The Deejays of Donetsk

The pilot of a fogbound jet circling over Moscow's Vnukovo Airport for an instrument landing was startled recently when he began receiving radio signals from "Prince" and "Angel." Clearly these communications did not come from the control tower. Equally bemused were listeners to an official radio broadcast on Ukrainian industrial production, which was interrupted by this message: "Ya Dunai! Ya Dunai! Mal-chiki i devochki, slushaite menya! Nachinayu peredachu dlya molodezhi Marinskogo Raiona [Danube calling! Danube calling! Listen, all you cats and chicks out there! This is a program for young people in the Marinka District]."

Illegal broadcasting by homemade transmitters has become a persistent and growing youth cult in the Soviet Union. After samizdat (clandestine publishing of dissident writings) and magnitizdat (circulating tapes of unorthodox poetry and music), there is now radioiz-dat--air-it-yourself programs of pop music, teen-age talk, messages to girl friends and even dirty jokes. All of which represents a somewhat refreshing contrast to official state-controlled broadcasting, which is apt to be long on lectures about beet growing and the life of Lenin, but short on entertainment.

Green Ghost. In the Ukrainian city of Donetsk (pop. 900,000), youthful would-be deejays adopted such sprightly call signs as "Buzz Saw," "Green Ghost," "Graveyard Goon," "Bullet Hole," "Spark of Love" and "The Invisible Man." The police were not amused. In an effort to make a clean sweep of the cluttered airways, 1,000 amateur Donetsk broadcasters--called "organ grinders" by the police--were arrested and fined 50 rubles ($69) for "violating rules governing the use of radio frequencies." There have been similar efforts to clamp down on underground broadcasts in other major cities.

Soviet officials claim that their displeasure with the "radio hooligans," who usually steal hard-to-get parts for their transmitters from state factories, is more practical than ideological. The music and chatter of the pirate stations are sprayed so widely across the medium-range radio frequencies that they have become a communications hazard. In Donetsk, many of the illegal transmitters were on the frequency of the railway switching station of this important industrial center. On the inland Sea of Azov, riverboat skippers complain that they cannot hear routing orders because of interference by Elvis Presley tapes. Judged even more hazardous, however, were the broadcasts of an operator in Vilna, Lithuania, who has been sentenced to three years in prison for "anti-Soviet agitation." His crime: retransmitting Western newscasts taped from a short-wave receiver.

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