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The RFE/RL Broadcast and Corporate Records are a rich and extraordinary resource for the study of the Cold War through one of the leading organizations that fought it. As a conflict of ideas and ideologies, the Cold War was unique not for its muddy battlefields and the stench of dead bodies so much as for the culture wars it inaugurated by broadcasting decadent Western music to Eastern Europe and by creating Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as a surrogate national outlet for news and cultural programming for the Soviet Bloc.
Announcing the launch of Radio Free Europe's broadcasts to Poland
Hoover marks the sixtieth anniversary of the famed 1956 revolution in Hungary by digitizing and making available rare scripts documenting the event
Radio Free Europe scholar A. Ross Johnson discusses Cold War radio in Hoover Digest
Stanford's "Rhetoric of Radio" class meets with Radio Free Europe archivists and sound recording specialists at Hoover
Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at Hoover’s Library & Archives, and the project archivist for its Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection. Shmelev’s expertise is in twentieth-c...
Comprising 10.5 million pages and more than 100,000 sound recordings from the 1950s to 2006, the records are separated in two collections representing broadcast and corporate arms. Many of the broadcast records are housed off-site, requiring advance notice for use. Contact RFE/RL project archivist Anatol Shmelev before visiting to determine availability.
The sound recordings are fragile and often unique. As a result, digital use copies must be produced before recordings can be made available. Thousands already exist and are available now on Hoover’s Digital Collections site, including more than 5,500 RFE/RL broadcast recordings and 160 RFE/RL corporate recordings.
Copies of sound recordings not yet digitized may be ordered. For further information, email hoover-library-archives@stanford.edu.
Additional recordings available via the following online resources:
International researchers and former officials met at the Hoover Institution to address the impact of Western broadcasting—especially Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)—during the cold war.
Johnson, A. Ross and R. Eugene Parta, eds. Cold War Broadcasting; Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Central European University Press, 2010.
More than twenty-five audiotapes from the papers of Barbara Nawratowicz have been digitized for preservation and access by Hoover's audio lab. Nawratowicz was the music director of Radio Free Europe's Polish service; the recordings comprise both spoken-word and musical genres. Many of the recordings are undated; those with dates range from 1952 to 1991.
Greatly expanded guides to the records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at the Hoover Institution Archives are now available. The revised guides, known as finding aids, reflect a significant increment to the materials as well as the continued processing of the records.
An extensive set of recorded oral histories about Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in the Sig Mickelson papers has been digitized by Hoover's audio lab.
A dramatization of Ferdinand Peroutka's play Šťastlivec Sulla, along with a number of his radio addresses and interviews, is among the more than forty audio recordings in the Peroutka papers digitized by the Hoover Archives.
Co-organizers: Hoover Institution and Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, with support from the Center for East European and Eurasian Studies, Stanford University, and the Open Society Archives, Central European University
Discussion about the launch of a Radio Free Afghanistan service has many recalling the lasting and important role of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in promoting democracy abroad.
Bernard Osher Fellowship Program
The Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Listening copies of many spoken-word recordings are now available in the Hoover Archives reading room.
