As morning broke over the Ukrainian city of Kherson last summer, those fumbling for their radios at 7am might have heard a Russian presenter greeting the day with his surreal imitation of a motivational video.
“As Lenin said: ‘In work we are forged.’ I too was an orangutan in a zoo, but when I started working hard I bought a car, built myself a villa in Crimea and even raised my IQ. Work as hard all day and you’ll be like me.”
Later, at 3pm, between a jazz-and-metal medley and a quiz with donuts for prizes, listeners could have heard a political discussion on the theme of “the Americans screwed up. Let’s make the Alaska People’s Republic exist” – a reference to the US state’s history under the Russian empire, before it was sold to the Americans in 1867.
These script extracts come from handwritten notes found in the Kherson HQ of the Ukrainian national broadcaster, Suspilne. The studios were taken over by a Russian propaganda station, Radio Tavriya, between March and November last year, when the city was occupied.
The scripts offer an insight into the curious cocktail of Soviet nostalgia, thinly veiled threat, supposed humour and extreme Russian nationalism offered to the population under occupation. At the time, all Kherson’s TV and radio stations fell under Russian control; mobile and internet networks were rerouted through Russia; and social media sites and Ukrainian news websites were blocked.
On the hour every hour, according to the Radio Tavriya script notes, messages would be broadcast purporting to be from women in the wider occupied Kherson area to loved ones fighting in the Russian army in Mykolaiv – the Ukrainian city to the immediate north-west that was relentlessly targeted by Russian artillery last year but remains under Ukrainian control.
Radio Tavriya could not be heard in Mykolaiv since the signal was blocked by the Ukrainians. The intended audience was likely, in fact, those in occupied Kherson. “Sending greetings to Nikolaev [Mykolaiv]: we are going to liberate you,” reads the script.
Even the weather forecast was to contain a bleak supposed joke about the “heat” of shelling. “Today it’s 34 degrees in Kherson, no precipitation, we are sending special greetings to Nikolaev city, it’s going to be hot.” Between February and October last year, more than 2,000 residential buildings were hit in Mykolaiv and 148 civilians killed.
At 9pm, after “half an hour of classical music time”, the host was to remind listeners of the upcoming curfew. At 10pm: “The city falls asleep, the mafia wakes up. It’s time to catch the saboteurs” – meaning the Ukrainian resistance.
Sofia Cheliak, a journalist with Suspilne’s culture channel in Lviv and programme director of the Lviv BookForum, found the notebook on a desk during a visit to the city in late December. She, with fellow members of the human rights organisation PEN Ukraine, was delivering aid to Kherson and meeting figures from the arts and broadcasting.
Russian soldiers had used the ground floor of the Suspilne offices as living quarters. Upstairs, where Cheliak discovered the script notebook in a box on a desk, there was an air of sudden abandonment. An empty bottle of Armenian cognac lay discarded, letters from Russian children to soldiers were still tacked up on the walls; and a door was scrawled with the Russian military motto “we don’t leave our own” along with the letter Z.
According to Cheliak, “even if the script wasn’t used, it is still clearly someone working up material … I imagine them sitting there, drinking their Armenian cognac, and creating this scenario, thinking: ‘How shall we do this.’ It isn’t sophisticated; it’s cheap and banal.”
The script – doodled with the eagle symbol that features on the Russian Federation’s coat of arms – even contains the words for a jingle: “Radio Tavriya speaking. Radio Tavriya is the best radio in Russia. Radio Tavriya, radio for you. 107.6 Radio Tavriya, we are working for you.”
Suspilne’s Kherson team has been unable to reclaim the studios after Ukrainian forces took back the city. Retreating troops blew up the transmitter tower; and the building is unsafe because of the scale of Russian shelling since the liberation. Instead, journalists are making digital broadcasts from a bomb shelter and fundraising to support their work.
Radio Tavriya, which brought in broadcasters from illegally Russian-occupied Crimea, continues to operate, but now from the left bank of the Dnipro River, to where the Russians retreated.
Cheliak also visited the city’s Oles Honchar Library – before last year’s invasion, a lively cultural centre. During the occupation, according to library employees, books on Ukrainian history and the EU were removed from the shelves.
In November retreating Russians, perhaps lacking the time to lower the Russian standard that flew beside the library, shelled the flagpole itself. That damaged the building and blew out most of its windows, leaving ragged curtains flapping in the wind and the collection exposed to the winter weather. Occupying a prominent position above the Dnipro delta, within range of Russian artillery on the opposite bank, the building is today a perilous spot.
Here, Cheliak found further evidence of the scale and flavour of Russian propaganda in the occupied city – such as leaflets, illustrated with photos of blonde mothers and children in Ukrainian national dress, promoting child benefit payments. The benefits were available, though, only to those who made their children Russian citizens.
She also discovered a 22-page pamphlet on Kherson’s history, published by the occupiers in the summer in preparation for September’s spurious “referendum” making the Kherson region officially a part of the Russian Federation.
The document, apparently distributed in the late summer, before the unrecognised vote, is flavoured with language straight out of the Soviet era, a strong sense of Russian ethnic nationalism, and a by now familiar line of thought that sees the Ukrainian government as puppets of the west and as Nazis. Like Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, it regards Ukraine (or Little Russia, as it says) as historically indivisible from the Russian Federation.
The pamphlet begins by relating that 1,000 delegates at a meeting at Kherson State University had voted to put together the pamphlet as “an ideological declaration that would set out the future of these southern Russian lands”.
It then pronounces “the unity of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and other nations as a single homeland … the successor of the Soviet homeland and the historical Russia”.
The pamphlet portrays Kherson’s period under Russian and Soviet rule as “a golden era”. It does not, however, mention the Holodomor, the period of enforced starvation as a result of Stalin’s collectivisation policies that resulted in the death by hunger of about 3.7 million Ukrainians in 1932-33.
“The golden era of the Kherson area ended with the collapse of Soviet Union,” it says. Since the Orange Revolution of 2004, Ukrainian governments have become “puppets of foreign capital”. The full-scale invasion of February 2022 was a “pre-emptive strike to defend Donbas and demilitarise and denazify Ukraine”.
The Russian language, which it says has been systematically eradicated from the region, would become the state language according to the document; its economic future would lie in alternative energy and in establishing “a cluster of high-quality tourist resorts”.
The pamphlet wraps up by asserting the area is “an indivisible part of a very big country, which has the proud name of Russia”.
“The whole thing is very Soviet. It reminds me of the referenda in eastern Poland, western Belarus and western Ukraine in 1939,” said Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and one of the world’s foremost Ukrainian history experts, who has reviewed the pamphlet. The point, he said, “is that no one really has to believe it; everyone should just see the very stupidity of the arguments as a sign that there really is no choice.
“The historical argument is that since Kherson was part of the empire, it must be part of today’s Russia. This would also mean that most of Poland, all of the Baltics and Finland also belong to Russia, as well as most of Ukraine.”
The arguments, he concluded, “are just thrown together. It’s not the work of someone who is very interesting. And that itself is interesting. The propaganda has been poor. They do not really know their audience any more.”
