Russia-1

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia-1 first flickered to life on the 14th of February 1956, carrying a name so plain it almost defied ambition: Programme Two. Seventy years later, it stands as the flagship of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, watched in an average week by three-quarters of urban Russians. How did a second-tier educational channel from the Soviet era become the country's most-watched network? The answer runs through coup attempts, a civil war inside a single building, a fraudulent documentary about a warship, and a long-running battle between Moscow and its own regional affiliates.

• 2. Born in Black and White

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  Programme Two began its life in 1956 carrying only content produced by the Ministry of Education of the Soviet Union, alongside children's programming, all of it in monochrome. It shared the national newscast Vremya with its sister channel from 1968 onward, keeping it tethered to the dominant channel even as it sought its own identity.

  In 1972 it renamed itself All-Union Program 2, and three years later it made the leap to color. Two years after that, it expanded its signal across the entire Soviet Union, becoming a genuinely national broadcaster. On the first of January 1982, sports, culture, documentary film, music videos, and feature films were officially added to its permitted output, a formal recognition that the channel needed to serve audiences beyond classrooms and nurseries.

  Starting New Year's Day 1984, the channel rebranded again as All-Union Channel 2. The very next year it aired the first rhythmic gymnastics broadcast in Soviet television history. By 1987 it had done something the entire USSR television system had never done before: it adopted sign language interpretation, later supplemented by subtitles, for its Vremya simulcasts, making it the first channel in the country to serve deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.

• 3. A Republic Demands Its Own Voice

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  Bella Kurkova, creator of the program The Fifth Wheel and a People's Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, brought the case directly to Boris Yeltsin. Her argument was blunt: central television reflected federal authority, not Russian republican interests, and Russia was the only Union republic without its own television channel. By 1989, every other Soviet republic had one.

  On the 13th of July 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Russia broke the national broadcasting monopoly, clearing the legal ground for Russia to launch its own stations. The very next day, decree number 107-1 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet formally established the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. Ivan Silaev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, helped secure both the building and the equipment the new station would need.

  The inherited Soviet infrastructure was not handed over freely. On the 6th of March 1991, the All-Union State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company transferred control of AUC2 to the new All-Russian company after 27 years of running it. The new management, led by general manager Sergei Podgorbunsky, was promised at least six hours of broadcast time per day. What followed was immediate friction: studios at the Ostankino Television Centre were unavailable to rent, programs failed to arrive on time, and finding presenters willing to work for an upstart Republican outfit proved far harder than anyone had anticipated.

• 4. "Vesti" and the First Broadcast

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  On the 13th of May 1991, deputy general manager Valentin Lazutkin officially launched the channel, now branded Russian Television, on three discrete time blocks: 11:35 to 13:35, 17:00 to 19:00, and 21:45 to 23:45. Six hours in total. In that first hour on air, the channel criticized Mikhail Gorbachev. The channel then aired its first newscast, Vesti, at 17:00, hosted by Svetlana Sorokina. Items in that premiere bulletin included destruction in an Armenian village and an interview with the Lithuanian president about potential repression from the Kremlin.

  Vesti was designed to be the opposite of Vremya. Where Vremya was cautious and censored, Vesti aimed to be fast, specific, and unfiltered. The staff had largely come from the Soviet Central Television channel known as the Television News Service, and their experience gave the young news operation a running start. Four studios were built inside the new operation: News for newscasts, Republic for current affairs, Lad for arts and culture, and Artel for entertainment and lifestyle.

  Within the first week, the children's program Good Night, Little Ones, which would continue airing from 2002 onward, made its debut. Two weeks after launch, the channel renamed itself RTR, for Russian Television and Radio, and introduced a new logo.

• 5. The Coup and the Basement Broadcast

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  On the 19th of August 1991, the Emergency Committee halted RTR's transmission. AUC2 took back the evening slots and filled them with planned programming, notably the ballet Swan Lake. The coup leaders believed they had silenced the republican broadcaster. They had not.

  RTR secretly organized a broadcast reaching the United States, other countries, and viewers across the USSR. Studio Vesti at the Ostankino Centre had been blocked by AUC2 management, so the transfer was recorded on videotape at a second facility on Shabolovka Street, using an outside broadcast van and mobile equipment the young channel had managed to acquire. The Emergency Committee then blockaded RTR headquarters on Yamskov field. For the next few days, the channel broadcast clandestinely until the coup collapsed.

  After the coup failed, Lazutkin issued the order resuming official broadcasting from 19:00 to midnight. On the 16th of September 1991, AUC2 ended its own operations entirely, and RTR absorbed its staff and programs. By the 31st of December of that year, Vesti was running three times a day; by the 20th of January 1992, it was running four times a day.

