RussiaDAY by day in Moscow Andrei followed the events of the Prague Spring. Early in the morning and late in the evening after work he tuned in to the BBC’s Russian Service and the American station, Radio Liberty.
In those years Soviet factories still produced huge numbers of short wave radio sets so that people could receive Radio Moscow’s broadcasts from end to end of their vast country. In the 1970s, as the repression of all independent or dissident thought got even worse, fewer sets were manufactured. Television took over in Russia. The fewer the short wave sets there were, the less the population was able to hear news from the West.
Despite the noisy interference broadcast by Soviet transmitters to jam foreign wavelengths, Andrei often managed to hear the news from London about what
