The Soviet news anchor who told comforting lies

Igor Kirillov 1932–2021

Igor Kirillov knowingly played a part for three decades. As the chief anchor of the USSR’s main evening TV news show Vremya (“Time”), the former actor would inform his audience of millions about the latest Soviet triumphs— the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first manned spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, a bumper grain harvest seemingly every year—and deliver communiqués from the Communist Party and reports on endless Western aggression. His steady, sonorous voice became such a constant in Soviet life that it was sampled by pop star Sting for his 1985 hit single “Russians.” But following the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Kirillov admitted that his broadcasts had been filled with lies and propaganda. “The hardest thing of all,” he said in 2011, “was to believe what I was reading out.”

Born in Moscow, Kirillov “briefly had ambitions to become a cinema director but switched to theater school,” said The Times (U.K.). His big break came in 1957, when he tried out for an announcer’s job by singing, playing a guitar, and reciting from memory a passage from the state-run newspaper Pravda. He got the job, and his “good looks, pleasant timbre, and fleeting, restrained smile” would earn him thousands of love letters from viewers.

Kirillov was well thought of even by opponents of the Soviet regime, said NPR

.org, partly because he never came across as “a Communist Party insider.” He stepped down from Vremya in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Soviet empire, and would in later years host broadcasts of special events. Kirillov was not a fan of modern TV news, believing the anchors spoke too fast. “If TV news goes in one ear and out the other,” he said, “our heads will be empty.”