The website of the BBC Russian service – bbcrussian.com – launched an archive of significant historical radio programs from the past 45 years today. Among the voices featured in the audio archive are Alexander Kerensky, Prime Minister during the 1917 Russian Revolution; Nobel Laureates for Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky; one of Russia’s great poets Anna Akhmatova; and Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.It also features former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former Beatle Paul McCartney – both of whom took part in live phone-ins with audiences in the USSR in the Eighties.
The archive – which can be accessed through the radio page on bbcrussian.com – brings together more than 50 hours of audio from nearly half a century. It is divided into sections on Culture, Society, Britain, History and Music.
The oldest recording in the archive is BBC Russian’s coverage of the funeral of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1965. First recorded in 1982, author Alexander Solzhenitsyn reads his seminal work One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. More recently, there are archive recordings of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered in 2006 in Moscow. There are also many recordings of the BBC Russian commentator Anatoly Goldberg who, for many generations of listeners in the Soviet Union, was a household name.
Among the programmes, clips and speeches are old editions of iconic programmes like Sevaoborot – featuring legendary broadcaster Seva Novgorodsev – Citizen Of The World, and London A-Z.
Sarah Gibson, Head of BBC Russian, says: “The Russian service continues to take pride in the range of topical voices it puts on air. This archive will allow a new generation to hear some of the pivotal events and people which have appeared on the BBC in Russian, many of whom have had a profound impact on Russian life over the last century.”
Now that the vintage programmes have been digitised, BBC Russian plans to donate the original tapes of its historical archive to the Hoover Institution in the United States.
(Source: BBC World Service International Publicity/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)