The 'Newspapers Without Paper'

...The BBC initiated its Russian transmissions in 1946, the VOA followed in 1947, RFE started broadcasting to Eastern Europe in 1950, and RL (known for the first few years as Radio Liberation) inaugurated programs in Russian and other Soviet languages in 1953...

...He says his book "does not purport to be a history of Radio Free Europe, much less a history of Western foreign broadcasting since World War II...

...He urged that the United States use radio to bring the truth to the Soviet Union in a number of languages...

...Nevertheless, the VOA service to the USSR encountered problems, especially in the first decade of its existence...

...In the last years of the Cold War RFE and RL became the dominant broadcasters...

...it deals to a lesser degree with RL...

...Urban ignores him altogether...

...The glory days of the Western radios that both authors justly praise may be over, but their message still needs to be heard...

...Nelson takes his title from an Izvestia attack on foreign broadcasters on August 20, 1968, the day the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia: "They are jointly known as the black heavens...

...35.00...

...It does seem possible to predict with high probability that in the long run Russia will achieve a more modern type of society with a more normal form of social coordination that relies more heavily on freer mass media instead of Party control, and is generally more pluralistic...

...Theodore Streibert, director of the United States Information Agency, which was set up in 1953 and took over the VOA, felt that "propaganda methods are associated with dictatorships...

...At least there was little dispute about two areas the VOA covered effectively— ethnic minorities, and the writings of dissidents in the Soviet Union...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty...

...To show the dichotomy between the attitudes of the British and the Russians toward broadcasting, Nelson quotes Komsomolskaya Pravda: "The foundation of BBC propaganda is the latest news, broadcast with emphatic objectivity...

...In the case of RL, neither author mentions the unique contribution to that goal by Howland Sargeant, its president from 1954 to 1975...

...He spent most of his career at Reuters, and was the respected news agency's general manager from 1976 to 1989...

...information from abroad and the fact that Soviet society is essentially an imitative one...

...While he agreed it was necessary to counter Soviet lies, he called the practice "repugnant" and "not in the American tradition...

...It represents, consequently, the political testament of a brilliant Hungarian-born antiCommunist conservative filled with a hatred for totalitarianism and a passion for pluralism that fueled his career at the BBC and RFE...

...Focus groups in the former Soviet republics stress the importance of democratic education in the current uncertain era...

...For the first two decades of their existence, RFE and RL were secretly subsidized by the U.S...

...Its director in the 1970s, James Keogh, said that "what we do not do—as the official voice of the United States—is indulge in polemics aimed at changing the internal structure of the Soviet Union...

...It is waged by enemies of Communism quite openly, even though under the mantle of 'impartiality' and 'objectivity.' But this does not lessen its hostile nature...

...The main reason for predicting this is indeed the growth of...

...The ban was finally lifted—in 1983...

...foreign policy...

...George Urban's book, as his subtitle suggests, presents an insider's perspective of RFE, where he held several positions including director...

...Their voices will be heard and will make a great deal of difference...

...It should be noted that in selecting material for broadcasting to the USSR, the BBC does not draw any conclusions of its own but leaves this to the listeners, who sometimes, through lack of experience or lack of knowledge, are hooked by those who for years have made it their practice to fish in troubled waters...

...256 pp...

...Bertram D. Wolfe, that master of anti-Stalinist dialectic, who was then head of a VOA ideological unit, told me that even quoting Karl Marx was verboten...

...Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was particularly grateful for RL's coverage of the August 1991 coup from inside Moscow, which USSR President Gorbachev heard along with that of the BBC while confined in the Crimea...

...from abroad...

...Surprisingly, the CIA exercised little editorial control beyond the broad mandate to serve the long-range interests of U.S...

...During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, a VOA producer who asked the music librarian for a recording of "Song of India" learned that it was no longer available...

...author of the forthcoming "Sparks of Liberty" At A 1965 conference on communications with the Soviet Union, sponsored by New York University and Radio Liberty, the late Ithiel de Sola Pool of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the keynote speaker...

...Twenty-five years later that prophecy was fulfilled when Mikhail S. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroïka delivered the coup de grâce to the CommunistParty's control of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites...

...Congress with the funds disbursed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA...

...He excoriates the American "liberal" press and "intellectual appeasers" as dangerous enemies of the radios, failing to mention that newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post supported their activities...

...It's by Rimsky-Korsakov, and we're not supposed to use anything by Russians," he was told...

...Although Nelson is not an area specialist, he is at home in the world of international communications...

...But for a short time in the early 1980s, a few Russian and Ukrainian ultranationalists on RL's Munich staff were able to exploit the laissez-faire policy of American executives appointed by the Reagan Administration...

...CIA Directors Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as Cord Meyer, the principal officer in charge of supervising RFE and RL, appreciated that independent surrogate radios could be catalysts for fundamental changes in the Soviet bloc if they were protected from hugger-mugger micromanagement...

