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The Russian radio station, called UVB-76, also known as Doomsday Radio (doomsday radio), suddenly started playing excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. According to the Russian magazine RU Life, the broadcast also contained an old Soviet song, but with lyrics presumably changed to celebrate an attack on Kiev. Social media was awash with the sounds of the “disturbing” broadcast, which came as the Kremlin threatened Ukraine with retaliation for the alleged drone attack on one of Putin’s residences.
The hypotheses
The broadcast features other oddities such as “humming” and some muffled voices under the music. Strange overlapping sounds that have led some to speculate that the frequency may have been hacked.
It’s not unusual for Doomsday Radio to play music, but it’s very rare.
According to Russian media, the music was heard last year and in February 2022. The change from the mysterious station’s usual “buzz” broadcasts has sparked new interest in online conspiracy communities. The commentators in Russia they observed that the Swan Lake it was famously aired in Russia when something bad or a political crisis was about to happen.
In the Soviet era and early post-Soviet Russia, Swan Lake broadcasts became associated with major political unrest or transitions, and people who knew that history came to regard it as a kind of code or indicator of turmoil. In the 1980s, Soviet state television repeatedly interrupted regular programming to broadcast long recordings of Swan Lake on days when important leaders died (such as Brezhnev in 1982, Andropov in 1984, and Chernenko in 1985). During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, television channels are said to have broadcast “Swan Lake” on a loop for hours or days, while the leadership situation was unstable and regular news was unavailable.
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