Vilnius’ M-1: Renegade Radio in Soviet Union : Broadcasting: After years of struggle, the Lithuanian station now unabashedly airs whatever it wants.

Hubert Grusnys swivels his chair, flips a switch and leans towards the microphone.

“That was the Boomtown Rats,” he says in smooth Lithuanian. “And this is radio M-1, your independent music radio station. And now, our review of today’s press. . . .”

Grusnys may sound like just another disc jockey, but he works for the first independent radio station in the Soviet Union, and he and his colleagues struggled for two years just to get permission to go on the air. M-1 is located in the capital of the independence-minded republic of Lithuania, and it unabashedly broadcasts whatever it wants.

M-1 has no censors and gets no government funds. It broadcasts live--a technique until now unheard of in the Soviet Union’s usually tightly controlled radio and television business. It is set up in two tiny rooms rented from Lithuania’s Youth newspaper, Lietuvos Rytas (Lithuania’s Morning). It first took to the airwaves on New Year’s Eve and it has been the most popular radio station in Vilnius ever since.

“We can say what we want,” said Rimantas Pleikys, one of the station’s founders. “If I want to say that Communist ideology is the greatest failure of the 20th Century, I can say it. And if I want to play heavy metal music, I can do that too.”

The equipment at M-1 is Western-made and brand new. There is a mixing console and turntable, compact disc and cassette players and three reel-to-reel tape players. Floor-to-ceiling shelves stand mostly empty, holding only a small collection of records, tapes and compact discs.

M-1’s format is music and information--music mostly bought on the black market or brought in by friends in the West, and information straight from the headquarters of Lithuania’s popular front.

M-1 is located in an unlikely place--on the 17th floor of a highrise in Vilnius that houses most of the republic’s state-run press agencies and is often referred to as “The Palace of Lies.”

But M-1 (which rents space there for 70 rubles a month) bears little resemblance to the staid press organs that fill the floors below. It’s ambiance is that of a college radio station, with young people running around frantically, gulping coffee and clipping tidbits of information from newspapers to read over the air.

M-1’s staff spends nearly every night working. They broadcast six hours a day, from 7 p.m. until 1 a.m.

They say they don’t mind the constant work. In January, a survey done by the Lithuanian Radio and Television Committee found M-1 the most popular radio station in the Vilnius area. “We’re whomping them in the ratings,” Pleikys said with obvious pride. “Where else in the Soviet Union can you find a radio station such as this?”

The answer to that question is only here, where Pleikys and Grusnys worked and dreamed for two years to make their radio station come into being.

Their inspiration came from the birth of Sajudis, Lithuania’s now-powerful opposition movement. As Lithuanians took to the streets rallying for independence from the Soviet state, a lively independent press grew up around the movement, and a panoply of political parties came into being. But even as the choices of reading material grew and citizens began enjoying fierce political debate, the republic’s radio and television frequencies remained completely under state control.

Pleikys, 32, knew well how few alternatives radio listeners had. As a radio journalist in Radio Vilnius’ Foreign Service and a teacher of journalism theory at the University of Vilnius, he was well attuned to what was--and was not--available over the republic’s airwaves. When he visited friends in Boston in 1988, he said he spent hours listening to the city’s lively and numerous rock radio stations and puzzling out how he might be able to bring a station like that to his home.

Grusnys, meanwhile, was working as a disc jockey in Vilnius dance pubs. He said he was weary of playing Soviet rock music and Western songs that stretched back to the days when disco was hot.

Both unhappy with their careers, the two got together to set out to found a radio station of their own. The problems seemed almost insurmountable at first. They had to get permission to broadcast, studio space and operating funds.

“It was a nightmare,” Pleikys said. “We went all day from office to office, but they wouldn’t give us permission. I think the government and the Communist Party were afraid of this radio station. They understood that we wanted to work live on the air, without any censorship.”

But then life in Lithuania began to change. The Lithuanian Communist Party began to pull away from the mother party in Moscow and early last year issued a resolution supporting the concept on an independent radio station. The state sponsoring agency, Glavlit, followed with permission to broadcast free of censorship. Then Pleikys and Grusnys received permission from the Ministry of Telecommunications to occupy a frequency on the Soviet Union’s FM band.

There was still, of course, the question of money--a painful problem that has not eased at M-1 in the time since. They finagled 60,000 rubles of start-up money from the Lithuanian Communist Youth League--a state organization for young people that is desperate to win back some of its waning popularity by changing its image. They linked up with Southwest German Radio, a West German station that invited them to Stuttgart and helped them raise funds. They came home with 15,000 deutsche marks ($9,000) from a West German chocolate company and 2,500 marks ($1,500) from the West German Social Democratic Party.

M-1 hopes to raise money eventually by selling advertising on the air. But advertising is almost unheard of in the Soviet Union’s mostly state-controlled economy, and so far there have been no takers. A trickle of money has come in through listener donations, and recently Pleikys drummed up 30,000 rubles from an organization called the Lithuanian Youth Science League.

But the station spent 1,000 rubles more than it earned in its first month, and its founders say that without outside help, they don’t know how much longer they can survive.