Émigré Politics and the Birth of Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service

• In Event: Russian Émigré Communities, Identities, and Belonging in the Interwar and Postwar Periods

Abstract

At the end of the Second World War, a significant Tatar community emerged in Germany, made up of small numbers who had arrived during the Interwar period and a larger contingent of POWs, refugees, and collaborators following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Several members of this wartime emigration later became the founding staff of Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service in 1953. However, although Radio Liberty was intended to act as unofficial mouthpiece for the U.S. government, the early Tatar-Bashkir Service was operated almost completely by these Tatar emigres with only minimal supervision by those from outside the community. As such, the service became known among others at RL for its particularly inflammatory and nationalistic rhetoric. This paper explores the politics of the Tatar émigré staff of Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service and places it in the context of Tatar nationalist thought in the first half of the twentieth century.

Author

• John Mulvey Romero, U of North Georgia