In an interview with AFP, Alexei Venediktov explains how Russia is more and more reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Venediktov ran Eho Moskvy radio, which ceased broadcasting on March 1.
Radio channel Eho Moskvy persevered for decades as one of Russia’s independent voices, but when it was abolished in March, the channel’s longtime editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov knew the era was over.
“The country has been thrown back in time in every way, in my view, it has been taken back 40 years,” Venediktov says in an interview with AFP news agency.
“We are now somewhere in the know of 1983,” Venediktov says. “There is war in Afghanistan, dissidents are in prison or they have been kicked out of the country, and there is Andropov in the Kremlin.”
Afghanistan during the war, Venediktov refers to the catastrophic intervention of the Soviet Union in 1979. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan only ten years later, and the war became costly in terms of both cost and loss of life.
Andropovilla Venediktov again refers to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, whose official title was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov led the Soviet Union from November 1982 to February 1984, and his background was Vladimir Putin intelligence service in the KGB.
Director of the Council Yuri Andropov.
News agency In an interview with AFP, Venediktov talks about the closure of the radio channel he is running. Eho Moskvy was finally silenced on March 1, a week after Russia had invaded Ukraine.
The frequencies of Eho Moskvy were transferred to Radio Sputnik. Sputnik is a state channel and thus the Kremlin’s mouthpiece.
“I understand [Putinin] logic: he couldn’t let us exist because during such operations, propaganda has to be total, ”Venediktov says.
Eho Moskvy was founded in the latter part of the Soviet Union in August 1990. Venediktov soon joined the ranks, and in 1998 he became editor-in-chief.
Venediktov is now 66 years old, and the Putin regime has recently named him a “foreign agent”.
Many independent journalists have left Russia for their own safety. However, Venediktov has decided to stay in Moscow.
“People will trust me more if I experience the same difficulties with them, walk the same streets with them and face the same effects of sanctions.”
Now Alexei Venediktov continues his work on the video service YouTube, which, according to AFP, has half a million subscribers to his channel.
According to Venediktov, the Russians need to know “why this happened” and “why you are hurt”.
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