CRASHING THE CURTAIN
Gedye, G.E.R.
Crashing the Curtain By G. E. ft. Gedye Vienna IAND MY friends in the 96th Guard Rifle Division," said the little man in the ill-fitting hand-me-down suit, "tuned in pretty regularly—but of...
...I have been among them since and have seen their despair...
...Their accuracy secured prompt credence for news of the outside world which could not be tested...
...Whatever the romance clinging to these names, he was just as dashing a fellow, as dull a dog, as decent a citizen as you or I. His wife and his children led just as humdrum or as jolly existences as our own...
...She disliked the Voice for what she called its "flattery of the workers, who had crawled to both Nazis and Communists...
...If he didn't he wouldn't be listening...
...Others spoke to reliable sources whose quotations I have carefully verified...
...Erno himself was a confirmed "Voice of America" fan, but he had friends who preferred Paris Radio, which talked more of Hungary's future...
...To discover the answer is not easy...
...Because the "Voice of America" and the BBC use wave lengths which "cuddle up" to Russia's, her jamming renders unintelligible many of her broadcasts to the West...
...There isn't one," the policeman replies...
...a Hungarian, according to a current jest, asks a policeman...
...GEDYE, one of the best-informed European correspondents, has covered major developments in Central Europe for more than three decades...
...But all the windows are closing—that means the BBC 8-o'clock broadcast is about to start...
...Broadcast interrogators are maintained at all camps for newly arrived fugitives and deserters...
...Then, bit by bit they realized their homes had become cells in the prison which was their country...
...I found that generally the BBC's British broadcaster, Sir Bruce Lockhart, has the biggest following of any...
...He himself plumped for the Voice of America and the BBC...
...The Voice of America is squandering its propaganda funds," spat out the Polish newspaper Geos Pracy recently...
...As for Sir Bruce, why, she asked primly, did he get himself so despised in "decent circles" by referring to Stalin as "a great man...
...His books on European politics Include "The Revolver Republic," "Heirs to the Haps-burgs," and "Betrayal in Central Europe," on its whole worldwide broadcasting program...
...The task of the West is easiest in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the former higher standard of living means that more people were accustomed to foreign stations...
...It spreads like wildfire around the country, and the whole population warms its hearts at the flame...
...Under Hitler they learned to do so clandestinely...
...II Karoly, a bank clerk, insisted that those who risked listening should get the ammunition of hard, irrefutable facts promptly and succinctly...
...Ill When hope itself seemed dead, contact was re-established with the normal world in whose continued existence it had become so hard to believe...
...Every time he snaps and snarls in print or over the ether, he re-awakens interest in these broadcasts...
...He said that there was no demand for religious broadcasts...
...A further 50 per cent are disturbed, but understandable...
...They were "not interested in capitalist chit-chat about Hollywood movie stars, but in average conditions outside as compared with their own...
...The poisoner of the ether, the 'Voice,' tireless in lying and hatred, is again on the go," snarled Trybuna Ludu...
...They listened in the hope of getting warning in time when their regime was about to collapse...
...No foreigners reached the country save those who served the new dictators...
...One turned a knob, and suddenly it wasn't true that there was only one God, Lenin, and that Stalin was his prophet...
...Before usage coupled with isolation got all these miseries accepted as normal, insisted Jan, women behind the Curtain should be reminded constantly of the better daily life outside it...
...What is the time...
...Stations of which the Russians showed their fear by this attention include "Radio Free Europe," Belgrade, the Vatican, Paris, Canada, and RIAS (Western Germany...
...Hard-hitting Emilia detested the BBC "for talking interminably about Britain, which interests no one...
...Foreign newspapers vanished...
...It was tremendously heartening, said Istvan, to hear how accurately and promptly the West learned details of local happenings...
...Paris was too long-winded...
...What are the Iron Curtain listener's preferences...
...And those who once knew any Grantchester, anywhere, rubbed their eyes in happy deliverance and cried with Rupert Brooke: "Stands the church clock at ten to three And is there honey still for tea...
...Factory workers enjoyed the more colorful "Free Europe...
...Many wanted radio instruction on the safest method of sabotage and "go slow" on the job...