• 6. Crisis, Shelling, and a Basement Studio

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  During the constitutional crisis of 1993, RTR took an editorial position of airing voices from across the political spectrum. When government forces shelled the White House, the channel's director refused an order to broadcast the bombardment live, citing the risk of civilian casualties among Moscow residents. After police cleared the area, RTR began broadcasting CNN's footage.

  The building that housed the Vesti studio was itself struck. A grenade launcher punched a hole in the wall, and armed men broke in, with the building catching fire. Program director Irina Vinogradova saved the footage. Technical director Stanislav Bunevich managed to keep the channel's broadcasts running from the facilities of the All-Russian STRC on Yamskov field. A temporary studio was assembled in a basement with the lights off. RTR remained the only television channel continuously on air during those events, and its coverage of that night earned Vesti a lasting political importance. First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shumeyko later donated a mantel clock to Vesti in recognition of the coverage.

  Field reporters Yuri Rostov, Vladislav Flyarkovsky, and Aleksandr Gurnov joined the channel in 1993 under news programming head Alexander Nekhoroshev, and political commentator Nikolai Svanidze began contributing to Vesti through a segment called Details in 1994.

• 7. Building a National Network

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  For much of the 1990s, Russia's regional television affiliates, known as GTRKs, had little incentive to carry the Moscow-produced schedule consistently. They would mix in locally produced programming or content acquired elsewhere, fragmenting the national channel's schedule at the regional level. The creation of the state holding company VGTRK eventually united all 89 state-owned regional studios under Channel 2's umbrella.

  In February 2004, the Russian government issued a formal resolution reorganizing VGTRK through the formal affiliation of its subsidiaries. By the end of that year the scope of the reorganization was visible to everyone working inside it. Local companies were converted into retransmitters of Moscow-produced programming. VGTRK management cut all regional production except news, which reduced broadcasting volumes at each GTRK from a range of 900-1,200 hours down to 590 hours. Whole departments were closed, and hundreds of employees in each of the 89 companies lost their jobs.

  On the 8th of May 1998, regional television and radio operations were integrated into the RTR broadcast, and the channel began broadcasting in 54 languages of the peoples of Russia. On the 31st of December 2018, a separate feed of the Russia-1 schedule was launched for each of Russia's eleven time zones. Before that date, going back to a practice that had started with the Orbita satellite system in 1967, the entire country had been served by just five feeds, time-shifted in increments of two, four, six, and eight hours from Moscow Time. Viewers in odd time zones had always received programming either an hour early or an hour late.

• 8. Propaganda, Sanctions, and the TEFI Awards

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  Coverage of the Beslan school siege in early September 2004 drew accusations of deliberate manipulation. Correspondent Margarita Simonyan, later to become a major figure in Russian state media, reported a hostage count of 354 on a live broadcast; the actual number, already known, was 1,128. Simonyan also stated on air that the terrorists had made no demands, while the main demand, withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, had already been announced.

  In April 2007, according to the Kommersant newspaper and the French rights holder, Russia-1 aired a heavily edited version of a French documentary about color revolutions called Revolution.com. USA: the Conquest of the East. The original film ran 53 minutes and 40 seconds; the version broadcast on the 15th of April 2007 ran 48 minutes. References to opposition organizations, footage filmed in Moscow, and the name of co-director Manon Loiseau were cut. The French agency SARAH stated the broadcast violated the terms of a contract explicitly prohibiting alterations.

  In 2017, editor Dmitry Skorobutov, who had worked at the channel for a long time, published a periodically updated guide for journalists listing forbidden topics. The list included anti-government protests, the downing of MH17, Nadia Savchenko, Crimean Tatars, and coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's anniversary. That same year, researchers at the Atlantic Council traced a story Russia-1 had aired to a piece of satire by Russian author Dmitry Sedov, written as a fictional panicked letter from an American sailor to his wife. The channel had broadcast it as a factual account of a US Navy destroyer being disabled by a Russian warplane's electronic warfare system; even after the Russian weapon manufacturer publicly denied the story and called it a fake, other Russian outlets continued adding invented details, including a false statement attributed to a former US Air Force commander in Europe.

  On the 23rd of May 2015, the channel aired a documentary titled Warsaw Pact: Declassified Pages, which presented the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia as protection against a NATO coup. Slovakia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the film tried to rewrite history, and Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said it grossly distorted the facts. On the 8th of May 2022, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control placed sanctions on Russia-1 for being owned or controlled by, or acting on behalf of, the Government of Russia. Despite the criticism and sanctions, the channel's projects and staff have repeatedly received TEFI awards, Russia's equivalent of an Emmy, and the channel holds a Certificate of Honor from the IPA CIS Council, issued on the 26th of November 2015, for participation in the international television forum Together.