RFE/RL comes out of the cold

Abstract

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which merged in 1974, is an international broadcaster with a unique history in more than one sense. Once the scourge of the Soviet Union and highly feared by its leaders in the Kremlin, this broadcasting agency achieved more than any other inter national broadcaster, or indeed any other instrument of war, to bring about the bloodless revolution in the Eastern bloc countries and the overthrow of communism in the USSR. One of the tools used by RFE/RL was the programme content of its broadcasts. The other, which perhaps played the pivotal role, was the way it targeted its SW transmissions with high accuracy. For example, in the case of Czechoslovakia, it targeted the Czech and Slovak regions separately, thus recognising the political differences which existed between the rural Slovaks and the more urban Czechs. Such differences created more work in RFE/RL, requiring separate programming, but made it easier to achieve the end objective - the undermining of Soviet power.