Roth-Ey (Book) Vol. 1

Roth-Ey, Kristen. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War. New York: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Post WWII- radio starts coming in 

"By 1955, the USSR was spending more on jamming than on broadcasting its own programs, and officials at the radio administration were discussing the possibility that, given both the amount of interference they were throwing up and the impossibility of percision jamming, they would soon paralyze the domestic radio network entirely" (Roth-Ey, 131)

132: Soviet Union produced the short wave radios

"The phenomenon of foreign broadcasting to the USSR was also a ringing testament to its modern, technologically advanced society and a backhanded compliment to its international importance. In the period the period 1963 to 1968, the USSR lifted jamming almost completely, even as Soviet media continued to rail against the enemy voices. To some observers it looked as if  the Soviet authorities had settled in for a hostile, useful peace." (R-E, 133)


"They had not, because though the ideological category of enemy voices had its uses, to be sure, the reality of foreign radio broadcasting to the USSR did pose genuine, intractable problems. What the authorities objected to on the most basic level was information. Jamming practices varied over time, but by and large the Soviets did not attempt to jam broadcasts with purely musical content, nor did they typically jam programs in foreign languages not native to people in the USSR, such as English. THe programming deemed most offensive had to do with Soviet domestic affairs. This could be news of natural disasters of readings of literature banned inside the USSR; it could be first-person accounts from émigrés about historical events such as collectivization or analyses of Kremlin politics. In 1968, it was news of Czechoslovak heresy of "Socialism with a human face" and the subsequent crackdown the triggered the resumption of full-scale jamming. Foreign broadcasting delivered information that the regime did not want people to have, period, and this made hamming, however ineffective, its natural stance." (R-E, 133)


"Yet arguably it was the very fact of foreign broadcasting inside the USSR, and not the informational content of its programs, that spoke loudest of all. By breaking the Soviet regime's media monopoly, foreign broadcasting shattered the regime's hold on the modes and meanings of cultural consumption in Soviet everyday life." (R-Y, 133-134)


"Radio in the Soviet context was designed to educate , inspire and organize collectives; entertainment always took a backseat to edification, and information was to be provided on a need-to-know basis in life with longer-range political agendas. Broadcasting, in other words, was part of planned cultural economy that had little to do with popular taste or timeliness. By contrast, foreign broadcasters went out of their way to present themselves as the Soviet audience's intimate friend and a champion of its rights to information and satisfaction. Programming on foreign stations often mixed formats (news and music) and cultural registers (high and low, serious and silly) and promoted entertainment for entertainment's sake in a way directly counter to Soviet cultural hierarchies and to the idea of uplift. Finally, foreign radio modeled a very different relationship to that time than what was to be found in Soviet media; it was, in a word, timely, and as it delivered not just news but "breaking news," foreign radio told Soviet listeners that they wanted, needed, and perhaps even had a right to be up-to-date in a modern world." (R-E, 134)


135: party create cheap knock off


135: in 20s and 30s, some freestanding radio sets, "For the most part Soviet radio operated via a ststem of radio diffusion exchanges (radiouzly) that picked up signals (via long-,medium- and short wave broadcasts) and relayed them to wired units (radiotochki)" (R-E, 135)


'41: "7 million radios, nearly 6 million of them wired public amplifiers of one sort or another, and Soviet broadcast signals reached almost every corner of the USSR." (R-E, 135)


136: during the war, radio became part of daily life, it was also PUBLIC


"In 1941, the regime had confiscated all freestanding radios for military use (and also, it seems, for the purpose of walling off the population from foreign broadcasters), and this meant that even more than in the thirties, the locus of the Soviet radio experience was the wired public set. People gathered around these radios to get the latest news, but they also came together to hear Soviet literature's leading lights recite poetry and read the Russian classics..." (R-E, 136)


137: '55 "Soviet industry was pumping out several times more sets per year than had been produced in the entire prewar period." 33 million
'65: "more than double again" 32 radios/100 people
'63: no more wireless 


