Eight Years of Radio Free Europe
KELLEN, KONRAD
Eight Years of Radio Free Europe By Konrad Kellen Broadcasts to five East European states in new phase On July 4, Radio Free Europe, a unique political instrument in American history, will begin...
...Is such an effort really necessary...
...Starting with a single 7 '/^-kilowatt transmitter for about an hour a day, RFE's effort has increased to the point where 28 powerful transmitters broadcast a combined total of some 2,700 hours a week to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania...
...As regards the future, RFE can only sow what it considers to be good seeds in the hope that, both in the routine course of events and at critical moments, its listeners will be better equipped for their unending struggle with their own regimes...
...In the early days, when the situation was frozen in the Soviet world, with Stalin in absolute control, even intellectual resistance to the regime seemed completely impossible, and RFE broadcasts merely tried to open tiny cracks in the wall by head-on thrusts...
...This terrible struggle between the people and the regime—alien to a democracy where governments can be voted out of office—is by no means over...
...Despite Free Europe," said the Soviet chief of state, Marshal Voroshilov in Warsaw last month, "the Poles are friends of the Soviet Union...
...economic and spiritual objectives in this area...
...RFE's chief purpose is to deny to the Soviet Union political and ideological consolidation of a territory which it holds physically, to wage a battle of interdiction against its political...
...One may cite the millions of dollars spent on jamming—no doubt reluctantly, as jamming gives RFE the attraction of forbidden fruit...
...Is there any evidence of the effectiveness of Radio Free Europe's efforts...
...It becomes deactivated, which is exactly what the Communists want...
...RFE is trying to make its contribution to such a development by giving peoples under Soviet rule the best possible intellectual equipment for participating effectively and creatively in changing the patterns of their societies...
...Eight Years of Radio Free Europe By Konrad Kellen Broadcasts to five East European states in new phase On July 4, Radio Free Europe, a unique political instrument in American history, will begin its ninth year of daily broadcasting to five satellite countries in Eastern Europe...
...This is largely true...
...Don't the people in Eastern Europe hate Communism, anyway...
...the ceaseless attacks in the Communist press and radio (an average of three a day over the last four years), which also provide free advertising for RFE...
...Now chief of the broadcast review staff at Radio Free Europe, he has also contributed to the Reporter...
...Since the upheavals, RFE has mainly been attempting to feed the intellectual ferment in the entire satellite belt, and to expose any veiled efforts on the part of the Communist leaders to re-tighten the screws and deprive the people of whatever relief they have gained since Stalin's death...
...and thousands of reports from refugees and letters from people inside Eastern Europe...
...But even the best mind cannot work reliably in the long run if it is isolated and deprived of information and stimulation...
...The Communists, who realize that public opinion is as important in a dictatorship as in any other system—that force alone is not enough—make a vast propaganda effort to align the thoughts and feelings of the captive populations with Moscow's objectives...
...Of course, many things have changed in the eight years that RFE has been broadcasting, and the broadcasts have changed with the times...
...RFE does not broadcast to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany or Albania...
...The purpose was to give the participants reliable information on the situation in their own countries and in the West on which they could base realistic decisions...
...In each case, it had to restrict itself to reporting the true facts, as fast and as well as it could gather them, to those involved in the struggle, and to "cross-report" them to the other satellites...
...Konrad Kellen received a Legion of Merit as a psychological-warfare officer with the 12lh Army in France, Luxemburg and Germany...
...The Soviets are aware of RFE's impact...
...Voroshilov thus concedes that a Western propaganda effort has become an active political force inside a country far away from home base...
...No matter what Khrushchev or other individual Communists have in mind, there can be little doubt that the long-range trend must be toward liberalization, an evolution to a more rational society...
...After Stalin's death, when there were outbreaks in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, RFE tried to cope as best it could with its dilemma of being strongly in favor of the revolutionaries and yet incapable of firing them on without violating the canons of decency...
...Radio Free Europe tries to frustrate that effort, by giving its listeners such information and opinions as will permit them to draw conclusions independent of Soviet doctrines...
...They need masses of misinformed, intellectually stagnant passivists just as much as they need cadres of devoted activists...
...Only the future can measure the success of this unprecedented political talkathon from the West to five subjugated nations...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 23
