Around The Samovar

A samovar is a metal container traditionally used to boil water for tea. There's a central tube in which you burn coal or wood to heat the water. Many Russian samovars have a konforta, a sing-shaped attachment that holds a teapot filled with tea concentrate. They're often very decorative.

The first reference I ever read misnamed the program, perhaps deliberately. It was in a truly excellent book Poland Under Black Light by Janusz Anderman. My English translated copy is from 1985.

"...a shop trainee showers people standing in line with orangeade and hides, laughing, behind the empty shelves; no one reacts; many newspapers carry reports on the bear that has shown up in the Tatra, it is affectionately referred to as Teddy, and a special correspondent reports on it for the Express; on Polish radio there's a program "Teatime Round the Samovar".

The Program at first seemed not to exist. Then I found the name variation. The was a Russian music program named "Around the Samovar."With the correct name I found multiple references. the most detailed is the March 12th 1934 issue of the Jewish Daily Bulletin in the Kilocycles column by George Field. [SOURCE]

"WEVD presents two other worthwhile programs, at 10:15 p. m. the University of the Air will be in charge of Professor Ernest Sutherland Bates who discusses "Coordination in our Present-day Life" and at 10:30 Zinoida Nicolina, soprano, Simon Philipoff, balalaika artist, Zam's Gypsy orchestra appear on Around the Samovar program."

 A 1930 issue of the Arriba record lists the program on the Columbia System at 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. In 1931 the Alabama Digital archives list the program in July of 1931 at 7:00 PM. [SOURCE]  The May 1931 Cincinnati Radio Dial lists the program at 10:30 on WKRC. It gives the impression that the show moved around often in it's first year.  It was some time before I found anything other than listings on radio schedules. 

The February 1931 issue of "What's On air" answers our origin questions. [SOURCE]. Columbia cancelled the program Majestic Curiosity Shop and mailed a misprint of their schedule for that month. Listeners were displeased with the mix up but we now learn that "Around the Samovar" debuted Sunday January 4th, 1931 and got their first earful of Peter Biljo and his Balalaika Orchestra. Purportedly Biljo was born in Leningrad, today called Saint Petersburg in 1893. (They were sometimes also called the Bilji Balalaika Orchastra.)  The Ogdensburg Republican Journal from that same week made note of the change in the Daily radio Highlights column by C. E. Butterfield with the arcane note

That issue of the Cincinnati Radio Dial also lists off more performers: Valia Valentinova, contralto; Eli Spivak, baritone; Eliena Kazanova, violinist, and Peter Biljo, director of the balalaika orchestra.The Radio Pictoral Spring 1931 issue took a stab at describing the program. [SOURCE] It listed the above performers and a very short description: "Around the Samovar" instead of the Curosity Shop, WABC chain at 9, with, the Gauchoa Going on at 10.30."  It included a list of the stations that carried the program: WHEC, WKBW, WEAN, WNAC, WORC, WPG, WJAS, WLBW, WMAL, WCAO, WTAR, WDBJ, and WADC. But the Cincinnati Radio Dial had more description:

"Each broadcast of"Around the Samovar" presents some new and novel phase of Russian music or some charming folk song that introduces the listener to new musical enjoyment. The programs are carefully prepared and rehearsed before going on the air, although they give one an impression of gay spontaneity."

The only problem with that story is that it very clearly appears on a WABC schedule at 9:30 PM, March 22nd 1930. [SOURCE]  It aired between the Nit Wit Hour and the Paramount Publix Hour.  More here on that Nit Wit Hour. [LINK]

The October 3rd, 1929 Brooklyn Times Union also listed the program with a complete song listing, and cited all solo performances.(below)  I had to look up Chankamanka; it appears to be made up or misspelled. Further backing up the 1929 date is a thesis paper by Martin Edmund Kiszko The Origins and Place of the Balalaika in Russian Culture. 

Kiszko goes on to describe the program in more detail then anything else I ever found. [SOURCE] It includes two extracts from a September 22nd 1929 script for the program from the Kasura collection. University of Illinois. (See pages 101 and 102.)

"One of the most popular radio programmes of the late twenties, when recordings of Russian music hit their peak, was Around the Samovar, illustrated here with copies of the original 1929 scripts (document 2). Around the Samovar featured Peter Biljo's Balalaika Orchestra and Soloists. The show's radio scripts of 1929 display a repertoire primarily made up of ballads, gypsy songs, popular Russian dances for orchestra,arrangements of Russian and European art music, and violin solos. Predominant is the use of the baritone or soprano vocalist accompanied by orchestra."