"The shift from wired to wireless radio had far reaching implications that went almost wholly unrecognized at time. For one thing, it meant that that had been a predominantly collective and public activity was now moving into the realm of private experience and was thus far less simple to quantify, monitor, and control-indeed, it was beginning to look less and less like a traditional Soviet phenomenon altogether. ( Groups of listeners gathered to join a radio rally or attend a performance of radio theater were doing something that fit easily into the category of a Soviet activity, whether social cultural, or political. But could the same be said of the solitary listener at home) A second, even more critical issue about the wireless radios--and one that only served to heighten their potential un-Sovietness--was the fact that large numbers of these sets could receive shortwave broadcasts. In fact, according to a 1949 report to the party's Central Committee from the radio administration, nearly all of the freestanding radios being produced by Soviet industry had shortwave broadcasts. And as A. Puzin, the head of the radio administration of Glavradio, pointed out, this meant they were "designed for receiving not just the Soviet, but also foreign radio programs" devoted, in his words, to "the foulest slander of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies. " Puzin recommended curtailing shortwave production almost completely. Nine years later, in 1958, the CC did its own investigation and found that production had not only continued but flourished: the USSR had produced more radios with shortwave capacity since 1949 than all 20 million radios in the USSR ready and able to tune in to foreign slander. At the time Puzin raised his alarm, there had been a mere half a million." (R-E, 138)


Why-WWII, also


"Wiring the vast expanses of Soviet territory for broadcasting, however, was an immense undertaking, even if the goal was to connect diffusion centers to loudspeakers and not individual homes. Radiofikatsiia using the wired system required three things in chronic short supply in the Soviet countryside: equipment, expertise, and perhaps most important of all, electricity." (R-E, 139)


-villages


139: consumer demand


140: "By the late fifties, as many as sixty different foreign stations were broadcasting to the USSR at certain times of the day. Jamming was worse than futile." (R-Y, 140)


high cost


"Nonetheless, the enemy voices could be heard with little trouble in more areas outside the centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities. Worse still, jamming operations made tuning in to republic and all-Union radio impossible in many areas: the Soviets were jamming themselves. With enemy radio the only thing to listen to, some klokhozniki were reportedly choosing to run the VOA and the BBC on their local wired networks.  (R-Y, 140)


141: tuning wasn't illegal


143: Estonian study in '66 "up to 70% of radio listeners" listened to Finnish and other foreign stations
Lithuania '67 35%
'68 Central Radio: 50% at least occasionally 


numbers inflated to make KGB mission look significant


"In closed-door meetings and in public settings, including in mass media, Soviet authorities regularly attacked foreign radio for corrupting listeners. The official list of corrupting influences from abroad grew long in the post- Stalinist era...But arguably, enemy radio had a place of honor in the official imagination. There were multiple divisions in the bureaucracy  for transcribing and analyzing foreign broadcasts, and their reports, sometimes quite sophisticated, went to the in-bosex of party elites on a regular basis. Jamming although no longer a matter for public discussion by 1960 (it was on Glavit's, the main censorship agency, list of taboo subjects), was no secret, and people in radio and the party-state administration were well aware of how ineffective and injurious it was." 


Radio Moscow 148-154


"Radio listening acquired its own disturbing undertones as of the late 1940s because of its association with foreign broadcasting. Radio was already moving in the direction of private consumption in the postwar USSR. Foreign radio, the enemy voice, pushed the point anc ould make all private listening seem more intimate and illicit." 


158: details what was on Soviet broadcasts, it was boring


162: Soviet radio was "attitude to the fact" "The reality was that calibrating attitudes was a politicians' game, not a journalistic one."


