Collective Farm Drivers Also Like the Beatles: Radio Liberty and the Engaged Listener

In the heady atmosphere of intelligence operations after the Second World War, the nascent CIA launched its first clandestine surrogate broadcasting enterprise in 1950 in the form of Radio Free Europe, delivering news and entertainment to the subject peoples of Eastern Europe through the voices of émigrés. Three years later (and coincidentally fresh on the heels of Stalin’s death), its sister station, Radio Liberty, was launched, staking out a bolder claim by broadcasting directly to the citizens of the Soviet Union itself.

Much work has been done on the history of Radio Liberty as an institution, and its role in the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. But relatively little has explored the broad swath of listeners as active participants in the complex, transnational community of sound. Building on the work of scholars like Friederike Kind-Kovács and Kristin Roth-Ey, and using the collection of listener mail sent to Radio Liberty over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, this presentation will examine the sub-population of Radio Liberty Russian Service listeners who were not part of the headline-grabbing samizdat network, or the various rights-based democratic movements. Whether commenting on a religious program, seeking specific music or reading material, or offering condolences on the death of John F. Kennedy, these were everyday listeners, with everyday concerns. Their letter-writing evinced a tangible interest in engaging in the imagined community surrounding the station. As Roth-Ey has remarked regarding the various assumptions about the experience of radio: “no listening is ordinary listening.”

The presentation will include a demonstration of an interactive map of listener mail for the time period covered, part of a digital project that combines text, image, and sound to create a multimodal experience of Radio Liberty artifacts.