It also appears in a June 1930 WABC schedule in the Radio Digest. It seems clear that seasons of the program aired from Spring of 1929 through 1930. Wireless World even paused to call it "A little Russian Programme" in their Future Features column of 1929. That may be it's actual debut. Also on WABC in 1929 was the program "In a Russian Village." It was already airing weekly in June of 1929 , and debut on the network at 8:00 June 7th. This appear in the Encyclopedia of American Radio, 1920-1960 by Luther Sies. It's short description states that it aired in 1929 and 1930 on CBS, featuring Peter Biljo and his Russian Musicians. It appears to be very similar to the Around the Samovar program lacking only the bevy of vocalists. The 1930 Who is Who in Radio describes Peter as the Director of Russian programs at Columbia Broadcasting.

The book The Ultimate History of Network Radio Programming by Jay Hickerson provides a bit of an Epilogue. In July and August of 1934 Biljo also directed the program Balalaika Orchestra aka Samovar Serenade for CBS. Then Peter Biljo pops up in 1938 advertised along choice liquors in a Russian restaurant advert.Sometime between 1934 and 1938 Peter's radio career came to an end. 

Peter Biljo died in Woodbury, CT in 1963. His earliest 78 was released by Brunswick in 1928. More here. The name of his radio program was borrowed by other musicians for their songs and albums including Leonid Bolotine, Vasily Andreyev even writer Bill Sarnoff.  The earliest appearance of his name is a 1926 issue of Billboard index of "legitimate" stage. This notes a performance of his balalaika Orchestra at Aeolian Hall backing vocalist Nadiejda Plevitzkaia alongside pianist Max Rabinovitch.  In an exciting twist it was later found that Plevitskaya was recruited by the NKVD (soviet secret police) he was arrested and eventually imprisoned for espionage in France. It's the basis of the French film Triple Agent (2004).

But getting back to the start of this query, how did Janusz Anderman hear this program having been born in 1949 in Poland? He's about 75 years old and still writing. His last book was Shaving of Losers published in 2021. He worked at Radio Wolna aka Radio Free Europe in the late 1970s. He also published the radio play "Stadion" in 1989. It's possible he became aware of those early American Russian programs possibly though radio Wolna or the then famous story of Ms. Plevitskaya. He's still alive today... Perhaps I should ask him.

The Baltic Chain and Radio

Today Hong Kong is trying to "unshackle" itself from China. On August 23rd in 2019 supporters of their pro-democracy movement linked hands across the island, creating human chains on both sides of the city's harbor that they stretched for almost 25 miles.

These protests were inspired a a similar, but much larger historic protest, in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. On Aug. 23, 1989 approximately two million people joined hands forming a chain 419 miles long. (some estimates say 1.5 M) It stretched from Tallinn in Estonia, through the Latvia capital Riga, to Vilnius in Lithuania.

The protest was referred to as the "Baltic Chain" or the "Baltic Way" or even the "Chain of Freedom."  The Soviets called it "nationalist hysteria" driven by "extremist elements" promoting anti-socialist and anti-soviet agendas. Were outsiders were exploiting nationalism with the goal of independence? Well that last bit turned out to be true.

Coordinating two million people is no small feat. They disseminated information through regional organizations like the Latvian Popular Front, the Reform Movement of Lithuania, and the Popular Front of Estonia and via clandestine broadcast services, like Radio Free Europe, VOA and the BBC despite Soviet jamming efforts.

President Gerald Ford strongly supported funding for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe in speeches in 1974. These broadcasts were elevated to a new status in November of 1983 when they were incorporated into a separate Baltic radio division called the Baltic States Service of Radio Liberty. For more on that please read Jonathan Conde's 2018 masters thesis [LINK].

The Baltics had largely industrialized Post-WWII under the Soviets. They post 1968 moved directly into commercialism. In 1967 the Estonia Stereo was developed at Tallinn Radio-Electronics. It was the first stereophonic radio set in the whole USSR, [model Estonia-005] and it was manufactured at the Red RET plant in Tallinn between 1969 and 1973.  Between 1971 and 1972 car sales in Estonia quintupled. But the media was still strictly controlled, and the internet was decades away.  As Peeter Vihalemm wrote in his paper Media Use in Estonia, "During the period of glasnost, when the multi-party system did not yet exist and the underground centers were weak, the media was the main mechanism of mass mobilization " [LINK].

The Book Estonia Life Stories by by Tiina Kirss and Rutt Hinrikus gives the story of Asta Luksepp. 