...In 1995 Czech President Vaclav Havel invited RFE/RL to move their operations to Prague, where they continue to broadcast today on a sharply reduced budget from Congress and with a limited future...

...This was generally true during the 33 years I worked there, and RL led the way in disseminating the demands for human rights by leading Jewish refuseniks...

...Despite its vaunted independence, Nelson says, "the BBC had no qualms about accepting the specific advice of the Foreign Office on handling particular aspects of anti-Communist propaganda...

...Urban is also on shaky ground when he categorically asserts that Radio Liberty was not guilty of broadcasting programs with anti-Semitic content...

...Ambassador in Moscow, reported to Washington that the Kremlin consistently sought to paint a distorted and unfavorable picture of America...

...The crucial role of Western radio during the Cold War has since been acknowledged not only by dissident intellectuals whose samizdat writings reached millions of their fellow countrymen, but also by apparatchiks of the former Communist regimes...

...Still, the well-deserved reputation for objectivity earned by the BBC's wartime transmissions endured, and attracted a large audience of Eastern Europeans and Soviet citizens who were fed up with their own media's biased shrillness...

...On the one hand was the U.S...

...The authors complement each other's picture of the two radios in that Nelson's is a panorama while Urban describes his "war within the Cold War" with opponents ofhispolicyand programming theories...

...Only a minority of State Department officials welcomed the VOA...

...The Senate refused to accredit the VOA to the press gallery, but TASS, Pravda, Izvestia, and Radio Moscow got seats...

...Such problems notwithstanding, in time the VOA gained a wide audience...

...It is confined to the story and issues connected with my work for the radio, and especially the climate in which my colleagues and I operated on the eve of the demise of the Soviet system and empire...

...Nelson writes that the VOA was beset by controversy during most of the Cold War: "Debates on détente versus confrontation were added to those on objectivity versus propaganda...

...Michael Nelson's pioneering War of the Black Heavens illuminates the entire spectrum of Western shortwave broadcasting, from the French, German, Canadian, and Vatican radios to the more influential British and American stations...

...historians have still to elucidate the vile role played by these Western radio stations...

...Ambassador to the Soviet Union urging a 'crisper anti-Communist line' and, on the other, the State Department advising the VOA to play down the 20th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution...

...The competition began with the onset of the Cold War, a term we are told was invented by none other than George Orwell...

...As early as 1945 Averell Harriman, then U.S...

...Moreover, 100 U.S...

...Those who are talking to the Soviet Union are not talking to deaf ears...

...Thus the Soviet Union was the ultimate victim of its own creation: The regime produced shortwave receivers for its propaganda goals, but could not successfully prevent heretical ideas from penetrating the minds of its citizens despite intensive and expensive jamming of broadcasts from the alien capitalist world...

...Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War By George Urban Yale...

...See my article, "Life at (Radio) Liberty," NL, February 5-19, 1990...

...Unlike the BBC and VOA, RFE and RL had a different mission...

...But I must take exception to some of his judgments...

...As Urban writes: "Speaking in the first person plural, they articulated the kind of opinions that free media would have expressed had a free press, radio and television existed under Soviet dispensation and were in effect national 'home services...

...They were staffed by émigrés and defectors from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who informed their fellow countrymen not only about the free world but about past and present events inside their countries that the dictatorships suppressed...

...And like most of the press, they stood foursquare in their repudiation of the attempt by Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to consign RFE and RL to the "graveyard of Cold War relics" during the détente period of the early '70s...

...In addition, Nelson quotes former Polish President Lech Walesa's reply when asked how important RFE had been in the cause of Polish freedom: "Would there be earth without the sun...

...scholars in the field of Soviet and Eastern European studies sent an appeal to the members of the committee urging them to preserve these valuable instruments of evolutionary change...

...one official called it "the illegitimate child at a family reunion...

...BBC] propaganda is straightforward propaganda...

...Then the director of a computerized simulation project that amassed information on the impact of Western media in the USSR, he declared: "Most of the things of a positive character that are happening in the Soviet Union today are explainable only in terms of the influence of the West, for which the most important single channel is radio...

...To read from the book would be far outside the normal style of programming and would tend to reinforce Soviet charges that the United States is utilizing these events as a political weapon and is intervening in the domestic affairs of the USSR...

...Unfortunately, Urban died in October 1997 before the publication of the book...

...Nelson gives him one sentence and misspells his name...

...The VOA exercised restraint, however, in its use of such samizdat material as Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago...

...He presents convincing evidence that the victory in the ideological struggle was due primarily to the cumulative efforts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Radio Liberty (RL...

...He points out that, ironically, it was Lenin who recognized the power of reaching the largely illiterate masses through a "newspaper without paper" after the Bolshevik Revolution...

...His book is the result of several years of interviews with key people and in-depth research in Western archives as well as the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow...