Igor Kirillov - the man known as the face and voice of the USSR for three decades - has died in Russia aged 89.
Kirillov
was Soviet TV's chief newsreader and announcer.
With
his trademark delivery - unhurried and calm - he informed viewers of the first
sputnik in space, and delivered the communiqués of the Communist Party.
He
also anchored all major Soviet set-piece events: from Moscow's Red Square
parades to communist congresses. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Positive
stories dominated Soviet news bulletins. Every year, to images of combine
harvesters advancing through the fields, Igor Kirillov would declare the grain
harvest a triumph.
But
did he believe it?
"For
me the hardest thing of all was to believe what I was reading out," Igor
Kirillov told me in an interview in 2011.
"Deep
down I knew that the texts contained half-truths. But as a newsreader you had
to convince yourself it was the complete truth. And I did. I persuaded myself
that we really were building communism. That life really would get better. Any
doubts I had I managed to overcome. If I hadn't then I wouldn't have been able
to do my job."
The
news wasn't always good.
In
the 1980s Soviet leaders got into the nasty habit of dying in rapid succession.
It was a sombre Igor Kirillov who informed the country of their passing.
It
happened so often, in fact, that it sparked this famous Soviet joke: Igor
Kirillov goes on air in a black tie and announces: "Comrades, you're going
to laugh, but another irreplaceable leader needs replacing."
"At
the job interview, I played the guitar and sang," he told me. "Then
they asked me to read something out. Luckily the night before I'd memorised a
copy of the newspaper Pravda. So I recited that, right off the top of my head.
Afterwards as I was leaving the building, the chief stopped me. 'Where are you
going?' he said. 'You've got the job and you're on air in two hours'."
The
communist newscaster had other jobs, too. He presented Soviet TV's version of
Top of the Pops. It was a little more Lenin than Paul McCartney.
In
1985 he became a global chart-topper, with a little help from Sting, whose hit
song Russians kicks off with Igor Kirillov's voice reading the news.
By
the late 1980s television news was changing around the world. Journalists were
replacing professional announcers as newsreaders. The USSR was no exception.
Soviet TV revamped its nightly news. In came reporters… out went the
"dyktory".
In
1990, during a study year in Moscow, I interviewed Igor Kirillov for a
university project. The Soviet Union's most famous announcer was having a
difficult time.
"I
read the news for 20 two years on the nightly news Vremya," he told me.
"Now they've decided not to use 'diktory'. There's a condescending, disdainful
attitude now towards announcers."
He
thought that journalists who became anchors delivered the news too fast.
"Russians
don't like fast talking. They have their own way of conversing: in a calm,
unhurried, thoughtful way.
"If
TV news goes in one ear and out the other, our heads will be empty."
By BBC
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