"Before leaving I stopped by at home and adjusted the radio to the right wavelegnth for my mother.  We gathered at the market square in Elva... Our assigned place in the chain was between Nuia and Viljandi. We kept driving toward Latvia until it was 7 o'clock. We stopped the buses and joined other folks from Vorumaa. There were so many people that we could not fit in one line, so we formed parallel chains. We were all moved to tears. We had radios along, and thus could follow the orders coming from Tallinn."

So what radio stations broadcast the signals and the events? According to Peeter Vihalemm, most of them.  "...the two-million-person demonstration “Baltic chain”, organised on 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was not only directly broadcast on all radio and TV channels in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but it was also organised and managed with the assistance of the media."  The weakness of the Soviets in this moment and the popularity of the independence movement is hard to overstate. The Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians expected reprisals and for the most part... they did not come, not that day anyway.

The reprisals came when Estonia made the big move for independence and started printing up their own Estonian Passports, then declared independence on August 20th 1991. Moscow sent in the tanks.  Thousands of citizens the Tallinn radio and TV tower to prevent it's use for Soviet propaganda. Radio operators jammed the elevator and threatened to turn on the oxygen-removing fire-suppression system on the soldiers. Bullet holes dating from the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 are still visible at the base of the tower.

While the people of Hong Hong fight their own fight, in Lithuania they commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Baltic Way with a radio art installation. It was conceived of by two young artists, Viaceslavas Mickevicius and Ieva Makauskaite who worked with Lithuanian national broadcaster LRT.
The radio installation, entitled "One Wave" is made up of more than 2,000 old radios that will play a trilingual song known to be the anthem of the Baltic Way entitled "The Baltics are waking up". According to EuroNews, Mickevicius, who was 5 years old in 1989, wondered how they managed to organise the protest. "It appeared that the main role was played by the radio. Special radio broadcasts helped to coordinate the rally," said Viaceslavas Mickevicius, one of the two artists.

Radio Azadliq means Radio Liberty

The word Azadliq (that is Azadlıq in cryllic) in the Azerbaijani language means Freedom or Liberty. There is a popular newspaper in Azerbaijan named Azadliq. In the city of Baku lies the biggest city-center square in the country, Azadliq square. [LINK] Prior to 1991, the square was named Lenin Square which leads to my third example: Radio Azadliq.

Radio Azadliq is just another name for Radio Free Europe (RFE) or Radio Liberty. The station broadcasts programs in many languages: Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Bosnian, Belarusian, Chechen, Crimean Tatar, Dari, English, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Tajik, Tatar, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek... Notice that Spanish, French and Italian aren't on there. RFE has always targeted Western Europe.

The division between the Russian sphere of influence and the West has a special relevance in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan first declared independence in 1918, breaking loose of the Russian empire in it's post WWI collapse. But Azerbaijan has oil. So after the rise of communism,under Lenin, Russia attacked, and an estimated 20,000 Azerbaijani soldiers died defending their 2-year old country. This soviet control remained status quo until 1991, when following Russia's economic collapse, Azerbaijan declared independence again. The Soviet response was more muted this time. They supported a military coup which installed a soviet-era former government. But Azerbaijan retained a somewhat independent-ish media until about 2007. More here.

In 2007 came the arrest of more than a dozen reporters critical of the regime. Newspapers were shut down, crushed by lawsuits. In 2008, the government of Azerbaijan  imposed a ban on all foreign media broadcasting in the country, including BBC, Evropa-Plus, Voice of America, and RFE, effective  January 1st, 2009. Radio Azadliq lost their 101.7 FM signal, more here. RFE continued on with a local office, but with content only available on shortwave, satellite or online.  More here and here.

Annually the regime created new restrictions on freedom of the press. They passed new laws banning photography without permission, anti-libel laws, bogus "hooliganism" rules. In 2011 at least 50 domestic and foreign journalists were harassed or attacked in 2011 in Azerbaijan. Then came the big 20014 crackdown.  The government has accused the station and its employees of espionage and of being a foreign-financed entity. The first charge is bogus, but the second charge is entirely true. Radio Free Europe has been financed by the American government since it was founded in 1953. The Baku office only opened in the 1990s.

The police raided the that same Baku office and seized computers, flash drives, documents and other materials, and then sealed the premises. A dozen employees of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Azerbaijan were arrested on December 27th and detained for up to 12 hours of questioning and/or torture. Officials even detained the station’s cleaning woman.

