Mac Luhan's assertion The medium is the message proves particularly apt for radio in the Soviet era. This study in media history charts how radio established a poetics of the acousmatic permeating all areas of culture, from the Avant-Garde of the 1920s to the mass media of the 1930s. It was manifested in the socialist realism of optimistic art and literature, shaped the familial understanding of political power and gave rise to a Soviet science that was conceived as practice in the service of the utopian.