Pirate radios ‘badge of courage’

Press, 7 September 1976, Page 20

Pirate radios ‘badge of courage’

By

VICTOR ZORZA in Washington

A broadcast over the radio network of the city of Archangel in the far north of Russia, said earlier this year that 30 radio pirates operating illegal transmitters had recently been caught in the area. It said that the pirates transmitted their broadcasts when the official radio stations were silent, especially at night. And it asked lawabiding listeners to report all such broadcasts to the authorities, “at any time of day or night,” and to do so anonymously if they preferred. Thirty radio pirates for a city of 370,000 may seem a lot, but it is still less than the average of 125 illegal transmitters that were being uncovered every month in Donetsk (population 934,000) two years ago, according to a Soviet youth newspaper. Another Soviet press report said at the time that “hundreds of radio hooligans” had been captured in the Moscow area. In the city of Kazan 115 pirate broadcasts were heard by the authorities in *he course of a five-hour check in 1970, and dozens of “radio hooligans” were caught during a police roundup and put on trial. But nothing seems to deter them, as the recent news from Archangel shows. The persistence of illegal broadcasting in what is usuallv described as a police state has often puzzled foreign observers. As long ago as in 1966 the Soviet Supreme Court, alarmed by the

growing numbers of pirate radios, announced that their operators could be prosecuted as political offenders. Before that, the illegal use of radio tmasmitters was treated by the courts as “malicious hooliganism,” But the Supreme Court ruled that radio pirates could also be tried for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” under the dreaded Article 70 of the Penal Code. During the ten years that have elapsed since then the Soviet press has provided a great deal of detail about the operations of the radio pirates, but very little information about any political activities they may indulge in. “Wherever we find radio hooligans,” a police official said in an article in the chief newspaper of Kirghizia, in Soviet Central Asia, “we discover antiSoviet propaganda.” The broadcasts contained “religious twaddle, and antiSoviet anecdotes." In the city of Kuibyshev on the Volga, said the local paper, the police arrested a girl who used to broadcast “full-blooded reactionary rumours and base tittle-tattle” over her own pirate station, which she called Radio Camomile. The political “gossip” which she had broadcast was then spread rapidly by people who were able to give it the ring of authority. “I heard it on the radio,” they would say. Little is known of the content of these broadcasts, because the range of the pi.♦k

rate radio stations is very limited and they cannot be heard abroad. So far as the evidence in the Soviet press goes, the transmitters, which are usually home-made, are mostly operated by youngsters who broadcast the kind of foreign music which is not available from official radio stations. They obtain on the black market tapes of songs by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the like, or they record them directly from foreign broadcasts, and then transmit them locally — interspersing them, of course, with their own comments, jokes and anecdotes. This, no doubt, is how some of the “anti-Soviet” propaganda creeps in. But every now and again news reaches the West of something more serious. A radio pirate in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was sentenced to three years for taping Western newscasts and re-transmitting them for local listeners. A pirate station in the Ukraine has broadcast nationalist antiRussian songs. A newspaper in Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, has reported a two-year sentence for a radio pirate accused of broadcasting “obscene” songs. But for every transmitter which is put out of action, several others pop up. “Cannot the authorities do something,” asked one newspaper more than three years ago, “against the activities of radio hooligans, whose number is increasing catastrophically?” Two years ago a

police officer wrote to the youth newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” to say that if the editors could tell him where to buy the detection equipment, not a single radio pirate would remain in his district.

Most of those caught by the police are fined and have their equipment confiscated. The prison and labour camp sentences are evidently reserved only for the explicitly political offenders — and it seems that few of these are caught. A transmitter which comes on the air only for a brief period, and moves from place to place between broadcasts, cannot be tracked down so easily. Most of the radio pirates castigated in the Soviet press get into the game out of youthful high spirits. The forbidden fruit tastes so much better than any other. But as they get older, some of them become interested in opposition policies. An official broadcast beamed by Moscow Radio to the United States earlier this year said that it would be wrong to ascribe the appearance of pirate radio stations to “acts of defiance” by the young. But “Komsomolskaya Pravda” was closer to the truth when it explained that young people who operated illegal transmitters regarded them as a badge of courage, “a sign of contempt for the risks involved.” And, it added, it made the boys shine in the eyes of the girls (Copyright 1976, _ _ Victor Zorza.)