...A couple of weeks later he was on the air...
...Rather than spin my own narrative, I am letting each blanketed listener speak for himself...
...It began with a calculated gradualness which lulled them into an "it-can't-happen-here" inertia...
...jamming stations employ between 12,000 and 15,000 persons...
...It is your money and mine which is being spent...
...Its Czech news is scanty and stale, its broadcasts have lost psychological touch with the homeland...
...Russia is spending millions of dollars on jamming operations, which have not met with complete success and never will...
...Boredom with the deadly earnestness of Communist broadcasts, said Jan, a clerk from Pilsen, is often the first step which leads toward the cardinal sin of listening to the West...
...Last year broadcasts to Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Albania were added to the jamming list...
...Frantisek, a Slovak clerk, wanted more news of the outside world to encourage people to hold out...
...Jamming obliges the Communists to eat up their resources in a negative field...
...Some were only "paper Communists...
...Karoly was a fan for the BBC because, he said, it offered more solid facts that the Voice, and Radio Free Europe made too many mistakes for him to risk his liberty to listen...
...Listeners should be told how things would be for Hungarians in the post-liberation world...
...In Poland the Communists are often betrayed into advertising Western broadcasts...
...His first request was for a pencil and paper to write a broadcast talk against Communism...
...Worn-out workers had to attend meetings till after midnight...
...American broadcasts to Russia since 1948, the BBC's since 1949, broadcasts to Poland since 1951, to Finland and to Czechoslovakia since January, 1952...
...there is no Gallup Poll behind the Curtain...
...No one needed to be told why he should hate the Communists...
...But where is the clock...
...Asked for suggestions for improving the broadcasts, he suggested tips about the prospects of and methods for escaping, and instructions as to how to avoid recapture in the Russian zones of Austria and Germany...
...A year ago a Polish radio propagandist was assassinated by persons outraged by his slanders against western stations...
...Gedye Vienna IAND MY friends in the 96th Guard Rifle Division," said the little man in the ill-fitting hand-me-down suit, "tuned in pretty regularly—but of course not till after midnight...
...Nominally, it is not an offense (in Albania it has just been made one) to tune in to a Western station, except in the presence of a visitor...
...The latter looks around the square and says: "It is a few minutes before 8 p.m...
...moreover, it advertises the Western broadcasts...
...An eclectic listener, Jan also went in for Czech talks from Rome, and news in Hungarian from Ankara and Israel...
...is that what was intended when the village was presented with a radio...
...It is not for the Communists, but for the average citizen that the West is spending its millions...
...Against it, terrorism is powerless...
...Here are typical statements by recent refugees to reach Austria...
...David Rodnick, of the U. S. Social Research Council, managed to poll several thousand citizens just before the Communists seized power in February, 1948...
...Erno said that the men and women in the street would like more precise details of the day-to-day lives of their opposite numbers beyond the Curtain...
...From the apartment of the village Burgomaster comes every evening the boom-boom-boom of the Voice of America...
...Their national leaders—of one party after another—suddenly became traitors, or vanished forever behind prison doors, or fled abroad...
...But workers have enough good sets to make it possible for details of foreign broadcasts to be spread around most factories...
...Young people, he said, began by turning from heavy Marxism-Lenin-ism to the escapist froth of Western dance music...
...She was a fan of the Sunday morning broadcasts of that great Czech journalist, Ferdinand Peroutka (who has been hotly attacked by some emigre groups...
...The long-distance jamming is done at the cost of Russia's own propaganda...
...The world beyond the Curtain disintegrated as though by atomic force...
...One thing which impressed radio listeners was the admission of difficulties in the West...
...He found that ordinarily 50 per cent, and for special broadcasts 75 per cent, of radio owners tuned in to the British Broadcasting Co...
...Women in the People's Democracies were robbed of their children by being forced into factories...
...Intelligence kindly supplied by Russia's counter-action shows that the psychological warfare arm is hitting where it hurts...
...We found this was the best way to listen...
...It is the same when the dictator is foolish enough to lose his temper...
...There was no remedy, no life outside this drab enslavement, no hope for the future...
...Unlike Emilia, he wanted more broadcasts to the workers...
