“The 1960s saw a major change in the work of the news service,” Lev Setiaev says. “Before that the information was handed out unsorted and each department had to make it into a news bulletin. That caused numerous discrepancies. Some started with the arrival of sportsmen, some – with important political news. There was even confusion at times. So in the early 1960s it became clear that the whole matter needed coordination and Radio Moscow began to talk in one language at last.”
 
The first centralized news bulletin went on the air in August 1963 and reached out to listeners all over the world. In the years of the Cold War most news reports and commentaries focused on the relations between the United States and Soviet Union. 

“The 1970s saw the strongest confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the deployment in Europe of the American middle-range missiles,” Lev Setiaev recalls. “The missiles were actually being made into strategic and if they had been deployed the flight time of nuclear weapons to the Soviet borders would have reduced to six minutes. Radio Moscow threw out a campaign against the deployment of the missiles. Our correspondents worked daily getting our diplomats, technicians, nuclear engineers and high-ranking military officials to warn of the dangers of such a deployment. The United States gave up the idea at last and this was our victory, in which Radio Moscow had made a hefty contribution too.”

In the early 80s the Soviet Union came forward with numerous proposals to rein in the arms race. Radio Moscow’s international observers kept a watchful eye on the course of talks to limit strategic nuclear weapons that were underway in Geneva for several years and on the Stockholm conference on disarmament in Europe. The then commentaries reflected the Soviet concern over the American “star wars” program and called for the prevention of weapons being deployed in outer space. Radio Moscow employees recall that for them failures at the talks were personal failures. 

Times changed, and so did the material. In the second half of the 1980s news bulletins from Moscow were studded with reports on trips of the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the United States. The news bulletins reported of the rapturous reception Mr.Gorbachev had from Margaret Thatcher, of his visit to France and Francois Mitterand’s appeal to western countries to support the Soviet perestroika and about Soviet-American summits, which invariably focused on disarmament. In the early 1988 Radio Moscow mentioned the date for the start of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan – May 15th 1988. In those years Soviet international observers wrote of the greater openness and a more balanced approach in the Soviet foreign policy and about Gorbachev’s new thinking. 

In 1989 Radio Moscow marked its 60th anniversary. Seven thousand listeners took part in the jubilee competition. The third question of the radio quiz – what Russian word had come to signify major changes in the Soviet Union – caused no difficulty. All participants responded with “It’s perestroika”. In 1989 Radio Moscow along with “Mir and Progress” radio station broadcast in 70 languages 248 hours a day.