From Liberation to Liberty: Politics and Values on the Airwaves at RFE/ RL

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Throughout the Cold War, liberation meant escaping Soviet control and defeating, or at least reforming, oppressive communist regimes. This was the aspiration of Eastern and Central European countries struggling with a political condition they defined as “captivity,” intentionally adopting the rhetorical charge of the term, with its explicit contestation of Soviet influence and attempts to re-assert national sovereignty as a strategy of resistance. In the United States, the 1959 Proclamation of Captive Nations Week, under the Eisenhower administration, announced the American political investment in liberating the countries behind the Iron Curtain. This investment took many forms, from money committed to an increased military budget, to financing public campaigns in the name of freedom, to financing (often concealed from the public) dissident immigrant groups and organizations that would play a key role in the Cold War, such as Radio Liberty (RL) and Radio Free Europe (RFE). Liberation became a catchall phrase for justifying U.S. foreign policy goals during the Cold War, which both empowered refugees from the Soviet Bloc, and at times manipulated or even marginalized them. This panel examines the interplay between the vision of liberation from the perspective of the refugees/exiles, especially those employed by RL/RFE, and the U.S. or more broadly Western institutional and political frameworks within which the refugees operated.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Simo Mikkonen, U of Eastern Finland (Finland)

Papers

• The Good Samaritans: Radio Free Europe and the US State Department - Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Carnegie Mellon U

• Romanian RFE Editors Fighting 'Totalitarianism' after Stalinism: Outdatedness or Insightfulness? - Ioana Macrea-Toma, Open Society Archives / Central European U (Hungary)

• Decolonization Avant-la-Lettre - Mark G. Pomar, U of Texas at Austin

Discussant

• Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Carnegie Mellon U