A Voice of the People

...Moscow at first ignored the foreign broadcasts, but once it realized the dangers they posed went to great lengths to prevent them from reaching their potential audiences by electronic jamming...

...What has Radio Liberty accomplished...

...It gave the peoples of the Soviet Union a voice of their own, stilled since 1917, and in this manner helped keep alive the spirit of intellectual and moral independence...

...When in the late 1980s Mikhail S. Gorbachev abandoned government control of information, the country exploded...

...Radio Liberty (or, as it was then called, Radio Liberation) began broadcasting on March 1,1953, five days before Stalin's sudden death...

...On my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1957 I was appalled to learn that some members of my own family in Leningrad, who had been evacuated eastward during the War, never heard of the Holocaust since the authorities deliberately ignored it...

...Its broadcasts, supplemented by reports from its correspondents throughout Russia, can now be heard on medium waves and even in cars...

...otherwise, its propaganda could not reach the population living outside large urban areas and collective farms in the central regions of the country...

...Sosin cites a message from Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, conveyed to Radio Liberty on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, that sums up its record: "It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of your contribution to the destruction of the totalitarian regime in the former Soviet Union...

...Funding henceforth came from Congress as well...

...Many Russians honestly believed that workers in Europe and the United States went on strike because they were starving...

...On another occasion it reported, also without comment, a speech by Solzhenitsyn that described Western democracy as "bordering on chaos, on state treason, on the right freely to destroy one's own country...

...chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who in the early 1970s launched a relentless though ultimately futile campaign against RFE and RL...

...During the period of what Sosin calls the "Clintonian perestroika" the joint RFE/RL budget was cut by nearly twothirds and the staff was reduced by one half...

...Soviet j arnming and terror were not the only problems the two stations had to deal with...

...To them the CIA was (and remained) a "spy" organization...

...RL now broadcast to the USSR programs that carried crude antiSemitic messages...

...The immediate grounds for Senator Fulbright's assault was information made public in 1971 that RFE and RL were financed and controlled by the CIA...

...His is the first authoritative account of an institution that played a major role in undermining Soviet authority andpaving the road to its collapse...

...association with it corrupted and exposed one to the charge of duplicity...

...The Congress had the good sense not to follow his advice...

...Having survived the challenges of the 1970s, Radio Liberty faced new and different problems in the early 1980s, when due to lax management by the BIB extreme Russian nationalists managed to seize control of a good deal of the programming...

...A great deal...

...A Polish woman who spent the War years working in a library in a small Russian town told me that after a couple of years she had sufficiently gained the confidence of the head librarian for the woman to take her aside and ask, in a whisper, "Tell me please, does the Soviet Union look as large on your maps as on ours...

...The most prominent champion of this view was Senator J. William Fulbright (D.-Ark...

...The demise of the Soviet Union led to a severe decrease in Radio Liberty's funding...

...This succinct statement neatly and authoritatively captures the station's historic importance...

...Ignoring highly favorable assessments of their work by a commission he himself had initiated, he demanded they be terminated...

...The instant Stalin's successors relaxed the censorship somewhat by letting in foreigners and permitting more Russians to travel abroad, a dissident movement began to emerge: Soon the regime's monopoly on opinion came under assault...

...Thus in 1982, RL transmitted around the clock, without comment, a letter from Solzhenitsyn to President Ronald Reagan in which, among other scurrilous charges, he accused the U. S. military of planning a genocidal nuclear attack on the centers of the Great Russian population...

...But about other countries they knew next to nothing, being cut off from contact with foreigners and lacking access to foreign media...

...Financed and controlled by the U.S...

...The lies spread about the Soviet Union they could to some extent counteract, because they knew from personal experience how things really stood...

...A number of influential people in the United States objected to them following the inauguration of détente on the grounds that they were "relics of the Cold War...

...Admirers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn aired writings of his that were no less crudely anti-American and antidemocratic...

...Radio Liberty's self-image was that of a "guest in the living room" of Soviet audiences and a "surrogate 'Home Service' to the Soviet people...

...Western intellectuals who had no qualms about cooperating with the many KGB front organizations, like George Arbatov's USA Institute, were outraged to learn that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, as well as the Congress for Cultural Freedom with its many outstanding publications (Encounter,Der Monat,Preuves, etc...

...My Moscow publisher, for example, has the receiver in his office turned to Radio Liberty at all times...

...It therefore sold quite cheaply mass-produced shortwave receivers...

...To have failed to become involved would have left the field to Soviet disinformation both at home and abroad, for there simply was no funding available from other sources to counter it...

...In addition, the KGB resorted to direct terror, murdering in the 1950s two RL employees, and in 1981 arranging for a bombing of its Munich headquarters...

...Unhappy as they may have been with their situation, they had no means of contemplating alternatives, and this made them more docile...

...When at full strength, jamming is estimated to have cost the USSR between $500 million and $1 billion annually, a sum greater than the combined annual operating budgets of VOA, RFE, RL, BBC, and Deutsche Welle...

...RFE and RL differed from all the other stations broadcasting to the Communist bloc in that they operated not as official government mouthpieces but as voices of the people residing in Eastern Europe and the USSR...

...In 1995 the remaining RL staff, along with the station's precious archives, moved to Prague, in response to an invitation from President Vaclav Havel...

...In reality, the CIA was and still is an information-gathering agency...

...Today RL continues to enjoy a large following in Russia, mainly because Russians tend to mistrust their own media...

...It remains in operation to this day, although on a significantly reduced scale...

...The revelations of CIA involvement in a number of seemingly independent activities aroused a storm of protests...

...Instead of liquidating the two stations, it entrusted their management to a Board of International Broadcasting (BIB) appointed by the President, with representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties...

...A number of foreign governments took advantage of this opportunity to broadcast to the USSR in Russian and minority languages...

...While the VOA adhered to strict guidelines of noninterference in the internal affairs of the Communist bloc —its mandate called for straightforward conveyance of information—RFE/RL employed numerous émigrés and assumed the role of spokesmen for the mute inhabitants living under Communist rule...

...In 1973, as a concession to "détente," it stopped interfering with VOA and the other official foreign services but continued to jam the more subversive RFE and RL...

...It draws not only on data obtained by clandestine means but on all available sources—including those in the public domain—to analyze for policymakers evidence bearing on national security...

...It is a gigantic research organization that has more in common with a think tank than with the world inhabited by James Bond...

...From Stalin's point of view, totally denying his subjects access to objective information was a perfectly sensible policy...

...Its main political effect was to rob them of the ability to make comparisons...

...Gene Sosin, who was affiliated with Radio Liberty from its inception in 1952 until his retirement in 1985, tells its story in a sober, judicious manner, extolling its achievements without concealing its shortcomings...

...The most influential of these services were the BBC, the Voice of America (VOA), Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe (RFE), which broadcast to the socalled satellite countries, and Radio Liberty (RL), which beamed to listeners in the Soviet Union...

...author, "The Russian Revolution," "Property and Freedom" It is difficult today for most people living in the West to conceive the extent to which, at the height of the Stalin era, Soviet citizens were kept in the dark about the true condition of their country and the world outside...

...Because of the USSR's immense size, even under Stalin the regime had to resort to shortwave broadcasting...

...government, they allowed considerable latitude to programmers to deliver not only factual information on world events but also to criticize Communist rulers and provide their audiences with a wide range of historical, cultural and religious material...

...Its intervention in the battle of ideas waged during the Cold War was a departure from its original mandate, yet quite legitimate given the money and patronage the KGB lavished on foreign individuals and organizations prepared to support the Soviet Union's policies...

...had been covertly financed by the CIA...