The Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under an agreement worked out between the two and approved by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors.
"We are very excited by the possibilities this archive transfer offers to researchers and others interested in the Radios and their work in support of U.S. foreign policy goals," said RFE/RL, Inc. President Thomas A. Dine. "We feel that the Hoover Institution, with its longstanding interest in the peoples and countries of our broadcast region, is uniquely well-suited as a home for our broadcast and corporate archives."
Hoover Institution director John Raisian said, "My colleagues and I are honored to be selected as the repository for the extraordinarily important archives of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. These archives provide an historical record of every major event, movement, and personality in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War and during the first years of transition from communism to democracy. Together with the Radios, we look forward to making this collection widely accessible for scholarly research."
The RFE/RL records and archives to be housed at Hoover cover the period from the creation of both Radios in the early 1950s until June 1995, when the corporation moved its broadcast headquarters from Munich, Germany to Prague. RFE/RL’s agreement with Hoover does not cover the archives of the RFE/RL Research Institute, which are housed at the Open Society Archives of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
The broadcast archives consist of some 61,000 reels of broadcast tapes, 7.5 million pages of broadcast transcripts, and thousands of additional documents generated by the various broadcast services of RFE and RL. The corporate records will include the administrative files of the offices of the President, Executive Vice President, RFE Director, RL Director, New York Program Center, Public Affairs Office, and other operating units.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international radio service to Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East funded by the U.S. Congress. More that 35 million listeners rely on RFE/RL’s daily news, analysis and current affairs programming to provide a coherent, objective account of events in their region of the world.
