Archive · 2016 · From the print edition of Saturday 31 December 2016, Vol. 24, No. 7,452
FeaturesTen years since the wave went silent
Radio Talas International went off the air ten years ago tonight. Its masts are gone, its tapes are in Chicago, and Talas still misses the voice that talked to the whole region.
TALAS — At midnight on 31 December 2006, as federal administration ended, Radio Talas International played the anthem, read a short announcement in Iradi, Russian, Uzbek and English, and went silent. For fourteen years it had broadcast from its masts west of Talas to the whole of Central Asia, and the neighbouring states had jammed it when it annoyed them. Uzbekistan called it "the voice of the occupation".
The masts were cut down in 2010, and the site is now a lorry depot. The station's tape archive went to the Iradi American Association in Chicago, where volunteers are digitizing it. They say they have reached 1997.
In Talas the station is remembered with a nostalgia that has little to do with its programmes, which were mostly news and American music. "When Irad talked to the whole region," is how a retired engineer who worked at the transmitter for eleven years put it. "Tashkent heard us whether it wanted to or not. Now Tashkent does not hear us at all."
Not everyone believes the masts were only for radio. A popular theory in Talas holds that they were built for intelligence and that the air base still transmits in their place. The engineer laughed. "I wish," he said. "Then somebody would still be paying for it."