THE SOVIET QUARANTINE 79the world from the Third Reich in the Second World War; it was
touted as the global bulwark against the reactionary, imperialist coali-
tion led by the United States. Official propaganda no longer claimed
that material conditions in the Soviet Union surpassed those in the
advanced West. But pride and optimism were not abandoned. The
Politburo under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko insisted that
the ‘way of life’ in the USSR was superior to anything encountered
abroad. Employment, housing, education and health care were said to
offer advantages to all rather than to a small, wealthy elite. The collec-
tivist principle had supposedly proved its worth.^5
This approach was applied in every country where communism
was established after the Second World War. First it happened in East-
ern Europe, then China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba.
Nearly all large Soviet cities had facilities to carry out the jamming
of Western radio broadcasts. The Russian-language programmes of
Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle
were singled out for attention across the USSR. Broadcasts in
Ukrainian on religious themes gave grounds for growing official con-
cern, and the authorities started a campaign of counter-propaganda
against Ukraine’s Christian traditions. Vatican Radio was an irritant to
the authorities in Catholic-inhabited Lithuania. Orders arrived from
Moscow about what and when to jam. The work was never done with
complete precision, and sometimes the employees – inadvertently or
deliberately – interfered with Radio Moscow. The problem was also
that Soviet radio sets had short-wave capacities that enabled deter-
mined citizens to switch around the dial and find some foreign
‘capitalist’ frequency. It was always easier to do this at country dachas
than in the towns. The USSR’s legislation meant that no one was
banned from listening to whatever they wanted. Since Stalin’s death in
1953 it was no longer a pretext for arrest. People could write to foreign
radio stations so long as their letters did not contain ‘knowingly false
fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social system’.^6
The Soviet authorities systematically inhibited messages and pack-
ages passed to and from the USSR. Anyone wishing to phone an
acquaintance abroad had to book the call a day in advance and use a
special booth. This made it easy for the KGB to listen to what people
were saying. The international traffic in letters and telegrams attracted
the same kind of suspicion. The regulations were severe about the kind
of goods that could enter the country. The American postal service
had to inform customers that it was unable to convey several types of