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If you’ve been a shortwave radio listener since the Cold War, you no doubt remember Radio Moscow‘s Mailbag program with Joe Adamov.
Tom Gavaras, a new contributor at the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive, recently shared a series of seven Radio Moscow studio recordings and noted:
These recordings were originally provided to me on reel-to-reel tape directly from Radio Moscow (which I dubbed to a cassette). At that time, I was program director at St. Cloud State University’s radio station KVSC-FM (St. Cloud, MN) and aired Moscow Mailbag once a week during the afternoon news block programming. Transcription shows from other shortwave stations were played on other weekday slots at the same time.
Recently, I started posting Colin’s recordings on a schedule so that each recording is being published exactly 40 years from the original broadcast date. Check out the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive each day (or subscribe via iTunes) to listen to the recordings.
Below, I’ve embedded the recording from New Year’s Day 1978 where we learned that Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko toasted the New Year with fruit juice (for obvious reasons, champagne was not allowed on the station!).
One of the advantages of hosting a contributor-driven shortwave radio audio archive, is receiving off-air recordings of defining moments in our world history. This is certainly one of them.
SRAA contributor, Richard Langley, writes:
“I’ve started to convert some of my old cassette shortwave recordings to mp3 files. I’ve uncovered a box of about 25 tapes with recordings mostly from 1990 and 1991. This was an interesting era for shortwave. There was the reunification of Germany, the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and then the First Gulf War. I monitored some of these events using my venerable Sony ICF-7600D receiver with the supplied wire antenna draped around my home office. I bought this receiver during a trip to Hong Kong (and the P.R.C.) in 1985. It was my first decent shortwave radio and I still have it but it has since been joined by several other receivers.
[…]
[The following] is a recording of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation speech as broadcast live by the World Service of Radio Moscow. As the announcer says, “a moment of history in the making.” It begins at about the three-minute mark of the recording (at 17:00 UTC). The speech is followed by a program of classical music (filler), the News in Brief at 17:30 UTC, followed by part of the program “Africa as We See It.”
Richard: many, many thanks for sharing this recording–I can’t wait to hear the other treasures you uncover in your collection.
For your listening pleasure: Radio Moscow World Service from December 25, 1991 on 17,670 kHz, beginning at 1657 UTC. Click here to download this recording as an mp3, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
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If you’ve been a shortwave radio listener since the Cold War, you no doubt remember Radio Moscow‘s Mailbag program with Joe Adamov.
