The author compares attempts by the Russian authorities to restrict Telegram with the Soviet campaign against foreign radio. For many people in Russia, the messenger has long been not just a communication tool but one of the main platforms for news, discussion of public events and exchange of opinions. In the author’s view, pressure on the platform is meant not only to push users toward controlled services such as Max, but also to tighten overall control over information.
At the same time, the text argues, such moves could also harm state propaganda itself: Telegram is widely used by pro-government media and channels, as well as by participants in the war, who in Russia are referred to as participants in the “special military operation.”
The Soviet precedent
After World War II, the number of radio sets in the USSR grew rapidly: in 1955 there were about 33 million, and ten years later that figure had doubled. The spread of standalone receivers made listening to radio an individual activity that was harder to monitor. For the authorities, the problem was that such devices could receive shortwave broadcasts and thus pick up foreign stations.
In 1958, the Central Committee found that up to 85% of shortwave receivers were located in the European part of the USSR where, officials complained, there was “nothing to listen to except enemy radio.” By the late 1950s, around 60 foreign radio stations could be heard in the country. Jamming them cost, as Central Committee officials acknowledged, “hundreds of millions of rubles” — more than Soviet spending on domestic and international broadcasting combined.
Even with “unlimited resources,” isolating the USSR from foreign radio was impossible, one Soviet official acknowledged.
The author notes that jamming often disrupted the USSR’s own broadcasts as well, while foreign stations still remained accessible outside Moscow and Leningrad. In the 1960s and 1970s, listeners looked for ways to improve reception, and by the mid-1970s the KGB cited a study saying that 80% of Moscow students listened to foreign stations. The practice of jamming ended only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and launched glasnost.