Radio in The Soviet Union - History - Radio Jamming

Radio Jamming

Beginning in 1948, the USSR made use of radio jamming to prevent its citizens from listening to political broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Voice of America (VOA). Over time this initial effort was escalated dramatically, with the approximately 200 jamming stations with a total between 3 and 4 megawatts of output power in 1952 expanded to about 1700 transmitters with a combined 45 megawatts of output power. By this latter date, the list of jammed foreign broadcasts had been expanded to include not only the successors to the BBC and VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, but also Deutsche Welle, Radio Vatican, Kol Israel, and others. Total electricity consumed in the course of this jamming operation has been valued at tens of millions of dollars annually, exclusive of site construction and personnel costs.

Jamming was initially attempted by means of superimposed random speech which mimicked station interference. Due to the ineffectiveness of this method, however, a move was later made to the generation of random noise to obscure human speech. From the early 1970s, satellites generating swinging carrier signals were used to interfere even more effectively.

Nevertheless, people continued (or attempted) to listen to Western broadcasts. In fact, there was even no jamming of these signals (excluding Radio Free Europe) at all, from 1963-1968, and from 1973-1980. In 1963, a further attempt was made to draw USSR radio listeners from western broadcasts by launching a radio station favouring Moscow city and oblast. The jamming stopped in 1988 (Radio Free Europe was, however, unblocked in August 1991).