Anna Mazurkiewicz is a prominent Polish historian of the Cold War whose Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972 was published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg in Berlin in 2021. The book tells the story of the Assembly of Captive European Nations and its role in bringing attention to nine nations of Eastern and Central Europe in their quest for liberation from communist dictatorship during the height of the Cold War. The archival riches of the Hoover Institution are prominent in the author’s bibliography (including the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) corporate records, Brutus Coste papers, Sig Mickelson papers, Arch Puddington collection, Stefan Korbonski papers, and others), but Mazurkiewicz also dug deeply into other archives and repositories, both in the United States and Europe, particularly Poland, to tell the story from all angles.
R. Eugene Parta’s Under the Radar: Tracking Western Radio Listeners in the Soviet Union was published by the Central European University Press in 2022. Parta writes from personal knowledge and experience at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he was director of audience research and program evaluation, yet he is also fully grounded in the documentation of the Cold War period, thereby providing more to the reader than an impartial observer familiar only with the documentary side of the equation could. His personal notes and details of how the organization functioned make the book a particularly important resource for future scholars. It also reads very well, turning what might have been a very dry statistical endeavor into something approaching a spy novel (albeit with the discretion required by the nature of the operation). Parta made extensive use of the Hoover Institution’s RFE/RL corporate records.
Mark Pomar’s Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, in 2022. The author was deeply immersed in the work of Radio Liberty as former assistant director of its Russian service. He went on to become director of the USSR Division at Voice of America, and his personal knowledge and experience inform his book and its conclusions. At the same time, he draws on memoirs of these broadcast agencies’ participants and witnesses, as well as secondary literature and documents, including those from the Hoover Institution (RFE/RL corporate records), the National Archives, and US government agencies, in particular significant memoranda released via Freedom of Information Act requests or mandatory declassification reviews and digitized for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project.
