Speechification

Archive Hour’s going to keep coming up round here isn’t it? I guess it’s inevitable when you think about the quality and volume of material available to the producers in the vaults at Broadcasting House. This programme’s a departure, though. The material here is new - amazing stuff recorded for a new archive of voices from Stalin’s Russia.

Orlando Figes has written a book about the indescribable suffering of ordinary Russians under Stalin. He travelled around Russia recording the voices of still-terrified survivors and he’s made two programmes under the series title: Stalin’s Silent People. The material is of such awesome quality and resonance as to brook no argument. Just listen, really.

The first programme is called War Against the family (MP3). Next week’s is called Freedom or Death. I’ll blog that one too.

Thanks to Rupert for the tip. Speaking of tips: Radio 4’s programme pages are usually a bit light on background but if you dig around a bit (use Google’s site: syntax) you’ll usually find a press release with much more information. Scroll down this one for a few interesting paragraphs about Figes’ project. Why don’t they use this material on programme pages?

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 6:41 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.