170: Soviets couldn't go all night-censor


172: 


"A 1968 survey by radio and TV's reseach bureau founf that 47 percent of people identified themselves as listeners to foreign radio (openly, the researchers notes); just under 10 percent described themselves as "regular listeners," while another 15 percent said they did not tune in themselves but heard about foreign radio broadcasts secondhand. The study was limited to urban regions, but inlike the Maiak survey, it covered multiple republics, it also gathered some interesting information on the tastes of listeners and their social profiles. The largest group of self-reported listeners was in the sixteen-to-thirty-year-old category; more men listened than women (52 percent to 41 percent), and most people listened at night. However there was no clear-cut correlation between educational levels and listening practices: aside from those in the lowest level (who had markedly lower rates), people of varying background reported listening to the foreign voices in rather similar numbers. Interestingly, when asked what they listened to on foreign radio, they split into two roughly equal camps. About 45 percent said they tuned in only for music and about the same number said they listened only to the news; 10 percent described themselves tuning in for both." (R-E, 172-173)


"Soviet researchers drew a direct connection between the inadequacy of domestic radio and the success of the enemy voices. 'The sluggishness and narrowness of the programs on Soviet radio, including on the First STation and Maiak, lead to a situation where a part of the audience is switching over to listen to foreign stations on either a regular or an episodic basis.' Listeners reported that they tuned in to foreign radio not only for what was unavailable from Soviet media sources but also for its timeliness. Here the researchers referred to an earlier study of Maiak to demonstrate just jow far off the mark the station was: fewer than 1 percent of the news segments covered events that had happened within the previous few hours, almost none were live, on-the-scene reports (o.5 percent of the total); about 25 percent of the airtime was given over to discussion of events or ideas with no clear time reference at all." 

Pudington Vol. 2 Samizdat

Where it gets relevant

"Ironically it was the Soviet Union that came to Radio Liberty's rescue--in two ways. First the repression  of Soviet dissent and official refusal to permit the publication of nonconformist writing gave rise to the samizdat phenomenon. Samizdat essays or reports typed and retyped in editions ranging from several dozens to a few hundred. Some reflected the opinions of dissident who favored democratic reforms for the Soviet Union. Others were written by those seeking autonomy, cultural freedom, or independence for the non-Russian peoples (p, 170)."

"In typed editions, a samizdat document might reach an audience of a few hundred or several thousand at best. If the document were broadcast on a Western radio station, however, it could reach millions. Because it broadcast many more hours each day than its Western competitors, Radio Liberty was able to devote hours of air time to the broadcasting of samizdat documents. Soon enough, a major goal of samizday authors was to arrange for the documents to be smuggled to the West and given to Radio Liberty." (P,170)

"One of the earliest samizdat documents to reach the West was a transcript of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, the first dissidents tried and sentenced to the Gulag for antistate activities. The document was duly delivered to RL's bureau in PAris. Francis Ronalds, bureau chief a the time, verified the document's genuineness and turned it over to the New York Times, on the theory that the news would have a greater impact if carried first by the Times than the avowedly anti-Communist RL. Radio Liberty then broadcast details of the trial after they had appeared in the times.  " (P,171)

"Radio Liberty next established a special program at which samizdat was read. Soon enough, the station was inundated with documents from the Soviet Union. The station established a samizdat archive and hired an archival staff to sift through, catalogue, verify, and circulate the thousands of documents that reached the station. Mario Corti, a Russian-speaking Italian who became chief of the samizdat unit, says that procedure. If, for example, a document mentioned a party official or KGB operative, the staff combed through the Soviet press to ensure that he name and posiion in the document corresponded to information published in the press." (P, 171)


"As a matter of strict policy, Radio Liberty never solicited samizdat; to have done so would have placed the author in jeporady of a sentence in the gulag. The samizdat unit was also carefuly to verify that each document was legitimate, in part out of fear that the KGB might concoct a report that, if taken at face value by RL and put on the air, might serve to discredit the dissident movement." (P, 171)


"More important than samizdat to RL's future was the wave of emigration the Brezhnev regime permitted as a concession to the United States during the early years of detente. Quite unexpectedly, tens of thousands of Soviet citizens were allowed to leave for the West. Many of the émigrés were educated, and a few had a journalism background. THe emigration included well-known cultural figures,--writers, singers, musicologists, artists--as well as authorities of Soviet science, economists, and others of the technological intelligentsia (P, 171)."


