Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere

In the 1960s, Radio Moscow’s North American service was ubiquitous. You could casually tune through the 25 or 31 meter bands any night and be treated to their signal, with the familiar voices, perfect English, and always-recognizable, slightly bassy Radio Moscow signal quality. Along with the BBC, HCJB and Radio Australia, it was one of the first stations an SWL would hear. Of course, Radio Moscow programming was a master course in "fake news" in the days when it was still called propaganda, but it was so well packaged that even a disbeliever could be forgiven for wondering if it might actually be true. Cutbacks in the 1990s were the start of the station’s decline, and today Radio Moscow, or Radio Rossii as it was called later, is just a shortwave memory.

But in 1961 Radio Moscow was everywhere, and in that year an unconventional audio engineer named Emory Cook produced an LP record on his Cook label titled "Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere." The recording is divided into various parts. Side A covers Struggle for Democracy, Mud Slinging in Latin America, and Segregation. Side B deals with Aggression, War and Peace, Religion, Free World vs. Police State, and Propaganda. The parts are separated by the familiar Radio Moscow interval signal. If you want to listen to one part at a time, your best bet is YouTube, to whom the recording was provided by Smithsonian Folkway Recordings  If you want to hear the whole thing, or avoid the YouTube ads and popups, click below:

The record was the source of some commentary in the "DX Listening Digest" section of the October 2007 Contact, the monthly bulletin of the U.K.’s World DX Club.

Perhaps more interesting than the record itself was Emory Cook’s pioneering of some interesting, if short-lived, recording techniques. He was a person of some notoriety, and has earned his own Wikipedia page, as well as a place at the Smithsonian. A complete list of his records can be found here, and the Radio Moscow LP is still available for purchase by way of CD or download here. According to the album notes, Cook was thinking about releasing more Moscow records, but it looks like this is the only one that ever made it out. The album notes, which contain further commentary on the various subjects covered in the recording, are a little dense, both in appearance and content. It looks like Cook authored them himself, with the help of "ethnomusicologist" Sam Eskin, who apparently had his own following.