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 eight decades, it has

grown from a short-wave radio service to a multimedia operation reaching upwards of 6 million

people per week, despite ongoing blocking in Russia. BBC Russians Oleg Bolderiv 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 short-wave transistor radio,

and obviously I had not many pastimes there, apart from fishing, picking berries,

reading Tolstoy, and that wears you out on day 3. And I was fiddling with a short-wave radio,

and on-chain the BBC Russian Service legendary DJ, 7 of Garotsif, and I was hooked.

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

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

this was heard pretty well. Even this tiny short-wave radio gave me a pretty good signal.

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

had sporadic 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 attacked Soviet Union. And then there were a few

occasions in which some Russians came on air in Russian. On some occasions we were 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, and I encourage him 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 populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviets. Yeah. 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 the early 60s and the 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 bold,

so much so that she would hear the BBC from every open window on her way home.

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

In a few days, there were hundreds of years with the birth of Staling. Staling is one of the

most exquisite leaders of the Soviet Union, who had been under the public critic for too long.

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 he became

a household name. The breaking moment came with invasion of the 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,

Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the BBC was covering this extensively and obviously it

was pulling 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 closed at 10 o'clock

in the evening and she says, you know, 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 his or her job but she is from the

studio manager 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 that

or 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

wave, you know, 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 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 of. And so the BBC Russian service very often gave

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

Anna Poletkovsky 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 village 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, Poletkovsky was due to attend the site of a school siege in

Beslan, North Ossetia. A group of mainly Chechen separatists had taken over 1,000 children and

adults hostage. Poletkovsky was prevented from flying there, she believes 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 Poletkovsky 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

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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 he's torn 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

sword 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 for. 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

other countries. That last voice you heard was my colleague Hadin Ali 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 are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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Indonesia's Makasar Strait 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 Strait. It's a straight between Sulawesi Island and Borneo

Island in Indonesia. Makasar Strait 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 strait. 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 hit the coral underneath, it's destroyed them. Many fish lives

among the corals. When the corals destroyed, the fish 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 corals. So a few years ago, there's this professor, his name is Safyudin Yusuf and he's from

Hassanudin University in Makassar 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 environment and

he teach 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

plant it on the sea bed and this will grow into a new color reefs in the next few years.

So the one who did the transplantation is a new wave of conservationists in Makassar

Strait 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 love to dives and this hobby, what makes them

want to do the restoration and also because they're brokenhearted with the fact that the corals

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 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 gives the corals more resilience

toward the stress of the environment. So for now, they're focusing on this one island called

Samalona Island. They published their new findings and it said this new corals is has 80% chance

of growth 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 fashionists is trying 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, Kertopati from BBC Indonesia.

That's all we've got time for today. If you want to let us know what you think about the show

or you have questions for us, send an email to the fifth floor at BBC.co.uk. We love hearing from

you. You can write to us at the fifth floor, all one word at BBC.co.uk.

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

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