"It was almost too good to be true. Indeed, some station veterans believe that RL officials, perhaps nervous over the possibility of a renewed curb on exit visa, were insufficiently discriminating in their hiring decisions, grabbing off any new emigrant who might conceivably be taught the rudiments of radio broadcasting. " (P, 171)

Puddington Vol. 1

Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.


VOA-convey a U.S. Perspective (P,ix)


freedom radio-Cold War institutions (P, ix)


"Their goal was not simply to inform their listeners but also to bring about the peaceful demise of the Communist system and the liberation of what were known as satellite nations. The radios pursued these goals not by promoting the American way of life, but by serving as surrogate home radio services, alternatives to the controlled, party-dominated, domestic press. (P, ix)


"A sizable portion of Radio Liberty's Russian-language programs, including some programs that regularly boasted audiences in the millions, originated from New York. The Russian service included four or five full-time editors and correspondents, but since New York was the preferred destination for those among the intellectual elite who were fed up with Soviet restrictions, Soviet censorship, Soviet poverty and, especially, Soviet hypocrisy, the service was able to recruit literally dozens of talented reporters, writers, poets, musicians and commentators from among the wave emigrants who left the USSR during the 1970s."


"Most were hired as part-timers or freelancers. Though their pay was hardly extravagant, it could be a life-saver for intellectuals who had left good careers in the Soviet Union for the uncertainties of life in the United States. For some, a more important consideration was the opportunity to work as a journalist or critic in the Russian language. Indeed, after years of censorship and self-censorship in the Soviet Union,  a job at Radio Liberty for a journalist or critic often provided the first opportunity for honest commentary. It enabled them to earn a decent living and place the spotlight of journalistic truth on the dark corners of Soviet life.  Having been unwilling participants in the dishonesty of the Soviet system, the exiled commentators could draw on years of experience to inform their listeners about the corruption of Soviet science, Soviet sport, and Soviet culture and the facts about the natural disasters and man-made catastrophes that were systematically covered up by Soviet authorities (P, Xii) ."


Xii: Sports reporter with stories in the drawer


Evgeny Rubin: "Sports journalism in the Soviet Union was dishonest, especially where the professionalism of so-call amateur athletes was concerned. We couldn't write about how athletes were devoting their entire life to sports; we had to write how they were students or soldiers or workers who came to the stadium after working hours to train. All of this was untrue, but we had to write it anyway. And we had to ignore how the officials were sending adult athletes to tournaments supposedly reserved for young people. We had to lie at every level, and we always had the censors looking over our shoulders. Any mistakes and I could be fired" (P, Xiii)


RFE officially launched May Day 1951


Pavel Tigrid (formerly of BBC)


"Tigrid pulled no punches in spelling out Radio Free Europe's methods for dealing with the Communist enemy. 'Our station has, above all, a fighting and political mission." he explained. "Our offensive is directed against Communism and Sovietism, against the representative of the terrorist regimes..." It goes on if you need it


8: Kennan father of project


13: Model for RFE was Radio in the American sector began in 1946 as wired radio service for Germans living in American sector of Berlin


"It broadcast news, commentary and cultural programs that were unavailable in the censored media of the German Democratic Republic."


FEC- Free Europe Commission


"The FEC;s initial radio plans were modest . Exiled leaders were placed before a microphone and given free rein to speak to their countrymen." (P, 17)


By July 1950: "It was to be a "channel of communication by radio with the prisoner states over which things might be said which are in the national interest to have said, but that an official organ of government such as the voice could not itself say.' Those who would speak over the RFE microphone would 'authentic voices of exiled political and intellectual leaders and occasionally the voices of lesser-known or unknown exiles." 


Crusade for freedom-fundraising "freedom dollars" 


24: "The CIA was the conduit for the bulk of RFE's budget and practically all of RL's budget during the stations' first two decades of existence." 


