Radio Mauve Moscow: The SHOCKING Russia Connection That Goes All The Way To South Reston

Longtime readers of this "web log" know that Reston played a pivotal role in winning the Cold War. As rhetoric about our former Soviet rival starts heating up again, our favorite correspondent, The Peasant From Less Sought After South Reston, has unearthed a shocking Reston connection, one that goes from the heart of Moscow straight to Glade Drive. Wait, what?

A Russia-funded radio station broadcasting blocks from the White House found a second home on the dial in Washington after its partner, a Virginia-based radio company, registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent.

Sputnik, a project of the Russian government, began broadcasting around the clock from a K Street office in June on 105.5 FM, and hasn’t stopped. However, that frequency is merely a “translator” — a station that rebroadcasts another station’s programming.

That radio station is registered to a company called Reston Translator, whose address of record is, in fact, in South Reston. Reston Translator actually had to register as a foreign agent because of Sputnik's Russian connections; the company's owner insists that the arrangement is merely a business agreement and argues that the government's efforts to place the "foreign agent" label on it will have a chilling effect on free speech, according to the Washington Post "news paper."

The Peasant did a little digging and found the agreement between the two companies (conveniently written in English and Russian). He points out that:

The Ruskie contact, the "Foreign Principal", is the ominously named the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency. Maybe this Agency would also like to branch out into publishing glossy quarterly magazines for, say, a certain homeowners association?

Only if they can translate those killer word finds out of the Cyrillic alphabet, the end.