common

is their love towards the sea and the marine biodiversity so they they love to dives and

these hobby what makes them want to do the restoration and also because they're broken-hearted

with the fact that the coral has been damaged from what they told me this is a movement that

been spread out throughout Indonesia there's a lot of volunteers even though they're not regular

volunteers so every weekend roughly three to five divers will join to do the transplantation

and also to do the maintaining of the the new healthy corals so one of the female divers that I

talked with is Dila since 24 years old and she said to me that to see the coral that she

transplanted into the sea and then to see it grows as a healthy coral and to see the fish coming

back to that reefs it's what makes her proud and want to continue to do this kind of restoration

to see it grows and to see marine life slowly coming back to the reefs it makes her really really

proud the Hassanudin University is overseeing all of this kind of restoration activities and they

say with this restoration that female divers did they say a lot of healthy corals now around

more than 50% of the island is coming back and also this new structure give the corals

more resilience towards the stress of the environment so for now they're focusing on this one

island called Samalona Island they publish their new findings and it says this new corals

is has 80% chance of grow with more resilient towards the stress of the environment and it's already

gained 50% of the cover of the corals now and Dila one of the female divers that I interviewed

she also said you can't do it in a in a in a small way like you don't have to be a diver but you can

also do like small things like when you go to the sea and you like snorkeling you try to not

damage the coral by your fence or you don't throw rubbish at sea or you can also do this movement

of coral adoption and and make donations so people could transplant more corals throughout

Indonesia sadly the collision with the ship and also the anchor throwing it's still happening

and now the concept of fashionist is tried to get the government to make a new regulation so

they could regulate the ship to dock and how to throw their anchor so they don't damage the corals

Thanks to Leshtia, Kerto Pati from BBC Indonesia

That's all we've got time for today

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send an email to the 5th floor at BBC.co.uk we love hearing from you you can write to us at

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You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service

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