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 

Kenez Vol. 4 Dissent

"Soviet dissenters did not form and did not even aim to form a movement of political opposition. They did not plan to take over the government and did not offer an alternative set of policies. They did not agree with on another concerning the large political issues of the day, and they came to object to official policies for a wide variety of reasons. The heterogeneity of this small group became ever more obvious. Yet this group had something in common: its members were courageous people who were willing to accept considerable risks for principles in which they believed. They represented a moral voice, and their willingness to accept persecution showed that Soviet regime was hypocritical and did not live up to its own idea. Their behavior demonstrated that it was possible to "live in truth" as the great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it (K, 223)."

Dissent arose gradually in the Krushchev period--that is, at a time when the Soviet Union ceased to be a totalitarian state. One factor was the amelioration of terror, and another was the ever-increasing conact with advanced capitalist countries. Soviet propagandists were correct when they maintained the West was a subversive force...."People live better in the West (K, 223)

"The year 1956 was a pivotal one. Khrushchev's "secret" speech filled many with hope and enthusiasm, and a conviction that a new era would come into being. After all, the first secretary himself had called for an jonest examination of the nation's past. In the first blush of enthusiasm a great deal of truth was spoken. Inevitably, in the first blush of enthusiasm a great deal of truth was spoken. Inevitably, in the aftermath of a more or less open discussion of Stalin's crimes and after the return of tens of thousands of innocent people from concentration camps, ideas would be expressed that went beyond the officially approved views. Writers were struggling to find the limits of the permissible, but those limits were diffidult to find, for Khrushchev's regime was rather unpredictable. Some individuals honestly helieved that their ideas might meet with governmental approval. Since Khrushchev's personality was mercurial and circumstances were constantly changing, it was hard to know what was permitted and what was not. Many people inadvertently found themselves in trouble. (K, 224)"

224: Pasternak publishes in Italy

"When Pasternak died in 1960, many who believed that the authorities drove him to his grave gathered in the cemetery in silent support of the anti-Stalinist cause. This was the first post-Stalin political demonstration. The dissident movement, a small group of courageous intellectuals, slowly was coming into being. (K,225)"

"The dissidents began to spread their ideas by typescripts to produced in many carbon copies.  The writings passed from hand to hand sometimes reaching thousands of people. This was samizdat (self-publishing) was born. The form of "publishing" became a regular part of the life of a large part of at least the urban intelligentsia. In the early stages of the cold war the United States established a set of radio stations in Munich, West Germany, in order to broadcast news and entertainment to communist Eastern Europe. The station which broadcast in Russian, Radio Liberty, made available to Soviet audiences Pasternak's entire long novel. This particular form publishing was called tamizdat (published elsewhere). The songs of dissenter bards such as Aleksandr Galich, Balut Okudzhava, and Vladimir Vysotskii were spread by passing audio tapes from hand to hand. (K, 225)"

"In the course of the second wave of the anti-Stalin campaing in 1962, Khrushchev personally intervened in order to allow the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This work was a subtle but unequivocal denunciation of Stalinist terror, perhaps the most daring work published up to that time in a Soviet journal. (K, 225)"

"While the author of that book was not arrested-for the arrest of Pasternak would have caused an international scandal, further harming the standing of the Soviet Union-the unknown and therefore unprotected reader could spend years in a labor camp for such an offense. (K,225)"

"In this respect the Brezhnev era was substantially different.There continued to be periods of relaxation and periods of more intense repression, but by and large the regime became more predictable. The authorities wanted to end the de-Stalinization process initiated by Khrushchev, which seemed too dangerous to them. (K, 226)"

-considered partial rehab of Stalin

A Narrowing of My Thesis

To narrow down my thesis, I find myself going back to where I started this project, with The Chronicle of Current Events. [1] The Chronicle was an underground newspaper published by a select group of dissidents in the late sixties and early seventies.  When I sat down to do this assignment earlier in the week, I panicked. I was going through my notes and it seemed to be a jumble of odd anecdotes about newspapers, journalists, Decembrists and radio. There was no sort of overarching idea.

That was until I found my notes on The Thaw Generation, written by Ludmilla Alexeyeva and translated by Paul Goldberg[2]. Alexeya’s book is her memoir of her years as a leader in the dissident movement; in particular, she focuses on the years she spent as an editor of the Chronicle. Looking at it, I realized everything I’ve been reading connects back to The Chronicle, at least in a tangential way. So my narrowed topic is: the reporting and dissemination of The Chronicle as a case study for how information was shared by dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Here’s how I see it shaping up, so far:

·      How The Chronicle came about-The context of The Chronicle is a fascinating story. The concern with openness and transparency began earnestly among dissidents after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich[3]. But the samizdat movement began in earnest after the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the subsequent publication of Ginzberg’s The White Book[4].

·      How an underground newspaper gathers news- This is one of the things that initially attracted to me to this topic. I spent the summer working at a newspaper and have a decent feel on traditional reporting. I didn’t have a sense of how to report a story when it was dangerous to get caught with notes or interview the people stories were on. The Chronicle used a network of dissidents spreading information back and forth to each other in person.

·      How to publish an underground newspaper in the USSR-This is where history of samizdat publishing comes in. Dissidents typed up carbon copies and passed them around. It’s impossible to estimate how many copies of The Chronicle were in circulation for this reason.

·      How/Why The Chronicle stories were broadcast on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Part of the reason The Chronicle was so influential in the USSR was that its articles were broadcast in. Dissidents were savvy about getting in touch with foreign broadcasters and journalists to bring their stories abroad.

·      How/Why The Chronicle  was published in the United States? How did Reddaway’s Uncensored Russia come to be? The Chronicle and tons of other samizdat was smuggled to the States and published here.

This is still somewhat of a jumble. The way I’m looking at it is the process story of how samizdat, using The Chronicle, as a case study came to be an influential part of the dissident movement.

I still don’t have a thesis for my thesis, per se, but everything I’ve been looking at does connect to the story of The Chronicle.

---

[1] Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union: the unofficial Moscow journal, a Chronicle of current events (New York: American Heritage Press), 1972.

[2] Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Paul Goldberg, trans. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 1993.

[3] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2005.

[4]Hayward, Max, trans, On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzha,” (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers), 1966.