This document is a report from Heorhii Sinchenko, Minister of Communications of the Ukrainian SSR, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine on the subject of “counteracting anti-Soviet radio broadcasting.” The report includes a list of shortwave radio stations targeted for jamming and provides an overview of the relevant infrastructure in 1982. In addition to Western stations such as Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, South Korea’s Radio Korea, and the Voice of Israel, broadcasters from socialist countries with strained relations with the USSR—like Albania’s Radio Tirana and China’s Radio Beijing—were also jammed. In total, 37 “anti-Soviet” radio stations broadcast into Soviet Ukraine. During the early 1980s, as Cold War tensions escalated, efforts to jam Western radio stations intensified.

The document reveals that the system of “radio protection” (as jamming was officially called) in the Ukrainian SSR was far from effective in 1982. Local transmitters, which were the most efficient means of jamming as they covered specific urban and suburban areas, were operational in only nine oblast centers across the republic.

Consequently, 16 of the 25 oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR lacked local jamming equipment entirely. In these uncovered regions, powerful shortwave transmitters located in other Soviet republics were relied upon to combat “enemy voices.” Transmitters from other republics were most likely used due to the nature of shortwave radio wave propagation. Transmitters with power in the hundreds of kilowatts required placement at significant distances from the intended jamming area to be effective. However, long-range jamming was far less effective and reliable compared to local jamming. It often failed to completely block the signals of targeted radio stations, primarily because of the high selectivity of radio receivers and the insufficient number of transmitters functioning as dedicated jammers. As a result, the majority of the Ukrainian SSR was only partially jammed or entirely unprotected.

The inadequacy of the jamming system is evident from the document, which indicates that at least three times as many local jammers would have been required in Ukraine to provide reliable “radio protection” for all oblast centers and major cities. Moreover, jamming foreign radio stations proved to be a challenging task due to the countermeasures employed by foreign broadcasters. These included techniques such as barrage broadcasting (simultaneously airing a program on multiple frequencies, making them technically difficult to jam), maximizing the use of all available transmitters, increasing transmission power, repeating programs, altering modulation, and employing short, repetitive sentences. Such methods enabled information to penetrate the “veil” of Soviet radio jamming.

The practice of jamming foreign radio stations in the USSR was discontinued entirely in 1988 as part of the liberalization of the information space during perestroika.