‘Democratic Censorship’ of Soviet Émigré Broadcasts on Radio Liberty During the Cold War

Drawing on materials from the Special Collections Division of the Georgetown University Library (Washington, D. C., USA), this article examines the problem of censorship affecting programmes broadcast by Radio Liberty during the Cold War. The analysis is based primarily on the correspondence between top-level station managers, R. Kelly and J. Lodeesen, and their staff, as well as on the radio’s internal administrative documentation. The article poses, for the first time, the question of which factors conditioned the censorship of programmes produced by Russian émigré journalists working for Radio Liberty. It is shown that the station’s overall anti-communist orientation set relatively rigid boundaries within which its employees operated. At the same time, station management was compelled to manoeuvre, taking into account various, and sometimes mutually contradictory, factors when shaping its information policy. Substantial attention is devoted to the monitoring of how Soviet listeners received Radio Liberty’s broadcasts. The American top-management of Radio Liberty sought, as far as possible, to consider the moods and preferences of the population of the USSR. Programmes that were likely to be received negatively by the Soviet intelligentsia were subjected to the strictest censorship. The leaders of Radio Liberty aimed to produce programme content that corresponded not only thematically but also stylistically to the needs of Soviet listeners. Criticism was directed at the deep-rooted attachment of parts of the staff to cultural traditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian culture. At the same time, American management was obliged to reckon with the prevailing moods within the administrations of successive US presidents and to take into account the signals coming from Washington, which served as serious constraints affecting the working conditions of Radio Liberty’s staff

Censorship · Cold war · Commercial broadcasting · Criticism · Insignificance · Intelligentsia · Population · Radio broadcasting · Academic Freedom and Politics · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media · Soviet and Russian History

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