...The government pays high prices for regular sets, giving a new Nepradio in part exchange...
...BBC...
...Formerly on the foreign staff of The New York Times and the London Herald, Gedye is now free-lancing from Vienna for the London Observer and The Progressive...
...Once we had found the station, we put the set under a wooden box, and covered our heads with blankets...
...Radio Free Europe was gradually establishing a good reputation after initial exaggerations...
...The remaining 20 per cent are inaudible...
...He was Sergeant Bayukhin Vadim Demidovitch, of the Red Army in Austria...
...for milk, at 9 for another hour or so for bread, and again for fruit or vegetables—rarely available...
...I will tell you something," an informer at Zam-brovo village told another Polish paper, Wola Luda...
...Workers had their own technique...
...Does it get us anywhere...
...Vaclav, a Czech official, said that 80 per cent of the population listened to the Voice...
...Emilia had the courage of her prejudices...
...Or: "Disgusting that lie of the Voice of America last night that . . . Jan wanted more comparisons between every-day life behind the Curtain and in the West...
...Too many myths of how lovely everything was in the gardens of the East had been exploded by returning prisoners-of-war for that line of sales talk to carry conviction...
...Erno, a former Hungarian Red Army officer, was one of many who were certain that Communists listen to the West...
...I don't see one," says the citizen...
...But in Czechoslovakia there was once a useful poll...
...He was emphatic that people wanted to be assured that the detested Communist system would never be replaced by the former unjust, corrupt, and oppressive semi-feudalism of the great Hungarian landed families...
...Are the millions wasted which brought this about, and thus called check to the progress of the Red King...
...Jaroslav, a clerk, put the percentage of listeners to foreign news at 65...
...Information regarding reception conditions, times, and subjects preferred is compared by all Western broadcasting authorities from intelligence agents on the other side of the Curtain, letters received through clandestine channels, and occasional unsigned letters missed by the censorship...
...Progress had come up against a blank wall, with one little postern door labeled "Death...
...Then came the terror, the end of real elections, of open trials, independent judges, and defending counsel...
...Most were nervous, dispirited, and jumpy on account of the intense hatred of the population...
...Moscow has been trying to jam...
...Istvan-of Budapest said that the Communist-built "Nepradio" (People's Radio) sets had no dial, only two buttons marked "Budapest I" and "Budapest II," the only stations procurable...
...The Slovak religious broadcasts from Madrid, he added, were "surely enough to satisfy all the old women of Slovakia...
...There are estimates that the U.S.S.R...
...With some of them I talked personally...
...At first they hailed liberation from Hitler...
...Those with ^radios told their colleagues at the machine with none: "Did you hear the latest stupid propaganda of Free Europe...
...Housewives had to queue up at 6 a.m...
...We were sitting in the Steirer Hof in Graz, in the British Zone of Austria, with drawn blinds, though it was still daylight, lest someone outside might aim an automatic at the little man...
...Families were broken up by the drafting of labor...
...He preferred the American stations and called the BBC "stuffy...
...I have known this citizen of Eastern Europe since 1925—in Warsaw and Budapest, in Sofia, Bucharest, and Tirana...
...To mention what one has heard is a crime, punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment...
...The one weapon you can put into our hands today," he said, "is the anti-regime joke...
...Antonin, a journalist, said the favorite items were those giving news of Czech anti-Communists— their escapes, arrests, or releases from prison, as these were suppressed in the country...
...The sergeant's defection was one infinitesimal, yet tangible return for the millions of dollars spent every year to penetrate the Curtain...
...Their newspapers ceased to appear or were replaced by mocking specters with the , familiar title page and make-up which failed to disguise their inner corruption...
...He had taken his boxed-in and blanketed radio so seriously that 24 hours earlier he had abandoned home and family to desert to the British...
...Nearly one-third of the broadcasts to Russia get through its 300 long-distance and its 1,000 local jamming stations...
...Emilia, a firm-minded Catholic school teacher from Czechoslovakia, no longer young, plumped for Radio Free Europe (which averages third place as the listeners' choice...
...On jamming the Voice of America alone, Russia is spending nearly as much as the United States G.E.R...
Vol. 17 • April 1953 • No. 4
