Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—A Collection of Studies and Documents ed. by A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta (review)

As Timothy Garton Ash points out in his foreword, this book is “a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of communism and the Cold War” (p. xv). The book is indeed valuable as far as it goes. Garton Ash is right in asserting that it contains “important general lessons for those seeking to impart reliable information to people living in unfree countries” (p. xvi).

The extent to which foreign radio broadcasts influenced the internal political and social evolution of the Soviet Union and East European countries is impossible to know with certainty. What is known is that the radio services had millions of listeners who were willing to endure the rasping noise of jamming and the threat of reprisals. What is also certain is that the Communist regimes were sufficiently worried about the radios’ impact on citizens to devote huge resources to electronic jamming, to extensive attacks in regime media (thus publicizing the targets), and to obstructive actions ranging from sabotage to harassment and even the murder of employees. The Communist governments also succeeded in planting intelligence agents on the radio staffs, including at one point the chief editor of the Radio Liberty Russian-language service. Post–Cold War access to Soviet and East European archives reveals that Communist leaders closely followed what the broadcasts were saying; Iosif Stalin, for example, received regular reports with transcriptions of programs, as did his successors.

Cold War broadcasts to the Soviet bloc faced two very different challenges. Audiences in the East European satellites, resentful of the Soviet Union’s hegemony and information monopoly, generally welcomed outside voices, particularly those of the Radio Free Europe (RFE) journalists who spoke their languages, as a source of truthful information and evidence that they had not been forgotten in the West. On the other hand, potential Soviet audiences for foreign broadcasters, of which Radio Liberty (RL) was only one, not only were more remote geographically but had been exposed to decades of regimentation and Communist indoctrination against the “bourgeois” West. Moreover, for Soviet citizens the shared memory of victory in the struggle against a foreign invader was still fresh. Outside broadcasters could hardly take for granted that their programs would attract large, receptive audiences in the USSR. Yet this book shows that in the Soviet Union, as in Eastern Europe, RL and other foreign radio services came to attract large and important followings. Voice of America (VOA), which broadcast popular jazz programs, had the largest audience numerically. The Russian programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and those of RL, in Russian and numerous other Soviet languages, shared second place, appealing to the older and better educated.

The book under review, edited by two senior veterans of Western broadcasting operations, RFE and RL, is an extremely useful compendium of information and insights covering the Cold War period. Despite the more general promise of the title, the preface indicates that the focus is principally on those two radios, the two U.S. government-supported “surrogate” broadcasters to the Soviet bloc that aspired as much as possible—and with considerable success—to act the role that might have been filled by their target countries’ domestic media had there been no censorship.

Part I has chapters describing the goals of the two radios, as well as a complementary chapter on the goals of the official VOA. Each of these three chapters is authored by a former executive of the radio service in question. This part sets the stage by tracing the evolution of the U.S. radios from their beginnings, at a time when the challenges of international communication were new to the United States. In that early period, some key figures believed that Madison Avenue techniques, successful in selling cigarettes, would be effective in promoting...