Word: russian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Monitoring stations report that about 20% of the programs are getting through entirely unjammed; 35% are jammed but still intelligible. Since the news is repeated over & over 24 hours a day, the Russians are undoubtedly still getting much news from the outside world. So far they have not been forbidden to listen to the Voice. As one escaped Russian airman put it: "To listen is not forbidden but it is not recommended...
After the first few days of defeat, the Voice and BBC rallied. They called up reinforcements (more transmitters) and settled down to a long, subtle contest. Soviet jamming proved that Voice programs were being heard by the Russian people and were feared by the Kremlin. Now all the Voice's Russian-language programs carry a punch line: "Obviously somebody considers it dangerous to permit the Soviet people to listen to truthful information from a free radio...
Strategic Error. The Voice's opportunity was originally of Russian making. To reach its own people over vast Russian distances, the Soviet government built many short-wave (6,000 to 21,000-kilo-cycle) transmitters and distributed about 5,000,000 short-wave receivers to listeners. This proved a strategic mistake. Under good conditions, short-wave listeners could also hear programs from as far away as the U.S. and Manila...
...news-starved Russian people took quick advantage. Voicemen believe that about 8,000,000 Russians listen regularly to bootlegged news from the West. The reports then flash by grapevine all over the Soviet Union. The Kremlin's answer was jamming. But, says Voiceman Herrick, "jamming is like a chess game." First you make a move. Your opponent makes a move; then you make a countermove...
...counter jamming is to use so many frequencies that the opponent cannot obliterate them all. The Voice now uses 36 stations and the BBC 25. They change their frequencies suddenly and often, instructing the Russian listeners to "search all short-wave bands." This keeps the jammers on the jump. It takes them about twelve seconds on the average to find and jam a dodging program. In the unjammed interval, an alert Russian listener may sometimes pick up a tidbit of news...