27-30: CIA involvement


36: mission change w/ outbreak of Korea not just dissidents any more


FEC board: 'The aim of Radio Free Europe is primarily to supplement the Voice of america in the field of propaganda, using the voices of exiled leaders incidentally as this seems consistent with its fundamental purposes. (P, 36)"


"Thus even before it inaugurated its full broadcast schedule, RFE had begun to construct a news and intelifence gatherin operation that would become the envy of scholars and journalists all over the world. In addition to the major Western newspapers, wire services and magazines, RDE acquitted a long list of Communist bloc publications, right down to small provincial weeklies . The next step was to set up a series of monitoring stations in which broadcasts from the official Communist radio stations were recorded, transcribed, and sent to the desk editors as background information. Although it was eventually centralized in the Munich headquarters, monitoring was at first organized on a catch-as-can basis. For example, on man, supplied with a room and and typewriter , took care of the monitoring for the entire Czechoslovak regime radio output. To monitor Romanian and Bulgarian radio broadcasts, a staff was hired in Istanbul; it took nearly a week for the staff's transcripts to reach RFE headquarters in New York. (P,38)" 


"In addition to its monitoring program, RFE opened a network of news and information bureaus throughout Western Europe. The chief of each bureau was an English-speaking journalist; the rest of the staff were usually exiles. THe bureaus eventually came to function like normal news operation, supplying reports relevant to the audience countries from London, Bonn, Rome and PAris. At first, however, the bureaus' main purpose was intelligence gathering. THe original plan called for a division of intelligence gathering between the CIA and RFE, with the CIA providing the general information about conditions behind the Iron Curtain and RFE providing material elicted in interviews with defecors. Thus the decision on where to locate the bureaus depended less on the news potential of the city than on how often it was frequented by travelers or refugees from the East. Bureaus were opened in Hamburg and Stockholm because these cities were often visited by ships from Poland. A bureau was opened in Istanbul because it was the destination of travelers and refugees from Bulgaria and Romania. Bureaus were opened in various cities in Austria because of their proximity to the Hungarian border. THe bureau staff conducted in-depth interviews with travelers and often employed standard defector interrogation techniques. Some of the information was sent to Munich as new reports, but sometimes the format resembled interrogation or intelligence reports. Because civic life was heavily politicized under communism, the inquiries were quite broad. ...." (P 39)


"Radio Free Europe did not maintain paid agents inside the Iron Curtain. It did, however, retain a network of well-connected émigrés in PAris, Vienna, Rome, and other European cities who kept abreast of political developments through contacts within the East European countries. THese agents would pass along information gathered from their various sources, and the material would then be analyzed and occasionally used in special broadcasts about internal conditions in the audience countries. RFE also recieved information on developments within the Communist world from letters sent to its special Box 52-20 in Munich. Listeners were invited to write to this address, and the information was sometimes was used in RFE's Messages programs, in which announcers would reveal the names of Communist spies or informers." (P,40)


41: huge autonomy


46-loyal fan base


"Reports from inside the Iron Curtain indicated that RFE was most appreciated for its harsh brand of anticommunism; at the top of the list of favorite programs were the Messages broadcasts, in which RFE announcers denounced by name Communist spies and informers....(P,47)"


"Radio Free Europe was also gaining listeners by simply broadcasting reports about important news items that the Communist media either ignored or presented hours or even days later than the Western broadcasting stations. According to an internal survey conducted in 1953, the Voice of Free Hungary aired items about the free world an average of forty-four hours earlier than Communist media, and thirteen hours earlier on items about Communist countries. In some cases, the differences were astonishing. ...Examples (47)


47: appeal to workers, but as dissent picked up,  appealed to them.


61: balloon project


92: Secret Speech
Published in NYT


"Though not given exclusive rights to the secret speech, RFE nevertheless played an important role in acquainting its listeners with Khrushchev's anti-Stalin message. The text was read over the air night and day, accompanied by commentaries that speculated on its implications for communism's future. (p, 92) " circulated by balloon


153: March 1953 "Radio Liberty from Bolshevism"
specifically Soviet focused 


155: in the image of RFE