Afterward, Radio Azadliq stubbornly continued it's programming. The regime responded by blocking their website and and some social media platforms. In 2016 Radio Azadliq’s daily program Azadliq A-Live was been taken off air by Kanal-V, a satellite television channel is broadcast over the Turksat 1C 420 Satellite. No explanation was given. Now limited to Facebook and Youtube, Radio Azadliq still presses on. More here.

A Silver Brick

On September 30th 1951 the president of Radio Free Europe (RFE) General Charles Douglas Jackson spoke in Reno NV. It was part of the "Crusade for Freedom" campaign by RFE.  There were 1,500 people in the Reno high school gymnasium. Radio station 1230 KATO-AM carried his speech live.  The vent went on for three hours and Clark Gable wielded the gavel to auction off a silver brick bearing the words "Nevada 1951." It was only one small part of the RFE "Crusade for Freedom" which financed their operations. Jackson toured the country and held TV network events on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Back in 1951 the silver brick was won with a high bid of $800 by casino and hotel magnate Charles W. Mapes Jr.  Then Mr. Mapes donated the brick back to RFE and it was taken to Las Vegas the next day where it was auctioned off again in front of a crowd of 2,000 at Elks stadium. This process was repeated at least fifty times, even once at the tiny Smith Valley Rotary Club in Wellington, NV where it only went for $21. The process seems so Normal Rockwell that you can overlook the fact that Charles Douglas Jackson was a spook that worked for the CIA for almost 50 years.

In official RFE history they usually refer to the man as C.D. Jackson. (I'm not sure if anyone actually called him that.) If you recall, RFE was created by the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), a CIA front organization formed by Allen Dulles in 1949. The NCFE included a mix of government spooks and moneyed business men from banker Frank Altschul to Reader's Digest owner DeWitt Wallace. The first chairman of the NCFE was diplomat and spook Joseph Grew, Jackson was it's second from 1951 to 1952. His speech at that rally was mostly about the evils of Communism.

"Truth is Communism's deadliest enemy. If the United States can win the cold war against Communism in Europe, the world stands a good chance of avoiding a shooting war. America's chief hopes for winning the cold war must be pinned on such innovations as radio networks and balloons, which carry messages of truth behind the iron curtain."

So, however you feel about the efficacy of it's mission or accomplishments, you have to concede first that the RFE was a U.S. government-controlled propaganda outlet. This a common use of resources by all governments. Given the ability to present information in a self-interested manner, most nations, businesses and individuals will do so. The criminality lies in the scope and scale. The important thing here is that the story about the silver brick was not a fund-raiser. It was a marketing ploy.  Propaganda was broadcast on the radio in Europe, but in the U.S. it was a pantomime.

RADIO FREE EUROPE

This image is courtesy Thom over at the AFRTS Archive Blog.

With the recent tensions between the United States and The Russian Federation of late I though tit might be worth revisiting the existence of Radio Free Europe (aka Radio Liberty). The radio service was actually founded a noticeably after the end of WWII. It wasn't a tool of the West against the Nazis. It was used as a tool against the Communists during the cold war funded by the CIA. Germany surrendered in May of 1945, Japan in august of the same year.  There was quite a lull in hostilities before RFE began broadcasting propaganda in 1949.

Also note that RFE is still broadcasting today. They still maintain 20 local bureaus in countries throughout Europe, and a corporate office in Washington D.C. Their coverage area includes: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgzstan, Macedonia, Modolva, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Pretty much the only part of Western Europe they aren't in is Romania and Bulgaria. RFE was headquartered at in Munich, Germany, from 1949 to 1995. The address must have seemed less politically appealing after German reunification as the headquarters were moved to Prague in the Czech Republic.

Their broadcasts have not been static. They have expanded and contracted as European Communism ebbs and flows. The RFE ended broadcasts to Hungary in 1993 and stopped broadcasts to Poland in 1997.  In 2004 RFE they stopped broadcasting to Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania. But in that time they also added Kosovo and Macedonia. 

These days the  CIA is a few steps removed their programming department. The RFE answers to the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. But back to their origins. They were founded by the National Committee for a Free Europe in 1949. They were later renamed the Free Europe Committee (FEC.) That committee was not comprised of the French underground. It was a public-private partnership of the CIA and certain corporations. The Wilson Center has more information on that here. But some names you might recognize form those early days include Frank Altschul, Frederic Dolbeare.  Dwight Eisenhower, Lucius D. Clay, Cecil B. DeMille, Charles Douglas Jackson, Allan Dulles and Henry Luce. More here.