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17 CHaPter 2 goals of radio liberty gene sosin aleksandr Herzen wrote from london in the 1850s: “there is no place for freedom of speech at home—it can be heard elsewhere. i remain in the West only to begin free russian speech, to set up for russia an organ without censorship, to be your organ: your free, uncensored speech is my goal.” He fulfilled that goal by publishing Kolokol (The Bell), the first russian émigré paper. it wielded great influence among the intelligentsia inside tsarist russia and was a powerful irritant to the authorities. Herzen expressed one of the basic goals of the shortwave station that was born a century later in 1953 as “radio liberation,” and became “radio liberty” in 1959. our electronic Kolokol declared its intentions in the inaugural broadcast of the russian service on march 1—the same day that stalin suffered his fatal stroke. incidentally, several weeks before we went on the air, we had prepared a dramatic opening to each day’s broadcasts. first the listeners would hear the tick-tock of a clock, then a sepulchral voice would intone in russian “today iosif Vissarionovich stalin is 73 years old, two months, so-and-so many days.” Pause. more tick-tock. then: “the time of stalin is coming to the end.” (“Vremya Stalina podkhodit k kontsu.”) alas, the idea was scrapped when objections were raised that, being a georgian, he might live to a hundred and we would be ridiculed.1 the program began by announcing: “this is radio liberation speaking , the free voice of your compatriots abroad.” it declared several of rl’s goals at the outset: the principle of sovereignty of the people that was first proclaimed by the february revolution of 1917; the right of all 1 for additional information see gene sosin, Sparks of Liberty; an Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (College Park: Pennsylvania state university Press, 1999); russian edition, 2008, ftp://realaudio.rferl.org/ru/sosin.pdf. i4 J&P.indb 17 2010.07.05. 7:54 18 the nationalities situated on the present territory of the soviet union freely to choose their fate on the basis of democratic self-expression; freedom of conscience and religion; elimination of the system of terror and forced labor; the breakup of the kolkhozes and the right of the peasants to choose their own form of agriculture; the end of Party and government control of the arts and sciences. also announced as a goal was the liquidation of the soviet union’s aggressive foreign policy by means of the overthrow of the regime and the end of Bolshevism. the declaration added: “it stands to reason that we cannot give you ready-made recipes and instruct you how to overthrow the hateful tyranny. When the decisive hour arrives, you yourselves will sense better than we can how you must act.” the first broadcast then concluded by declaring that “our task is to tell you about what you will never hear in the soviet union, to provide you with truthful information, and to help liberate you from the web with which soviet propaganda is enveloping your souls.” it was not long before rl started broadcasting in many other languages of the ussr, appealing to the historical memory and national aspirations of the minorities, and promising to provide soviet citizens an uncensored medium with a broad spectrum of ideas and information denied to them by the Kremlin—the truth about life abroad, the truth about the past, and the truth about what was really going on inside their own country. We gave them glasnost more than thirty years before gorbachev and Yakovlev. radio liberation has been criticized for its early broadcasts. its message has been called too militant and aggressive, its tone too shrill and hostile, its alleged aims too apocalyptic and revolutionary. it is true that in the first year the american government financed a group of political émigrés who called themselves “the Coordinating Center of the antiBolshevist struggle.” they were authorized to voice their implacable opposition to the dictatorship over a station called liberation, which would implement the policy of the new eisenhower administration. so it is no wonder that many of the writers and announcers took advantage of the opportunity to get even with the regime that had brought such grief to them, their families and their beloved homeland. it took time for our policy and programming controls to restrain the more intransigent and vengeful émigrés on the staff, especially the broadcasts...

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